In the Autumn of Life in the Autumn of 2006 in New Hampshire's White Mountains
From Our Living Room About a Mile from Robert Frost's Old Farm House
Three mountain ranges are visible in the above picture taken in an earlier foliage week:
The Kinsman Range (about 10 miles away showing the pointy-headed Garfield, Baby's Cradle, and Lafayette)
The Twin Mountain Range (about 20 miles away showing North Twin and South Twin)
The distant Presidential Range (about 30 miles away showing part of Mt. Washington with its wind-swept dome in the clouds)
Our closest mountains (Cannon, Three Graces, North Kinsman, and South Kinsman) are to the right and not visible above.
It's been an absolutely breath-taking foliage season this year under a nightly awe-inspiring full moon this week.
We've been blessed!

Tidbits on October 10, 2006
Bob Jensen

Foliage Network --- http://www.foliagenetwork.com/default.php
Foliage in New Hampshire's White Mountains --- http://www.nhliving.com/foliage/index.shtml
Fall Foliage --- http://gonewengland.about.com/cs/fallfoliage/l/blfoliagecentrl.htm
Foliage Pictures --- http://photo.net/travel/us/ne/foliage

For earlier editions of Tidbits go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

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

Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   
 

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

Bob Jensen's Home Page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

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

American Heroes (Until We Meet Again) --- http://www.iwo.com/heroes.htm
Poem from fallen soldier honors the brave --- http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?ID=312361&Category=9

All mortal beings, which God brought forth, die the same
Man is not exempt

All will inevitably end as the dust from whence we came
It matters not of age

Do not mourn me if I should fall in a foreign land
Think this of my passing

In a far-off field a finer soil mixed with the foreign sand
A dust that is American

A dust that laughed, cried, and loved as an American
On this plot there shall be

A little piece of America, a patch for the free man
Which no oppressor can take

From this soil grows grass shimmering a little greener
Brilliant emerald ramparts

A Breeze whisping White Poppies with scent a little sweeter
Flowers towards heaven

Mourn not my terrible death but celebrate my cause in life
Viewed noble or not

I would have sacrificed and gave all that I had to give
Not to make man good

But only to let the good man live.

— Aaron Seesan

Bravo America --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/BravoAmerica.asf

Interactive Dig Black Sea: The Pisa Wreck --- http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/blacksea/index.html

Professors Sharing Their Lectures on Video
Take Five from the University of Texas http://www.utexas.edu/inside_ut/take5/
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Free music downloads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Asleep at the Wheel: Driving Western Swing --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6167532

Unearthing an Unexpected Musical Treasure --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6105697

From the Discovered Tapes
* 'Roll on Waters' - Woody Guthrie * 'This Land Is Your Land' - Woody Guthrie

'Rogue's Gallery:' Songs of the Sea --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6105152

For Chico Hamilton, the Beat Goes On --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6112226

New Island Sounds from Cuba's Young Guard --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6126331

Audra McDonald: A 'Theater Geek' Turns to Pop --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6099887

Teoria (interactive music learning tutorials) ---  http://www.teoria.com/

New York Fetes Composer Steve Reich at 70 --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6155645

Live a Life That Matters --- http://susie1114.com/LiveALife.html

Photographs and Art

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

From the University of South Carolina
Celebrating the Works of F. Scott Ftzgerald --- http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/

CELT Corpus of Electronic Texts --- http://www.ucc.ie/celt/publishd.html

Travels With A Donkey In The Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) --- Click Here

Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) --- Click Here

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. --- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/AlcLitt.html

The Adventure Of The Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) --- Click Here

The Paris Review: Interviews --- http://www.theparisreview.com/literature.php 

From the Pew Research Center
Looking Backward and Forward, Americans See Less Progress In Their Lives --- http://pewresearch.org/assets/social/pdf/Ladder.pdf

Homer Simpson's Words of Wisdom --- http://funny2.com/homer.htm

Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!
Karl Marx (1818-1883). Purported to be his last words --- Click Here 

I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967). Purported to be his last words --- Click Here 
Jensen Comment
But only free for a while. The Bolivian Army executed Che without a trial after he was captured by U.S. Special Forces.

Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames!
Saint Joan of Arc (1412-1431). Purported to be her last words --- Click Here 

Dream and you will be free in spirit, fight and you will be free in life.
Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara

Every word has been, at sometime, a neologism.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges

The people we should thank are the innovators and entrepreneurs, the individuals who see new opportunities and risk exploring them -- the people who find new markets, create new products, think out new ways to handle commodities commercially, organize work in new ways, design new technology or transfer capital to more productive uses. The entrepreneur is an explorer, who ventures into uncharted territory and opens up the new routes along which we will all be traveling soon enough. Simply to look around is to understand that entrepreneurs have filled our lives with everyday miracles.
Johan Norberg, "Humanity's Greatest Achievement," The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2006; Page A11 --- Click Here

The uneven sheds stretch back
Shed behind shed in train
Like cars that have long lain
Dead on a side track
Robert Frost in a newly-discovered World War I poem entitled as quoted by Scott McLeMee in "War Thoughts at Home," Inside Higher Ed, October 4, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/10/04/mclemee

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
John Burroughs as quoted in a recent email message from Paula.

Question
Do Wall Street investment banks favor the GOP with cash donations?
Hint: The answer will probably surprise you.

Wall Street has shifted its allegiance in the 2006 election cycle by donating more to Democrats than Republicans who have been the investment banks' usual benefactors, U.S. Federal Election Commission data show. Five leading firms Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bear Stearns Companies Inc.,Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. have contributed $6.2 million so far to candidates before the November elections, with about 52 percent going to Democrats . . . "People give ideological money and they give money to people they think are going to win," said Maurice Carroll, director of Quinnipiac University's Polling Institute in Hamden, Connecticut. "It looks like it's going to be a good year for Democrats."
Tim McLaughlin, "Wall Street's political cash favors Democrats," Reuters, October 6, 2006 --- http://elections.us.reuters.com/top/news/usnN06393176.html/?src=092906_MARKETING_CMS_ElecMidArt
Jensen Comment
Although the economy is in relatively good shape and tax revenues are pouring into Washington DC and state houses across the land, there is also a general feeling that the GOP-controlled House and Senate blew their chances for major reforms on health care, Medicare, Social Security, and education reforms. Huge worries arise from the GOP failures to control government spending and corruption. There is a high degree of Wall Street resentment toward some legislation, particularly Sarbanes-Oxley costly fraud prevention accounting rules. Doubts have also arisen, long before Bob Woodward's book, about GOP incompetence and corruption, an image that was long "Delayed."  All these things have strengthened the campaigns of Democratic candidates, and Wall Street bets on winners. Change is in the wind (and "wind" is the correct term for candidates from both parties).

House Republicans have done a lousy job of policing themselves
The larger problem for House Republicans is that they've amassed a poor record of policing themselves amid a succession of scandals. Even as Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay and Bob Ney tarnished the party's image, no one other than a few "moderates" who don't have much sway in the caucus took the lead in called for drumming any of them out of the ranks. It's also notable that none of these three men survived their respective scandals. Cunningham is serving time in the federal pen after pleading guilty to corruption charges late last year. Mr. Ney abandoned plans to run for re-election a few weeks ago after it became clear a federal investigation was heading straight for him.
Brendan Miniter, "The Problem Isn't Foley:  House Republicans have done a lousy job of policing themselves," The Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2006 --- http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bminiter/?id=110009031

Sex, lies and power games are just the latest symptoms of a Republican Party that has strayed from its ideals
"The End of a Revolution," by Karen Tumulty, Time Magazine Cover Story, October 8, 2006 --- Click Here

But after controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of Bush's six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals. The exquisite political machinery that aces the elections has begun to betray the platform. To win votes back home, lawmakers have been spending taxpayer money like sailors on leave, producing the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history. And the party's approach to national security has taken the country into a war that most Americans now believe was a mistake and that the government's own intelligence experts say has shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

One of the problems is that after the Republicans got into power, the system began to change them, not just the other way around. Among the first promises the G.O.P. majority broke was the setting of term limits. Their longtime frustrations in the minority didn't necessarily make them any better at reaching across the aisle either. Compromise, that most central of congressional checks and balances, has been largely replaced by a kind of calculated cussedness that has left the G.O.P. isolated and exposed in times of crisis.

Continued in article

Question
Is the GOP manipulating fuel prices for purposes of winning votes?
Answer from the Liberal Left

"Gas Pump Politics," by Nicholas von Hoffman, The Nation, October 3, 2006 --- http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061016/howl

Do the Democrats lose 50,000 votes every time the price of gasoline drops a penny? We'll have the answer to that question in a few weeks, but in the meantime cheaper gasoline raises some interesting questions.

The first of which is whether or not the Republicans have arranged to lower them to prevent what had seemed to be defeat in November. Certainly, the timing of the price drop might cause even the credulous to entertain a suspicion or two.

You may be sure that the Republicans are delighted to see gasoline fade from the list of voter irritations. You may also be sure that the Republicans would have arranged for prices at the pump to swoon if they could, but can they?

Not likely. To make the price of gasoline come down in Ohio, where the GOP is in big trouble, the prices have to drop everywhere. No special walled-off Ohio oil market, or even an American oil market, exists. If the price of oil is going to go down in Cincinnati, it is going to have to go down in Shanghai. Oil, as the economists say, is fungible.

There are times when energy prices are manipulated, California's electricity cost being an example. A few years ago, by closing certain generating plants and refusing to sell electricity from certain other plants, an artificial shortage was created, which drove up the price of electricity and drove ordinary Californians to the poorhouse.

But California is not part of a world electricity market. As opposed to oil prices, those electricity prices could be forced upward without worrying about how would-be suppliers in Canada or elsewhere would react. If California had been part of a world market, when the prices went up outside suppliers of electricity would have rushed in to sell and the prices would have been forced down again.

Because oil must be refined, it is possible to play some games with gasoline prices. Refineries can be pulled off line for no good reason except to drive the price of the products up. The operative word here is "up."

Driving prices down is another matter. Manipulators make money when the price goes up. Manipulators do not make money when the price goes down.

Down is going to cost somebody a lot of money. For practical purposes, the only way to make prices go down is to sell gasoline at a loss because you must sell it under the going price. Not quite the same as giving it away, but it's close.

And you have to sell a lot of it under the going rate. Last winter, for example, we saw President Bush's good friend the devil-defying Hugo Chávez, sell heating oil to poor Americans at lower-than-market prices, and guess what effect that had on the price of heating oil generally? None.

