Video of Roger Williams Playing Autumn Leaves --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_1tp2APNcg
Video of Roger Williams Playing Autumn Leaves --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO5cueCo0No
Autumn Leaves (Frank Sinatra) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhB8H1YnRF0
o of Roger Williams Playing Autumn Leaves --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO5cueCo0No
Autumn Leaves (Nat "King" Cole) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY17gMP5QvI
Autumn Leaves (Andrea Bocelli) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAMy_hivbtk
Autumn Leaves (Jazz piano trio) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ZzjMNgkZg

The above picture was actually taken at the end of October 2005 when there was less snow on the mountains
We can now see quite a lot of snow on the Presidential Range about 20 miles northeast of our closer Kinsman Range.
It has been a great year for foliage and relatively warm October weather.

Above is a view of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains
Below is a view of Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Clay, and Mt. Washington taken from our front porch
Twin Mountain in the Twin Mountain Range is in the foreground
Each day of late autumn brings us closer to skiing season
But now we're still enjoying colors of autumn leaves
 

 The above rock is in the middle of our circular driveway
Below you can make out part of my neighbor's swimming pool that we enjoy when they occasionally come up here
Our old maple tree's trunk below is over fourteen feet in circumference

Tidbits on October 17, 2007
Bob Jensen

Videos From Bob Jensen's Personal Camera (the pictures are clear but some of them lost a bit in the video) ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/Video/Personal/
The Tidbits.wmv video is narrated.

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   

Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

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

CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination

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

A Very Short Video History of Religion --- http://www.mapsofwar.com/ind/history-of-religion.html

Roger Williams in Concert

• Born Free (Star Wars Upside Down) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbVy28mjUQQ

• Autumn Leaves --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_1tp2APNcg

• Autumn Leaves --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO5cueCo0No

• Impossible Dream (Elvis Slide Show with Roger Williams Accompanying) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXpp69H6jhc

Halloween Hangman (interactive video; randomly hit the buttons)  --- http://www.dedge.com/flash/hangman/hangman.swf

From Princeton
University Channel (video and audio) ---  http://uc.princeton.edu/main/

Ideas Worth Spreading --- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2670820702819322251

Mathematics for Economics: Enhancing Teaching and Learning (includes video tutorials) ---  http://www.metalproject.co.uk/

Bowdoin College Combines Old and New Architecture --- http://chronicle.com/media/flash/v54/i08/bowdoin/

Snowball is a medium sulfur-crested Eleanora cockatoo and he loves to dance and sing ---
http://birdloversonly.blogspot.com/2007/09/may-i-have-this-dance.html

The word-crafted version of California's SB 777 Law (signed by Governor Schwarzenegger) ---
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/sen/sb_0751-0800/sb_777_bill_20070223_introduced.pdf
A video debate from both sides that leaves viewers pretty well confused --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqyilGupb9A
Al
The bill should be called the Lawyers Full Employment Act since California courts are bound to become crammed with harassment lawsuits coming form all sides of society seeking to win the legal lottery. The losers inevitably will be California taxpayers who ultimately will foot the bill of their school districts defending themselves in lawsuits, many of which will be cookie cutter lawsuits, i.e., thousands of lawsuits that are virtual photocopies with the names, dates, and places changed.

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

Richard Wagner's 'Die Walkuere' From the Washington National Opera (Entire Performance ) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15196750
Placido Domingo, Anja Kampe, Alan Held, Gidon Saks, Linda Watson, Elena Zaremba, and Fricka Zaremba

Violinist Julia Fischer Voted Artist of the Year 2007 --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14992483

Leos Janacek's 'Jenufa' From the Washington National Opera --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14992132

Josh Ritter in Full Concert (poetic in the style of Bob Dylan but a better singer) --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14939797

Love Is On A Roll (Don Williams video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub5Y3IHluF8

Jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut and pop icon Elvis Presley aren't a likely pairing: Chestnut is one of the top pianists of a generation born many years after songs like "Love Me Tender," "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel" made Presley the king of rock 'n' roll. But on Chestnut's new CD, Cyrus Plays Elvis, he offers a fresh outlook on Presley --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15039843

'Rag and Bone' by The White Stripes (Meg White, Drummer) --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15319394

The Americans Are Coming (rock) --- http://www.wishyswavs.com/americanscoming.html?1158520005859

Roger Williams in Concert

• Born Free (Star Wars Upside Down) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbVy28mjUQQ

• Autumn Leaves --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_1tp2APNcg

• Autumn Leaves --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO5cueCo0No

• Impossible Dream (Elvis Slide Show with Roger Williams Accompanying) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXpp69H6jhc

Glenn Beck on Global Warming --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquohKzR8QI

October 13, 2007 message from Peter Webster (The Acoustic Music Archive) [peter@acousticmusicarchive.com]

Dear Bob,

I wondered whether you would link to me from your website. My site is called The Acoustic Music Archive. I have posted lyrics, chords and information about the origins of some of my favorite traditional songs, together with my own recordings of them that visitors can optionally listen to.

I have provided some HTML below that you could paste in to your Links page ( http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm ):

The Acoustic Music Archive
http://www.acousticmusicarchive.com/lyrics_chords_and_downloads.html 

The site is a place where people can find lyrics and chords for folk songs, discover their origins and listen to recordings of them.

Let me if you want to link and I will put a reciprocal link back to you from my links page ( http://www.acousticmusicarchive.com/links.html ).

Thanks,

Peter Webster
The Acoustic Music Archive
www.acousticmusicarchive.com 

iTune purchases can be played on five iPods at the same time
"Making iTunes Music Purchases Available to Multiple Computers," by Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2007; Page B4 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119024466861833141.html

Q: With the new iPods coming out, how do you deactivate an old one? I think Apple only allows a certain number to be used with an account.

A: You don't have to deactivate an iPod if you replace it. The copy-protection rules imposed on Apple by the entertainment companies allow for copy-protected music and videos purchased from the iTunes Music Store to be stored and played on an unlimited number of iPods.

The only "deactivation" iTunes users have to perform is on a computer -- Windows or Mac -- because the copy-protection rules allow purchased, copy-protected songs and videos to be played on no more than five computers at a time. So, before you replace a computer on which you are storing such purchased, protected iTunes material, you should deauthorize the machine by going to the "Store" menu in iTunes and selecting "Deauthorize Computer...".

Of course, if you aren't at or near the five-computer limit, this issue may not matter. It's also irrelevant if none of the music or videos you play from within iTunes is copy-protected material purchased from the iTunes store. You can happily use iTunes and iPods without buying any copy-protected stuff from Apple. You can restrict your music and videos to those you copy from legally obtained CDs, those you create yourself, or those you buy in unprotected formats from iTunes, or other sites, like eMusic.

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

BookMooch allows you to trade books on your shelf for other books --- http://bookmooch.com/

"Only minutes after creating a list of books I am willing to give away on Bookmooch, I already had enough points to request free books from others. Tomorrow, I am mailing two complete strangers some old books. And four strangers have promised to send me books I was planning to buy on Amazon. An excellent trade! Bookmooch works!"
- Solana Larsen (a BookMooch member)
See Joanne Kaufman, "Clear the Bookshelf and Fill It Up Again, All Online," The New York Times, October 15, 2007 --- Click Here

March 27, 2007 message from Tina Bungert [tina.bungert@hitflip.de]

. . . I would like to introduce you to our service and web site Hitflip that might be an interesting addition to your links for books and education. Hitflip is a community to swap used books and other original media. It is therefore an easy and cheap alternative to the existing online book stores. You can find hitflip at http://www.hitflip.de  .
The just recently launched English version can be found at http://www.hitflip.co.uk .

