The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
(Good thing Obama sent Churchill's bust back to the U.K. from the Oval Office and replaced it with a bust of Lincoln who wrote that Government should print all the money it needs without  borrowing)

February 25, 2009 message from Mac Wright [Mac.Wright@VU.EDU.AU] in Australia

Lawrence Livermore Laboratories has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science.

The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons,  88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic  mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are  surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from four days to four years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years; It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

Mac Wright
Lecturer
Victoria University
Melbourne
Australia 

February 25, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

America, what is happening to you?
 “One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, in September 2008....“the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire . . .
 Richard Florida, "How the Crash Will Reshape America," The Atlantic, March 2009 --- http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography

Hi Mac,

 NASA discovered new black holes in the US that have been named AIG, CITI, B of A, Fannie, Freddie, Wells Fargo, Health Care, Welfare, Education, etc.

Black holes are supposed to suck in everything including light. These U.S. black holes seem to feed on trillions of dollars but have no interest in sucking in light or the Governmentium (Gv) that feeds them,

A former Andersen partner, David Walker, who for a time became the top accountant in the U.S. Government, now spends all of his time and energy warning Governmentium (Gv) and the public about how the U.S. cannot simply keep adding to unbooked off-balance-sheet (OBSF) entitlements liabilities that are now more than five times the booked National Debt. Entitlements, especially in health care, will grow off-balance sheet at an accelerating pace under the current liberal and unstoppable U.S. Congress. Each child in the U.S. will soon be tagged with over $500,000 in OBSF debt to pay for the extravagances of her/his grandparents.

David Walker says that nobody even knows what the unbooked U.S. OBSF debt amounts to at present. That's governmental accounting at its best.

 The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon.
 David M. Walker, Former Chief Accountant of the United States --- http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/0218.html

 Also see David’s dire warnings on CBS Sixty Minutes concerning the unbooked national debt for entitlements (over five times the booked national debt and soaring with new entitlements) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm

All of the major news outlets are reporting that the stimulus bill voted out of conference committee last night has a meager $789 billion price tag. This number is pure fantasy. No one believes that the increased funding for programs the left loves like Head Start, Medicaid, COBRA, and the Earned Income Tax Credit is in anyway temporary. No Congress under control of the left will ever cut funding for these programs. So what is the true cost of the stimulus if these spending increases are made permanent? Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) asked the Congressional Budget Office to estimate the impact of permanently extending the 20 most popular provisions of the stimulus bill. What did the CBO find? As you can see from the table below, the true 10 year cost of the stimulus bill $2.527 trillion in in spending with another $744 billion cost in debt servicing. Total bill for the Generational Theft Act: $3.27 trillion.
 "True Cost of Stimulus: $3.27 Trillion," Heritage Foundation,  February 12, 2009 ---
 http://blog.heritage.org/2009/02/12/true-cost-of-stimulus-327-trillion/

The above quotation illustrates how Governmentium (Gv) misleads the public by never mentioning its OBSF insanity. The biggest head-shaker to any accountant who understands what OBSF means, is Obama’s promise to shrink the soaring annual budget deficit of over $1.7 trillion (and rising) to about $600 billion per year by 2012 when he will be up for re-election. But the hidden OBSF entitlements obligations after four years of liberal spending on entitlements will have grown from $55 trillion to over $100 trillion. Obama never mentions the OBSF disaster! That not be healthy for his re-election worries.

Have you ever once heard President Obama, House Speaker Pelosi, Senate Leader Reid, Ben Baranke, or any other atom in Govermentium (Gv) mention the unbooked OBSF entitlements obligations? Of course not!

Congress is having a field day with the OBSF stuff!
To change the metaphor, it’s like adding a trillion kilos of spending to the visible deck of the USS Governmentium (oops I meant to say Titanic)  and 100 trillion of OBSF kilos to the engine room. This ship is headed for the bottom unless somebody listens to David Walker.

 America, what is happening to you?
 “One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, in September 2008....“the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire . . .
 Richard Florida, "How the Crash Will Reshape America," The Atlantic, March 2009 --- http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography

Bob Jensen’s futile warnings about entitlements (including links to David Walker’s enlightening videos) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm

 Bob Jensen

Though they seldom invoke Fisher, policymakers in America are applying his (Irving Fisher) ideas. In academia Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Federal Reserve, sought to formalise Fisher’s debt-deflation theory. His research has shaped his response to this crisis. He decided to bail out Bear Stearns in March 2008 partly so that a sudden liquidation of the investment bank’s positions did not trigger a cycle of falling asset prices and default. Indeed, some say the Fed has learnt Fisher too well: from 2001 to 2004, to contain the deflationary shock waves of the tech-stock collapse, it kept interest rates low and thus helped to inflate a new bubble, in property. Were Fisher alive today, “he would tell us we have to avoid deflation, and to worry about all that inside debt,” says Robert Dimand, an economist at Brock University in Canada, who has studied Fisher in depth. “The ideal thing is to avoid these situations. Unfortunately, we are in one.” Fisher was born in 1867 and earned his PhD from Yale in 1891. In 1898 he nearly died of tuberculosis, an experience that turned him into a lifelong crusader for diet, fresh air, Prohibition and public health. For a while he also promoted eugenics. His causes, both healthy and repugnant, combined with a lack of humour and high self-regard, did not make him popular.
"Out of Keyne's Shadow," The Economist, February 14, 2009 --- http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13104022

Over investment and over speculation are often important; but they would have far less serious results were they not conducted with borrowed money. The very effort of individuals to lessen their burden of debts increases it, because of the mass effect of the stampede to liquidate…the more debtors pay, the more they owe. The more the economic boat tips, the more it tends to tip.

Though they seldom invoke Fisher, policymakers in America are applying his ideas. In academia Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Federal Reserve, sought to formalise Fisher’s debt-deflation theory. His research has shaped his response to this crisis. He decided to bail out Bear Stearns in March 2008 partly so that a sudden liquidation of the investment bank’s positions did not trigger a cycle of falling asset prices and default. Indeed, some say the Fed has learnt Fisher too well: from 2001 to 2004, to contain the deflationary shock waves of the tech-stock collapse, it kept interest rates low and thus helped to inflate a new bubble, in property.

Were Fisher alive today, “he would tell us we have to avoid deflation, and to worry about all that inside debt,” says Robert Dimand, an economist at Brock University in Canada, who has studied Fisher in depth. “The ideal thing is to avoid these situations. Unfortunately, we are in one.”

Fisher was born in 1867 and earned his PhD from Yale in 1891. In 1898 he nearly died of tuberculosis, an experience that turned him into a lifelong crusader for diet, fresh air, Prohibition and public health. For a while he also promoted eugenics. His causes, both healthy and repugnant, combined with a lack of humour and high self-regard, did not make him popular.

In 1894, on a trip to Switzerland, he saw, in water cascading into mountain pools, a way to “define precisely the relationships among wealth, capital, interest and income,” Robert Loring Allen, a biographer of Fisher, wrote. “The flowing water, moving into the pool at a certain volume per unit of time, was income. The pool, a given volume of water at a particular moment, became capital.” Over the next 30 years he established many of the central concepts of financial economics.

In 1911, in “The Purchasing Power of Money”, Fisher formalised the quantity theory of money, which holds that the supply of money times its velocity—the rate at which a dollar circulates through the market—is equal to output multiplied by the price level. Perhaps more important, he explained how changing velocity and prices could cause real interest rates to deviate from nominal ones. In this way, monetary forces could produce booms and busts, although they had no long-run effect on output. Furthermore, Fisher held that the dollar’s value should be maintained relative not to gold but to a basket of commodities, making him the spiritual father of all modern central banks that target price stability.

During the 1920s Fisher became rich from the invention and sale of a card-index system. He used the money to buy stocks on margin, and by 1929 was worth $10m. He was also a prominent financial guru. Alas, two weeks after he saw the “plateau” the stockmarket crashed.

To his cost, Fisher remained optimistic as the Depression wore on. He lost his fortune and his home and lived out his life on the generosity of his sister-in-law and Yale. But his work continued. He was prominent among the 1,028 economists who in vain petitioned Herbert Hoover to veto the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930. And he developed his debt-deflation theory. In 1933 in Econometrica, published by the Econometric Society, which he co-founded, he described debt deflation as a sequence of distress-selling, falling asset prices, rising real interest rates, more distress-selling, falling velocity, declining net worth, rising bankruptcies, bank runs, curtailment of credit, dumping of assets by banks, growing distrust and hoarding. Chart 1 is his: it shows how deflation increased the burden of debt.

Continued in article

It's more expensive to buy an $800 car to live out of day-to-day
It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card. The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service. Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it's seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market. Among the many dispiriting numbers that bleakly depict the decrepitude of this onetime industrial behemoth, the steep slide of housing values helps define the daunting challenge to anyone who wants to lead this shrinking, poverty-pocked city of about 800,000 people. It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card. The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service. Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it's seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market. Among the many dispiriting numbers that bleakly depict the decrepitude of this onetime industrial behemoth, the steep slide of housing values helps define the daunting challenge to anyone who wants to lead this shrinking, poverty-pocked city of about 800,000 people.
Tim Jones, "Detroit's outlook falls along with home prices Motor City on the brink of bankruptcy, but still 15 people want to be mayor." Chicago Tribune, January 29, 2009 --- http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-detroit-housingjan29,0,5435392.story
Jensen Comment
Remember that $7,500 is the middle price such that half the Detroit homes are cheaper than the median. This means that in some neighborhoods it's possible to buy a grand old three story house for $500. If your lucky, the drug dealer next door will have 24/7 armed guards that will watch over your new mansion for free. I apologize here. The demise of Detroit's housing market is really not good material for humor. This fall in home values, however, is not due to the subprime mortgage scandal. Detroit's real estate values have been plunging for decades as Detroit became an increasingly dangerous place to live. When I was on the faculty at Michigan State University 40 years ago, inner city homes in Detroit were dirt cheap in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Over the years the situation has only grown worse.