Last winter Chávez, through Citgo, owned by Venezuela, dumped 16 million gallons of heating oil at below-market prices in eight states, and if it pushed down the price of heating, nobody could see it. Imagine how many million barrels of oil it would take to depress the entire gasoline market--and how much it would cost. Rich Republicans, who are desperately clinging to every nickel out of fear the death tax will pauperize their heirs, are not about to make a campaign contribution of this magnitude. If that's the cost--and it would be--of keeping Denny Hastert in the House Speaker's chair, they'll take their chances with Nancy Pelosi.

The Democrats, posing as the champions of the great unwashed as they do, dare not show their apprehension at the slump in gas prices even as they watch votes melt away. Nevertheless, every time gas prices drop, people kid themselves into believing the oil is going to flow forever and that we can go on living as we have forever.

If the past is any kind of a guide, the numbskulls in Detroit will postpone the design and production of truly energy-efficient automobiles, a decision that will ultimately put them out of business. Lower prices will bring research and development on more expensive alternatives to a halt. The thousands of undertakings, great and small, that can increase efficiency will be put off yet longer.

There will be no politicians of note who command national attention (Al Gore aside) to tell us that we are once more frittering away precious lead time between now and when (a) the oil runs out and (b) the environment crashes.

The American religion of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost has made it a point of pride never to plan ahead, never to be ready and never to prepare. So in war after war we are caught with our pants down and in peace each Katrina is worse than the last one.

Whatever danger, no matter how real, how close or how certain, the response is, "Oh, the free market will take care of it" or "Aw, don't worry, technology has our back covered." So instead of throwing ourselves into energy conservation to postpone the day of disaster, we hear speeches about energy independence and ethanol.

As of now all ethanol can do is win the Midwestern farm vote. Yet the Democrats ought not to give up hope. The Republicans seem to have an inexhaustible supply of crooked pederast Congressmen, and there is one deep truth, which is that oil prices, like all prices, fluctuate. Next time the Ds may catch 'em on the down cycle.

"Why Are Saudis Approving Cheaper Oil? Short term, the kingdom fears economic disruption from price spikes. Long term, though, it seeks to manage the market with boosted capacity," by Stanley Reed, Business Week, October 4, 2006 ---
Click Here

Unbelievable as it may sound, Saudi Arabia is practically applauding the 22% plunge in global oil prices since July. On Sept. 19, Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi called a price of about $60 per barrel "reasonable." Analysts think the Saudis could even live with a price in the mid-$50's per barrel. "The Saudi price target is probably lower than the rest of OPEC; they are still happy at $50 per barrel," says David Kirsch, an analyst at PFC Energy in Washington.

Why would the kingdom, which boasts the world's largest oil reserves, cheer a price slump? In fact, the Saudis never felt comfortable with $70 oil, fearing that sky-high prices might kill off the global appetite for their single source of wealth.

"There is concern that the volatility in the markets is so beyond anyone's control that it could cause severe damage to the world economy," says Sadad Al Husseini, the retired exploration and production chief of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company. The Saudis, he says, "are determined to try and manage better."

INVESTING IN CAPACITY.
That's not to say the Saudis want to see prices continue to drop. In the short term, they're trying to keep them from crashing below $50 per barrel by gradually withdrawing oil from the market. But they're also investing tens of billions of dollars to build spare capacity.

At a mid-September OPEC meeting in Vienna, Oil Minister Naimi said Saudi Arabia plans to expand production in seven fields to add 2.4 million barrels per day of capacity, boosting its total to about 12.5 million barrels per day by 2009. On Oct. 1, the Saudis announced they would start work in early 2007 on a new oilfield called Moneefa, which will have 900,000 barrels of capacity and come on line in 2011.

The Saudis want to be able to pump more so they can manage prices by adding supply when markets are tight, and removing it when inventories fatten. Of the major OPEC producers, only the Saudis currently have significant spare capacity. But by 2004 they had allowed their buffer to dwindle to around 700,000 barrels per day, not enough to cover a major outage such as a shutdown of Iranian production. Like the rest of the industry, they were caught napping by the big surge in demand beginning in 2004, which triggered a doubling of prices over the following two years.

DECOUPLING OIL FROM POLITICS.
The new production won't come cheap. The cost of expanding production will exceed $24 billion, figures Nawaf Obaid, managing director of the Saudi National Security Project, a Riyadh consultancy. He says the Saudi leadership under King Abdullah wants to "decouple energy and foreign policy" by building up enough spare capacity to offset a cutoff of crude from Iran as well as another major producer such as Venezuela or Nigeria. They also want to tamp down criticism from U.S. politicians.

For now, Venezuela and Nigeria say they are cooperating with Saudi Arabia’s short-term goal. Oil ministers from the two nations in late September promised to cut production by 170,000 barrels per day, which should help the Saudis steady prices without reducing their own 30% share of OPEC production. But some market watchers think the Saudis will eventually have to shoulder nearly all of the cuts of 1 million barrels per day or more that may be required to keep oil above $50 per barrel.

"We have seen the peak [in prices] for a while unless something blows up," says Leo Drollas, an analyst at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London. Even so, the Saudis want an insurance policy of extra capacity in case prices spike again.

From Columbia University
Having wreaked havoc onstage, the students unrolled a banner that read, in both Arabic and English, "No one is ever illegal."

"At Columbia, Students Attack Minuteman Founder," by Eliana Johnson, The New York Sun, October 4, 2006 --- http://www.nysun.com/article/40983

Students stormed the stage at Columbia University's Roone auditorium yesterday, knocking over chairs and tables and attacking Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minutemen, a group that patrols the border between America and Mexico.

Mr. Gilchrist and Marvin Stewart, another member of his group, were in the process of giving a speech at the invitation of the Columbia College Republicans. They were escorted off the stage unharmed and exited the auditorium by a back door.

Having wreaked havoc onstage, the students unrolled a banner that read, in both Arabic and English, "No one is ever illegal." As security guards closed the curtains and began escorting people from the auditorium, the students jumped from the stage, pumping their fists, chanting victoriously, "Si se pudo, si se pudo," Spanish for "Yes we could!"

The Minuteman Project, an organization of volunteers founded in 2004 by Mr. Gilchrist, aims to keep illegal immigrants out of America by alerting law enforcement officials when they attempt to cross the border. The group uses fiery language and unorthodox tactics to advance its platform. "Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious ‘melting pot,'" the group's Web site warns.

The pandemonium that ensued as the evening's keynote speaker took the stage was merely the climax of protest that brewed all week. A number of campus groups, including the Chicano caucus, the African-American student organization, and the International Socialist organization, began planning their protests early this week when they heard that the Minutemen would be arriving on campus.

The student protesters, who attended the event clad in white as a sign of dissent, booed and shouted the speakers down throughout. They interrupted Mr. Stewart, who is African-American, when he referred to the Declaration of Independence's self-evident truth that "All men are created equal," calling him a racist, a sellout, and a black white supremacist.

A student's demand that Mr. Stewart speak in Spanish elicited thundering applause and brought the protesters to their feet. The protesters remained standing, turned their backs on Mr. Stewart for the remainder of his remarks, and drowned him out by chanting, "Wrap it up, wrap it up!" Mr. Stewart appeared unfazed by their behavior. He simply smiled and bellowed, "No wonder you don't know what you're talking about."

"These are racist individuals heading a project that terrorizes immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border," Ryan Fukumori, a Columbia junior who took part in the protest, told The New York Sun. "They have no right to be able to speak here."

The student protesters "rush to vindicate themselves with monikers like ‘liberal' and ‘open-minded,' but their actions, their attempt to condemn the Minutemen without even hearing what they have to say, speak otherwise," the president of the Columbia College Republicans, Chris Kulawik, said. On campus, the Republicans' flyers advertising the event were defaced and torn down.

The College Republicans expressed their concern about the lack of free speech for opposing viewpoints on the Columbia campus in the wake of the evening's events. "We've often feared that there's not freedom of speech at Columbia for more right-wing views — and that was proven tonight," the executive director of the Columbia College Republicans, Lauren Steinberg, said.

The Minutemen's arrival at Columbia drew protesters from around the city as well. An hour before Messrs. Stewart and Mr. Gilchrist took the stage, rowdy protests began outside the auditorium on Broadway, where activists chanted, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, the Minutemen have got to go!"

Continued in article

Mr. Bollinger (President of Columbia University), a legal scholar whose specialty is free speech and the First Amendment, quickly condemned this week’s disruption. “Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus,” he said yesterday in an interview. “Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers.” He added, “There is a vast difference between reasonable protest that allows a speaker to continue, and protest that makes it impossible for speech to continue.”
Karen W. Arenson and Damien Cave, "Silencing of a Speech Causes a Furor," The New York Times, October 7, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/nyregion/07columbia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

With Columbia University again under fire over speech issues, the president is condemning anyone who prevents another’s speech from taking place. On Wednesday, protesters stormed a stage where Jim Gilchrist, head of the Minuteman Project, a “vigilance operation” opposing illegal immigration, was speaking, forcing him to stop his talk. Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s president, pledged that the university would investigate the incident and procedures for making sure that speakers can give their talks. In a statement, he said: “This is not a complicated issue. Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.”
Inside Higher Ed, October 9, 2006

Question
Who are the 50 hottest professors according to RateMyProfessors.com?

Answer --- http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/hotProfs.html
It helps to teach huge classes!
The top seven have six red peppers
The hottest professor is a Canadian psychology professor.
Four of the top seven teach in Canadian universities.
There are a surprising number of mathematics professors near the top.
There's a scarcity of business professors near the top, although Business Policy professor Laura Allan from Wilfrid Laurier University (in Canada) is hot at Rank 11.
Accounting professors are ice cubes in these rankings of hot professors.

Question
What topic dominates instructor evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com (or RATE for short)?
Answer --- See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation 

Bob Jensen's critical threads on teaching evaluation controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

October 5, 2006 reply from Dee (Dawn) Davidson [dgd@MARSHALL.USC.EDU]

But there’s also this list on Business Week. Our Merle Hopkins is here.
Click Here

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/sep2006/bs20060918_503106.htm?chan=bschools_undergrad+--+favorite+professors_favorite+professors 

dee davidson
Leventhal School of Accounting
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California
 dgd@marshall.usc.edu 

October 5, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Dee's link mentioning the popularity of Professor Hopkins illustrates how misleading the outcomes can be for RateMyProfessor.com. Even though Professor Hopkins has huge classes, only 12 students bothered to send any ratings into the RateMyProfessor.com --- http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=18909

There are definitely small (Epsilon?) sample problems, outlier problems, and a non-random/self-selecting sampling problems at RateMyProfessor.com. Also there is a tendency for disgruntled students to be more self-selecting than satisfied students. This is the case for Merle Hopkins.