Poetry Magazine --- http://www.poetrymagazine.org/ 
Poetry Magazines --- http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/
Poetry Daily --- http://www.poems.com/

The Literature Page (Classics) --- http://www.literaturepage.com/

The Uncommercial Traveller by Charles Dickens --- Click Here

Songs Of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) --- http://www.logoslibrary.eu/pls/wordtc/new_wordtheque.w6_start.doc?code=11272&lang=EN

Underwoods by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)  --- Click Here

In the spirit of Scott's article above, you might read the "Resident Alien" sermon forwarded by Dr. Wolff --- Click Here
 

Forwarded by Dick Haar

Let's Tax The Rich!

The latest figures (2005 data) from the IRS and the Tax Foundation shows:

The top 1% accounted for 21.2% of all income and paid 39.4% of all taxes

The top 5% accounted for 35.8% of all income and paid 60.0% of all taxes

That's right the top 5% paid more taxes than the other 95%

The top 50% in income paid 97% of all taxes.

Gee Whiz let's lay some more taxes on the rich.

Gee Whiz let's also lay a Windfall Tax on all pension savers (i.e. a huge penalty for long-term saving by all workers):
. . . Nancy Pelosi wants to put a Windfall Tax on all stock market profits (including Retirement fund, 401Ks and Mutual Funds! and CREF accounts) . . . When asked how these new tax dollars would be spent, she replied "We need to raise the standard of living of our poor, unemployed and minorities. For example, we have an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in our country who need our help along with millions of unemployed minorities." "Windfall profits taxes could go a long ways to guarantee these people the standard of living they would like to have as 'Americans'."
Free Republic, October 16, 2007 --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1911844/posts
Jensen Comment
If this Windfall Tax becomes reality after the Democrats sweep the 2008 election, it will be too bad that you're locked into your retirement savings plans (e.g., CREF) that depend on the stock market, because the stock market will plunge south as soon as it even appears that Pelosi's Windfall Tax has a chance.But when the value of your retirement account plunges you won't have to pay as much Windfall Tax. Should you look at this as good news or bad news?

This is about as close as you can get to a retroactive tax without actually imposing a retroactive tax. Even the millions of employed minorities have to fear this egalitarian confiscation of their savings. Even if you shift your pension plan out of corporate equity investments (stocks), you will be liable for accumulated capital gains up to the date you shift to other investments.  For example, if you started saving for retirement in CREF 30 years ago, nearly all the value of your portfolio is capital gain subject to the Windfall Tax.

This may be a shot in the arm for the real estate market as investors cash in their corporate equity savings and invest in real estate. But it won't do the working poor or the unemployed any good as the corporations cut back on operations due to higher cost of capital. But don't panic yet! The Democrats have recently proved (Senator Reid in particular) that they're just as vulnerable, or possibly more vulnerable, to corporate lobbying powerhouses.

Every major daily paper in New York took note of President Bush's decision to bestow the first Medal of Honor of Operation Enduring Freedom on Navy SEAL Lt. Michael Murphy - a Long Islander who gave his life for his country and his fellow SEALs. Every paper but one, that is.
"Unfit to Print, The New York Post, http://www.nypost.com/seven/10132007/postopinion/editorials/unfit_to_print_.htm

The Treasury Department announced today that it had designated three Saudi nationals as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (“SDGTs”). All three are accused of providing funds to al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf Group (“ASG”). The first, Abdul Rahim Al-Talhi, is described as an “al Qaida-affiliated financier, a loyal colleague of Usama bin Laden, and a member of a Saudi Arabia-based donor network funding terrorists and supporting extremist activity.” The second, Muhammad ‘Abdallah Salih Sughayr, is the “principal conduit” for “unidentified Saudi extremist donors wishing to provide financial and ideological support to the ASG network in the Philippines.” And the third, Fahd Muhammad ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz Al-Khashiban, “gave then-ASG leader Khadaffy Janjalani approximately US $18,000 to finance a planned ASG bombing operation targeting either the U.S. or the Australian embassy in Manila [in the early 2000s].” The plot was disrupted by Philippine authorities “before its completion,” but “Khashiban continued to routinely provide money to the ASG.” I thought of two things, primarily, when reading this today. First, every account I’ve read has said that the Saudis have been fairly unhelpful in cracking down on the jihadi finance network operating on their own soil.
Thomas Joscelyn, "Saudi Cash for al Qaeda," FrontPage Magazine, October 11, 2007 ---
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C2437CDF-BD57-4FAC-B18D-4160EE5309C1

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
Dwight D. Eisenhower --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower

MTV Arabia, a new 24-hour free satellite channel, will begin broadcasting in Arabic across the Middle East on Nov. 16. The Viacom -owned network's flagship show, Hip HopNa ("my hip-hop"), will be co-hosted by Saudi rapper Qusai Khidr and Palestinian-American producer Farid Nassar, aka Fredwreck, who has worked with Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and other marquee names. The show will visit 10 cities across the Middle East in search of talent, giving would-be Arab rap stars an international platform. Noujaim won the show's first competition, and Fredwreck has produced one of his tracks. "This is a music genre that is bubbling underneath the surface here, and we want to claim it as our own," says Bhavneet Singh, head of emerging markets for MTV Networks International (MTVNI ) . . . And U.S. media giant Viacom aims to deliver it, as well as Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and more . . . MTV Arabia is the biggest test to date of the network's two-decade-old localization strategy. MTV's flagship music channel has seen its American TV ratings slip and has struggled online. Management believes the biggest growth will come overseas, and the network now pumps out a blend of international and local tunes from Russia to Indonesia to Pakistan. That has helped MTV and sister operations, such as VH1 and Nickelodeon, reach 508 million households in 161 countries. "This isn't going to be MTV U.S.," Bill Roedy, vice-chairman of MTV Networks, says of the latest offering. "It is Arabic MTV made by Arabs for Arabs."
"The Arab World Wants Its MTV," Business Week, October 22, 2007 --- Click Here

"The Politics of Disaster," The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2007; Page A20 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119197595006254164.html

We've been warning of the financial disaster looming off the Florida coast ever since Governor Charlie Crist socialized the state's hurricane insurance market and put Florida taxpayers on the hook for billions. Earlier this year, Mr. Crist stumped for and then signed a law making the Florida government the state's dominant insurer, but without the reserves that would be required of real insurance companies. The plan will work splendidly as long as there are no hurricanes in Florida, but the state will face a difficult challenge once the inevitable storm hits: how to pry new tax revenue out of Floridians just as they begin sifting through the rubble that used to be their homes.

Now Florida's politicians are doubling down on their mistake, by trying to make all American taxpayers subsidize insurance for Florida homeowners. Congressman Ron Klein (D., Fla.) is hoping for a floor vote this fall on his Homeowners' Defense Act and has been assured by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that this is a top priority. Governor Crist is also lobbying hard.

Mr. Klein's bill would force the U.S. Treasury to issue below-market loans to state-insurance programs, while also creating a kind of Fannie Mae of disaster reinsurance, a federally chartered organization called the "National Catastrophe Risk Consortium." Like Fannie, the consortium would carry an implicit guarantee from the federal government as it issues securities in the capital markets, distorting prices as it sells subsidized reinsurance to participating states, all the while saddling taxpayers with new risks. According to Treasury Assistant Secretary Phillip Swagel, "Taxpayers nationwide would subsidize insurance rates in high-risk areas, which would be both costly and unfair."