Professor Schiller at Yale asserts housing prices are still overvalued (but not in Detroit) and need to come down to reality
The median value of a U.S. home in 2000 was $119,600. It peaked at $221,900 in 2006. Historically, home prices have risen annually in line with CPI. If they had followed the long-term trend, they would have increased by 17% to $140,000. Instead, they skyrocketed by 86% due to Alan Greenspan’s irrational lowering of interest rates to 1%, the criminal pushing of loans by lowlife mortgage brokers, the greed and hubris of investment bankers and the foolishness and stupidity of home buyers. It is now 2009 and the median value should be $150,000 based on historical precedent. The median value at the end of 2008 was $180,100. Therefore, home prices are still 20% overvalued. Long-term averages are created by periods of overvaluation followed by periods of undervaluation. Prices need to fall 20% and could fall 30%.....
Watch the video on Yahoo Finance --- Click Here
See the chart at http://www.businessinsider.com/the-housing-chart-thats-worth-1000-words-2009-2
Also see Jim Mahar's blog at http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/shiller-house-prices-still-way-too-high.html
Jensen Comment
Some Republicans now propose that mortgage rates be set at 4% or lower for 30-year mortgages, but this will simply jumpstart the mortgage brokering racket (with overvalued appraisals) that got us into this mess. Also banks are not going to make 30-year loans at such low fixed rates. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack, now owned by Congress, will have to buy up those new loans. Currently Freddie and Fannie need trillions to recover from the toxic paper they already own. If current homeowners can also refinance at such low rates we're talking tens of trillions of cost in this stupid Republican plan being pushed by real estate brokers and home builders and especially mortgage brokers.
"A Republican Fannie Mae The worst mortgage idea since Barney Frank's last one," The Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123388493959055161.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

February 23, 2009 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

Very interesting, but much of what you say is dependent on how consistent was the 2000 value of $119,600.

Dave Albrecht
 

February 24, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

Picking any earlier year as a benchmark for value is a lot like picking a benchmark year for an inflation index such as the CPI-Urban. It doesn’t matter so much which year is chosen as a benchmark year if all related calculations are then relative to that benchmark. If there’s inflation in a given benchmark year, the inflation-adjustment calculations in other years are valid as long as the same benchmark is used for all years. I think the same reasoning applies to a real estate value benchmark year.

The important outcome of Schiller’s conclusion lies in the graph at
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-housing-chart-thats-worth-1000-words-2009-2
The cost of building houses went up, but not anything like home prices soared like a rocket after Greenspan lowered interest rates and the mortgage fraud processes commenced on Main Street and Wall Street.

The surge in housing prices was not the same among all 50 states. There are four sunshine states that had the biggest surge and will now receive the lion’s share of the mortgage bailout funding. Those states are California, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada. Michigan is the fifth foreclosure problem state, but the problem there is job loss rates rather than inflated housing values and overbuilding of new homes. I hate to admit it, but I learned this five-state foreclosure bailout unfairness last night from Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck also had the world’s simplest explanation for the CDO problem. He used a giant cookie to represent a single home mortgage of John Doe. John Doe’s mortgage was sold to AGI (or virtually any investment bank). AGI in turn crumbled the cookie into crumbs that were scattered into CDO collateralized securitization instruments. A given CDO securitization instrument was then comprised of cookie crumbles from hundreds of mortgage contracts, including a crumb from John Doe’s contract.

The mathematical theory was that investing in John Doe’s single cookie had a lot of unsystematic risk that John Doe might lose his job and default. But in a CDO investment the loss would only be one small cookie crumb. That was the Markowitz-based theory until the housing market crashed.

I don't think that Glenn Beck has ever heard of Harry Markowitz, so he still has a few academic lessons to learn. Sadly, academic lessons can sometimes be toxic. Actually you did not have to crumble each cookie if you held over a million whole cookies in your portfolio, which was the strategy of Marion and Herb Sandler at World Savings. The Sandler's used more traditional portfolio theory rather than CDO-based Markowitz-based theory of cookie crumbles.

The problem of course, is that now too many crumbs are rotten and the CDO investments themselves are toxic to the banks that hold them, including Bank of American that bought a bunch of them when B of A bought Countrywide and Merrill Lynch. If you know the CDO’s are toxic, why buy them? B of A’s CEO, Lewis, should’ve been lynched after buying Lynch,.

Glenn Beck pointed out a great legal tactic that John Doe can use for delaying foreclosure after missing a succession of mortgage payments. If hauled into court, John Doe should insist on seeing his mortgage contract --- the original big cookie. This will send all the bank lawyers to work at enormous fees trying to aggregate all of John Doe’s cookie crumbs scattered around the world after CDOs were bought, sold, bought, sold etc. in cookie crumble piles. This just adds to the problems banks are having when foreclosing on saavy guys like John Doe. In many instances it is just cheaper to renegotiate a favorable mortgage with John Doe. But I presume, the owners of every crumb of John Doe’s big cookie must agree to the renegotiated mortgage.

Now you see why the banks that bought these toxic loans were so stupid. JP Morgan made a stupid deal buying WaMu. Bank of America made a stupid deal buying Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch. Wachovia made a stupid deal when buying World Savings. Wells Fargo made a stupid deal when buying Wachovia. And the list of stupid CEOs goes on and on.

What were they thinking?
They probably believed, as they were taught at Harvard, Chicago, and Wharton, that Harry Markowitz was infallible.

Bob Jensen

Bob Jensen's threads on CDO cookie crumbles and their CDS insurance contracts that turned into disaster can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout

"The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2009: Technology Review presents its annual list of 10 technologies that could change the way we live," MIT's Technology Review, March/April 2009 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport.aspx?id=37

Question
What are the analogies that led to the names "Amazon" and "Kindle?"

Answer
The word "Amazon" depicts an enormous river of books (an now millions of products) flowing into the world.
The word "Kindle" depicts lighting a fire to read or wanting to read.

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm

Video:  The Glass Ceiling is Shattered for Business School Women Who Become Deans
Today, female business school deans are unlikely to receive such celebrity status. One reason? There are more of them than ever before, according to new data from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), one of the leading business school accreditation agencies. Of the 668 deans at AACSB-member schools in the U.S., nearly 17% are women. Meanwhile, women deans at the 460 AACSB-accredited schools in the U.S. now make up 15.5% of the dean pool, a 35% increase from the start of the decade, according to AACSB. (See our slide show featuring female deans of top U.S. business schools.)
Alison Damast , "Women Shattering B-Schools' Glass Ceiling Once almost solely the province of men, the offices of business school dean are increasingly held by women," Business Week, February 20, 2009 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2009/bs20090220_540066.htm
Jensen Comment
God bless them and more power to them. I would've considered being made a Dean as some sort of punishment for bad behavior.

"Unigo.com Gives Everyone a Say About College Picks," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123499498840816053.html

Research on choosing colleges takes many forms, including visiting campuses and studying the schools' Web sites. But for a lot of high-school students and their parents, finding a centralized resource containing information about numerous schools still means buying one of the thick, costly printed guides to college that have been around for years. The Web versions of these books are surprisingly dry.

But there's a new, free Web site that, while overseen by paid editors, is built on lively content submitted by current students at the colleges. The information isn't just words and numbers, but includes numerous photos and videos for most schools. You also can create a small social network of people interested in the same schools or who share other common traits.

In other words, this is a college-information resource built for the age of YouTube and Facebook.

The site, Unigo.com, costs nothing to use and supports itself with ads. Although it's only a few months old, it already covers about 250 colleges and universities, and claims to average dozens of student-created reviews, photos and videos for each college. Its sophisticated search engine lets applicants comb all this material to find just what applies to them. For example, Unigo would let you see all content relevant to an Asian-American female applicant with conservative political views.

. . .

Unigo also contains articles on general topics, such as how to decide what size of college is best for you, and how to get the most out of a college tour.

While the editors ban personal attacks and nudity, they don't bar negative comments. Unigo deliberately seeks out pro and con opinions. Many of the student submissions are enthusiastically positive, but plenty are negative comments on campus social life, the costs, the food, the faculty, the dorms and other topics.

The site feels surprisingly full for such a young venture, but it has some quirks and issues. Coverage is uneven. For instance, Vassar College in New York boasts 117 reviews and 42 videos, while the much larger University of Kansas has only 45 reviews and three videos. Finding the detailed search feature can be clumsy, because it's not obvious on the home page. You can't generate a quick comparison among colleges, and the site lacks any parent-oriented sections, although parents are free to use it.

Finally, there are just loads of colleges that aren't yet included. The first 250 schools were "seeded," with months of research and solicitation of student content. Unigo is confident it can get more schools, but only time will tell.

Still, Unigo is a good example of how user-generated content can do a lot to enhance an important topic, and still keep editorial standards.

Find all of Walt Mossberg's columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com .

Continued in article

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

Understanding Supplemental Security Income SSI Spotlight on SSI Benefits for Aliens (2008 Edition) ---
http://www.ssa.gov/ssi/spotlights/spot-non-citizens.htm

Who is a Qualified Alien? There are seven categories of qualified aliens. You are a qualified alien if the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says you are in one of these categories:

Lawfully Admitted for Permanent Residence (LAPR) in the United States, which includes "Amerasian immigrant" as defined in Section 584 of the Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 1988, as amended;

granted conditional entry under Section 203(a)(7) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as in effect before April 1, 1980;

paroled into the United States under Section 212(d)(5) of the INA for a period of at least one year;

refugee admitted to the United States under Section 207 of the INA;

granted asylum under Section 208 of the INA;

deportation is being withheld under Section 243(h) of the INA, as in effect before April 1, 1997 or removal is being withheld under Section 241(b)(3) of the INA; or,

"Cuban or Haitian entrant" under Section 501(e) of the Refugee Education Assistance Act of 1980 or in a status that is to be treated as a "Cuban or Haitian entrant" for SSI purposes.

In addition, you can be a “deemed qualified alien” if, under certain circumstances, you, your child or parent has been subjected to battery or extreme cruelty by a family member while in the United States.

Where were the auditors?
What surprised me is the size of this alleged fraud
"This is huge," said David Rosenfeld, associate regional director of the SEC's New York Regional Office.
"This is a truly egregious fraud of immense proportions."