Bob Jensen

October 5, 2006 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

Camtasia 4
And another important new feature of Camtasia 4 – you can create Camtasia VIDEOS of your lectures in Ipod format. So the students can now study 24x7, wherever they are!
Richard Campbell, October 3, 2006

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

Women in MBA Programs

September 29, 2006 message from Priscilla Reis [reispris@ISU.EDU]

While these questions have nothing to do with technology, I'm sure someone on the list will have some insight. The gender balance of our undergraduate accounting program tends to fluctuate between 40 and 50% female. However, our population of female MBA applicants, and thus, students (combined accounting students and those concentrating in other areas), has gone down to less than 20%.

Are other schools also suffering from a paucity of female MBA applicants/students? Does anyone know of any recent studies on gender balance in MBA programs? Has anyone developed effective methods for attracting more female students?

Priscilla R. Reis, Ph.D., CMA
Department of Accounting
College of Business
Idaho State University
Box 8020 Pocatello, ID 83209
reispris@isu.edu

September 29, 2006 reply from Ellen Glazerman, Ernst & Young LLP [ellen.glazerman@EY.COM]

Research has been done by the University of Michigan and C200. The percentage of women in MBA programs nationally is 30% (or less). this year has seen a slight increase in these numbers at the most competitive business schools in the US. GMAC has some of this most recent data. There is a Foundation - Forte Foundation: Inspiring Woman Business Leaders - that is a unique partnership between business schools and companies. You should get some good information from their website: fortefoundation.org. I hope it is helpful!

Ellen

September 29, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Women now make up more than 60 percent of all accountants and auditors in the United States, according to the Clarion-Ledger. That is an estimated 843,000 women in the accounting and auditing work force.
AccountingWeb, "Number of Female Accountants Increasing," June 2, 2006 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=102218

Since most states require at least 150 credits to sit for the CPA Examination, most of the men and women at the entry level have masters degrees.

It is possible to check on the male/female proportion for selected programs at http://www.aacsb.edu/knowledgeservices/omd2/simple-srch.asp

Member schools have access to all sorts of data on graduate and undergraduate business programs in the AACSB's huge databases --- https://www.aacsb.edu/knowledgeservices/datadirect/dd-intro.asp

Also see the Management Education at Risk report https://www.aacsb.edu/publications/metf/default.asp

October 2, 2006 reply from Tracey Sutherland [tracey@AAAHQ.ORG]

It seems there's some recent evidence that more women managers bring equity to women in their companies (link below). On the other hand, our colleagues in sociology have been tracking for some time effects related to increased numbers of women in professions - one related to lower salaries is illuminated below in a fairly recent report from psychology.  Related to Bob's posting that women now make up about 60% of accountants, it's interesting to consider the possible implications of the trend over time.

Tracey Sutherland
Executive Director
American Accounting Association

From the Journal of Applied Psychology (2003) - Pay of Both Men and Women Managers is Less When Managers’ Subordinates, Peers and Supervisors are Women, Study Finds. Specific findings regarding gender and pay indicate that:

• Managerial pay becomes substantially lower as the percentage of females that the manager supervises increases. For example, on average, a male or female manager whose subordinate group is comprised of 80% female receives approximately $7,000 less in pay than a manager whose subordinate group is 80% male.
• Managerial pay remains relatively constant when the percentage of females that the manager supervises is less than 50%. However, once females become the majority in the workgroup, both male and female managers pay decreases sharply as the percentage of female subordinates in the workgroup increases. For example, a manager who supervises a group comprised of all women receives approximately $9,000 less than one who supervises a group comprised of 50% women.
• On average, managerial pay decreases by approximately $500 for each 10% increase in the percentage of his or her female peers.
• On average, a manager whose supervisor is female receives approximately $2,000 less pay than one whose supervisor is male.

Women breaking the glass ceiling seems to help other women in the company -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/12/AR2006081200858_pf.html

October 3, 2006 reply from Linda Kidwell, University of Wyoming [lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]

Thanks for the story Tracey.

In reading the news story, there is some confusion as to whether they are discussing snapshots or trends. What I'm getting at is this: Is it that "as women move into management positions" in general, or as women in traditionally male or female fields move into management? If you read the piece through, it sounds like the real story is that women are starting to break the glass ceiling in traditionally male fields. Thus more of their subordinates are men, pay has traditionally been higher, thus pay continues to be higher. Where there are many junior management women, they are looking at traditionally female areas, and pay is lower, as it has always been. They haven't attempted any time series analysis to see what happened within any given industry as women entered management ranks. I don't really see that they've made the case that women at high ranks bring other women into better pay, or that women in lower ranks have a negative trending effect on men who work for them. So I don't really anticipate the influx of women into accounting depressing the pay of men in the profession. They are moving into (taking over? :-) ) a traditionally male field, so their pay should come up to par in accounting rather than bringing down the pay of men in the field.

Perhaps I'm naive, but that's been my experience -- any pay differentials I've experienced have been when I taught at teaching focused smaller colleges (more female domain) relative to research focused universities (male domain), rather than a male/female differential within either type of school. And before I changed careers, I was clearly in traditionally female jobs, being paid peanuts. Working within the financial administration at Harvard at the beginning of the unionization movement among staff and lab workers, I still remember the organizers' slogan: "You can't eat prestige!" Pay at Harvard for staffers, most of them women, was a disgrace. But that's off point, I suppose, or is it?

Linda

October 4, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

An encouraging sign in terms of breaking the glass ceiling in accounting firms has been Deloitte's "Women's Initiative" commenced 12 years ago. Results to date are linked at http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/section_node/0,1042,sid%253D2261,00.html

 

WIN 2005 Annual Report Women’s Initiative teams delivered more than 235 programs in 2005 and were honored with seven national awards. Our number of women partners, principals and directors rose along with our women in leadership positions. Learn about these and more achievements in the 2005 Annual Report.

Blog Excerpts One way the Women's Initiative connects with our people is through the WIN blog on the Deloitte intranet site. The blog covers personal perspectives on topics ranging from work/life balance to gender bias to the power of networking. Read some recent excerpts.

This week Deloitte's program for maintaining training programs and re-entry initiatives for women who take out time to raise a family made the national news in a very positive way.

It also helped that Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers were recognized as two of the best (in the Top 10) companies in the U.S. for working mothers, according to an annual survey by Working Mother magazine.

Progress in terms of working women and women planning career re-entry after raising a family  is probably greater in accountancy than in most industries.

Bob Jensen

"E&Y, PwC Top Employers for Working Mothers," SmartPros, September 27, 2006 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x54886.xml

Bob Jensen's threads on women in accountancy and law professions are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

"Trading in Harrah's Contracts Surges Before LBO Disclosure:  Options, Derivatives Make Exceptionally Large Moves; 'Someone...Was Positioning'," by Dennis K. Berman and Serena Ng, The Wall Street Journal, October 4, 2006; Page C3 --- http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB115992145253481882.html

Trading in Harrah's Entertainment Inc. options and derivatives contracts reached a fevered pitch in the days leading up to news of a potential leveraged buyout of the gambling giant, making it the latest in a string of recent deals marked by unusual trading activity.

At one point last week, the volume of "call" options, contracts to buy a specific number of shares by a fixed date at a specified price, increased to almost six times the August average. At about the same time, movements in the credit-default swap market suggested that traders in the sophisticated financial instruments were anticipating a potential buyout.

Harrah's said Monday that it had received a $15.1 billion buyout offer from private-equity firms

Apollo Management and Texas Pacific Group. The $81-a-share offer caused Harrah's shares to jump 14% and its bonds to fall 11% as the company's credit ratings were cut to "junk" by Standard & Poor's. Yesterday, the shares fell 1.3%, or 97 cents, to $74.71 as of 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The Las Vegas company is reviewing the buyout proposal and isn't certain a transaction will be sealed.

Last Thursday, two trading days before the offer was announced, options traders exchanged 23,597 call contracts, nearly six times the August volume, according to Options Clearing Corp.

"Clearly, someone out there was positioning for some movement in Harrah's," said Stacey Briere Gilbert, Susquehanna Financial Group's chief options strategist. "I don't know whether they were positioning for an LBO, but for something."

Derivatives tied to Harrah's bonds also moved. The price of a five-year credit-default swap that protects an investor against a default in $10 million of Harrah's bonds climbed 24% last week to $114,000 annually, according to Markit Group.

The price of Harrah's swaps more than doubled to $265,000 after Monday's announcement.

These derivatives, which trade over the counter and are much more active than the bonds to which they are tied, are lightly regulated and traded mostly by big banks and hedge funds. Some investors use them to hedge against a debt default, while others use them to speculate on whether a company's default risk is rising or falling.

As the options and derivatives markets experienced abnormal swings, Harrah's publicly traded shares were relatively flat last week. "The stock market is by far the slowest to respond," Ms. Briere Gilbert said.

In a leveraged buyout, the company being acquired often ends up taking on additional debt, increasing its risk of default and causing the price of the swaps to rise. The firm's existing bonds also tend to fall in value on such news, pushing their yields higher as investors demand greater returns to compensate for the additional risk.

In a market awash in rumor, speculation, and sometimes dumb luck, it can be hard to pinpoint who was trading and why such trading began. Often, an options trade unrelated to a deal can set off "piggyback" buying from traders hoping to catch a lucky break. Many such rumors -- as with a recent round of talk about Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. -- create a trading stir that ends in a whimper. No deal ever materialized for Starwood.

Bob Jensen's "Rotten to the Core" threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

October 5, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

NEW TAKE ON PEER REVIEW OF SCHOLARLY PAPERS

The Public Library of Science will launch its first open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE which will focus on papers in science and medicine. Papers in PLoS ONE will not undergo rigorous peer review before publication. Any manuscripts that is deemed to be a "valuable contribution to the scientific literature" can be posted online, beginning the process of community review. Authors are charged a fee for publication; however, fees may be waived in some instances. For more information see http://www.plosone.org/.

For an article on this venture, see: "Web Journals Threaten Peer-Review System" By Alicia Chang, Yahoo! News, October 1, 2006 --- http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061001/ap_on_sc/peer_review_science

Bob Jensen's threads on peer review are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#PeerReview

The Global Technology Revolution 2020 ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2006/RAND_TR303.pdf

Question
Is Harvard's curriculum tantamount to no curriculum?
What does it take at a minimum to have an undergraduate education?

