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 socie