"Carnegie Mellon and Pitt Accuse 2 Investment Managers of $114-Million Fraud," by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2009 --- Click Here

The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University are suing two investment managers who allegedly took $114-million from the institutions and spent it on cars, horses, houses for their wives, and even teddy bears. The two managers, Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh, are said to have taken a total of more than $500-million from the universities and other investors through their company, Westridge Capital Management, and they have also been charged with fraud by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The universities named several associates of Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh in the lawsuit. According to the complaint, the universities became alarmed after the National Futures Association, a nonprofit organization that investigates member firms, tried to audit Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh’s company. The association determined that that Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh had taken hundreds of millions in loans from the investment funds. On February 12 the association suspended their membership after repeatedly trying, and failing, to contact them. That step spurred the universities to try to locate their money. On February 18 they contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission and sought an investigation. According to their lawsuit, Carnegie Mellon had invested $49-million and the University of Pittsburgh had invested $65-million. Today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette listed some of the things that Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh had purchased with their investors’ money: rare books, Steiff teddy bears at up to $80,000 each, a horse farm, cars, and a $3-million residence for Mr. Walsh’s ex-wife. Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh were also handling money for retirement funds for teachers and public employees in Iowa, North Dakota, and Sacramento County, California. In the Post-Gazette, David Rosenfeld, an associate regional director of the SEC’s New York Regional Office, said the case represented “a truly egregious fraud of immense proportions.” Mr. Walsh, it appears, had ties to another university as well. He is a member of the foundation board at the State University of New York at Buffalo, from which he graduated in 1966 with a political-science degree. In a written statement, officials at Buffalo said that he had not been an active board member for the past two years and that foundation policy forbade investing university money with any member of the board.

"Pitt, CMU money managers arrested in fraud FBI says they misappropriated $500 million for lavish lifestyles," by Jonathon Silver, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 26, 2009 --- http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09057/951834-85.stm

Two East Coast investment managers sued for fraud by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University misappropriated more than $500 million of investors' money to hide losses and fund a lavish lifestyle that included purchases of $80,000 collectible teddy bears, horses and rare books, federal authorities said yesterday.

As Pitt and Carnegie Mellon were busy trying to learn whether they will be able to recover any of their combined $114 million in investments through Westridge Capital Management, the FBI yesterday arrested the corporations' managers.

Paul Greenwood, 61, of North Salem, N.Y., and Stephen Walsh, 64, of Sands Point, N.Y., were charged in Manhattan -- by the same office prosecuting the Bernard L. Madoff fraud case -- with securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy.

Both men also were sued in civil court by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which alleged that the partners misappropriated more than $553 million and "fraudulently solicited" $1.3 billion from investors since 1996.

The Accused

Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh are accused of misappropriating millions from investors. Here is a look at some of their biggest personal purchases:

• HOME: Mr. Greenwood, a horse breeder, owned a horse farm in North Salem, N.Y., an affluent community that counts David Letterman as a resident.

• BEARS: Mr. Greenwood owns as many as 1,350 Steiff toys, including teddy bears costing as much as $80,000.

• DIVORCE: Mr. Walsh bought his ex-wife a $3 million condominium as part of their divorce settlement.

"This is huge," said David Rosenfeld, associate regional director of the SEC's New York Regional Office. "This is a truly egregious fraud of immense proportions."

Lawyers for the defendants either could not be reached or had no comment.

Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh, longtime associates and former co-owners of the New York Islanders hockey team, ran Westridge Capital Management and a number of affiliated funds and entities.

As late as this month, the partners appeared to be doing well. Mr. Greenwood told Pitt's assistant treasurer Jan. 21 that they had $2.8 billion under management -- though that number is now in question. And on Feb. 2, Pitt sent $5 million to be invested.

But in the course of less than three weeks, Westridge's mammoth portfolio imploded in what federal authorities called an investment scam meant to cover up trading losses and fund extravagant purchases by the partners.

An audit launched Feb. 5 by the National Futures Association proved key to uncovering the alleged deceit and apparently became the linchpin of the case federal prosecutors are building.

That audit came about in an indirect way. The association, a self-policing membership body, had taken action against a New York financier. That led to a man named Jack Reynolds, a manager of the Westridge Capital Management Fund in which CMU invested $49 million; and Mr. Reynolds led to Westridge.

"We just said we better take a look at Jack Reynolds and see what's happening, and that led us to Westridge and WCM, so it was a domino effect," said Larry Dyekman, an association spokesman. "We're just not sure we have the full picture yet."

Mr. Reynolds has not been charged by federal authorities, but he is named as a defendant in the lawsuit that was filed last week by Pitt and CMU.

"Greenwood and Walsh refused to answer any of our questions about where the money was or how much there was," Mr. Dyekman continued.

"This is still an ongoing investigation, and we can't really say at this point with any finality how much has been lost."

The federal criminal complaint traces the alleged illegal activity to at least 1996.

FBI Special Agent James C. Barnacle Jr. said Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh used "manipulative and deceptive devices," lied and withheld information as part of a scheme to defraud investors and enrich themselves.

The complaint refers to a public state-sponsored university called "Investor 1" whose details match those given by Pitt in its lawsuit.

The SEC's Mr. Rosenfeld said the fraud hinged not so much on the partners' investment strategy but on the fact that they are believed to have simply spent other people's money on themselves.

"They took it. They promised the investors it would be invested. And instead of doing that they misappropriated it for their own use," Mr. Rosenfeld said.

Not only do federal authorities believe Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh used new investors' funds to cover up prior losses in a classic Ponzi scheme, they used more than $160 million for personal expenses including:

• Rare books bought at auction;

• Steiff teddy bears purchased for up to $80,000 at auction houses including Sotheby's;

• A horse farm;

• Cars;

• A residence for Mr. Walsh's ex-wife, Janet Walsh, 53, of Florida, for at least $3 million;

• Money for Ms. Walsh and Mr. Greenwood's wife, Robin Greenwood, 57, both of whom are defendants in the SEC suit. More than $2 million was allegedly wired to their personal accounts by an unnamed employee of the partners.

"Defendants treated investor money -- some of which came from a public pension fund -- as their own piggy bank to lavish themselves with expensive gifts," said Stephen J. Obie, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's acting director of enforcement.

It is not clear how Pitt and CMU got involved with Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh. But there is at least one connection involving academia. The commission suit said Mr. Walsh represented to potential investors that he was a member of the University at Buffalo Foundation board and served on its investment committee.

Mr. Walsh is a 1966 graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo where he majored in political science.

He was a trustee of the University at Buffalo Foundation, but the foundation did not have any investments in Westridge or related firms.

Universities, charitable organizations, retirement and pension funds are among the investors who have done business with Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh.

Among those investors are the Sacramento County Employees' Retirement System, the Iowa Public Employees' Retirement System and the North Dakota Retirement and Investment Office, which handles $4 billion in investments for teachers and public employees.

The North Dakota fund received about $20 million back from Westridge Capital Management, but has an undetermined amount still out in the market, said Steve Cochrane, executive director.

Mr. Cochrane said Westridge Capital was cooperative in returning what money it could by closing out their position and sending them the money.

"I dealt with them exclusively all these years," Mr. Cochrane said.

"They always seemed to be upfront and honest. I think they're as stunned and as victimized as we are, is my guess."

He said Westridge Capital had done an excellent job over the years.

The November financial statement indicated that the one-year return from Westridge Capital was a negative 11.87 percent, but the five-year annualized rate of return was a positive 8.36 percent.

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

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

"Argentina Has a Bond It Wants to Sell You:  Deadbeat nations should be kept out of U.S. capital markets," by Mark Shapiro and Nancy Soderberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123569777717089081.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

In 2001, Argentina defaulted on $81 billion in sovereign bonds. Four years later it presented a unilateral, nonnegotiable restructuring plan worth about 25 cents on the dollar. When half of its foreign lenders said "no thanks," Buenos Aires repudiated their claims.

Since Argentina had earlier agreed to waive sovereign immunity and accept the jurisdiction and judgments of New York courts, more than 160 lawsuits were filed. But the governments of Nestor Kirchner and of his wife and successor, Christina Fernandez, have ignored numerous court judgments. Judge Thomas Griesa has repeatedly condemned their conduct, noting in 2005 that "I have not heard one single word from the [Argentine] Republic except ways to avoid paying those judgments." Nothing has changed since then.

If Argentina gets away with its misdeeds -- offering terrible terms for restructuring its debt and then repudiating its obligations to those who object -- the likelihood of additional defaults could increase substantially. If that occurs, it would inflict another serious blow to a global financial system in crisis.

Already, Buenos Aires's scofflaw behavior is being imitated. Citing Argentina's example, Ecuador recently defaulted on sovereign debts issued in the U.S., though it has the means to meet its obligations. The default drove down the market price of the bonds. The Correa government then entered the American secondary market with a massive repurchase program, scooping up much of its own debt at a very steep discount.

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

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

Questions
Why might you want to teach a modified IRR?

Is the reinvestment-at-the-same-rate assumption true?
It may not be, when interim cash inflows occur far in the future, or if there is limited available capital to fund competing projects.

Is timing important?
Yes, it is vital. A change in the expected receipt of future cash inflows by as little as 30 days has a significant impact on the computed IRR.

"Spreadsheets at Work: Rating Your Own IRR Some tips for doing these key calculations; and introducing "modified" internal rate of return," by Richard Block and Jan Bell, CFO.com, February 20, 2009 --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/13052407/c_2984312?f=FinanceProfessor/SBU
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar.

It is budgeting season again. Financial analysts are completing their analyses of the R&D or capital spending projects being proposed. And financial executives are either anxiously awaiting those analyses, or already getting started on their reviews. No doubt the analyses include investment costs, anticipated future savings, discounted cash flows, computed internal rates of return, and a ranking of which projects make the "cut," and which do not.

Almost certainly, a spreadsheet was used for each project — to compute the discounted cash flows, the internal rates of return, and the presentation of the overall rankings.

You will take comfort, of course, because these analyses, and your decision on which projects to accept or fund, were based on a sound financial principle: namely, the better the internal rate of return, the better the project.

But is that comfort warranted? Or might you be vulnerable to the weaknesses long pointed out — if too often ignored — by researchers who have warned that IRR calculations often contain built-in reinvestment assumptions that improperly improve the appearance of bad projects, or make the good ones look too good .

IRR, of course, is the actual compounded annual rate of return from an investment, often used as a key metric in evaluating capital projects to determine whether an investment should be made. IRR also is used in conjunction with the Net Present Value (NPV) function, determining the current value of the sum of a future series of negative and positive cash flows; namely investments and savings. The prescribed discount factor to be used in computing NPV is the company's weighted average cost of capital, or WACC. The internal rate of return is the annual rate of return, also known as the discount factor, which makes the NPV zero.

The rub in justifying long-term project funding decisions by using IRR is two-fold. First, IRR assumes that interim cash inflows, or savings, will be "reinvested," and will produce a return — the reinvestment rate — equal to the "finance rate" used to fund the cash outflows (the investment.) Second, the anticipated investment cash outflows required for the project, and for the anticipated cash inflows from savings once the project is complete, are so far in the future that their timing is difficult to determine with reasonable accuracy.