"As Goes Harvard. . . ," by Donald Kagan
See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CustomizedCurricula

Harvard University is Making Another Stab at Defining a Core Curriculum Requirement

"Direction and Choice," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, October 5, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/05/harvard

On Wednesday, the university released a new plan for undergraduate education that would designate certain subjects as ones that must be studied. As a result, every Harvard undergraduate would have to take a course on the United States and a course dealing with religion, among others. Few top colleges and universities have such requirements. But students would be able to pick within those broad topics, with the idea that many courses would meet the requirements.

. . .

The report goes on to say that general education “prepares students to be citizens of a democracy within a global society” and also teaches students to “understand themselves as product of — and participants in — traditions of art, ideas and values.” General education should also encourage students to “adapt to change” and to have a sense of ethics, the report says.

The general education proposed by the faculty panel would have students take three one-semester courses in “critical skills” in written and oral communication, foreign languages, and analytical reasoning.

Then students would have to take seven courses in the following categories:

• Cultural traditions and cultural change.
• The ethical life.
• The United States and the world (one each in the U.S. and the world).
• Reason and faith.
• Science and technology (one in a life science and one in a physical science).

Within these categories, there would be a broad range of courses that could fulfill the requirements. Each would have to meet certain general education requirements, such as providing a broad scope of knowledge and encouraging student-faculty contact. But the subject matter within categories could vary significantly.

For instance, courses suggested as possibilities for the cultural traditions requirement include “The Emergence of World Literature,” “Art and Censorship,” and “Representations of the Other.” Courses for study of the United States could include “Health Care in the United States: A Comparative Perspective” and “Pluralist Societies: The United States in Comparative Context.” The reason and faith requirement, which would involve all students studying religion in some form, might have courses such as “Religion and Closed Societies” and “Religion and Democracy.”

In explaining the rationale for a faith and reason requirement, the Harvard professors noted that most college undergraduates care about religion and discuss it, but “often struggle — sometimes for the first time in their lives — to sort out the relationship between their own beliefs and practices, the different beliefs and practices of fellow students, and the profoundly secular and intellectual world of the academy itself.”

The report also noted the many tensions around religion in modern society — including fights over school prayer, same-sex marriage, and stem cell research. “Harvard is no longer an institution with a religious mission, but religion is a fact that Harvard’s graduates will confront in their lives both in and after college,” the report said, explaining why a religion requirement is important. At the same time, it added: “Let us be clear. Courses in reason and faith are not religious apologetics. They are courses that examine the interplay between religion and various aspects of national and/or international culture and society.” In the ethics requirement, students will consider how to make ethical choices, but in religion, students “will appreciate the role of religion in contemporary, historical or future events — personal, cultural, national or international.”

‘Activity Based Learning’

Beyond the various course requirements, the Harvard panel called for the university to consider new ways to link students’ in-class and out-of-class experiences.

“The big thing for many Harvard undergrads tends to be their extracurricular activities. It’s almost a cliché that they spend more time out of the yard than in the yard,” said Menand. “We don’t want to bureaucratize that, but we think there is a natural connection between the classroom and what takes place out of the classroom.”

This part of the report is more vague and less prescriptive, and in fact the panel calls for another panel to consider how to carry out the idea of promoting “activity based learning.” Generally, the report said, the pedagogical idea it wants Harvard to embrace is that “the ability to apply abstract knowledge to concrete cases — and vice versa.” Examples given to show the value of this kind of learning include the statements that “studying the philosophy of the 17th century might inform the production of a classic play by Molière” and “working on a political campaign can bring to life material in a course on democracy.”

In a course, this link might be made through optional papers that students could write on how an outside activity helped the student understand course material or how course material influenced a planned activity. If several students participate in the same out-of-class activity, team work might be involved in and outside of class. And in either case, the report said, closer faculty-student contact would be encouraged.

What It Means in Cambridge and Beyond

At Harvard, a series of meeting are now being scheduled for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to review the report and — eventually — to vote on it. Menand said that while the review would take months at least, it need not wait for Harvard to have a new permanent president.

Schneider of the Association of American Colleges and Universities said she thought the report might have a positive impact. “I think that what this is doing is restoring the purpose of general education requirements, which is to connect learning with real world citizenship.”

She said it made a lot of sense for Harvard to say that students need to study the United States, and the world, and science, and religion, etc., rather than using broad distribution requirements. “Let’s think about what’s going on in American high schools. Students have one year of American history or maybe two, but they may never study the United States again,” she said. Harvard’s proposal would mean that they would study the United States again, and at a deeper level than they could in high school.

Continued in the article

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

An Agenda for Harnessing Globalization ---
http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/fellows/ghani20060901.pdf

"PC World's 100 Fearless Forecasts," by Richard Baguley and Eric Dahl, PC World via The Washington Post, September 29, 2006 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092900005.html?referrer=email

From inexpensive 20-megapixel cameras to 50-terabyte DVDs, here's our definitive list of technologies we're looking forward to seeing.
PC World, September 29, 2006 --- http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127152/article.html

"New Nikon Can Send Its Photos Via Wi-Fi So It's More Useful," by Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2006; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/personal_technology.html

For the past few weeks, I've been testing Nikon's $350 Coolpix S7c, a camera with built-in Wi-Fi wireless technology. The S7c captures photos, logs into your nearest Wi-Fi network and sends the photos in an email that contains thumbnail images and a link to Nikon's Coolpix Connect Web site. Recipients can download the photos or view them in a slide-show format on the site.

I found that emailing images with the Coolpix S7c was fast, simple and efficient. It took only a few minutes to set up, and I was comfortable using the camera's other basic features after taking just a few photos. Though the S7c's Wi-Fi receiver wasn't as strong as the one in my laptop, it worked well.

Wi-Fi technology isn't as widely available as cellphone networks are, but it's not unusual to find bookstores, coffee shops and schools with Wi-Fi. To help you along, Nikon includes a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi service with its camera. This works in Starbucks, airports, Borders bookstores and many other places.

Other digital cameras with integrated Wi-Fi have been introduced within the past year by Eastman Kodak and Nikon. But Kodak's EasyShare-one digital camera didn't link up to the network consistently, and Nikon's Coolpix S6 -- astonishingly -- would send images only to the photographer's computer.

The Coolpix S7c (the "c" stands for connect) boasts an edgy gun-metal gray casing, a generous three-inch viewing screen and a smart rotary dial that eases navigation and photo scrolling. Its beauty is backed up with brains, including a maximum resolution of 7.1 megapixels -- more than enough for normal users -- and a 3x optical zoom lens.

MojoPac Versus GoToMyPC

With MojoPac, you can go to any Windows XP computer in the world, plug in your MojoPac device, and bring up your MojoPac PC. The experience is exactly as if you are logging into your Personal Computer, complete with your desktop, shortcuts, applications and preferences --- http://www.mojopac.com/portal/content/hellomojo.jsp

If you are online, it is a bit easier to do this with GoToMyPC where you personal computer is back in the office and you are any online computer in the world (unlike MojoPac, nothing needs to be installed on the remote access computer) --- https://www.gotomypc.com

With GoToMyPC you are actually operating your office computer from a remote site. There is a fee for GoToMyPC, but the fee is quite reasonable for the service rendered.

Full Disclosure to Consumers of Higher Education?

"Regulating the New Consumerism," by John V. Lombardi, Inside Higher Ed, September 27, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/09/28/lombardi

One of the themes in the much commented on report of the Spellings Commission highlights the need to fully inform higher education consumers about everything. For some, accountability not only means being responsible about teaching and research, but also delivering some form of full disclosure. This trend reflects the continued move of higher education from a specialized product sold to well-informed customers to a generic product sold in widely varying formats to large numbers of often unsophisticated consumers.

As is usually the case with high profile commissions, this one responds to a mature trend, not something new and different. The proliferation of rankings and ratings of every conceivable type is the clearer example of the commodity college degree, but the commission, because it speaks for at least one part of the government, has a coercive capacity where the ratings have only a demonstrative capacity.

What, then, is the full consumer information we need? Much current university and college published data is actually not very helpful. As a normal practice, we produce measures of central tendency — averages or means — or we provide ratios of one kind or another. So we talk about average class size or average student/faculty ratios; average discount rate on tuition and fees; and the average financial aid package or the average debt on graduation. Universities and colleges provide information on the average endowment or average state investment per student.

All of these, and many others, provide an average representation of the reality of campus life. If universities and colleges managed, as do other high tech, high quality enterprises, by reducing the variation around the mean to produce a homogeneous product, these average numbers might have some usefulness. That’s not how higher education works.

Instead, colleges and especially large public universities manage in ways that appear to maximize the variation they can sustain in the quality and diversity of their students. They admit students with SAT scores ranging from 900 to 1600 perhaps, students whose parents have no taxable income and those whose income reaches above six or seven figures. They admit students who are the fourth generation of college attendees and the children of migrant workers whose home experience includes no prior engagement with higher education. Universities pride themselves on the wide diversity in the ethnicity and economic capability of their students and they speak eloquently of the wide range of socioeconomic circumstance from which their students come.

This is all to the good, but it illustrates why the average numbers we often discuss as the tokens of accountability disguise more often than they inform. Instead of average class size, we might display the percentage of students in classes under 25, 26 to 50, 51 to 100, and over 100. Even that is not as helpful, for example, as providing a transcript analysis of the graduating class. The aggregate measures that tell us how many classes are under 50 students tells us how the faculty teach, but not what individual students take. Students in engineering may have mostly classes smaller than 50 while students in humanities or social sciences may have mostly classes larger than 100. We may find that 30 percent of our graduating students never took a class under 50 even though such classes were available. Knowing what kinds of class contexts are available is a helpful overall indicator, but it does not tell the interested consumer what students actually choose to do or are advised to do.

We call for better information on the cost of college. By this, we mean both the “costs” of what colleges spend on providing an education and the “price” that students pay for that education. The latter is a very slippery number. Everyone knows that there is a sticker price and a discounted price. Everyone knows that students receive discounts for various reasons.

What we do not provide very often are data that describe the characteristics of students who receive discounts and reveal the relationship between particular characteristics and the discounts the institution provides. For example, we do not know the relationship between the marker for merit (SAT, GPA) and the amount of merit aid provided (for those institutions that provide merit aid). If we did, we might find that not all students with a 1350 SAT will get the same merit aid package.