Transferring the risk from condo-owners in Boca to taxpayers in Syracuse does not reduce the cost of hurricane disasters. In fact, now that Congress looks ready to volunteer middle-class taxpayers nationwide as the financial backstop for lovely beachfront properties, South Florida developers will have even less incentive to use sturdy materials and set homes a reasonable distance from the waterline. We have already run this experiment with the National Flood Insurance Program, with predictable results. When people can buy insurance at below-market rates, they tend to stay in accident-prone homes.

Continued in article

Meanwhile, the credibility of conservatives has diminished steadily. These days they cannot even achieve clarity on the meaning of their favorite cliches. For instance, the president hates "federalized health care," but sponsors a Medicare prescription drug program that wastes hundreds of billions on drug companies and private insurers. Right-wing definitions no longer seem so clear, either. When the government awards a billion dollars in sweetheart mercenary contracts to a wealthy Republican family in Michigan, that's "private enterprise." But when the government helps a struggling middle-class family in Maryland send its children to the doctor, that's creeping socialism.
Joe Conason, "Why 'Socialism' Evokes No Fear," RealClearPolitics, October 11, 2007 --- http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/10/why_socialism_evokes_no_fear.html

Three months after Democrats made headlines with a plan to double the taxes on hedge funds and private equity, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seems to have had a change of heart. On Monday, the Nevada Senator indicated he won't follow through on the tax-the-rich plan, demurring that the Senate is awfully busy. This is a little awkward for a party that has made income inequality a campaign staple. But the turnabout isn't so mysterious in an election season when Wall Street moneymen have made more than $6 million in political donations, with most going to Democrats, especially a certain Senator from New York
"Reid's Tax Hedge," The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2007; Page A20 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119197609550554166.html

The word-crafted version of California's SB 777 Law (signed by Governor Schwarzenegger) ---
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/sen/sb_0751-0800/sb_777_bill_20070223_introduced.pdf
Jensen Comment
A video debate from both sides that leaves viewers pretty well confused --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqyilGupb9A
The bill should be called the Lawyers Full Employment Act since California courts are bound to become crammed with harassment lawsuits coming form all sides of society seeking to win the legal lottery. The losers inevitably will be California taxpayers who ultimately will foot the bill of their school districts defending themselves in lawsuits, many of which will be cookie cutter lawsuits, i.e., thousands of lawsuits that are virtual photocopies with the names, dates, and places changed.

Dr. Hawley Crippen was hanged for murdering and dismembering his showgirl wife, then fleeing with his mistress across the high seas with the police in hot pursuit. Loaded with enough sordid details and twists to eventually fuel more than 40 books and several movies, this London case is second only to Jack the Ripper in its sensational notoriety . . . For nearly a century, Crippen, a homeopathic physician, was thought to have poisoned his flamboyant and domineering wife with an obscure toxin, dismembered her body and buried little more than tissue in his London cellar. Crippen was labeled “one of the most dangerous and remarkable men who have lived in this century.” . . . “Crippen was not convicted just of murder – but the murder of Cora Crippen,” Trestrail said. “If that body is not Cora, then that’s another trial.”
"Science casts doubt on famous British murder case:  Ninety-seven years after an American was hanged in London in one of the most notorious and famous murder cases in British history, forensic science at Michigan State University is producing evidence that his execution was a mistake," PhysOrg, October 16, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news111759429.html 

The fighting in Pakistan this week has been more in tense than any current op erations across the border in Afghanistan. President Musharraf is paying, with interest, for trying to cut a deal with Islamist fanatics. The combat operations in North Waziristan involve thousands of ground troops, artillery barrages and attack aircraft. This isn't internal policing. It's war.
Ralph Peters, "Coddling Killers:  Pakistan's Appeasement Fails," New York Post, October 11, 2007 --- http://www.nypost.com/seven/10112007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/coddling_killers.htm?page=0

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in a BBC interview, played down the Israeli (possible nuclear site) raid, saying that Israeli jets took aim at empty military buildings, but he did not give a specific location. His statement differed from the initial Syrian claim that it had repulsed the air raid before an attack occurred.
Hugh Naylor, "Syria Tells Journalists Israeli Raid Did Not Occur," The New York Times, October 11, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/middleeast/11syria.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports. The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state. The Bush administration was divided at the time about the wisdom of Israel’s strike, American officials said, and some senior policy makers still regard the attack as premature. The attack on the reactor project has echoes of an Israeli raid more than a quarter century ago, in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq shortly before it was to have begun operating. That attack was officially condemned by the Reagan administration, though Israelis consider it among their military’s finest moments. In the weeks before the Iraq war, Bush administration officials said they believed that the attack set back Iraq’s nuclear ambitions by many years. By contrast, the facility that the Israelis struck in Syria appears to have been much further from completion, the American and foreign officials said. They said it would have been years before the Syrians could have used the reactor to produce the spent nuclear fuel that could, through a series of additional steps, be reprocessed into bomb-grade plutonium.
David E. Sanger and Mark Mazzetti, "Analysts Find Israel Struck a Nuclear Project Inside Syria," The New York Times, October 14, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/washington/14weapons.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

A bomb hidden in a cart of toys killed two children and wounded 17 others in a playground in northern Iraq on Friday, the first day of a national holiday to celebrate the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Mussab Al-Khairalla, Yahoo News, October 12, 2007 --- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071012/ts_nm/iraq_dc

Canada's socialized health care system, hailed as a model by Michael Moore in his documentary, "Sicko," is hurting, government officials admit, citing not enough money for more equipment and staff to handle high risk births. Sarah Plank, a spokeswoman for the British Columbia Ministry of Health, said a spike in high risk and premature births coupled with the lack of trained nurses prompted the surge in mothers heading across the border for better care
Sara Bonasteel, "Canada's Expectant Moms Heading to U.S. to Deliver," Fox News, October 10, 2007 ---
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C2933%2C300939%2C00.html
Also see Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives --- http://www.policyalternatives.ca/

An art theft from the art gallery at Linfield College is particularly personal and painful for the artist. The Oregonian reported that the work, “The Sexy Sex: All Nude Revue Rug One,” was a life size nude self-portrait by Tamera Bremer, a Portland artist who is an adjunct at the college. She told the paper that she felt “violated” by the theft. As to how she got the idea to produce a nude of herself in the form of a rug, she said that she got the idea that “a bearskin rug could really be a bare-skin rug.”
Inside Higher Ed, October 12, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/12/qt

China's Looming Crisis-Inflation Returns ---
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/pb54_keidel_china_looming_crisis_final.pdf

Shed not for her the bitter tear Nor give the heart to vain regret Tis but the casket that lies here The gem that filled it sparkles yet.
Epitaph of Myra Maybelle Shirley "Belle" Starr --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Starr
According to legend,the Bandit Queen Belle Starr had been a spy, a Confederate General, the brains behind many outlaw gang, and the consort of nearly every western badman including all of the Younger Brothers. In 1889, she was killed by a shotgun blast while horseback riding. Although there were multiple suspects including both of her children, the killer was never identified