Is the reinvestment-at-the-same-rate assumption true? It may not be, when interim cash inflows occur far in the future, or if there is limited available capital to fund competing projects. Is timing important? Yes, it is vital. A change in the expected receipt of future cash inflows by as little as 30 days has a significant impact on the computed IRR.

But by knowing and using the subtleties of the various IRR functions available in an electronic spreadsheet, we can safeguard ourselves against miscalculations based on faulty assumptions, and minimize the range of error by early detection of faulty assumptions.

In this article, part one of a two-part series, we will study the reinvestment issue. The second article will address how to reduce inaccuracies — minimizing the range of error — based on timing concerns.

Continued in article

"A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation", by Mebane Faber, SSRN, Spring 2007 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962461

Bob Jensen's threads on rate of return theory --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/roi.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm

"Cheap Hydrogen from Scraps:  Turning organic waste into hydrogen now works without expensive platinum," by Nora Schultz, MIT's Technology Review, February 23, 2009 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22208/?nlid=1795&a=f 

It sounds almost too good to be true: add a few bugs to food scraps and waste water to generate clean hydrogen fuel. But over the past few years, researchers have been gradually working toward this promising scheme for producing hydrogen.

Now, with the help of an unassuming stainless-steel brush, microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) have taken another step forward. The steel brush can be used to replace the expensive platinum normally employed as the electrolysis cell's cathode, slashing costs by more than 80 percent.

Hydrogen is an appealing, environmentally friendly fuel because burning it creates only water as a waste product. MECs harness the electrons produced by certain bacteria as those bacteria feed on biodegradable material. The bacteria sit on an electrode--the anode--as they metabolize organic matter in an oxygen-devoid chamber. Not being able to react with oxygen, the electrons travel from the anode to the counter-electrode--the cathode--where they combine with protons to form hydrogen.

In late 2007, a team led by Bruce Logan, Kappe professor of environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, showed that they could improve the efficiency of this process: by adding a small jolt of electricity (0.25 volts) at the cathode. Until now, however, the researchers have relied on a platinum catalyst on the cathode to make the process fast enough.

"The need to use a precious metal catalyst had been holding back further development of the technique, but now we have found a way to do it without platinum," says Logan.

Compared with platinum, which acts as an effective catalyst when applied in a thin layer to a flat piece of carbon cloth, a simple piece of stainless steel is two-thirds less effective. But when Logan's team increased the surface area of the stainless-steel cathode by arranging the material in the form of a high-density bristle brush, hydrogen production rates increased to values that matched or even exceeded those of the platinum cathode. While the platinum cathode costs around 15 cents, the stainless-steel brush only set the researchers back 3 cents.

Question
Did Harvard and Wharton (Penn) kill Wall Street (nobody disputes that it's DOA)?

"Kevin Hassett: How Ivy League narcissists killed Wall Street," by Kevin Hassett, The Providence Journal, February 22, 2009 --- http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_hassett22_02-22-09_0NDBQJT_v16.4003053.html

FOR TWO CENTURIES, Wall Street survived wars, depressions, bank panics and terrorist attacks. Now Wall Street as we know it is dead. Gone.

When a healthy and thriving person dies suddenly, a medical examiner may talk to family and friends to see if the deceased had recently changed behavior in some way.

Wall Street did change radically in recent years in one notable way. Twenty or 30 years ago, it was common for the best and the brightest to be doctors or engineers. By the 2000s, they wanted to be investment bankers.

When Wall Street was run by people randomly selected from the population, it was able to survive everything. After the best and brightest took over, it died the first time that real-estate prices dropped 20 percent.

Are the two facts related? In other words, did Harvard kill Wall Street?

The suspect certainly had the opportunity. If you walked into any major Wall Street firm a year ago and randomly selected an employee, chances are that person would either be from an Ivy League school, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown and so on, or have an Masters in Business Administration, or both.

The statistics are striking. Back in the 1970s, it was typical for about 5 percent of Harvard graduates to work in the financial sector, according to a recent study by Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz. By the 1990s, that number was 15 percent. It probably climbed since then. And the proportion of those with MBAs grew as well. Economists Thomas Philippon, of New York University, and Ariell Reshef, of the University of Virginia, found that, in 1980, workers in finance earned about the same wages, on average, as workers in other sectors. By 2005, financial-sector workers earned 50 percent more than similar workers in other industries.

Philippon and Reshef went on to explore what caused the surge in wages in the financial sector. They found one of the key reasons was the increasing reliance on highly educated workers with post-graduate degrees.

Their results accord with anecdotal evidence concerning the hiring practice of Wall Street firms. A 2008 report in Fortune said that Goldman Sachs hired about 300 MBAs in 2007 and that, last year, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were planning to hire 160 and 235 MBAs, respectively.

Is it just a coincidence that so many superstar minds arrived on Wall Street just as it died?

Perhaps not.

Wall Street is gone because its firms did a terrible job assessing the risks of the positions they took. The models these firms used to evaluate risks failed. But having a failed model brings a firm down only if the firm collectively buys into the model.

To do that, the firm must be run by people who have a great deal of faith in their models, and a great deal of faith in themselves. That’s where Ivy Leaguers and MBAs come in.

What do you get from an MBA? One recent study found that MBAs acquire an enormous amount of self-confidence during their graduate education. They learn to believe that they are the best and the brightest.

This narcissism has a real career impact. Psychologists at Ohio State University studied the behavior of 153 MBA students, who were put in groups of four and asked to orchestrate a large financial transaction on behalf of an imaginary company. The psychologists observed that the students who had the strongest narcissistic traits were most likely to emerge as leaders.

According to Amy Brunell, the lead author, the results of the study had large implications for real-world settings, because “narcissistic leaders tend to have volatile and risky decision-making performance and can be ineffective and potentially destructive leaders.”

Guys like John Thain (Harvard Business School, 1979) exemplify this behavior when their sense of entitlement is so grand that they can spend a fortune renovating an office while their firm is going up in flames.

Continued in article

The End of Investment Banking as We Know It and What to Do About It --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#InvestmentBanking

Question
Did Harvard and Wharton (Penn) kill the traditional MBA job market?

Answer
No doubt! Now the hot opportunity is a job with the Federal Government.

"MBAs: Uncle Sam Wants You:  With the private sector job market more dismal than ever, suddenly government and nonprofit jobs are some of the hottest tickets around," by Anne VanderMey, Business Week, February  16, 2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2009/bs20090216_831796.htm?link_position=link1

At the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin on Feb. 9, dozens of students crowded a classroom for an evening career workshop, breaking an attendance record. The scene was typical of B-school campuses across the country—with jobs in short supply, recruiters are finding themselves more courted than ever. What was different, though, was that this wasn't an event for investment banking, management, or even consulting. It was a pitch for nonprofit and government work.

Uncle Sam has never been very popular with MBA graduates, most of whom are accustomed to the hefty signing bonuses and competitive salaries in private industry. But with the U.S. shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, many companies freezing wages, and an MBA job market turning more dismal by the minute, the stability of government is starting to look a lot more appealing.

At McCombs, Director of MBA Career Services Stacey Rudnick said 70 people came to a workshop called "MBA Jobs You've Never Considered," the largest turnout in recent memory for a spring career workshop. Usually, by this time of year, students already have jobs lined up. "Students are looking for every opportunity, every bit of new information that might help them extend or broaden their search," Rudnick said

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on careers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

"Courses Finance Students Should Take," by Brigitte Yuille, Investopedia, February 2009 ---
http://investopedia.com/articles/professionaleducation/09/non-finance-courses.asp?viewed=1

Executives in search of well-rounded finance students look for certain skills, and studies have revealed that these executives want schools to place more emphasis on quantitative, strategic, critical decision-making and communicative skills - skills that are sometimes best developed in classes outside of business schools. If you want to get the best possible preparation for the finance world from your undergraduate education, put some thought into which classes to take that may fall outside the finance curriculum.

What Companies Want
Business leaders at Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm, discussed areas of change that could be implemented at graduate business schools in a 2003 article "What Business Needs from Business Schools". They suggested that more courses were needed to teach graduates to effectively manage individuals and team-driven organizations, provide tools for problem solving, and provide better grounding in theory. They also recommended more courses outside of the traditional curriculum. (Companies are in need of strategic candidates, not walking resumes. Learn more in Business Grads, Land Your Dream Job.)

What Companies Want
Business leaders at Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm, discussed areas of change that could be implemented at graduate business schools in a 2003 article "What Business Needs from Business Schools". They suggested that more courses were needed to teach graduates to effectively manage individuals and team-driven organizations, provide tools for problem solving, and provide better grounding in theory. They also recommended more courses outside of the traditional curriculum. (Companies are in need of strategic candidates, not walking resumes. Learn more in Business Grads, Land Your Dream Job.)

Finance professors at Duke and Berkeley have made suggestions for courses finance students should take outside of their business school curricula. John Graham, a finance professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and John O'Brien, finance professor at Berkley's Haas School of Business recommend the following areas of study:

 

1. Mathematics - Courses in college algebra and calculus will help students learn how to solve equations in complex financial markets. Statistics helps with decisions based on the likelihood of various outcomes and allows finance students to learn to reach conclusions about general differences between groups and large batches of information. It also explains the movements of a company's stock.
   
    
2. Accounting - Financial and managerial accounting courses teach finance students how to understand, record and report financial transactions, monitor the company's budgets and performance, and examine the costs of the organization's products and services.
   
    
3. Economics - Economics looks at how scarce resources are allocated to achieve needs and wants. A course in macroeconomics will teach finance students to understand the impact of financial market activities on the overall economy. Microeconomics will help them understand the behaviors that occur within individual firms and among consumers as well as how various financial decisions can impact a firm's success. (For more on these subjects, read Economics Basics: What Is Economics?, Macroeconomic Analysis and Understanding Microeconomics.)
   
    
4. Psychology - Financial professionals need to understand the behaviors and thought processes that help drive the movements in financial markets. A course in critical thinking teaches a finance student to reflect and evaluate an argument and examine situations in all dimensions before applying a solution. This involves understanding what is not known about the situation versus what is known. Behavioral finance can help finance students explore why and how the financial markets aren't working by examining how investors' behaviors are associated with market anomalies. This subject helps financial professionals determine where investors make mistakes and how to correct them by examining the emotion or thought behind the actions. Behavioral psychology helps finance majors look at the observable and cognitive aspects of human behavior within a financial environment. (Find useful insight about how emotions and biases affect the market in Taking A Chance On Behavioral Finance.)
   