Almost all institutions provide a wide range of need based aid, some from federal or state sources that are regulated and some from institutional sources that are not. Institutions create need based packages to achieve enrollment goals, and sometimes following a formula based on the federal guidelines and sometimes using ad hoc packaging to achieve balance in our student populations. This is especially so when institutions are under clear directions from their boards to change the composition of the student body in some way, for example to prefer legacies or first generation students, or to increase the percentage of men or women.

Student debt is a mystery number because the data on average debt deal with only a fraction of the student population. Average debt refers to the average institutionally managed debt of those graduating seniors who have debt. So it does not tell us about the debt of those students who in addition to institutionally managed debt have private debt from a local bank, from credit cards, or from other sources. It also does not tell us about those students who do not qualify for any institutionally managed loans but nonetheless borrow money from local banks, credit cards, and other sources. Nor does it tell us how much of the debt students contract is required by the formal cost of attendance and how much responds to lifestyle issues related to housing, transportation, illness, family obligations, and entertainment among other issues.

In the real world of higher education — rather than the idealized world of commissions and homogenizing government regulations — higher education institutions, while they produce a standardized product, do so for widely varying market niches made up of customers with widely varying characteristics.

Many of the proposed measures that we see coming from commissions and regulators speak to some mythical average student experience, usually reflecting the idealized type of the elite private four-year college. As such they may satisfy some, but will surely fail to provide more accurate information to individual consumers. How, we might ask, am I to know whether my child is average and therefore likely to have the average experience the data highlight? How many of the graduates actually participated in the average experience, or did most of them pass through the institution at the upper or lower edges of the experience represented by the calculated average?

Continued in article

Learning Accountability
The Spelling Plans for carrying the recommendations of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plans a many faceted campaign to carry out the recommendations of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, including providing matching funds to colleges and states that collect and publicly report how well their students learn, building a “privacy protected” database of college students’ academic records, and streamlining the process of applying for federal student aid.
Doug Lederman, "The Spellings Plan," Inside Higher Ed, September 26, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/26/spellings

It may not have seemed that way at times, but Charles Miller, the chairman of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, apparently felt constrained in what he could say during his time at the helm of the panel. In a letter containing “personal observations” about higher education, which he shared with Secretary Margaret Spellings when he formally gave her the panel’s final report this month and shared in public at a forum at the Cato Institute Wednesday, Miller makes many of the same points about higher education’s problems that he did when he spoke up during the commission’s deliberations. But he adopts tougher language in some cases, referring repeatedly to the “dysfunctional” nature of higher education finances and describing higher education as being “replete with opaque, complex information systems which are not informative for governing boards, policymakers and the public.” And while Miller continues to criticize private colleges for their “special resistance to accountability,” a theme he hit repeatedly during the commission’s life, he takes special aim at the nation’s elite research universities, which largely escaped his wrath over the last year. Because their “research expenditures are a major ‘cost driver’ in higher education,” he wrote in his letter to the secretary, those institutions “need the same intense examination and skeptical analysis other financial issues require, especially since most of these are public funds.” He added: “I think there is ample evidence that our great universities have much to account for—-and have great intellectual and financial resources to contribute—-yet often come to the public arena without taking full responsibility for their own imperfections while at the same time demanding more of the scarce public resources.”
Inside Higher Ed, September 29, 2006

Spellings Announces Plan to Improve Higher Ed --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6146394

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

They've Got to be Kidding!
Myths versus Realities of "America's Most Innovative College"
So do you know which U.S. college or university was cited for “innovation in curriculum development and program delivery” in the commission’s report? The winner is Neumont University, in Salt Lake City. The final version of the Spellings commission report, released September 19, states that “Salt Lake City-based Neumont University is educating the most sought-after software developers in the world” (p. 25). . . . But honestly, is Neumont really one of the best, most innovative colleges in the country? Perhaps, at least against the criteria outlined by Miller. But with due respect to Neumont’s students, faculty, and founders, and also to Miller’s comments about the need for risk and innovation, is this really the best example of a replicable curricular innovation that might “trickle over” to other sectors, as opposed to being cloned by other, aspiring for-profits eager to tap the demand for technology degrees and training? Ample research confirms that individual and organizational change occurs with some, but not too much, dissonance: individuals and organization eager to change need to be able to visualize their capacity to do so. But by highlighting Neumont, the commission has selected a model that is just probably too dissonant and too distant for the vast majority of U.S. colleges and universities.
Kenneth C. Green, "The Most Innovative College in America?" Inside Higher Ed, October 9, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/10/09/green

Congressional Crooks are Democrats and Republicans
"Politicians preying on the public," by Mychal Massie, WorldNetDaily, October 3, 2006 --- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52241

"Lender Overcharged U.S. $1 Billion, Audit Finds," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/02/nelnet

For many months, student loan watchdogs have been charging that lenders have taken advantage of a loophole in federal law to reap billions of dollars in profits to which they were not entitled. Late Friday, the U.S. Education Department’s inspector general strongly backed their view, releasing an audit that accused the National Education Loan Network (Nelnet) of having received $278 million in federal subsidy payments for which it was not eligible and of inappropriately charging the government for as much as $882 million more.

The inspector general’s office urged Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to order Nelnet to return the improper payments it has already received and to instruct the company to revise its estimates for future payments to exclude funds for the contested loans. Meanwhile, officials at Nelnet, a Nebraska-based company, disputed the audit’s findings but said they would work with the department to resolve them.

At issue in the case is Nelnet’s use of an exemption in federal law that allowed lenders that financed the student loans they issued using tax-exempt bonds issued before 1993 to earn a government subsidized interest rate of 9.5 percent. Congress engaged in several aborted attempts to fully close the loophole throughout the 1990s and the early part of this decade, but some lenders continued to find ways to take advantage of it by recycling the pre-1993 loan funds, before Congress, as part of the Higher Education Reconciliation Act, finally closed it permanently this year.

In the audit, the inspector general describes a process by which Nelnet seemed quite purposefully to try to expand its pool of loans that would qualify for the 9.5 percent “special allowance” payments from the federal government. “Through Project 950,” as the company’s effort was called, “Nelnet used a series of transactions to increase the amount of loans ostensibly funded by tax-exempt obligations from approximately $551 million” in March 2003 to $3.66 billion in June 2004, according to the audit.
The company, the inspector general found, moved loans into and then — “as little as one day later” — out of a non-taxable trust estate with the goal of making those loans qualify for the 9.5 percent rate.

The audit recounts exchanges in 2003 and 2004 in which Nelnet sought and believed it had gained Education Department approval for its practices regarding the 9.5 percent loans. But the inspector general says that Nelnet’s inquiries did “not appear to reflect a comprehensive disclosure by Nelnet of the nature or effect” of its effort to increase its volume of loans eligible for the higher rate.

A 1993 letter outlining the practice, the audit says, “did not identify the eligible source of funds that would be used to purchase and qualify loans for the 9.5 percent floor, did not state directly that the process would be repeated many times, and did not state that the process would result in a substantial increase in the amount of loans billed under the 9.5 percent floor.”

The audit incorporates a response that Nelnet officials submitted to an earlier draft of the audit this summer, which the inspector general notes “strongly disagrees with our finding and recommendations and requested that our draft report be withdrawn.”

In a prepared statement, Nelnet said company officials believe the inspector general’s report is “incorrect” because it is “inconsistent with the Higher Education Act, applicable laws, policy, department regulations, and the guidance to student loan companies previously issued by the Department.”

Nelnet will “seek a resolution of this matter with the Department and will also examine all other available remedies that prove the merits of our position,” said Mike Dunlap, the company’s chairman and co-chief executive officer.

Critics of the lenders’ continued use of the 9.5 percent loophole heralded the inspector general’s audit. “The depth and breadth of Nelnet’s failure to comply with the law is breathtaking, and the cost to taxpayers is staggering,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce. “In an era of high budget deficits, we must be vigilant about ensuring that available tax dollars are used to provide affordable college loans to families, not to provide excessive subsidies to banks.”

Miller and others, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who pushed the Education Department to look into the Nelnet matter, and watchdog groups like the Project on Student Debt, urged Spellings to back the inspector general. “The secretary of education should make sure that Nelnet pays back every penny they’ve wrongly claimed and should use the near $1.2 billion saved to help students and families pay for college,” said Michael Dannenberg of the New America Foundation, who has aggressively criticized the 9.5 percent rate practice.

Continued in article

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

The National Centers for Career and Technical Education --- http://www.nccte.org/

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

Abolishing the Core Computer Science Curriculum in an Effort to Attract Majors
The Georgia Institute of Technology is today unveiling what some experts believe is a much broader approach to the problem. The institute has abolished the core curriculum for computer science undergraduates — a series of courses in hardware and software design, electrical engineering and mathematics. These courses, in various forms, have been the backbone of the computer science curriculum not just at Georgia Tech but at most institutions.
Scott Jaschik, "New ‘Threads’ for Computer Science," Inside Higher Ed, September 26, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/26/gatech

The other, perhaps more costly alternative, is to maintain a core of required courses that are no longer silos in terms of specialized content --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Silos

Students may take the easiest way out in customizable curricula ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CustomizedCurricula
 

Government Questions Tax Exempt Status of Division I NCAA Athletics
The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee has sent the National Collegiate Athletic Association a pointed eight-page letter asking the sports group to justify the tax-exempt status of big-time collegiate sports. The letter, from Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) to Myles Brand, the NCAA’s president, is framed as part of the committee’s broader examination of the nonprofit sector, which, like a parallel review in the Senate Finance Committee, has touched on the pay and oversight of college presidents, among other things. Thomas’s letter asks 25 questions related to the association’s finances and educational mission, on such topics as coaches’ compensation and the alleged lack of rigor of many athletes’ academic programs, and demands extensive information from NCAA officials. And its underlying theme is summed up in such pointed statements as this one, posed as as question: “How does playing major college football or men’s basketball in a highly commercialized, profit-seeking, entertainment environment further the educational purpose of your member institutions?” Thomas’s letter seeks a reply by October 30.
Inside Higher Ed, October 5, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/05/qt

Also see "Ball’s in the NCAA’s Court," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, October 6, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/06/ncaa

Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in higher education (including "Rewarding Stupidity of Top Athletes") are at  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics

Question
What may be the largest criminal tax fraud prosecution in U.S. history?

"Prosecutors in KPMG Tax Shelter Case Offer to Try 2 Groups of Defendants Separately," Lynnley Browning, The New York Times, October 5, 2006 --- Click Here

Last year, 16 former KPMG employees, as well as a lawyer and an outside investment adviser, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan on charges that they conspired to defraud the Internal Revenue Service by creating and selling certain questionable tax shelters.