Wansink's research on bottomless bowls of creamy tomato soup (hidden tubes imperceptibly keep refilling them) won in the nutrition category. He was on hand to receive his trophy, Oct. 4, at Harvard University from six authentic Nobel laureates. The research, published as a featured article in the journal Obesity Research in 2005 showed that people eating from soup bowls that don't empty ate 73 percent more soup than those eating from normal bowls, said Wansink. Yet, the slurpers at the self-filling bowls did not rate themselves any fuller than the normal-bowl slurpers, said Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell, and author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think."
PhysOrg, October 12, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news111406356.html 
The Ig Nobel homepage is at http://www.improb.com/
A new survey says working in an office may be hard on the waistlines of nearly half of U.S. workers --- http://physorg.com/news111396200.html

To finance its Schip largesse, the House would eviscerate Medicare Advantage, an innovative 2003 program that allows seniors to choose among various private health plans. It's growing rapidly and currently serves some 8.3 million seniors, or about 18% of the eligible population. According to the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, most are the urban poor, seniors in rural areas and minorities. No doubt they are attracted by the additional benefits, increased access to specialized medicine, and coordinated preventative services that Advantage offers over the traditional version.
"The Schip Revelation," The Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2007; Page A12 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118662306308792513.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Google famously and charmingly admonishes itself, "Don't Be Evil." Google also cultivates the image of the ultragreen company, giving subsidies to employees to buy hybrid cards and spending millions to install 1.6 megawatts of photovoltaic panels at its Mountain View, CA, headquarters. So on the day that Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize for promulgating accurate climate science in the public interest, here's a riddle: why does Google lend its technical muscle to science-bashing and fact-distorting websites that mislead Gmail readers and other Google customers on global warming and climate change?
David Talbot, "Nobel Prizes, Climate Keywords:  Google helps organize the world's disinformation, too," MIT's Technology Review, October 12, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/21882/?nlid=601
David Talbot is the Senior Editor of MIT's Technology Review --- http://www.entforum.caltech.edu/Past_Archive/bios1202.pdf

After President Bush vetoed Congress's major expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, Nancy Pelosi declared: "President Bush used his cruel veto pen to say, 'I forbid 10 million children from getting the health benefits they deserve.' " As far as political self-parody goes, that one ought to enter the record books. It's wrong on the facts, for one, which Speaker Pelosi knows. The Schip bill was not some all-or-nothing proposition: A continuing resolution fully funds the program through mid-November, so none of the 6.6 million recipients will lose coverage. And even if Washington can't agree by then, there will be another stopgap, because Schip might as well already be an entitlement. In truth, the Bush Administration endorses a modest expansion. A majority of Congress backs a much larger expansion. The controversy is over the role of government in health care.
"Schip Howlers When children become political props," The Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2007 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110010730

It is true that a house divided against itself is a house that cannot stand. There is a division in the American house now and believing this as I do, I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are now developing this political year. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as President.
Lyndon Baines Johnson --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Baines_Johnson

October 2007 Presidential Candidate Fund Raising Totals to Date --- http://query.nictusa.com/pres/2007/Q3/
Honest Abe would never have a chance to become President of the United States in the 21st Century

David Bach's "Latte Principle" --- Click Here
A Penny Saved Compounds to Much More Than a Dollar Earned
Jim Mahar provided the following two links:

"Penny's Add Up to Millions," Free Money Finance, October 15, 2007 --- http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2007/10/pennies-add-up-.html

Here's a post from Yahoo Finance that details the author's struggle with her husband to take his lunch to work. But the essence of what she says is really that saving/watching your pennies is the key to wealth. Her thoughts:

I'm convinced that for the average person who wants to build wealth, pennies count.

Pennies have a funny way of snowballing into dollars, and then hundreds, and then thousands, especially if you use them to buy the stocks of well-managed companies. Consider the story of a parking attendant who earns $20,000 a year but has amassed a $500,000 equity portfolio. Or the one about a group of New Yorkers who managed to save for a down payment on a (very expensive, very tiny) piece of the Big Apple. Or the clan of seven dubbed "America's cheapest family," who paid off their mortgage in nine years on a salary of $35,000 a year.

I've seen article after article bashing David Bach's "Latte Principle" -- the idea that if you save on small spending you can amass a large amount of wealth. The main argument against it is that people should be paying attention to large expenditures -- that's where the real difference is made. But Bach isn't saying to ignore the expensive decisions in life. He's just aware that for many of us there are small amounts we spend every day without really thinking about how much they end up costing us. And that if we just limit a few of them and save that money, we can save a good amount throughout the years.

Continued in article

"How to Save a Bundle of Money,"  Free Money Finance, October 15, 2007 --- http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2007/10/how-to-save-a-b.html

Yahoo Finance has a list of ten money drains along with the annual costs of each of them. I view this as a list of where we all can save a bundle of money. Here's their list as well as the annual amounts spent on each of them (in other words, what you could save if you eliminated them):

1. Coffee -- $360 per year.
2. Cigarettes -- $1,660 a year.
3. Alcohol -- $3,650 per year.
4. Bottled water from convenience stores -- $365 per year.
5. Manicures -- $1,068 per year.
6. Car washes -- $348 per year.
7. Weekday lunches out -- $2,350 a year.
8. Vending machines snacks -- $260 per year.
9. Interest charges on credit card bills -- $4,868 in interest (over time).
10. Unused memberships -- $480 per year.

Now of course I wouldn't suggest that someone cut out everything and eliminate all of life's pleasures. After all, we should use part of our money to enjoy ourselves. But for those people out there looking for a way to save a bit extra, for those who simply "can't make it on what I earn", and for those who would simply like to pay down their debt, this is a pretty good list to consider cutting down on -- even if it's for a short period of time. And you don't have to eliminate each of the items above, simply consider cutting back on them. There's still tons of savings available by cutting your car washes, manicures, or alcohol consumption in half.

And if these aren't enough money saving ideas, check out my list of ways to save money from 2005-2006 as well as my 2007 list.

Jensen Comment
Of course eliminating all the above would not necessarily be wise. If there's five feet of snow on the ground, I'm not about to wash my own car. Yet getting the car washed in winter is more important than in summer if you live where they salt and sand the roads. Spending $358 each winter car washes may well save thousands if you can, thereby, double the life of your car.

New cars lose 60% of value in the first four years. Most people waste more money on cars and interest charges for car financing than any other single cash drain in their lives, including the cost of housing. Cars are a necessity of life for most of us who have no convenient public transportation alternatives. But frequent trading in of good cars for new cars is a monumental mistake in finance. Leasing is also a synonym for stupidity. Insiders call it "fleecing a car." But I'm grateful for ignorant people who are constantly turning in good owned or leased cars. Most of the cars I've owned over the years were turned back leased cars. Great mechanics put my previously-owned or previously-leased vehicles back in top shape, and I save a bundle relative to their prior owners. If you must finance your next vehicle, please be a smart shopper and be informed how dealers cheat --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudDealers.htm

I lived in San Antonio for 24 years where over 500 cars per month are stolen. See the video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQPSXCqBqz4
My answer was to buy an old car (usually a station wagon) and make it look even less desirable to the thousands of car thieves cruising about San Antonio by day and by night. Little did thieves know that underneath the hood was a new power train and other features that made my old heaps just like new. I always remember a comedy show that featured a company in Los Angeles that would ghettoize a new or relatively-new car to make it look like a junk yard dog. My city cars were like that. My wife and I were more safe since our cars were of little temptation to carjackers. But my children generally crouched down in the seats or asked to be let out a block away so their friends would not see them in my cars.