    
5. Writing - A course in technical writing will teach students how to put forth strong, clear and organized ideas, purposes and explanations in memos, reports and letters.

Additional Course Recommendations
The business consultants at Booz Allen Hamilton - Joyce Doria, Horacio Rozanski and Ed Cohen - made their case for curriculum reform and also recommended courses in psychology, economics and human behavior. In addition, they recommended classes in the following areas of study:

 

• Communications - A communications course, such as public speaking, helps finance students present financial reports and explain the meanings behind equations and numbers to colleagues in group settings. It also helps with the management of people and organizational relations, such as in delegating responsibilities to employees within financial departments.
  
  Business students also need courses in corporate communications, crisis communications and PR strategies according to a 2005 Public Relations Society of America study. It states how financial scandals and downturns can affect shareholder support, consumer confidence and corporate reputation issues. Finance students will benefit from knowing how to handle corporate reputation issues should they arise. 
  
   
•  Ethics - Corporate scandals, such as the Enron scandal, which involved irregular accounting procedures, have also encouraged some business schools, such as the University of San Francisco and Loyola University Chicago, to add a course in ethics to their finance curricula. These courses focus on moral development in an attempt to stem future misconduct in business environments.

Conclusion
Students studying finance will be tasked with big responsibilities in their careers. They will have to manage the flow of money at their companies and identify financial risks and returns to make effective business decisions. Those finance majors who want to have an edge over their competition, both during the initial post-graduate job search and throughout their careers, will take advanced mathematics, accounting, economics, psychology, communications and writing courses to gain a deeper insight into their jobs and a better ability to work effectively with people.

For related reading, see Top Job-Search Mistakes For Finance Grads, How To Land A Finance Job Straight Out Of Undergrad and Top 10 Cities For A Career In Finance.

Brigitte Yuille has worked in journalism for more than a decade in the areas of radio, online, print and television. Her personal finance articles have been published in newspapers, such as the New Jersey Star-Ledger and the South Florida Business Journal and online at AOL, Bankrate, Inc., MSN and Yahoo. She’s also served as an editor for Florida Society of Association trade publications. Ms. Yuille is currently pursuing a graduate degree in business journalism at Florida International University.

Jensen Comment
The above list is a bit outdated. Recommended courses now include the following:

1. Sociology 347 --- Homeless in Manhattan
2. Biology 342 --- How to Live With Lice
3. Engineering 174 --- How to Fit Two Lawn Mowers and Three Gas Cans Into the Back of  Pickup
4. Sociology 243 --- How to Make It the Rest of Your Life on Welfare and Food Stamps and 14 Kids
5. Management 412 --- ACORN Leadership and Fund Raising
6. Theatre 357 --- Tricks of the Trade for Porn Stars

Bad and Badder Presidents in U.S. History
"Was George W. Bush the Worst President? A historian urges us to take a deep breath before we answer," by Thomas Fleming, The Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123578552846098603.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Several polls of historians have named George W. Bush the worst president in American history. This baffles me. I've been writing about presidents for a long time. What I know, and what I presume these gentleman know, doesn't connect.

Is Mr. Bush worse than John Adams? When a shooting war at sea started between the United States and revolutionary France in 1798, Honest John wrote a letter to George Washington, offering to resign so that George could resume the job. How's that for presidential leadership? Meanwhile, Adams had kept Washington's cabinet officers on the job, although he loathed them. He finally fired them in a fit of hysteria, which made them wonder if he had lost his mind.

Is Mr. Bush worse than Thomas Jefferson in his second term? Rather than build a decent navy to deal with the British -- who had a habit of boarding American ships on the high seas and forcing kidnapped sailors into semislavery -- Jefferson declared an embargo on all trade with England and the rest of Europe. The American economy came to a horrific standstill; smuggling became New England's chief industry. Someone described the embargo as "cutting a man's throat to cure a nosebleed." Nonplussed, Jefferson quit, telling only James Madison, his secretary of state, who was de facto acting president for the last year of Tom's term.

James Madison, who officially succeeded Jefferson in 1808, made presidential passivity into an art form. "Little Jemmy," as they called him in New England, watched while 4,500 British troops disembarked from their ships, marched to Washington, D.C., and burned the White House, the Capitol and almost everything else worth torching. You can't do much worse as a war leader than that performance.

Woodrow Wilson? When World War I exploded, Irish-Americans objected to his pro-British tilt. Wilson responded that ethnics like these loudmouthed micks were "pouring poison into the veins of our national life," alienating the largest voting bloc in the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, as a Southern-born pol to his wingtips, he segregated almost all employees of the federal government.

Next, Wilson talked Congress into declaring war on Germany on the assumption that we would not have to send a single soldier to France. Before the war ended, we had 2,000,000 troops overseas, and in three months of fighting lost 144,000 men.

Elected by seven million votes thanks to the electorate's loathing for Wilson, Warren G. Harding confessed to reporters that he was not up to the job. He told one newsman that he wanted to make the U.S. tariff higher than the Rocky Mountains to help Europe's industries recover from World War I. The appalled reporter realized the president had one of the biggest issues of the era exactly backward.

Harding had a concealed box at the Gayety Burlesque Theater where he spent many afternoons and nights. In the leftover hours he concentrated on poker and trysts with a blonde named Nan Britton -- reputedly in a closet off the Oval Office -- while his appointees looted the federal government.

Is Mr. Bush worse than Roosevelt in his second term? Re-elected by a massive majority, FDR wanted to pack the Supreme Court with Democrats. Congress, dominated by members of his own party, wasted a year wrangling over the bill and ultimately rejected it. Meanwhile, FDR's intemperate remarks about greedy businessmen wrecked confidence and triggered a semireplay of the Great Depression in 1937. The Republicans made massive gains in the 1938 midterm elections. FDR was rescued from an exit even more humiliating than Jefferson's by World War II, which he used as an excuse to run for a third term.

Worse than Jimmy Carter, the self- proclaimed Washington "outsider" who presided over the most horrendous stagflation in our history? As his poll numbers sank, Mr. Carter had the temerity to lecture citizens on their "crisis of spirit." His approval rating had plummeted to 22% when Ronald Reagan defeated him. Let us skip Bill Clinton. He and Bush are too contiguous; proximity makes comparisons inevitably rancorous.

My purpose is not to denigrate these men. John Adams had great political courage. He often espoused unpopular views, warning us, among other things, that a majority can be as tyrannical as a king or dictator -- something that we may need to remember in the next few years.

Thomas Jefferson displayed good judgment in his first term when he put aside his ideological scruples and purchased the Louisiana Territory. James Madison deserves admiration for the way he gave his remarkable wife, Dolley, a chance to create the role of First Lady and establish women as important political players. Woodrow Wilson's idealism was flawed, but his vision of America's role as a world power was profound. FDR's masterful confrontation with the fear created by the Great Depression made his first term an unforgettable achievement.

In this light, however wavering, maybe it's time to suspend the rush to judgment on George W. Bush for 10 or 20 years. I suspect we will decide Mr. Bush's first term, with his decisive response to 9/11, deserves some praise, and that his second term succumbed to an awesome amount of bad luck, from his generals' disagreements on how to fight the war in Iraq to the Wall Street collapse of 2008.

Many presidents have run out of luck in their second terms, but Mr. Bush's record in this department will be hard to match. Beyond the popularity polls there may be a dimension we should remember in judging every president: sympathy.

Mr. Fleming is a former president of the Society of American Historians. His most recent book, "The Perils of Peace, America's Struggle to Survive After Yorktown," (Smithsonian) has just been issued in paperback.

Jensen Comment
All presidents have to deal with a hostile press, although the press has grown exceedingly liberal in the past decade such that there was much more hostility and biased reporting for the purpose of destroying both George W. Bush and the Republican Party (not that it needed much help while destroying itself). The way the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Newsweek, and NBC applaud Obama and lick his boots to a fault is a great example of press liberalism in spite of Obama's stepping up of the hopeless war in Afghanistan and irresponsible generational theft of all hope for the U.S. economy in the long run. "When the great Scorer comes to write against their names," my guess is that George W. Bush will come out way ahead of Barack Obama, although both will rate low as spendthrifts who "entitled" the United States to its death --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/entitlements.htm

Oops I have to moderate what I said above about The New York Times
I can't believe the NYT published this Op-Ed from a former (ten-year) CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
This WSJ-like heresy would never appear on NBC or MSNBC
"Stop the Bailouts ," by William Poole, The New York Times, February 28, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/opinion/01poole.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper

THE fundamental causes of this recession, unique in the experience of the United States, were mortgage defaults and the consequent insolvency of major financial firms. These insolvencies, and especially fear of them, damaged normal credit mechanisms.

The self-correcting nature of markets will ultimately prevail. We should not underestimate the power of monetary policy; with the sharp increase in the nation’s money stock starting in September, monetary policy is now extraordinarily expansionary. I believe, though without great confidence, that the recession will end in the second half of this year.

Federal policy is damaging the economy’s prospects.
It fails to provide the needed tax incentives for investment in factories and equipment, incentives that were central to efforts to revive the economy during the Kennedy-Johnson era and under Ronald Reagan. But government spending can’t lead the way to sustained recovery, because its stimulating effect will be offset by anticipated higher taxes and the need to finance the deficit.

Heavy-handed federal intervention into the management of companies from banks to auto makers will also delay recovery. And misguided efforts to help distressed homeowners by permitting courts to rewrite the terms of mortgages will cause banks to limit mortgage lending, which will prevent housing from contributing to the recovery.

The unrelenting anger across the country over bailouts of corporations and households that made unwise and even irresponsible financial decisions is influencing federal policy. Punitive measures, like forcing companies receiving federal dollars to cancel employee events, will increase uncertainty over where the government will strike next in its effort to deflect public outrage. Instead of more bailouts, we need a clear and consistent path to fundamental reform of our financial system.

William Poole is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 1998 to 2008.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
Alexander Tyler. 1787 - Tyler was a Scottish history professor that had this to say about 2000 years after "The Fall of the Athenian Republic" and about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution.
As quoted at http://www.babylontoday.com/national_debt_clock.htm (where the debt clock in real time is a few months behind)
The National Debt Amount This Instant (Refresh your browser for updates by the second) --- http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

America, what is happening to you?
“One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, in September 2008....“the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire . . .
Richard Florida, "How the Crash Will Reshape America," The Atlantic, March 2009 --- http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
(Good thing Obama sent Churchill's bust back to the U.K. from the Oval Office and replaced it with a bust of Lincoln who wrote that Government should print all the money it needs without borrowing)

Google versus Publishers

February 22, 2009 message from Gerald Trites [gtrites@ZORBA.CA]

Despite the fact that the Google Library Project has been and continues to be controversial, this settlement has generally been greeted positively within the publishing industry. It represents a compromise on both sides and is endorsed by the Authors’ Guild as well as the Association of American Publishers. The hope is that the terms of the settlement, though costly to Google, will ultimately prove beneficial to all parties, as well as to the public interest.