The proposal to split the group comes after Judge Kaplan raised concerns about some prosecutorial tactics in the complex case. KPMG narrowly averted criminal indictment last year over certain questionable shelters and instead reached a $456 million deferred-prosecution agreement. Judge Kaplan has criticized prosecutors for pressuring KPMG to cut off the payment of legal fees to the defendants.

His concerns how appear to extend to the indictments of the defendants.

According to a transcript of the hearing on Tuesday, Judge Kaplan said: “The government indicted 18 people knowing that the effect of doing that would be to put economic pressure on people, along with whatever else puts pressure on people to cave and to plead, because they can’t afford to defend themselves and because perhaps there are other risks involved in a joint trial. That is the patent reality of this case.”

A representative for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan did not have a comment on the letter yesterday.

The letter, which was not filed under seal but did not appear on the court’s docket, was confirmed by two persons close to the proceedings.

Under the proposal, the junior defendants would include Jeffrey Eischeid, the rising star who was in charge of KPMG’s personal financial planning division; John Larson, a former KPMG employee who set up an investment boutique that sold shelters; David Amir Makov, a onetime Deutsche Bank employee who later worked with Mr. Larson’s investment boutique, Presidio Advisory Services; and Gregg Ritchie, a former partner; among others.

The senior defendants would include Jeffrey Stein, a former vice chairman who was the No. 2. executive at the firm; John Lanning, a former vice chairman in charge of tax services; Richard Rosenthal, a former chief financial officer; Steven Gremminger, a former associate in-house lawyer; Robert Pfaff, a former KPMG partner who worked with Mr. Larson to set up Presidio Advisory Services; David Greenberg, a former senior tax partner; and Raymond J. Ruble, a former lawyer at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood; among others.

Lawyers for the defendants maintain that their clients did nothing illegal, while prosecutors contend that they created and sold tax shelters, some involving fake loans, that deprived the Treasury of $2.5 billion in tax revenue.

Bob Jensen's threads on this and other KPMG litigations are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#KPMG

SEC Accuses Ex-CFO of Lantronix CFO of Channel Stuffing
The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused the former chief financial officer of Lantronix Inc. of engaging in a scheme to overstate financial results for personal gain. On Wednesday, the Commission noted in its cease-and-desist proceedings against the company that Steven Cotton, the former CFO, allegedly inflated revenues for the second and third quarters of fiscal year 2001, its fiscal year 2001, and the first quarter of fiscal year 2002. He reportedly did this primarily through artificially boosting sales by offering distributors special terms to induce them to purchase more product than they needed, which is called channel stuffing, according to the SEC complaint . . . The regulator claims that Lantronix deliberately sent excessive product to distributors and granted them expanded return rights and extended payment terms. In addition, as part of its alleged channel stuffing scheme and to prevent imminent product returns, Lantronix loaned funds to a third party to purchase Lantronix product from one of its distributors, noted the complaint. The third party later returned the product, said the document.
Stephen Taub, "SEC Accuses Ex-CFO of Channel Stuffing The regulator alleges that one-time Lantronix CFO overstated revenue while understating losses," CFO.com September 28, 2006 --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/7987629?f=alerts

Bob Jensen's threads on channel stuffing (including Coca Cola) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/eitf01.htm#ChannelStuffing 

Doral Financial Settles Financial Fraud Charges
The Securities and Exchange Commission on September 19, 2006 filed financial fraud charges against Doral Financial Corporation, alleging that the NYSE-listed Puerto Rican bank holding company overstated income by 100 percent on a pre-tax, cumulative basis between 2000 and 2004. The Commission further alleges that by overstating its income by $921 million over the period, the company reported an apparent 28-quarter streak of “record earnings” that facilitated the placement of over $1 billion of debt and equity. Since Doral Financial’s accounting and disclosure problems began to surface in early 2005, the market price of the company’s common stock plummeted from almost $50 to under $10, reducing the company’s market value by over $4 billion. Without admitting or denying the Commission’s allegations, Doral Financial has consented to the entry of a court order enjoining it from violating the antifraud, reporting, books and records and internal control provisions of the federal securities laws and ordering that it pay a $25 million civil penalty. The settlement reflects the significant cooperation provided by Doral in the Commission’s investigation.
"DORAL FINANCIAL SETTLES FINANCIAL FRAUD CHARGES WITH SEC AND AGREES TO PAY $25 MILLION PENALTY," AccountingEducation.com, September 28, 2006 ---
http://accountingeducation.com/index.cfm?page=newsdetails&id=143606

The independent auditor for Doral Financial is PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) --- Click Here for Doral's 10-K
PwC's charges to Doral increased from $2.2 million in 2004 to $5.6 million in 2006.

Bob Jensen's threads on PwC are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#PwC

From Ernst & Young:  Financial Management: The Primary Challenge
Financial management still has an image problem, but those who regard it as the domain of the ‘bean counter’ are behind the times. In the modern organization the CFO and finance function are called upon to fulfil many varied roles, ranging from corporate governance and disclosure, to strategy and business process engineering. Yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also empowering and exciting.Leading academics from the world’s most respected business schools have contributed to a series of articles on this subject in a sponsored Financial Times series, and we have our own perspectives on this too.
"Financial Management: The Primary Challenge," Ernst & Young, September 2006 --- Click Here

"Zune Won't Kill the IPod," Leander Kahney, Wired News, October 3, 2006 --- http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71896-0.html?tw=wn_index_2

Microsoft's soon-to-be-released Zune MP3 player is a sure-fire iPod killer -- if you believe what you been reading in the press recently.

There's nothing the press likes more than a good fight, and the Zune looks like a worthy contender for the iPod's heavyweight crown.

The tech press loves the Zune because of its specs. They tally up the features and conclude the Zune is better because there's more stuffed inside.

When it launches next month, the Zune will cost $250 for 30 GB -- just like the equivalent iPod. But the Zune also has Wi-Fi for wirelessly trading songs; a larger, 3-inch screen (good for widescreen movies); and will connect to Microsoft's Zune Marketplace music service, which will sell songs at 99 cents each and offer a $15 a month subscription plan.

The Zune will definitely have an impact. That's guaranteed by Microsoft's clout, and is why music labels, movie studios and accessory makers are jumping on the Zune bandwagon.

But although the Zune looks good on paper, it's not going to kill the iPod because of three things:

1. It's not cool and never will be.

The iPod is streets ahead in the things that really matter: ease of use, aesthetics and -- here's the tough one -- cool. The Zune is not cool. You can tell that at a glance. Take the choice of colors. It'll come in black, white and brown.

Wait a sec -- brown? Surely this is some sick joke gone horribly wrong. Or are they trying to rip off LG's Chocolate phone?

The Zune's best bet is waiting it out until the iPod becomes passé, which seems unlikely given that Apple is constantly redesigning and refreshing the device.

2. The Zune will be locked down tighter than the queen's knickers.

The Zune's interesting features -- Wi-Fi sharing and the music subscription plan -- will be subject to a strict digital rights management scheme, and given Microsoft's reputation in this area (PlaysForShit) -- I'll bet the Zune will drive customers to the iPod.

After all, PlaysForSure is such a technical and marketing disaster Microsoft is abandoning it altogether in favor of the Zune, which will attempt to tightly integrate hardware, software and services, just like the iPod.

But whereas Apple's FairPlay digital rights management scheme seems to be working very well (surprisingly, there aren't widespread reports of glitches and problems), Microsoft's penchant for complex and glitchy verification systems bode ill for the device.

3. Wi-Fi song sharing will not catch on in public.

The Zune's only original feature is Wi-Fi song sharing, which will allow Zune owners to search for others nearby and temporarily trade songs over the air. Traded tunes will be playable up to three times over three days, and can be flagged on the player for later purchase online. Otherwise they disappear.

But while it's obvious that sharing songs will be fun with friends at school or college, it's not an activity that will take off in public. It'll largely be confined to peer groups.

Also see http://physorg.com/news78764385.html

"The New iPod: Ready for Battle?" by Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, October 4, 2006, Page D1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/the_mossberg_solution.html

Question
How much have workers shared in recent economic growth?

"Coming of Wage," by Allan Hubbard and Edward. P. Lazear, The Wall Street Journal,  October 2, 2006; Page A10 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115975253063679596.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

The U.S. economy has faced challenges from recession to corporate scandals to terrorist attack to natural disasters. And through it all, the economy has proven to be resilient and responsive. In the past three years our economy has grown 3.7% per year, faster than any other major industrialized economy, and added more than 5.7 million payroll jobs, more than all the jobs added in the European Union and Japan combined.

Yet questions understandably arise about whether this economic expansion is paying off for U.S. workers. American workers are among the hardest working and most productive in the world. They deserve to receive their share of the gains in this economic expansion, as they have in past expansions.

A pattern that prevails as the economy moves from recession to recovery, and then into a sustained expansion, is that productivity grows first. The higher productivity growth means higher profits for businesses, which induce them to expand output and then employment. Later, as fewer workers are available for hire, wages grow, profit rates fall, and workers' share of the gains rises. This is what we observed during the last expansion. After the recession in the early 1990s, wage growth was flat. It did not pick up until the last few years of the decade.

We are seeing the same pattern in this economic expansion. Productivity growth has been exceptionally strong in the past five years, well above the historical average. And now employee compensation per hour has also picked up. Over the first half of this year, compensation growth has averaged a remarkable 6.3%, at an annual rate adjusted for inflation. This growth is much faster than in previous years.

As has been the case for many years, higher health-care costs mean much of the growth in compensation goes to benefits. Although benefits are important, workers also naturally care about whether their paychecks are going up.

Recently, nominal wages of production workers have also grown considerably. At an annualized rate, nominal wage growth has been about 4% so far this year, faster than at this point in the last economic expansion. Nominal wages are now growing faster than the past couple of years and are growing at about the same rate as they were in the late 1990s.

The difference between this economic expansion and the last expansion is that higher-than-expected energy prices have consumed much of this strong nominal wage growth. Inflation-adjusted wage growth without the increase in energy prices is similar to past economic expansions. The issue here is energy prices, not wage growth. Workers' paychecks are going up, but they have had to use much of that increase for energy purchases like gasoline.

The recent news on energy prices is good for workers. Nationwide gasoline prices have fallen by about 65 cents per gallon since early August and market data suggest that inflation will fall below the levels of the past few months. This decline, coupled with the nominal growth rates that we see in both compensation and wages, means that workers should enjoy more real earnings in the months ahead.