Next to car financing, the biggest mistake most people make is credit card financing to a point where they seldom zero out what they owe on credit cards. This is the "dirty secret" of that makes credit card companies suck billions upon billions of dollars out of the economy --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#FICO
When we're about to go on long trips, I overpay monthly expenses ahead of time so that if we're delayed in returning home we never have to worry about being charged interest or late payment penalties. For example, I put huge credit balances into our credit card accounts before going on a long adventure.

Do I buy into David Bach's "Latte Principle?"
Well yes and no. I do not believe in Spartan living so I can watch my savings grow for the sake of watching my savings grow. I don't drink latte, but I also opt for four-star or five-star hotels or lovely country inns when my wife and I are on adventures. Expensive restaurants are generally wastes of money, but we go to them when the mood is right and/or the friends we're with prefer a top restaurant. Often you can eat just as well in the hotel's lounge as in the expensive restaurant down the hall. There's a huge difference between what you splurge for on daily (like credit card interest and latte) versus what you splurge for infrequently. When I used to come home at night and have a couple of drinks daily, I drank cheap Boca Chico rum in my cubalibras. Now that I don't drink daily, I splurge on fine wine and expensive liquor once in a while.

In the final analysis, I would have to say that I live better in retirement because I pretty much followed the "Latte Principle" before it was called "Latte Principle." Most of my travels in life were financed by others who made me sing (lecture) for my supper, but I enjoyed the fellowship and strokes of these types of trips more than I did boring leisure vacations. I spent as much as I could possibly afford on land and houses, but these generally returned more than I paid for them. I spent as little as possible on cars and preferred to buy finely-tailored suits in upscale second hand shops (look for Second Looks in San Antonio and Austin).. I think most of the former owners of my suits had passed on in life.

I never argue with my wife over money even when she tips almost as much as the check itself.  I never object when she hands out ten dollar bills to receptionists,  postal clerks, trash haulers, window washers, and bell ringers outside the Wal-Mart stores. She's thrifty but likes a lot of new things she generally buys on sale. She seldom shops in stores. But the UPS truck stops up here in the mountains nearly every day. While my wife is wearing the "8" and "0" buttons off on  phone in our den (mostly she orders gifts), I'm on the computer ordering everything from books to groceries to space heaters from Amazon.com (a great, great place to shop). Our UPS driver's name is Joe, and if I'm not at home he comes into the basement and assembles what he's just delivered. Will your UPS driver do that?

I truly got my money's worth out of faculty clubs. I would've joined expensive country clubs but I never had time for a round of golf even once a week. Such is the price one pays for being a workaholic.

It's easier for a workaholic to live by the "Latte Principle." But most of us workaholics are doing what we like best.

October 17, 2007 reply from Barbara Scofield [scofield@GSM.UDALLAS.EDU]

When my husband was in training to be a police chaplain, the trainer began talking about the issue of stolen cars by pointing to my husband and saying, “What kind of car do you drive?” Rob, my husband, responded, “A ’99 Saturn wagon.” The police trainer told him, “You can leave the keys in your car.”

Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA

 

"Not Nobel Winners," The Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2007; Page A10 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119223307015357948.html

In Olso yesterday, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to the Burmese monks whose defiance against, and brutalization at the hands of, the country's military junta in recent weeks captured the attention of the Free World.

The prize was also not awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and other Zimbabwe opposition leaders who were arrested and in some cases beaten by police earlier this year while protesting peacefully against dictator Robert Mugabe.

Or to Father Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest in Vietnam arrested this year and sentenced to eight years in prison for helping the pro-democracy group Block 8406.

Or to Wajeha al-Huwaider and Fawzia al-Uyyouni, co-founders of the League of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia, who are waging a modest struggle with grand ambitions to secure basic rights for women in that Muslim country.

Or to Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who has fought tirelessly to end the violence wrought by left-wing terrorists and drug lords in his country.

Or to Garry Kasparov and the several hundred Russians who were arrested in April, and are continually harassed, for resisting President Vladimir Putin's slide toward authoritarian rule.

Or to the people of Iraq, who bravely work to rebuild and reunite their country amid constant threats to themselves and their families from terrorists who deliberately target civilians.

Or to Presidents Viktor Yushchenko and Mikheil Saakashvili who, despite the efforts of the Kremlin to undermine their young states, stayed true to the spirit of the peaceful "color" revolutions they led in Ukraine and Georgia and showed that democracy can put down deep roots in Russia's backyard.

Or to Britain's Tony Blair, Ireland's Bertie Ahern and the voters of Northern Ireland, who in March were able to set aside decades of hatred to establish joint Catholic-Protestant rule in Northern Ireland.

Or to thousands of Chinese bloggers who run the risk of arrest by trying to bring uncensored information to their countrymen.

Or to scholar and activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, jailed presidential candidate Ayman Nour and other democracy campaigners in Egypt.

Or, posthumously, to lawmakers Walid Eido, Pierre Gemayel, Antoine Ghanem, Rafik Hariri, George Hawi and Gibran Tueni; journalist Samir Kassir; and other Lebanese citizens who've been assassinated since 2005 for their efforts to free their country from Syrian control.

Or to the Reverend Phillip Buck; Pastor Chun Ki Won and his organization, Durihana; Tim Peters and his Helping Hands Korea; and Liberty in North Korea, who help North Korean refugees escape to safety in free nations.

These men and women put their own lives and livelihoods at risk by working to rid the world of violence and oppression. Let us hope they survive the coming year so that the Nobel Prize Committee might consider them for the 2008 award.

Question
Do we want the Shotgun Game to be so dominant in academic research?

Just got another rejection from a journal. I'm not all that surprised, because it was a pretty good (I think it was ranked #5 in it's area) journal and it was a stretch to send this piece there. But you never know - sometimes you catch a referee (and editor) in the right frame of mind. Oh well, this just means we make a few changes and send it back out to another journal. I used to panic about this stuff, but I now know that most papers (if they're decently well done) eventually find a home somewhere. I felt pretty good a couple of weeks back, since I had five pieces under review. But one of them got accepted (darn!) another came back with a revise-and-resubmit, and this one got rejected. So, I'm no longer "Mungo Compliant" - I fall short of the "three papers under review" standard. So it's time to get the R&R's off my desk and back in an editor's hands. I have five other projects in various stages (two of them are actually somewhat completed working papers), but until they're submitted to a journal somewhere, they're nothing but vaporware. So it's back to the academic salt mines...
Unknown Professor who generates the Financial Rounds Blog, October 10, 2007 --- http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/

Jensen Comment
In no way to I want to criticize what the Unknown Professor (I know who he is and respect him a lot) is doing while playing the publish or perish game. Actually he's a recently-tenured and very talented associate professor who's seemingly still playing the "Shotgun Game" he learned to play, as an assistant professor, while seeking tenure and promotion. Most academics still actively seeking publication in research journals are playing the same game.

Think of each shotgun pellet as a research paper which in modern times is generally a co-authored paper that gives rise to more pellets (i.e., more papers) loaded into the shotgun shell. The "Shotgun Game" (my definition) is analogous to standing at one end of a football field and firing a 12-gage into the air while hoping that one or more of the tiny pellets will fall down on a target beyond the opposite goal line. At first the target is a very small Tier 1 academic journal target. There may even be several of small targets of about the same Tier 1 small size, especially when foreign journals are allowed to be targets. The game may be replayed several times with substituted Tier 1 targets until the player and/oror the referees grow weary of repeated plays at the Tier 1 level. Then the player moves up to Tier 2 journals that have targets twice the size of Tier 1 journals and are, accordingly, easier (not necessarily easy) to hit. Then there are Tier 3 journals, Tier 4 journals, and on and on. Ultimately there are conference proceedings with targets that take up half a football field and are easy to hit even when played by blind researchers. Each shell fired is reloaded with pellets that missed the targets on earlier plays of the game.

This would free up the Tier 1 and possibly Tier 2 journals for formal peer reviews of mortar shells. The Tier 3 and Tier 4 journals would happily float off from the clouds into outer space, never to be seen again.

Controversies over "micro-level" research remain --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MicroLevelResearch

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

October 13, 2007 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

In business education you bet we want the shotgun game! It is codified into AACSB standards. Professors must be academically qualified, which means only peer-reviewed papers. Locally, the pressure becomes intense to remain AQ. At my school, ANYTHING peer-reviewed counts. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same at other schools. Profs that don't play the game much anymore look through filing cabinets and old floppy disks hoping to find something close enough finished to send out. Stuff that was mercifully killed years ago by the author now gets pulled out and submitted. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a few that start with the lowest tiered journals because it might increase the chance of an acceptance.

What I find insultingly ludicrous is that getting publications counts for so much while at the same time most published accounting research carries little or no real world value. Perhaps I should qualify that. Any non-education publication with my name attached carries little world value. OK,they all carry no real world value.

And what about ethics? How many authors cave in to what they perceive as unnecessary referee demands just so the paper gets accepted? Isn't this some form of prostitution? And how many co-authors is(are?) too many? Will you add my name to your paper just pulled out of the filing cabinet and dusted off if I add your name to my paper reclaimed from the trash heap?

Perhaps I shouldn't admit it, but I am one of 8 co-authors to a recently accepted paper. It's to a nice journal, and I'm glad I did it. But in the old days, I wouldn't even have put it on my resume for fear that too many would laugh at my joining with 7 others on a paper. But now? Maybe it'll help me keep AQ.

Why is it that securing professional development in education is not a factor in qualifying you to teach accounting classes?

David Albrecht

October 14, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

I was on the faculty of a university where I encouraged a senior colleague accounting professor to apply for a sabbatical leave. He'd not taken a single leave of absence in over 30 years.

His proposal was to leave town and take several professional courses (not all in accounting) in residence at the University of Texas. This would have done him a lot a good aside from giving him a breather from teaching three of the largest sections of students in the entire university.

A "professional leave" sabbatical, in my viewpoint, would've made him much better able to serve our students with fresh material and renewed enthusiasm.

In spite of my repeated appeals with the rest of our faculty who voted on leave proposals, he was turned down because a professional scholarship proposal was not a research proposal. If he'd proposed running a stupid survey on whether hair color made a difference on passage of the CPA examination in the first sitting among our alumni, he'd have gotten the only sabbatical in his entire career.

This professor was a good teacher but he was not a researcher. He could've conducted a stupid hair color survey, but he refused on principle.

Bob Jensen

Question
Can you succinctly distinguish egalitarianism versus individualism versus communitarianism?

"The Culture War on Facts:  Are you entitled to your own truth?" by Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine, October 9, 2007 --- http://www.reason.com/news/show/122892.html

"There is a culture war in America, but it is about facts, not values," declare the researchers at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project in a new study called "The Second National Risk and Culture Study: Making Sense of-and Making Progress In-the American Culture War of Fact" (full study not yet available online). Contrary to the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous maxim, the study finds that most Americans believe they're more than entitled to their own opinions; they believe that they are entitled to their own facts. Obviously, this complicates public policy debates.

The chief aim of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project is to show how cultural values shape the public's risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Project scholars define "cultural cognition" as "the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact to values that define their cultural identities." Their research found that cultural identity values "exert substantially more influence over risk perceptions than does any other individual characteristic, including gender, race, socioeconomic status, education, political ideology and party affiliation."

This is intuitive to most of us. Ask nearly any American a couple of questions about what they think of a list of policy issues: the death penalty, abortion, gay rights, the minimum wage, school choice, nuclear power, public health, gun control, climate change, the propriety of Christmas crèches in town squares, and affirmative action. You will quickly get a pretty good idea of what they think about all of the issues on the list. But why do the ways people think about policy issues tend to cluster together? The answer turns on how people feel about societal risks and the policies aimed at reducing those risks. And how people feel about risk is shaped by their core values.

The Project usefully classifies cultural values on two cross-cutting axes: hierarchy-egalitarianism and individualism-communitarianism. Hierarchs think that rights, duties, goods and offices should be differentially distributed on the basis of clearly defined and stable social characteristics (e.g., gender, wealth, ethnicity). Egalitarians believe that rights, duties, goods and offices should be distributed equally without regard to such characteristics. Individualists think that people should secure the conditions of their own flourishing without collective interference or assistance. Communitarians believe that societal interests trump individual ones and that society should be responsible for securing the conditions for individual flourishing.

. . .

So is the proper framing of public policy issues really enough to bring an end to the culture war? I doubt it. After all, just who is going to make polluters, green scaremongers, Republicans, gun control nuts, neocons, fetus fetishists, Democrats, drug warriors, neo-luddites, global warming catastrophists, climate change deniers and the like stop distorting, I mean, framing the facts to fit their cultural values?

Continued in article

Intellectuals, Free speech, and Capitalism

"Intellectuals, Free speech, and Capitalism-Becker," by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, The Becker-Posner Blog, October 7, 2007 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

Although there are numerous exceptions in economics and political science departments, business and medical schools, and elsewhere, the majority of faculty is considerably to the left of the general population. They are at the forefront of the politically correct movement. This is why Larry Summers ran into the problems that led to his resignation as president of Harvard. However, college faculties are not the only promoters of political correctness. Many print and TV journalists, actors and movie directors, and others involved in more intellectual and creative pursuits have the same views. Why is this so?

I wish I had the answer; I don’t, so I will speculate about possible reasons. In his 1950 book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, the great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, discussed exactly this question when asking why intellectuals were so opposed to capitalism during his time? His answer mainly was that businessmen do better under capitalism, whereas intellectuals believe they would have a more influential position under socialism and communism. In essence, Schumpeter's explanation is based on intellectuals' feeling envious of the success of others under capitalism combined with their desire to be more important.

I do believe that Schumpeter put his finger on one of the important factors behind the skepticism of intellectuals toward markets, and their continuing support of what governments do. Neither the unsuccessful performance of the US government first in Vietnam and now in Iraq, which they so strongly condemn, nor even the colossal failures of socialism and communism during the past half century, succeeded in weakening the faith of intellectuals in governmental solutions to problems rather than private market solutions. Since their basic hostility to capitalism is largely unabated, but they are embarrassed to openly advocate socialism and very large governments, given the history of the 20th century, intellectuals have shifted their attacks to criticisms of the way they believe private enterprise systems treat women and minorities, the environment, and various other issues. They also promote political correctness in what one can say about causes of differences in performance among different groups, health care systems, and other issues.

I believe considerations in addition to simple jealousy and envy are behind the opposition of intellectuals to capitalism. A belief in free markets requires confidence in the view that both sides to a trade generally gain from it, that a person's or a company's gain is not usually at the expense of those they trade with, even when everyone is motivated solely by their own selfish interests. This is highly counter-intuitive, which is why great intellectuals like the 16th century French essayist, Marquis de Montaigne, even had a short essay with the revealing title "That the Profit of One Man is the Damage of Another ". It is much easier to believe that governments are more likely than private individuals and enterprises to further the general interest.

Of course, the evidence that has been accumulated since Schumpeter's book gives good marks to free market systems in promoting the interests of the poor and middle classes, including minorities. And examples abound of corrupt and incompetent government officials who either mess things up for everyone, or promote these officials' interests. This evidence has impressed the man and woman in the street, but intellectuals are more removed from the real world, and tend to rely on and trust ideas and intellectual arguments.

This would be my primary explanation for the questions raised by Posner about why faculty (and I add other intellectuals too) have become further to the left of their students and the general population. In effect, intellectuals have changed their views far less than other groups in response to the evidence. While intellectual opinions have stood rather still, the general population has moved their thinking against government solutions and toward solutions that use markets and other private transactions and relations.

"Intellectuals, Free speech, and Capitalism-Posner," by Richard Posner, The Becker-Posner Blog, October 7, 2007 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

Probably another reason for the left's influence in higher education is that Americans who came of age during the late 1960s, a portion of whom were radicalized then, are today in senior positions in many faculties. (A man or woman who was 18 in 1968 is 57 today.) A third reason may be the dearth of other outlets, besides faculty politics, for political activism today. There is no serious left-wing movement in the United States. There is a strident Republican right influential in the Republican Party, but the strident Democratic left exerts little influence on the Democratic Party. You can post an angry comment on MoveOn.org, but that cannot be a very satisfactory mode of political expression compared to frightening the University of California's Board of Regents into embarrassing itself by disinviting a Democrat of Larry Summer’s stature and distinction, or épater-ing the bourgeoisie by inviting Ahmadinejad to thunder against Bush and the West from a perch on Morningside Heights.

An ironic counterpoint to university leftism is the increasing, and increasingly successful, imitation of business firms by America's colleges and universities. The leading universities are becoming giant corporations with multi-hundred-million dollar (or even billion dollar) budgets. As they grow, they need and so they hire professional management. Professional university management, in turn, takes its cues from its peers in the business sector. So we have universities deeply involved in hedge funds, greedy for supracompetitive investment returns, engaged in the commercialization of scientific research, angling for applications for admission by the children of the rich, manipulating their statistics in order to move up in U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings (for example by fuzzing up their admissions criteria, so that they get more applicants and therefore turn down more and so appear more selective), exaggerating the job prospects of their advanced-degree graduates, bidding for academic stars by offering high salaries and low teaching loads, and, related to the bidding wars, creating a two-tier employment system with tenured and tenure-track faculty on top and tenure-less, benefit-less graduate students and temporaries on the bottom to do the bulk of the teaching. And so the modern American university system allows its faculty and administrators to live right, while thinking left.

Here’s why: My students should not be able to tell, at least from what I say in class, who I prefer to sit in the oval office. For one thing, this would be a form of “bait and switch,” since nothing about the sharing of my political opinions appears in the catalogue that the students presumably consult before paying their money and scheduling my course. More to the point, however, is that I am not qualified to teach students about who should be elected. In fact, I am no more qualified to tell people who they should vote for than I am to teach a class in quantum mechanics. I have colleagues over in the physics department who are qualified to offer a course in the latter subject; none of us has the same credibility when it comes to the former. Indeed, in an important way, this blanket incompetence is a part of the class lesson — particularly, though not exclusively, in a class on American government. It is an implicit argument for democracy, or at least democratic equality. It is also, however, an argument about education.
Paul A. Sracic, "Teach Only What You Know," Inside Higher Ed, October 11, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/10/11/sracic

Faculty members identify as liberals and vote Democratic in far greater proportions than found in the American public at large. That finding by itself won’t shock many, but the national study released Saturday at a Harvard University symposium may be notable both for its methodology and other, more surprising findings. The 72-page study — “The Social and Political Views of American Professors” — was produced with the goal of moving analysis of the political views of faculty members out of the culture wars and back to social science. The study offers at times harsh criticism of many of the analyses of these issues in recent years (both from those hoping to tag the professoriate as foolishly radical and those seeking to rebut those charges). The study included community college professors along with four-year institutions, and featured analysis of non-responders to the survey (two features missing from many recent reports). The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal than is widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to be in a distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are more faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist. And while the study found that faculty members generally hold what are thought to be liberal positions on social issues, professors are divided on affirmative action in college admissions.

Beware of Security Patch Email Messages Purportedly from Microsoft

"Virus Alert: Beware fake Microsoft patch e-mails," AccountingWeb, October 12, 2007 --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=104068

Microsoft Security alerts are such a part of computing life that virus writers have now created spoof security alert e-mails to trick users into activating a trojan horse program.

Symantec's security response blog recently reported on the appearance of fake Microsoft Security Bulletins that either carried the Trojan.Dropper virus as an attachment, or included infected links in the e-mail.

The blog posting includes an example message purporting to be MS06-602, a cumulative security update for Internet Explorer. It's a plausible sounding message an an extremely clever piece of what security experts call "social engineering" to trick people into activating the malicious code - but no such bulletin exists.

"We urge users to refrain from opening files or clicking links in e-mails from unknown sources," writes blog contributor Vikram Thakur.

"We recommend all users to always keep their computers up-to-date on latest patch levels for all software installed. In doing so, it's important that users always download these patches from the original software vendor sites, by visiting the sites themselves rather than following links in e-mails or other third-party Web pages."

Bob Jensen's threads on computing and network security are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm

When liberals and feminists debate pornography --- http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/mcelroy_17_4.html
(Note that I am Robert E. Jensen retired from Trinity University. I'm not Robert W. Jensen, Associate Professor of Journalism, from the University of Texas.)

"How Higher Ed Can Fix K-12?," by Thurston Domina, Inside Higher Ed, October 12, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/10/12/domina

Texas’s recent educational policy-making history helps to explain how. Texas became a national leader in school reform in the 1980s and early 1990s, adopting standardized testing and school accountability policies that provided a model for the No Child Left Behind Act. But all that changed in 1996 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit banned affirmative action at Texas colleges and universities. The Hopwood decision was discouraging news for minority high school students in Texas, and in the year after the decision, the state’s public high schools slipped on several important indicators of school quality, from student attendance to advanced course taking and college enrollment. Hopwood also threw the state’s educational policy-makers for a loop. In the years that followed the decision, the state put its high school reform program on autopilot as it scrambled to maintain racial and ethnic diversity at its flagship public universities in the post-affirmative action era.

Between the discouraged students and the distracted policy-makers, it sounds like a recipe for educational disaster. But as I demonstrate in a paper published in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Texas high schools posted record numbers just two years after Hopwood. And in the years that followed, those numbers kept climbing.

What happened? The short answer is that Texas’s higher education establishment got involved in the state’s high schools. Worried that black and Hispanic enrollment at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M would plummet in the wake of the affirmative action ban, the state created a series of policies designed to clearly articulate higher education standards and broadcast them widely to students across the state.

The best known of these policies was H.B. 588, the Texas top 10 percent law. Passed by the Legislature in 1997, the law guaranteed admission to any in-state public college or university to any student who graduated in the top 10 percent of his or her Texas high school class. The law was conceived as a racially neutral alternative to affirmative action, designed to use high school racial segregation to build diversity at UT and A&M. But the law had an unexpected effect on the state’s high schools as well. Previously, the criteria for UT and A&M admissions were so complex that high-performing students at high schools where there was little formal or informal college counseling frequently didn’t even bother applying. The top 10 percent law changed that, replacing a confusing admissions system with a simple one, and boosting college application rates from high-poverty and high-minority schools that had frequently sent few applicants. And that’s not all: Under the new admissions regime, advanced course enrollment and student attendance rates also improved at disadvantaged high schools. By clearing the path to college, the top 10 percent law created an academic press in high schools where alienation and demotivation once ruled.

Continued in article

Thurston Domina does a good job highlighting the positives but a poor job highlighting the negatives. For example, no mention is made about how students are gaming the Texas Ten Percent Rule" by avoiding the hard courses, hard instructors, and even not taking college admission tests (they can get into the finest public universities in Texas without taking admission tests) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#10PercentLaw
A few good things can be said for the learning incentives of having to study for SAT/ACT tests and for taking the more difficult humanities, math, and science courses in high school. Many bad things can be said for having incentives to avoid such important things just to raise grade averages to meet the ten percent threshold.

New technology can detect whether a passenger in your car is a dummy
Solo commuters frustrated by snarled traffic have taken extreme measures to sneak into high-occupancy carpool lanes: costumed mannequins in passenger seats, dolls swaddled like babies--even dogs in bonnets. But a company called Vehicle Occupancy, based at Loughborough University, in Leicestershire, England, says that it has developed an infrared camera-mounted scanning system that foils 95 percent of such trickery.
"Foiling Carpool-Lane Cheaters," MIT's Technology Review, October 11, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19523/?nlid=595
Jensen Comment
It would save a lot of time and trouble if new admissions to college had to pass through the same scanning system.
 

This can become a life/death game up here in deep snow country

"'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation," PhysOrg, October 9, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news111145481.html

When it comes to explaining the evolution of human cooperation, researchers have traditionally looked to the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) game as the paradigm. However, the observed degree of cooperation among humans is generally higher than predicted by mathematical models using the IPD, leaving unanswered the question of why humans cooperate to the extent they do.

A group of researchers from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the University of Edinburgh in the UK suggests that a different game, called the “iterated Snowdrift game” (ISD), may more realistically reflect social situations that humans face, compared with the IPD. In experimental tests, the proportion of cooperative acts in the ISD game (48%) was significantly higher than those in the IPD (29%).

The cause for this difference is due to the higher risks of being exploited in the IPD compared with the ISD, where the risk of being exploited by someone who doesn’t cooperate when you do is lower.

“In principle, natural selection predicts individuals to behave selfishly,” Rolf Kümmerli, co-author of the study, told PhysOrg.com. “However, we observe cooperation in humans and other organisms, where cooperation is costly for the actor but benefits another individual. The question is why does natural selection favor such cooperation? One solution to this problem is given by the ‘Snowdrift’ game (but not by the PD), where individuals gain direct benefits from their cooperative acts.”

The situation of the Snowdrift game involves two drivers who are trapped on opposite sides of a snowdrift. Each has the option of staying in the car or shoveling snow to clear a path. Letting the opponent do all the work is the best option (with a pay-off of 300 used in this study), but being exploited by shoveling while the opponent sits in the car still results in a pay-off of 100. (The other two possibilities, both shoveling and both sitting, have pay-offs of 200 and 0, respectively.)

Compare this with the Prisoner’s Dilemma. For a quick synopsis, two prisoners being questioned each have the choice to either defend the other’s innocence or betray the other’s guilt. As in the Snowdrift game, the best option is to betray your opponent while he defends you (pay-off of 400), and next for both of you to defend each other (pay-off of 300). Also, as in the Snowdrift game, both of you betraying results in a pay-off of 0.

However, the significant difference is in the greater risk in the Prisoner’s Dilemma when you cooperate while your opponent defects: while shoveling snow always helps you out, even when the opponent sits (100 pay-off), defending an opponent who betrays you results in the worst outcome for you—a pay-off of -100. In the study, participants cooperated more in the ISD because they could always obtain individual benefits by cooperating, while the costs of cooperating were shared between cooperators.

The researchers noticed other interesting trends in the study, which involved 96 participants (38 female and 58 male) divided into 16 groups and arranged in 48 pairs, not knowing their partner’s identity or gender. Each pair repeated (“iterated”) both games 12 times, though were initially told the number of repetitions was randomly determined. The researchers created global competition by revealing that the players with the four highest pay-offs would receive monetary awards.

Players who employed “Tit-for-Tat” and “Pavlovian” strategies—known to increase pay-offs in the IPD—had better pay-offs in both games than players who did not use these strategies. Further, the researchers found that female participants were twice as likely to use one of these strategies as male participants in the ISD (but not the IPD), resulting in both greater cooperation in female-female pairs compared with male-male pairs, as well as greater pay-offs for individual females. Interestingly, these results contrast with the theory of social sciences, suggesting that there is no simple rule on how males and females behave in different social dilemmas.

“The most significant result is that humans adapt the degree of cooperation according to the social context (ISD or IPD) and the behavior and gender of their partner,” Kümmerli said.

Besides offering a potential explanation for the high levels of cooperation among humans, the ISD may also have more real-life associations than the IPD. For example, as the researchers point out, two scientists collaborating on a report would benefit if the other worked harder. But when your collaborator doesn’t do any work, it’s probably better for you to do all the work yourself. You’ll still end up with a completed project, rather than life in prison.

“Many natural situations of cooperation are much more similar to the SD than to the PD,” Kümmerli said. “For that reason, I think that the SD can provide more indications why cooperation is favored by natural selection than the PD. However, the PD is still a useful tool for mathematical models and to demonstrate differences in cooperation between two groups and in treatment of the gender differences in our study.”

Citation: Kümmerli, Rolf, Colliard, Caroline, Fiechter, Nicolas, Petitpierre, Blaise, Russier, Flavien, and Keller, Laurent. “Human cooperation in social dilemmas: comparing the Snowdrift game with the Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Proc. R. Soc. B, doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.0793.

Coexistence of cooperators and defectors is common in nature, yet the evolutionary origin of such social diversification is unclear. Many models have been studied on the basis of the assumption that benefits of cooperative acts only accrue to others. Here, we analyze the continuous snowdrift game, in which cooperative investments are costly but yield benefits to others as well as to the cooperator. Adaptive dynamics of investment levels often result in evolutionary diversification from initially uniform populations to a stable state in which cooperators making large investments coexist with defectors who invest very little. Thus, when individuals benefit from their own actions, large asymmetries in cooperative investments can evolve.
Michael Doebeli, Christoph Hauert,Timothy Killingback, "The Evolutionary Origin of Cooperators and Defectors," Science, October 2004 --- http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5697/859  

Jensen Comment
There is a rather good module about game theory at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Theory

Prisoner's Dilemma --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Chicken Game --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_chicken

Nash Equilibrium --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_Equilibrium

Anecdotally Let Me Tell You a Snow Drift Tale About My Father (Vernon E. Jensen)

After leaving the family farm following World War II, my father commenced driving gasoline transports in his cousin Martin's  business that owned a chain of D-X Stations and Bulk Plants in small towns in northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota (but mostly in Iowa). Eventually he bought into this "jobbering" corporation and became the territory manager of the entire operation.

Once he got caught in a whiteout on Highway 169 between Humboldt and Algona. Although he was only about 16 miles from home, the wind-whipped drifts of snow made it impossible for the car to move in any