To quote from the website of the Association of American Publishers, www.publishers.org, "the agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online, and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works. The distribution of payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, will take place through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project. … Cash payments will be made for books scanned prior to the deadline for opting out of the settlement. In addition, rightsholders will be paid a share of revenues for future uses of their books."

Google has already reportedly digitized 7 million books; of these, an estimated 1 million are in the public domain, 5 million are out of print or commercially unavailable, and 1 million have been digitized as part of formal publisher agreements.

Action Required

In order to be part of the settlement, you need to file a claim for your books by January 5, 2010. You may do so by completing the claim form available online at www.googlebookssettlement.com.

In order to opt out of the settlement, you must do so by May 5, 2009, also via www.googlebookssettlement.com.

Please note that if you do nothing, your works will automatically be bound by the terms of the settlement if it is approved.

Note: If you find the web site for googlesettlement.com difficult to navigate, or have difficulty either finding or printing the 6-page Claim Form, you can call the toll-free number 1-888-356-0248, and push button 1 to register for a printed package to be sent to you.

Additional Background

If you'd like more information, we encourage you to access the following weblinks:

1. "Why the Google Settlement Matters to You", an informative document prepared by Access Copyright, the Canadian Copright Licensing Agency. http://www.accesscopyright.ca/Default.aspx?id=243

2. "How the Authors Guild v. Google Settlement Will Work", http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/how-the-authors-guild-v-google-settlement.html

3. "Google, AAP, Authors Guild: Joint Public FAQ", http://publishers.org/main/Copyright/Google/Faq.htm

4. "The Future of Google Book Search", http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/

5.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090205.wgoogle0205/BNStory/Technology/home?cid=al_gam_mostemail

Question
The only thing more bizarre would be for Liz Taylor to claim that Richard Burton bought this 840 lb emerald to match her eyes?

"How an Emerald, 840 Pounds of It, Landed in Court L.A. County Sheriff Has the Big Rock Many Claim to Own," by Timara Audi, The Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123578111660297983.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

Just before Christmas, detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department pried open a crate outside a warehouse to find something they had been chasing for months: an 840-pound Brazilian emerald that had been reported stolen.

Now, if they could just figure out who owns it. So far, at least five people have come forward to say it's theirs.

"It seems like the more we talk to people, the more people claim to have ownership over this thing," said Lt. Thomas Grubb, who heads the sheriff's investigative team on the case. "We haven't determined who's not a suspect, really."

Unable to determine who the real owner is, Lt. Grubb decided to keep the emerald locked up while the investigation proceeds. Meanwhile, a Los Angeles civil court is scheduled to hear from different claimants in the case on Tuesday.

Lt. Grubb, who had spent the bulk of his 26-year career conducting narcotics investigations, first got onto the case last September. A distraught man named Larry Biegler had called the sheriff's office to say that his giant emerald had been stolen from a Los Angeles-area warehouse where he had been keeping it. It was worth nearly $400 million, he said.

Lt. Grubb's detectives began investigating.

The emerald, they determined, was in the possession of two businessmen named Todd Armstrong and Kit Morrison, whom detectives tracked to a small town called Eagle, in western Idaho. When the detectives arrived in Eagle, Mr. Armstrong was in the process of trying to sell the emerald to a buyer. "We've run into a small snag," Mr. Armstrong says he told his buyer.

The Idaho men said the emerald belonged to them. They said in an interview they paid Mr. Biegler $1 million for diamonds he never delivered. Mr. Biegler had put the emerald up as collateral, they say, for the stones. When the diamonds didn't materialize, they picked up the emerald from the warehouse in Los Angeles. They showed investigators a stack of documents they said prove their claim.

Mr. Biegler -- a gem broker and real-estate investor -- disputes that account. He says he kept up his end of the diamond deal, and claims the Idaho men agreed to pay $80 million for the emerald, which he was willing to sell at that price.

The Idaho men agreed to turn over the emerald to the sheriff's deputies until the matter could be resolved. But the emerald wasn't even in Idaho. Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Morrison had placed it in a secured warehouse in Las Vegas for safekeeping.

Lt. Grubb began to organize an excursion to Las Vegas. On the morning detectives drove to get the emerald, he told his deputies: "We're going to stop on the way and get breakfast. We're going to pick up a $400 million piece of evidence. On the way back, we're not stopping."

When Lt. Grubb finally laid eyes on the emerald, he said, "It almost didn't look real."

Those who have seen the emerald describe it as a black boulder with protruding arm-sized green crystal cylinders. Gem experts say unbroken crystals of that size are rare. Such a large specimen usually would not be broken down into smaller pieces for jewelry. It would more likely be sold intact to a private collector or a museum. An appraisal done in Brazil valued it at $372 million, according to documents filed with the Los Angeles court.

However, George Harlow, curator of minerals and gems for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, says that the most impressive mineral specimens might bring a price of up to six or seven figures. "But nine figures? I'm unaware of any mineral specimen that's ever gone for that much money."

So far, the Bahia emerald hasn't sold for a fortune. But it definitely has been around. The emerald was first dug up from a mine in 2001 in Bahia, in eastern Brazil. Bahia emeralds are among the oldest on Earth, formed two billion years ago, according to the Gemological Institute of America.

The emerald's first owners were a Brazilian gem trader, who owned the rights to the mine, and his business partner. In 2005, they shipped the emerald to a business associate in San Jose, Calif., named Ken Conetto, according to claims made in court documents filed by Mr. Conetto. Mr. Conetto says he kept the emerald stored in San Jose while attempting to find a buyer. He did not pay for the emerald, but he agreed to share some of the profits with the Brazilians, he says.

From San Jose, Mr. Conetto sent the gem to New Orleans, where he thought he had a buyer lined up. When Hurricane Katrina hit, it flooded the warehouse where the emerald was being kept, Mr. Conetto says. The emerald was submerged for weeks, and the sale was never concluded. The emerald returned to San Jose.

Mr. Conetto enlisted Mr. Biegler to help him sell the emerald.

They thought they could find potential buyers in Los Angeles. So last June, they loaded the rock into a van and drove it down themselves, Mr. Conetto said. Halfway through the trip, the van broke down, leaving the two men and their emerald stranded somewhere on Interstate 5. They rolled into a motel. Mr. Conetto said they paid the motel's owner and her boyfriend to help load the emerald into another van.

Eventually, it made it to Los Angeles County, where it sat in a warehouse.

But things began to sour between Mr. Biegler and Mr. Conetto, according to both men. Mr. Biegler says he took possession of the stone after Mr. Conetto pledged it as collateral on a loan he failed to pay.

Mr. Conetto says he never actually borrowed the money and that the emerald is still his.

It's not uncommon for gems to be used as financing tools for business deals, passed back and forth on paper among brokers while never leaving a vault. That can lead to multiple parties using a jumble of documents to claim rights to the same gem.

Meanwhile, new claims continue to emerge. Anthony Thomas a gem trader from outside San Jose, says he is the rightful owner of the emerald because he purchased it for $60,000 from the Brazilians in 2001. Mr. Thomas has also filed a claim in Los Angeles superior court.

On Tuesday, the court will begin hearing the competing claims of ownership. The emerald, however, remains locked up in the sheriff's custody.

"I'm going to write a nonfiction book on this," Mr. Armstrong says. "But I'm going to have to sell it in the fiction section because nobody will believe it's true."

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Is The Terminator running a type of Ponzi with California's colleges?

"California's Budget Problems Leave Community Colleges Holding IOU's," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i26/26a00101.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

When California approved its budget last month, the community-college system managed to escape the sharp budget cuts that befell most other agencies. But the state's fiscal troubles have nonetheless created a cash crisis for two-year colleges.

As part of its plan to close a $41-billion budget deficit, California will delay providing $540-million in aid to its community colleges this year, forcing them to come up with the money for several months while the state waits for more revenue to come in. Payments that would normally arrive in the spring will be on hold until July, and payments scheduled for July will be delayed until October.

The delay affects most state agencies, including the University of California. But it puts an especially severe strain on the state's 110 community colleges, which have less room in their budgets for discretionary spending than their larger counterparts do, and only enough reserve funds to survive short-term emergencies. At many two-year colleges, 85 percent or more of the budget is committed to salaries and benefits, making it difficult to weather unexpected dips in revenue.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This is less of this IOU concern since the Federal government will soon bail out California's fiscal mismanagement. Fiscally responsible states were probably stupid not to get on more of the Recovery Act's porkulus gravy river flowing at the highest rate flowing into sunny California.

Totally independent of the Recovery Act's bailout of California, President Obama is now promising every U.S. citizen (and millions of pretenders) a free year or two of college. Soon tens of millions of folks may collect their Social Security checks and enroll in college or tech school at no cost for an added OBSF fringe benefit of retirement. Since so many U.S. workers retire to sunshine states, the sunshine states may benefit the most from the free education and training. Schools should gear up for a lot more demand for sewing, fly fishing, and basket weaving courses.

It's also the sunshine states that will benefit the most from the trillions about to be spent to avoid home foreclosures since sunshine states baked up the lion's share of toxic cookies. The sun really does shine down more on some states than other states. The states with the biggest foreclosure problem are California, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada. Michigan also has a severe foreclosure-rate problem, but that is more of problem of high unemployment rates than in overbuilding of new homes and condos and apartment complexes.

Power Plays in the Real World
Considerations that some states overlook when adding taxes

"New York (and tax-crazy California and Mass.) Vulnerable to Poaching in Recession," by  Danny Hakim and Patrick McGeehan, The New York Times, March 1, 2009 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/nyregion/02border.html?_r=1

When Pepsi executives came to Gov. David A. Paterson’s Manhattan offices in late October, they wanted to head off an expansion of bottle deposit requirements to noncarbonated drinks.

They left the meeting thinking the governor was sympathetic to the concerns of one of his state’s largest corporations and that the discussion would continue. But two weeks later, Mr. Paterson included the expanded deposit requirements in a deficit reduction plan; later, he proposed an 18 percent tax on nondiet sodas without giving the company a heads up.

Now Pepsi is weighing a searing response: moving the headquarters of the Pepsi Bottling Group and more than 1,000 jobs, from Somers, in Westchester County, to Connecticut, which has been dangling a roughly $30 million incentive package.

Continued in article

"Sidekicks might top a dubious category: theft," MIT's Technology Review, February 27, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/22241/?nlid=1819&a=f

Nisha Taylor was just about to put her beloved T-Mobile Sidekick in her bag. She thought the cell phone would be safer there than in her pocket. In the few seconds it took for the 18-year-old to unwind the string loop that held the Sidekick to her wrist, someone else eyed the device and made off with it.

"He just runs and he hits the phone," Taylor said. "The string pops. The phone goes up in the air. He catches it and he runs."

Although the Sidekicks -- which have flashy flip screens and the youthful cachet of endorsements by rapper Snoop Dogg and basketball star Dwyane Wade -- aren't among the country's best-selling phones, they might be the most stolen ones.

Boston police reported more than 300 stolen Sidekicks in 2008, accounting for 14 percent of all robberies in the city. New York City saw a 59 percent surge in subway robberies in December compared with the previous year, driven largely by thieves targeting high-end cell phones, especially the Sidekick.

Continued in article

Question
Does a professor have more freedom of speech than any employee?

"Professors' Freedoms Under Assault in the Courts," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i25/25a00103.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Public-college professors received some indication of how little they could count on academic-freedom protections with a 2000 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Urofsky v. Gilmore.

The case involved a lawsuit by Virginia public-college professors challenging, as an infringement on academic freedom, a state law prohibiting public employees from using state-owned computers to view sexually explicit material over the Internet. The lead plaintiff, Melvin I. Urofsky, was a constitutional historian at Virginia Commonwealth University who argued that the law hindered his ability to teach students about the Communications Decency Act.

In their opinion upholding Virginia's law, a majority of Fourth Circuit judges said they had extensively reviewed the history of academic freedom and concluded that, to the extent the Supreme Court "has constitutionalized a right of academic freedom at all," it is only a right possessed by higher-education institutions, not by individuals. The ruling said professors at public colleges do not have any speech rights beyond those of other public employees.

No other federal circuit's appeals court has issued a similar decision. Nevertheless, William E. Thro, a former Virginia solicitor general who is now a lawyer at Christopher Newport University, argues that Urofsky has the potential to influence courts beyond the Fourth Circuit, partly because it may represent the lengthiest and most detailed discussion of individual academic freedom to emerge from a federal appeals court.

Of far greater immediate concern to faculty and free-speech advocates is the fallout from the Supreme Court's 2006 Garcetti ruling. That case involved a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, Richard Ceballos, who challenged disciplinary actions taken against him for questioning an affidavit issued by his office. Writing for a five-member court majority, Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said "when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking out as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline."

In a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice David H. Souter expressed hope the decision would not jeopardize the speech rights of public-college faculty members who "necessarily speak and write 'pursuant to official duties.'" The majority responded to his concern by sidestepping the issue and putting aside the question of whether its logic "would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching."

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

Professor Accused of Pocketing NASA Money
Federal investigators are accusing a University of Florida professor and three members of his family of fraudulently receiving millions of dollars from NASA and then funneling money to their personal bank accounts, court documents show. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the office of the university’s Innovative Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute, which was founded by the professor, Samim Anghaie, who is its director and teaches radiological engineering.
The New York Times, February 28, 2009 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27prof.html?_r=1

From the Scout Report on February 13, 2009

Zemanta 1.2 --- http://www.zemanta.com/ 

Those individuals with a weblog (or those who might be thinking of starting one) will want to take a close look at this latest edition of Zemanta. With a simple point and click action, visitors can add tags, URL links, photos, and related articles to each post. Their site also includes a demonstration video of all of the program's features and a place where visitors can ask questions. This version of Zemanta is compatible with all operating systems.

---

Floola 4.7 --- http://www.floola.com/modules/wiwimod/ 

Those persons looking for an alternative to iTunes might find Floola worth a look. This portable music playing software package allows users to take notes and download photos quickly. Visitors can also use the application to keep their Google calendars updated. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer.

From the Scout Report on February 20, 2009

Camfrog Video Chat 5.2 --- http://www.camfrog.com/ 

Talking to people online can be a great deal of fun, and even holding a videoconferencing meeting for work can be a real treat. Both activities are possible with Camfrog Video Chat 5.2, and the online support for this application is very good. Visitors looking to meet new people can join live webcam chat rooms, or they can feel free to create their own. This version of Camfrog Video Chat is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer.

---

TeamViewer 4.0.5615 --- http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx 

If you're trying to bring together a team of people spread across four continents to work online, you might want to take a look at the TeamViewer application. Interested parties can use the application for desktop sharing and file transfer, provided all of the computers in question are running TeamViewer. Visitors can also use the application to create presentations. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.

 

Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance, economics, and statistics --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Education Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Evolution Resources from the National Academies --- http://nationalacademies.org/evolution/index.html

How did life evolve on earth?
From the National Academy of Sciences
Science, Evolution, and Creationism ---  http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11876 

Elements of Architecture --- http://exhibits.slpl.org/steedman/elements.asp

World Architecture Community --- http://www.worldarchitecture.org/main/

America's Favorite Architecture --- http://www.favoritearchitecture.org/

National Marine Sanctuaries Media Library [Quick Time] https://marinelife.noaa.gov/media_lib/index.aspx

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services: Fisheries and Habitat Conservation --- http://www.fws.gov/fisheries/

Academic Earth --- http://academicearth.org/

Teaching Geologic Map Interpretation with Google Earth --- http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/structure/teaching_geo_map_interp.html

The California Geotour: Online Geologic Field Trip Guides --- http://www.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/geotour/Pages/Index.aspx

e-Agriculture --- http://www.e-agriculture.org/

Agriculture, Climate Change, and Carbon Sequestration --- http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/PDF/carbonsequestration.pdf

World Food Situation --- http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation

Food Policy Institute at Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station --- http://www.foodpolicyinstitute.org/default.asp

Health Organization: Tropical Diseases --- http://www.who.int/topics/tropical_diseases/en/

Center for Aging Services Technologies --- http://www.agingtech.org The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation tutorials in medicine, medical insurance, healthcare administration ---  http://www.rwjf.org/

RAND: Health Compare (health policy options research) --- http://www.randcompare.org/

Music and the Brain [iTunes] http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/musicandthebrain/index.html 

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

Social Science and Economics Tutorials

Public.Resource.Org --- http://public.resource.org/

Citizen Journalist's Guide to Open Government --- http://www.kcnn.org/open_government/

Federal Eye --- http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/

Asian Development Bank --- http://www.adb.org/

Afghanistan Analyst --- http://afghanistan-analyst.org/default.aspx 

American Cinema (video) --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series67.html

The Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas --- http://www.cah.utexas.edu/ssspot/

The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana --- http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/stern-lincoln/ 

Crossroads to Freedom (civil rights) ---  http://www.crossroadstofreedom.org

Celebrate Diversity with Dream in Color --- http://www.scholastic.com/dreamincolor/africanamericanheritage/index.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social

Law and Legal Studies

From the Scout Report on February 13, 2009

In response to a lawsuit filed by the Associated Press, artist Shepard Fairey countersues Artist Files Lawsuit Against the Associated Press Over Image of Obama http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/arts/design/10fair.html 

Fair Use Project Files Suit Against The Associated Press on Behalf of Artist Shepard Fairey --- http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6061 

Artist questions police's timing of his arrest on graffiti charges http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/02/10/cultural_acclaim_residents_anger/ 

Lawrence Lessig: Remix --- http://fora.tv/2009/01/14/Lawrence_Lessig_Remix#chapter_01 

Banned in Boston http://www.bu.edu/library/guides/boston/banned.html 

Obey Giant --- http://obeygiant.com/

From the Scout Report on February 20, 2009

Forensic Science Methods Called Into Question by National Academies Report Study Calls for Oversight of Forensics in Crime Labs [Free registration may be required] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/us/19forensics.html 

Call For Forensics Overhaul Linked to 'CSI' Effect http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100831831 

Forensics under the microscope http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-forensics-specialpackage,0,4244313.special 

Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12589#toc 

Forensic Magazine http://www.forensicmag.com/ 

DNA Forensics --- http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/forensics.shtml

Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law

Math Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

History Tutorials

Jane Fonda's Broadcasts on Radio Hanoi (audio) --- http://www.wintersoldier.com/index.php?topic=FondaHanoi

The Nuclear Vault: U.S. Nuclear Detection and Counterterrorism, 1998- 2009
 --- http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb270/index.htm

Afghanistan Analyst --- http://afghanistan-analyst.org/default.aspx 

The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana --- http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/stern-lincoln/ 

Crossroads to Freedom (civil rights) ---  http://www.crossroadstofreedom.org

Celebrate Diversity with Dream in Color --- http://www.scholastic.com/dreamincolor/africanamericanheritage/index.htm

The Early Chinese-Canadians --- http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/chinese-canadians/index-e.html

King's Last March [civil rights history) http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/king/

Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth --- http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Munch/index

Vatican City State --- http://www.vaticanstate.va/EN/homepage.htm 

American Cinema (video) --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series67.html

Hulu TV and Movies --- http://www.hulu.com/

Expo 67 (world's fairs) --- http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/expo/index-e.html

Reconstructing American History --- http://newt.org/Portals/0/Capitol Visitor Center Report_.pdf

The Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas --- http://www.cah.utexas.edu/ssspot/

Eisenhower National Historic Site --- http://www.nps.gov/history/museum/exhibits/eise/index.html 

Presidential Library --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Library

Folger Shakespeare Library --- http://folger.edu/index.cfm 

Shakespeare's Staging --- http://shakespeare.berkeley.edu/

Arden: World of William Shakespeare --- http://swi.indiana.edu/arden/gi_specs.shtml

Charles Olson's Melville Project --- http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Works_in_the_Collection/Melville_Project/index.htm

Umbrella 1978-2005 (art Journal) --- http://indiamond6.ulib.iupui.edu/umbrella/

The Whisperers:  Private Life in Stalin's Russia --- http://www.orlandofiges.com/

National Yiddish Book Center --- http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/

Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575-1725 --- http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/captured_emotions/

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  

Language Tutorials

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages

Writing Tutorials

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

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

February 20, 2009

• 1 Million U.S. AIDS Cases
• Stroke Risk Linked to Fast Food
• Brain Device OK'd for OCD
• Raptiva Tied to Brain Infection
• Flu Season Is Here

News

• New Way to Ease Peanut Allergy
• B Vitamins May Cut Stroke Risk
• Smoking Before 17 May Up MS Risk
• Global Warming May Harm Elderly
• 1 Million U.S. AIDS Cases

February 24, 2009

• Calcium May Cut Cancer Risk
• Potato Products Recalled
• Breakthrough Drug Stops Flu
• B Vitamins May Cut Stroke Risk
• Smoking Before 17 May Up MS Risk

February 25, 2009

• Women: Alcohol Ups Cancer Risk
• Drug May Prevent Prostate Cancer
• Health Pic Poor for Uninsured 
  (Thanks to Beverly Hills Rep. Henry Waxman, mult-millionaires who lost their jobs can get free Medicaid)
• Vitamin D May Prevent Colds
• Calcium May Cut Cancer Risk

February 26, 2009

• Why Hair Goes Gray
• New Way to Predict Prostate Risk
• Teen Obesity: Deadly as Smoking
• Hormonal Role in Parkinson's
• Women: Alcohol Ups Cancer Risk

March 2, 2009

• Doodling May Boost Memory
• New Drug Slows Prostate Cancer
• GI Drugs Get 'Black Box' Warning
• Mental Fatigue Hampers Exercise
• MS Drug May Aid Walking

 

Question
What if we can soon identify schizophrenia, mental retardation, and autism while a defective fetus can still be aborted?

"A Hole in the Genome A small chunk of DNA linked to schizophrenia, mental retardation, and autism may change the way we think about disease," by Emily Singer, MIT's Technology Review, March/April 2009 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22135/?nlid=1819&a=f

Go about 145,000,000 bases (or "letters") down the long arm of chromosome 1 and you'll come to 1q21.1, the genetic address of a small but important piece of DNA that is particularly prone to mistakes. When chromosome 1 is duplicated during normal cell division (say, in creating sperm or eggs), short, repetitive bits of DNA within this stretch are all too likely to mistakenly pair up, raising the chances that the new cells will have extra or missing copies of specific pieces of DNA.

Those small mistakes can have a big impact on people who carry them. Several studies in the last year have found that missing or extra pieces of DNA in the 1q21.1 region put the bearer at risk for a surprisingly broad range of psychiatric and neurological disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, and mental retardation. The discovery that one piece of DNA can lead to such diverse outcomes is opening new avenues in the study of disease. Rather than focusing solely on finding a common genetic flaw in everyone with a particular disease, researchers have begun to examine the various consequences that the same genetic flaw may have in different people. These studies suggest that even patients with different diagnoses may share common biological problems. "It's been eye-opening," says Mark Daly, a geneticist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA, "because it's made us realize that in searching for the molecular basis of disease, it may be profitable to search for connections between seemingly unrelated phenotypes." Last year, Daly and his colleagues identified a section of DNA on chromosome 16 that also raises the risk of several different brain disorders, suggesting that this pattern may be common in the genetics of disease.

Physicians have long known that structural abnormalities in our genomes--deletions, duplications, and rearrangements of large stretches of DNA--trigger developmental problems and disease. Down syndrome, for example, results from an extra copy of chromosome 21. But over the last few years, new kinds of microarrays--small slides dotted with specific sequences of DNA--have begun allowing scientists to efficiently search the genome for architectural flaws too small to be visible with a microscope. These errors, called copy number variations, are distinct from the single-letter changes that until recently have been the focus of most research into genetic variation. Ranging in size from one thousand to more than one million base pairs, they can encompass part of a gene or one or more entire genes.

The far end of region 1q21.1, which at about one million bases long constitutes a tiny percentage of the roughly 3.2 billion pairs of letters that make up human DNA, harbors just one of the genome's many "hot spots"--so called for their tendency toward structural instability. But in this region, structural abnormalities--especially missing sequences--seem particularly troublesome. Intrigued by this mysterious morsel of DNA, Heather ­Mefford, a pediatric geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, compiled data on variations in 1q21.1 from clinical genetics labs around the world. She found that 25 patients in a sample of more than 5,000 people with autism, mental retardation, or other congenital abnormalities were missing the same chunk within the region. While that is a small percentage, no one in a similar-sized group of healthy people carried that particular mistake, meaning that the deletion is the likely cause--or at least partial cause--of the patients' problems. Studies by other researchers have linked similar changes in the region to schizophrenia, as well as to abnormal head size and accompanying developmental delays.

Different studies linking 1q21.1 to mental retardation, autism, and schizophrenia all identified deletions or duplications in approximately the same region. That's because this particular stretch is flanked by repetitive sequences prone to rearrangement. It contains at least eight known genes, the functions of which are mostly unknown. "This region of the genome must clearly have one or more genes that are important for normal cognitive development," says Mefford, whose research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There are two huge levels of ethics questions about genetic defects that can lead to misery after birth. One is the question of whether such defects should be corrected before or shortly after birth if indeed the technology for such corrections is invented. Second is the bigger question as to whether such defects that usually lead to misery for the birth child and many who come into contact with it should be prevented by abortion.

Joshua Lederberg years ago was one of the first Nobel scientists that I ever encountered face-to-face in the 1970s who raised the questions that there may be some science that should itself be aborted. At the time he was concerned in particular with cloning science that could lead to an imbalance between the male-female proportion in the world. The question of whether genetic defects can be aborted is even more serious and has shades of Hitler's Superior Race overtones and externalities. However, I would be the last person on earth who wants to ban research into genetic defects.

As an accountant I like to analogize this to a company’s financial statements that contain a hole that can lead to investor misery. If the bankers get their way to create a fair value hole in bank financial statements it may well be such a defective hole --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#FairValueAccounting

"Why Hair Goes Gray Study Blames a Chain Reaction That Makes Hair Bleach Itself From the Inside Out," by Miranda Hitti, WebMD, February 25, 2009 --- http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/news/20090225/why-hair-goes-gray

Scientists may have figured out why hair turns gray, and their finding may open the door to new anti-graying strategies.

New research shows that hair turns gray as a result of a chemical chain reaction that causes hair to bleach itself from the inside out.

The process starts when there is a dip in levels of an enzyme called catalase. That catalase shortfall means that the hydrogen peroxide that naturally occurs in hair can't be broken down. So hydrogen peroxide builds up in the hair, and because other enzymes that would repair hydrogen peroxide's damage are also in short supply, the hair goes gray.

Putting the brakes on that chemical chain reaction "could have great implications in the hair graying scenario in humans," write the researchers, who included Karin Schallreuter, a professor clinical and experimental dermatology at England's University of Bradford.

The study appears online in The FASEB Journal; the FASEB is the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

 

Felice Prager developed a list of "what I have learned about high school, college, and myself " by joining a social network called WhoJaHateInHighSchool&College, The Irascible Professor, February 24, 2009 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-02-25-09.htm  

U.K.'s Number Two Favorite Airline:  Trading a Pound for a Pound?
Ryanair may go where no airline has gone before: charging passengers a pound to use its planes' toilets. In an interview Friday with the BBC, Chief Executive Michael O'Leary said the carrier is looking at "putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might have to actually spend a pound or spend a penny in the future. We're always at Ryanair looking at the ways to constantly lower the cost of air travel and make it affordable." And what if a passenger leaves home without any cash? O'Leary dismissed the concern, saying no one goes aboard a Ryanair aircraft with "anything less than a pound."
Christopher Hinton, ”Marketwatch, February 27, 2009 --- http://snipurl.com/tink-drinks  

Jensen Comment
This new policy has led to new ways to economize such as when a husband and wife squeeze in together for the price of one. Or when our now-famous California mother squeezes in four of her fourteen children at a time and then uses the facility herself with two of her children --- the total cost = four pounds for a savings of 11 pounds..

One problem is that when passengers are lined up to use the facility, it's only polite to hold the door open for the next passenger --- oops freebies. Also passengers that must vomit and cannot fumble for a coin quickly enough are encouraged to mess up the flight attendants’ seats.

Accountants will have some troubles measuring the contribution margin of each pound received --- meaning a British pound coin. They’ve never modeled the fixed, semi-fixed, and variable costs of this open-door product.

Another huge problem is that passengers may avoid purchasing alcoholic beverages, especially beer. This greatly complicates the CPV analysis by managerial accountants. It turns a one-product problem into an interactive multiple-product problem  with very uncertain sales mix coefficients. But on international flights this will make a great education case for the study of cross-border dumping and transfer pricing.

Another issue is equitable pricing
There’s a fixed price for those passengers who use the toilet for two minutes versus those that sit for an hour. If they have to pay, some people really like to get their money's worth.

The airline is now thinking about Frequent Filling points that can earn you a one free use after ten fills. This will really screw up revenue recognition accounting formulas,  because some free fills will go unused and others will be traded in the black market.

To avoid having to deal with cash for drinks and tinks while in the air, accountants are recommending using red versus yellow pre-paid vouchers. Or the airline could sell one pound coupon books where you get one tink for one coupon and one beer for four coupons. Beefeaters will cost six coupons.

The next big thing will be to charge ten pounds to exit the airplane after a landing. Crash landings in the Hudson will cost more, but tinks in the river are free.

Tidbits Archives --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

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

World Clock --- http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock and Calendar --- http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones --- http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) --- http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
         Also see http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
         Facts about population growth (video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth --- http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq --- http://www.costofwar.com/ 
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons --- http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.

Three Finance Blogs

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

Some Accounting Blogs

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

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

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

Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing Universities --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Free Textbooks and Cases --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Free Mathematics and Statistics Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

Free Science and Medicine Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

Free Social Science and Philosophy Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social

Free Education Discipline Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

Teaching Materials (especially video) from PBS

Teacher Source:  Arts and Literature --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm

Teacher Source:  Health & Fitness --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/health.htm

Teacher Source: Math --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math.htm

Teacher Source:  Science --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/sci_tech.htm

Teacher Source:  PreK2 --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/prek2.htm

Teacher Source:  Library Media ---  http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/library.htm

Free Education and Research Videos from Harvard University --- http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp

VYOM eBooks Directory --- http://www.vyomebooks.com/

From Princeton Online
The Incredible Art Department --- http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/

Online Mathematics Textbooks --- http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html 

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives --- http://enlvm.usu.edu/ma/nav/doc/intro.jsp

Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
Any college may post a news item.

Accountancy Discussion ListServs:

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

AECM (Educators)  http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/  AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc Roles of a ListServ --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/  CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.

AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1  This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.

Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com  This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM]

Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) --- http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm

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