The Bush administration is pursuing a variety of short and long-term measures to address high energy prices. Last year, the president and Congress enacted the first major energy bill in over a decade. It is a significant first step toward a long-term vision of achieving greater energy security through diversification of energy sources, improved efficiency and increased domestic production. In addition to implementing the new law, the administration is pursuing new ideas for alternative technologies and clean domestic production. For example, the administration and Congress are working to increase research in alternative fuels, and to safely increase domestic oil and natural gas production in the Outer Continental Shelf and Alaska. These and other pro-growth policies will benefit both the overall economy and workers.

Most importantly, American entrepreneurs and companies are investing billions of dollars in creative ideas for new fuels, power resources and better efficiency. Our flexible economy that rewards risk-taking and boosts productivity will also help us produce reliable and cost-effective energy.

With some politicians and commentators criticizing tax relief, free trade, immigration and labor policies, it is important to recognize the truth about wages and the distinctions between this economic expansion and past expansions. Increasing the tax and regulatory burden on our economy will not increase wages or make the current expansion more rewarding for workers. Without the tax relief, workers would be taking home a smaller portion of their paychecks. Higher taxes and a higher regulatory burden would just slow the strong productivity growth that we need to remain competitive in the global economy and increase standards of living.

Mr. Hubbard is director of the National Economic Council. Mr. Lazear is chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

From Jim Mahar's blog on October 3, 2006 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

Will stocks go Boom?

 

Canada's National Post gives us all something to worry about it its series on the impact of an aging labor force. In the second part of the series, the paper examines whether as baby boomers retire if they will drive down stock prices.

Will stocks go Boom?:

"In the United States, for example, the ratio of workers to retirees is expected to fall to just 2.6 in 30 years, from 4.9 today. In Japan, the ratio of retirees to active workers is expected to fall even further, to one to one by about 2050.

In other words, the number of potential stock buyers will soon begin a steep decline....No less an authority than Jeremy Siegel, the famous Wharton finance professor and author of Stocks For The Long Run, has sounded the alarm, calling the ageing population the most critical issue facing the developed world."

What about the impact on finance? Not only will the changing workforce impact pension funds, social security, and health care costs, but it will likely drive down the stock market as the boomers end saving and begin to draw down their portfolios.

Now before you panic, the coming tidal wave of retirees in the developed world may be offset by other factors (notably foreign investment as more lesser developed countries develop and formerly impoverished people become investors) but it is something to consider and "gameplan".

Most likely outcome? As baby boomers age they will shift money out of stocks and this will be a factor that keeps returns lower than their historical averages. Which means we should all lower our projected returns. This unfortunately means we will have to save more for a comfortable retirement be it personally, in corporate pension funds, or in government sponsored "social security" accounts.

And if this analysis is wrong and the market continues to earn higher than historical norms? We will have set aside more than needed and you will have more money in your portfolio than expected, which is not the worst thing in the world!

Some past articles on this topic:
Will bomers drive down markets? (October 2004)

Porterba on impact of Boomers (November 2004)
 

---

USATODAY.com - Easy credit can mean long-term hardship for college students

I am torn on this one. On one hand it is inarguable that many people (including no doubt a higher percentage of college students) do get into financial difficulty stemming from excessive use of credit cards. However, the ban on marketing of the credit cards on campus does seem a tad much. Credit cards do have their upsides as well: they help build credit and lower transaction costs.

On the other hand, many 18 year olds are not ready for credit cards and do succumb to overspending.
From USATODAY.com :

Easy credit can mean long-term hardship for college students: "College students tend to have less financial experience than older adults, making them more susceptible to these pitches....Nearly a dozen states, including New York and California, have made it harder for card companies to market on public campuses. And a growing number of colleges, on their own, have begun to impose restrictions."

Of course the credit card companies do not want to lose this market.

So what to do? If you are a college student who is mature enough to use (and not misuse) a credit card, I would recommend highly getting one to build credit and for ease of use. However, get one with no fee and pay off the bill completely every month. If you find this progressively more difficult to do, stop using it until it is paid off.

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

Latest Headlines on September 30, 2006

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"Do Dieting Monkeys Live Healthier and Longer Lives?" by Katherine Bourzac, MIT's Technology Review, October 3, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17572&ch=biotech

An ongoing study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in which rhesus monkeys are being fed an extremely calorie-restricted diet gives preliminary evidence that the regime prevents age-related diseases. For decades, scientists have known that a diet of about 30-percent fewer calories than normal extends the lifespan of mice by 10 to 20 percent, reduces their incidence of cancer, and prevents the deterioration of learning and memory in the rodents. And similar effects have been shown in lower organisms from yeast to fruit flies. But such life extension has not been proven yet in primates.

Researchers at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center have been studying a group of 76 rhesus monkeys, half of them on calorie restriction and half on a normal diet, for 18 years, to determine whether or not the restricted diet has the same health benefits in primates as it does in other animals. The study will likely go on for at least another decade, since the monkeys are only now entering old age. Captive rhesus monkeys usually live to around 25 years old, which is now about the average age of the monkeys in the study. An age of 40 for a rhesus monkey is similar to 120 for a human--the apparent maximum lifespan.

Although there is now strong evidence that caloric restriction prevents diabetes in the primates (the disease is a major killer of captive rhesus monkeys), it's still too early to assess the diet's effects on their lifespan, according to Richard Weindruch, professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, who is heading up the study.

But preliminary evidence suggests that the diet is preventing loss of muscle mass, arthritis, menstrual irregularities, and other signs of aging. "Over the next 10 years, survival differences will come out," predicts Ricki Colman, a scientist on the study. Meanwhile, eight of the monkeys on a normal diet have died of age-related causes such as cancer and diabetes; five on the restricted diet have died of these causes.

As the monkeys enter old age, the researchers are beginning gene expression profiling on them--the first step toward finding the molecular mechanisms that connect the extreme diet to its effects in the animals. The monkeys will also undergo MRIs and be tested for mental acuity, to assess whether or not the diet prevents age-related deterioration of learning and memory.

Even if a diet of 30-percent fewer calories proved to extend healthy human lifespan, however, it's unlikely that most people could be able to stick with it. (A group of individuals following such a diet, called the Calorie Restriction Society, seem to have some health benefits. See "Human Study Shows Benefits of Caloric Restriction".)

Researchers studying caloric restriction in animals, including Colman, say that, in general, such a diet is "not a long-term possibility in humans." Rather, the primary goal of their study, Colman and Weindruch agree, is to learn about aging and to understand how caloric restriction changes metabolism and gene expression.

In Europe It’s Fish Oil After Heart Attacks, but Not in U.S.
In a large number of studies, prescription fish oil has been shown to improve survival after heart attacks and to reduce fatal heart rhythms. The American College of Cardiology recently strengthened its position on the medical benefit of fish oil, although some critics say that studies have not defined the magnitude of the effect. But in the United States, heart attack victims are not generally given omega-3 fatty acids, even as they are routinely offered more expensive and invasive treatments, like pills to lower cholesterol or implantable defibrillators. Prescription fish oil, sold under the brand name Omacor, is not even approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in heart patients.
Elizabeth Rosenthall, "In Europe It’s Fish Oil After Heart Attacks, but Not in U.S.," The New York Times, October 2, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/health/03fish.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Autism undergoes biggest-ever US study
The largest US study ever of the causes of autism, the poorly understood developmental disability that affects more than one million Americans, is under way. The five-year, 5.9 million-dollar study will involve 2,700 children and five separate research institutes aiming to identify causes of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in young children, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on October 6.
"Autism undergoes biggest-ever US study," PhysOrg, October 9, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news79598890.html

Question
Is metabolic syndrome a real disease or a figment of the drug industries greedy imagination?

"The Thin Pill 75 million Americans may have something called metabolic syndrome. How Big Pharma turned obesity into a disease – then invented the drugs to cure it," by Thomas Goetz, Wired Magazine, October 2006 --- http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/thin.html

But some wonder if metabolic syndrome really identifies anything new. Skeptics, which include the American Diabetes Association, suggest that researchers, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies have been so hasty to embrace the disease (each for their own reasons), they've overlooked evidence that the science behind the diagnosis is flimsy and conjectural. These critics say that so-called metabolic syndrome lumps together risks we already recognize and monitor – or worse, that it's just a fancy way to describe obesity. By accepting it, we medicalize a lifestyle condition that we already know how to treat: with diet and exercise.

The debate is hardly academic. The pharmaceutical industry has spent millions of dollars developing dozens of drugs aimed at obesity generally and metabolic syndrome in particular. Many of those drugs are now or will soon be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for approval. At the same time, the industry is lobbying the FDA to recognize the syndrome as a disease and to reconsider its approach to obesity drugs, a shift that would accelerate demand for new drugs.

Continued in article

"U.S. Health-Care System Gets a 'D'," Business Week, September 21, 2006 --- Click Here

The U.S. health-care system is doing poorly by virtually every measure. That's the conclusion of a national report card on the U.S. health-care system, released Sept. 20. Although there are pockets of excellence, the report, commissioned by the non-profit and non-partisan Commonwealth Fund, gave the U.S. system low grades on outcomes, quality of care, access to care, and efficiency, compared to other industrialized nations or generally accepted standards of care. Bottom line: U.S. health care barely passes with an overall grade of 66 out of 100.

The survey was carried out by 18 academic and private-sector health-care leaders, who rate the system on 37 different measures. The poor grade is particularly discomfiting, the researchers note, because the U.S. spends more on medicine, by far, than any other country. Approximately 16% of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) is devoted to health care, compared with 10% or less in other industrialized nations.

Health care is also responsible for most new job creation, according to BusinessWeek's Sept. 25 cover story (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/25/06, "What's Really Propping Up The Economy"). Yet the U.S. ranks 15th out of 19 countries in terms of the number of deaths that could have been prevented. The study estimates that each year 115 out of 100,000 U.S. deaths could have been avoided with timely and appropriate medical attention. Only Ireland, Britain, and Portugal scored worse in this category, while France scored the best, with 75 preventable deaths per 100,000.

BELOW POTENTIAL. The U.S. ranks at the bottom among industrialized countries for life expectancy both at birth and at age 60. It is also last on infant mortality, with 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 2.7 in the top three countries. There are dramatic gaps within the U.S. as well, according to the study. The average disability rate for all Americans is 25% worse than the rate for the best five states alone, as is the rate of children missing 11 or more days of school.

The report found that quality of care and access to care varied widely across the country, and it noted substantial gaps between national averages and pockets of excellence. The authors concluded that, if the U.S. improved and standardized health-care performance and access, approximately 100,000 to 150,000 lives could be saved annually, along with $50 billion to $100 billion a year.

Continued in article

"Taming Peanut Allergy Takes Researchers Down Uncertain Road," by Jane Zhang, The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2006; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/science_journal.html

In a world of wheat-free cookies and dairy-free ice cream, the peanut industry is helping fund the quest for a "nut-free" peanut.

Peanuts aren't nuts at all, of course, but legumes, or seeds, as are beans and lentils. An estimated 1.5 million Americans, including some 600,000 children, experience allergic reactions to peanuts, ranging from hives to nausea to sometimes-fatal anaphylactic shock. With most of the annual 150 food-allergy deaths blamed on peanuts, many schools have created peanut-free zones or gone totally "peanut free."

The number of children with peanut allergies has skyrocketed, doubling from 1997 to 2002, according to a study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. And it's a mystery why peanut allergies are causing more problems. One explanation is that physicians are more adept at detecting them. Another is that the modern environment may be, in a sense, too clean: If the human immune system were exposed to more allergens, a peanut might not send it into overdrive.

An approved asthma drug, Xolair, may be useful in treating peanut and other food allergies; injected into patients, it would reduce certain antibodies that are thought to cause anaphylactic food allergy. Last year, though, clinical trials came to a halt after two children, who had been given peanut protein in a screening to gauge the severity of their allergy, experienced anaphylactic reactions. The drug's makers -- Genentech, Novartis and Tanox -- are working with the Food and Drug Administration to design a new trial, Genentech says.

Determined scientists, in some cases with peanut-industry funding, are trying to develop other therapies, or a vaccine, to prevent or reduce the severity of peanut reactions. A nut-free peanut would be genetically altered so that it is less likely to set off an immune response. Peanut farmers and food processors have given $5.6 million over the past decade to eight scientists, mainly for peanut-allergy work, says Howard Valentine, of the American Peanut Council.

Two researchers -- Wesley Burks, chief of pediatric allergy and immunology at Duke University Medical Center, and Hugh Sampson, his counterpart at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine -- are trying to create a vaccine. They have slightly modified the three peanut proteins responsible for most reactions so they don't trigger such strong reactions from human mast cells. By administering the modified proteins to subjects in slowly increasing doses, they hope to condition their immune systems to tolerate more. They have tested the therapy on mice and plan to start on humans in a year or so.

Another experimental therapy aims to reduce the severity of reactions. Dr. Burks's team administers powdered or liquid peanut proteins to patients in incrementally increasing doses, starting with 0.001 peanut the first day, to one whole peanut six months later. They hope one day to develop a drug or a physician-administered therapy. In a trial completed on eight patients, Dr. Burks says the subjects tolerated 13 peanuts before experiencing a reaction -- enough, in theory, to save an allergic child's life in case of accidental ingestion.

Peanut interests have helped to fund the work of Peggy Ozias-Akins, a horticulture professor at the University of Georgia, Tifton. She wants to develop a plant whose peanuts are free of the three major protein allergens.

Screening the genetic structure of peanuts harvested on an experimental farm, Dr. Ozias-Akins is searching for ones with a defunct Ara h 2 gene, which is responsible for a protein that causes reactions in about 90% of patients with peanut allergy. When she finds plants with the defunct gene, she'll use them in a traditional breeding program to produce less-allergenic plants. She expects it will take at least three years to breed the plants and test them in animals.

Dr. Ozias-Akins's team also is trying to disable the Ara h 2 gene by modifying the peanut plant's genetic structure. She shoots cloned copies of the gene into a peanut, which can create a disabled gene that suppresses the function of the original one. Her team is growing plants with a disabled Ara h 2 gene in the greenhouse and testing whether the peanuts contain the allergy-causing protein.

Success is a long way off. Without the protein, other genes may compensate for its loss, making the new plants more, not less, allergenic than regular peanuts. As a result, any new genetically modified food product would have to go through animal testing and human clinical trials.

And even if Dr. Ozias-Akins gets there, it isn't clear that the world will embrace the results of her work. Says Duke's Dr. Burks, "If you take out all those proteins that cause allergic reactions to the peanut, then you no longer have a peanut."

Consumers may reject a genetically modified nut-free peanut. Dr. Ozias-Akins is aware of the skeptics but hopes the benefits will outweigh concerns. "Nothing -- or very little -- we eat today is natural or hasn't been exposed to artificial selection," she says.

"It's the best solution on the horizon right now," says Don Koehler, executive director of Georgia Peanut Commission. "We may never have an allergen-free peanut, but you've got to try. You've got to dream a little."

National Alliance for Hispanic Health --- http://www.hispanichealth.org/

Online Radiology Teaching Files and Medical Image Atlas and Database --- http://rad.usuhs.mil/medpix/medpix_home.html

"Cranky? You may be smarter than you think," PhysOrg, September 27, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news78645755.html

People who are readily disagreeable in their youth may end up being smarter than their laid-back contemporaries in their golden years, a new U.S. study says.

The study by psychology professor Jacqueline Bichsel of Morgan State University in Baltimore found that cranky people maintain a higher level of intelligence from about age 60 and up than more easy-going seniors.

"These individuals have a higher vocabulary," she told The Baltimore Sun. "They have a better use of words, a better knowledge of facts."

Her study, conducted with Thomas Baker of York University in Toronto, found grumpy old men and feisty old women are often smarter in some ways than young people.

It concludes that an ability to be open to new situations may predict intelligence earlier in life, but disagreeableness may predict intelligence later in life.

Elephants Becoming Mad Rapists and Killers
Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in ‘‘a number of reserves’’ in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.
Charles Siebert, "An Elephant Crackup?" The New York Times, October 8, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html
Jensen Comment
Much of the bad behavior in young male elephants is attributed to the loss of role models and controlling adults.

Note the serious medical finding:
"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"
Jensen Comment
This type of therapy has been shown to distract patients from almost all their maladies.

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners --- http://improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2006

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded on Thursday night, October 5, at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

The ceremony was webcast at www.improbable.com . Recorded video will be posted here soon.

Two days after the ceremony -- on Saturday, October 7 -- the new winners will give free public lectures at the
Ig Informal Lectures.

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.
REFERENCE: "Cure for a Headache," Ivan R Schwab, British Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 86, 2002, p. 843.
REFERENCE: "Woodpeckers and Head Injury," Philip R.A. May, Joaquin M. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7957, February 28, 1976, pp. 454-5.
REFERENCE: "Woodpeckers and Head Injury," Philip R.A. May, Joaquin M. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7973, June 19, 1976, pp. 1347-8.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Ivan Schwab

NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.
REFERENCE: "Dung Preference of the Dung Beetle Scarabaeus cristatus Fab (Coleoptera-Scarabaeidae) from Kuwait," Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Musalam, Journal of Arid Environments, vol. 35, no. 3, 1997, pp. 511-6.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Faten Al-Musalam

PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.
REFERENCE: http://www.compoundsecurity.co.uk
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Howard Stapleton planned to attend, but his plans were interrupted by a family medical situation.

ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.
REFERENCE: "Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound," D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand,  Perception and Psychophysics, vol. 39,1986, pp. 77-80.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Lynn Halpern and Randolph Blake

MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed
REFERENCE: "Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed," Velocity, June 2006,
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes
CONTACT: Nic Svenson, Communications Officer, CSIRO Industrial Physics, Phone: +61 (2) 9413 7643, Fax: +61 (2) 9413 7644, nic.svenson@csiro.au
CONTACT: Dr. Piers Barnes, Post Doctoral Fellow, CSIRO Industrial Physics, Office: +61 2 9413 7179, Mobile: +61 410 273 353, Fax: +61 2 9413 7200, <piers.barnes@csiro.au>

LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."
REFERENCE: "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 20, no. 2, March 2006, pp. 139-56.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Daniel Oppenheimer

MEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."
REFERENCE: "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage," Francis M. Fesmire,  Annals of Emergency Medicine, vol. 17, no. 8, August 1988 p. 872.
REFERENCE: "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,"
Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven, Journal of Internal Medicine, vol. 227, no. 2, February 1990, pp. 145-6. They are at the Department of Internal Medicine, Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel.
REFERENCE: "Hiccups and Digital Rectal Massage,"  M. Odeh and A. Oliven, Archives of Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery, vol. 119, 1993, p. 1383.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Francis Fesmire

PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.
REFERENCE: "Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half," Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch, Physical Review Letters, vol. 95, no. 9, August 26, 2005, pp. 95505-1 to 95505-1.
REFERENCE: video and other details at <http://www.lmm.jussieu.fr/spaghetti/index.html>
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch

CHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rosselló of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain,  for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature."
REFERENCE: "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature," Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito, José Bon, and Carmen Rosselló, Journal of Food Science, vol. 64, no. 6, 1999, pp. 1038-41.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via video recording.

BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.
REFERENCE: "On Human Odour, Malaria Mosquitoes, and Limburger Cheese," Bart. G.J. Knols, The Lancet, vol. 348 , November 9, 1996, p. 1322.
REFERENCE: “Behavioural and electrophysiological responses of the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae (Diptera: Culicidae) to Limburger cheese volatiles,” Bulletin of Entomological Research, B.G.J. Knols, J.J.A. van Loon, A. Cork, R.D. Robinson, et al., vol. 87, 1997, pp. 151-159.
REFERENCE: "Limburger Cheese as an Attractant for the Malaria Mosquito Anopheles gambiae s.s.," B.G,J. Knols and R. De Jong, Parasitology Today, yd. 12, no. 4, 1996, pp. 159-61.
REFERENCE: "Selection of Biting Sites on Man by Two Malaria Mosquito Species," R. De Jong and B.G.J. Knols, Experientia, vol. 51, 1995, pp. 80–84.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Bart Knols

For prior years' awards go to http://improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2006

More Tidbits from the Chronicle of Higher Education --- http://www.aldaily.com/

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

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

Three Finance Blogs

Jim Mahar's FinanceProfessor Blog --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
FinancialRounds Blog --- http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Karen Alpert's FinancialMusings (Australia) --- http://financemusings.blogspot.com/

Some Accounting Blogs

Paul Pacter's IAS Plus (International Accounting) --- http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
International Association of Accountants News --- http://www.aia.org.uk/
AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries --- http://www.accountingeducation.com/
Gerald Trite's eBusiness and XBRL Blogs --- http://www.zorba.ca/
AccountingWeb --- http://www.accountingweb.com/   
SmartPros --- http://www.smartpros.com/

Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Richard Torian's Managerial Accounting Information Center --- http://www.informationforaccountants.com/ 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone:  603-823-8482 
Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu