The legislation's guidelines for crafting the rescue plan were clear: the TARP should protect home values and consumer savings, help citizens keep their homes and create jobs. Above all, with the government poised to invest hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in various financial institutions, the legislation urged the bailout's architects to maximize returns to the American people.

That $700 billion bailout has since grown into a more than $12 trillion commitment by the US government and the Federal Reserve. About $1.1 trillion of that is taxpayer money--the TARP money and an additional $400 billion rescue of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The TARP now includes twelve separate programs, and recipients range from megabanks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase to automakers Chrysler and General Motors.

Seven months in, the bailout's impact is unclear. The Treasury Department has used the recent "stress test" results it applied to nineteen of the nation's largest banks to suggest that the worst might be over; yet the International Monetary Fund, as well as economists like New York University professor and economist Nouriel Roubini and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman predict greater losses in US markets, rising unemployment and generally tougher economic times ahead.

What cannot be disputed, however, is the financial bailout's biggest loser: the American taxpayer. The US government, led by the Treasury Department, has done little, if anything, to maximize returns on its trillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded investment. So far, the bailout has favored rescued financial institutions by subsidizing their losses to the tune of $356 billion, shying away from much-needed management changes and--with the exception of the automakers--letting companies take taxpayer money without a coherent plan for how they might return to viability.

The bailout's perks have been no less favorable for private investors who are now picking over the economy's still-smoking rubble at the taxpayers' expense. The newer bailout programs rolled out by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner give private equity firms, hedge funds and other private investors significant leverage to buy "toxic" or distressed assets, while leaving taxpayers stuck with the lion's share of the risk and potential losses.

Given the lack of transparency and accountability, don't expect taxpayers to be able to object too much. After all, remarkably little is known about how TARP recipients have used the government aid received. Nonetheless, recent government reports, Congressional testimony and commentaries offer those patient enough to pore over hundreds of pages of material glimpses of just how Wall Street friendly the bailout actually is. Here, then, based on the most definitive data and analyses available, are six of the most blatant and alarming ways taxpayers have been scammed by the government's $1.1-trillion, publicly funded bailout.

1. By overpaying for its TARP investments, the Treasury Department provided bailout recipients with generous subsidies at the taxpayer's expense.

When the Treasury Department ditched its initial plan to buy up "toxic" assets and instead invest directly in financial institutions, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. assured Americans that they'd get a fair deal. "This is an investment, not an expenditure, and there is no reason to expect this program will cost taxpayers anything," he said in October 2008.

Yet the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), a five-person group tasked with ensuring that the Treasury Department acts in the public's best interest, concluded in its monthly report for February that the department had significantly overpaid by tens of billions of dollars for its investments. For the ten largest TARP investments made in 2008, totaling $184.2 billion, Treasury received on average only $66 worth of assets for every $100 invested. Based on that shortfall, the panel calculated that Treasury had received only $176 billion in assets for its $254 billion investment, leaving a $78 billion hole in taxpayer pockets.

Not all investors subsidized the struggling banks so heavily while investing in them. The COP report notes that private investors received much closer to fair market value in investments made at the time of the early TARP transactions. When, for instance, Berkshire Hathaway invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs in September, the Omaha-based company received securities worth $110 for each $100 invested. And when Mitsubishi invested in Morgan Stanley that same month, it received securities worth $91 for every $100 invested.

As of May 15, according to the Ethisphere TARP Index, which tracks the government's bailout investments, its various investments had depreciated in value by almost $147.7 billion. In other words, TARP's losses come out to almost $1,300 per American taxpaying household.

2. As the government has no real oversight over bailout funds, taxpayers remain in the dark about how their money has been used and if it has made any difference.

While the Treasury Department can make TARP recipients report on just how they spend their government bailout funds, it has chosen not to do so. As a result, it's unclear whether institutions receiving such funds are using that money to increase lending--which would, in turn, boost the economy--or merely to fill in holes in their balance sheets.

Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, summed the situation up this way in his office's April quarterly report to Congress: "The American people have a right to know how their tax dollars are being used, particularly as billions of dollars are going to institutions for which banking is certainly not part of the institution's core business and may be little more than a way to gain access to the low-cost capital provided under TARP."

This lack of transparency makes the bailout process highly susceptible to fraud and corruption. Barofsky's report stated that twenty separate criminal investigations were already underway involving corporate fraud, insider trading and public corruption. He also told the Financial Times that his office was investigating whether banks manipulated their books to secure bailout funds. "I hope we don't find a single bank that's cooked its books to try to get money, but I don't think that's going to be the case."

Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, suggested to TomDispatch in an interview that the opaque and complicated nature of the bailout may not be entirely unintentional, given the difficulties it raises for anyone wanting to follow the trail of taxpayer dollars from the government to the banks. "[Government officials] see this all as a Three Card Monte, moving everything around really quickly so the public won't understand that this really is an elaborate way to subsidize the banks," Baker says, adding that the public "won't realize we gave money away to some of the richest people."

3. The bailout's newer programs heavily favor the private sector, giving investors an opportunity to earn lucrative profits and leaving taxpayers with most of the risk.

Under Treasury Secretary Geithner, the Treasury Department has greatly expanded the financial bailout to troubling new programs like the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) and the Term Asset-Backed-Securities Loan Facility (TALF). The PPIP, for example, encourages private investors to buy "toxic" or risky assets on the books of struggling banks. Doing so, we're told, will get banks lending again because the burdensome assets won't weigh them down. Unfortunately, the incentives the Treasury Department is offering to get private investors to participate are so generous that the government--and, by extension, American taxpayers--are left with all the downside.

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize winning economist, described the PPIP program in a New York Times op-ed this way:

Consider an asset that has a 50-50 chance of being worth either zero or $200 in a year's time. The average "value" of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is 'worth.' Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses. Some partnership!

Assume that one of the public-private partnerships the Treasury has promised to create is willing to pay $150 for the asset. That's 50 percent more than its true value, and the bank is more than happy to sell. So the private partner puts up $12, and the government supplies the rest--$12 in "equity" plus $126 in the form of a guaranteed loan.

If, in a year's time, it turns out that the true value of the asset is zero, the private partner loses the $12, and the government loses $138. If the true value is $200, the government and the private partner split the $74 that's left over after paying back the $126 loan. In that rosy scenario, the private partner more than triples his $12 investment. But the taxpayer, having risked $138, gains a mere $37."

Worse still, the PPIP can be easily manipulated for private gain. As economist Jeffrey Sachs has described it, a bank with worthless toxic assets on its books could actually set up its own public-private fund to bid on those assets. Since no true bidder would pay for a worthless asset, the bank's public-private fund would win the bid, essentially using government money for the purchase. All the public-private fund would then have to do is quietly declare bankruptcy and disappear, leaving the bank to make off with the government money it received. With the PPIP deals set to begin in the coming months, time will tell whether private investors actually take advantage of the program's flaws in this fashion.

The Treasury Department's TALF program offers equally enticing possibilities for potential bailout profiteers, providing investors with a chance to double, triple or even quadruple their investments. And like the PPIP, if the deal goes bad, taxpayers absorb most of the losses. "It beats any financing that the private sector could ever come up with," a Wall Street trader commented in a recent Fortune magazine story. "I almost want to say it is irresponsible."

4. The government has no coherent plan for returning failing financial institutions to profitability and maximizing returns on taxpayers' investments.

Compare the treatment of the auto industry and the financial sector, and a troubling double standard emerges. As a condition for taking bailout aid, the government required Chrysler and General Motors to present detailed plans on how the companies would return to profitability. Yet the Treasury Department attached minimal conditions to the billions injected into the largest bailed-out financial institutions. Moreover, neither Geithner nor Lawrence Summers, one of President Barack Obama's top economic advisors, nor the president himself has articulated any substantive plan or vision for how the bailout will help these institutions recover and, hopefully, maximize taxpayers' investment returns.

The Congressional Oversight Panel highlighted the absence of such a comprehensive plan in its January report. Three months into the bailout, the Treasury Department "has not yet explained its strategy," the report stated. "Treasury has identified its goals and announced its programs, but it has not yet explained how the programs chosen constitute a coherent plan to achieve those goals."

Today, the department's endgame for the bailout still remains vague. Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote in the Financial Times in May that the government's response to the financial meltdown has been "ad hoc, resulting in inequitable outcomes among firms, creditors, and investors." Rather than perpetually prop up banks with endless taxpayer funds, Hoenig suggests, the government should allow banks to fail. Only then, he believes, can crippled financial institutions and systems be fixed. "Because we still have far to go in this crisis, there remains time to define a clear process for resolving large institutional failure. Without one, the consequences will involve a series of short-term events and far more uncertainty for the global economy in the long run."

The healthier and more profitable bailout recipients are once financial markets rebound, the more taxpayers will earn on their investments. Without a plan, however, banks may limp back to viability while taxpayers lose their investments or even absorb further losses.

5. The bailout's focus on Wall Street mega-banks ignores smaller banks serving millions of American taxpayers that face an equally uncertain future.

The government may not have a long-term strategy for its trillion-dollar bailout, but its guiding principle, however misguided, is clear: what's good for Wall Street will be best for the rest of the country.

On the day the mega-bank stress tests were officially released, another set of stress-test results came out to much less fanfare. In its quarterly report on the health of individual banks and the banking industry as a whole, Institutional Risk Analytics (IRA), a respected financial services organization, found that the stress levels among more than 7,500 FDIC-reporting banks nationwide had risen dramatically. For 1,575 of the banks, net incomes had turned negative due to decreased lending and less risk-taking.

The conclusion IRA drew was telling: "Our overall observation is that US policy makers may very well have been distracted by focusing on 19 large stress test banks designed to save Wall Street and the world's central bank bondholders, this while a trend is emerging of a going concern viability crash taking shape under the radar." The report concluded with a question: "Has the time come to shift the policy focus away from the things that we love, namely big zombie banks, to tackle things that are truly hurting us?"

6. The bailout encourages the very behaviors that created the economic crisis in the first place instead of overhauling our broken financial system and helping the individuals most affected by the crisis.

As Joseph Stiglitz explained in the New York Times, one major cause of the economic crisis was bank overleveraging. "Using relatively little capital of their own," he wrote, banks "borrowed heavily to buy extremely risky real estate assets. In the process, they used overly complex instruments like collateralized debt obligations." Financial institutions engaged in overleveraging in pursuit of the lucrative profits such deals promised--even if those profits came with staggering levels of risk.

Sound familiar? It should, because in the PPIP and TALF bailout programs the Treasury Department has essentially replicated the very over-leveraged, risky, complex system that got us into this mess in the first place: in other words, the government hopes to repair our financial system by using the flawed practices that caused this crisis.

Then there are the institutions deemed "too big to fail." These financial giants--among them AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America-- have been kept afloat by billions of dollars in bottomless bailout aid. Yet reinforcing the notion that any institution is "too big to fail" is dangerous to the economy. When a company like AIG grows so large that it becomes "too big to fail," the risk it carries is systemic, meaning failure could drag down the entire economy. The government should force "too big to fail" institutions to slim down to a safer, more modest size; instead, the Treasury Department continues to subsidize these financial giants, reinforcing their place in our economy.

Of even greater concern is the message the bailout sends to banks and lenders--namely, that the risky investments that crippled the economy are fair game in the future. After all, if banks fail and teeter at the edge of collapse, the government promises to be there with a taxpayer-funded, potentially profitable safety net.

The handling of the bailout makes at least one thing clear, however. It's not your health that the government is focused on, it's theirs-- the very banks and lenders whose convoluted financial systems provided the underpinnings for staggering salaries and bonuses, while bringing our economy to the brink of another Great Depression.

Bob Jensen's threads on why the infamous "Bailout" won't work --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#BailoutStupidity

"Virtual Medical Training Comes to Second Life," by Erica R. Hendry, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3890&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Students have graduated, earned law credit, and held debates on Second Life. Now some universities are using the virtual world to train nurses.

Virtual medical training is nothing new — medical students have used CD-ROM’s and other interactive programs to practice diagnosis for years. And MyCaseSpace, a virtual medical-training program created by a professor at the University of Central Florida, will allow professors to create simulated cases to test students at Central Florida’s College of Medicine this fall.

What makes the Second Life approach different, according to an article in Discover magazine, is its ability to call on real-life participants, giving students access to professors or volunteers who act as patients, as well as a range of medical experts who teach or practice at colleges and universities across the country.

Students can interact with the patients and doctors, order tests, diagnose problems, and recommend treatment, according to the article.

For example, a professor at San Jose State University created a Heart Murmur Sim, which uses real cardiac sounds to train students to listen to a patient’s chest — called a cardiac auscultation exam — and identify heart murmurs, the article said.

Another program is the Nursing Education Simulation, created earlier this year by a nursing instructor in Washington. The program requires students to wear a headset with a display, like pilots use, to “monitor” and “use” defibrillators, IV pumps, and medication to treat a computer-generated patient who is experiencing certain symptoms.

While no studies have emerged about the benefits of using Second Life to train medical students, it offers a richer set of resources, with lower costs, than training in a physical, simulated operating room, said John Lester, an education and health-care market developer at Linden Lab, the company that created Second Life.

“If there’s an expert in Brussels who is a specialist in a procedure that I want to teach my students, I can bring him or her into the virtual space to train them,” Mr. Lester said in the article. “Moving around in the physical world is expensive and the biggest obstacle in medical training.”

Jensen Comment
The University of Central Florida in mentioned above. At UCF our Second Life expert in accounting education is Steve Hornik --- http://www.bus.ucf.edu/shornik/

Second Life Video Tutorials --- http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Video_Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on virtual reality learning and Second Life are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife

Blackboard Learns of Many Serious Customer Gripes
At an open "listening session" with top executives of Blackboard here Wednesday at the company's annual conference, college officials expressed frustration with many of the system's fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed to turn into a communal gripe session, with complaints ranging from the system's discussion forum application, to the improved -- but still lacking -- user support, to the training materials for faculty members. Participants' concerns were often greeted with nods of agreement and outright applause from their peers as they spoke of their frustrations with the system.
Ben Eisen, "A Gripe Session at Blackboard," Inside Higher Ed, July 16, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/16/blackboard

Bob Jensen's threads on the frustrating Blackboard monopoly and its claim to rights to virtually all distance education ---  http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Blackboard.htm
Jensen Comment
Blackboard should've never been allowed by anti-trust officials to buy out WebCT. Nor should it have been granted the vague patent that worries the whole distance education world.

STMs = Science, Technical, Medical Top Academic Journals
HSSs = Humanities, Social Science Top Academic Journals

Questions
Is the acceptance rate among STMs higher of lower than HSSs?
Is the acceptance rate higher or lower in The Accounting Review relative to STMs and HSSs?
Is the cost per article higher or lower in STMs than in HSSs?
Will eliminating hard copy publishing significantly reduce the costs of leading journal publishing?

It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal, and the prevailing model used by many publishers of STM journals will not work for their humanities and social-sciences counterparts. Those are some of the eye-opening conclusions released today in a report on an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.

The report, "The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations," was conducted by Mary Waltham, an independent publishing consultant, at the request of a committee organized by the National Humanities Alliance in 2007. The panel was charged with trying to understand how the rapid evolution of scholarly communication, particularly the rise of open access, will affect the alliance's members, many of which are scholarly societies that rely on traditional subscription models to run their publishing operations. "It was high time we did our homework," said William E. Davis, chairman of the committee and executive director of the American Anthropological Association.

With money from a grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the patron saint of many recent attempts to diagnose and remedy what ails scholarly publishing, Ms. Waltham took a close look at the data for flagship journals from eight leading societies for the years 2005 to 2007. The participating associations included Mr. Davis's group, the American Academy of Religion, the American Economic Association, the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, the American Statistical Association, and the Modern Language Association.

If eight journals don't sound like much of a sample, consider that the group includes some of the most prominent publications in major humanities and social-sciences disciplines: The American Historical Review and the American Political Science Review, for instance.

Even learned-society publishers in the humanities and social sciences may be taken aback by just how expensive it is to publish an article in their fields. It cost an average of $9,994 in 2007 to publish an article in one of the eight journals analyzed, compared with an average of $2,670 for STM journal articles.

Difference in Acceptance Rates

That STM figure comes from a study done by Ms. Waltham in 2005 of publishing models that learned societies used for science and medical journals. According to the new report, humanities and social-sciences articles tend to be longer and to have a lower acceptance rate. The average article length in the eight journals surveyed is 19 pages; the STM average is 12 pages. Acceptance rates are much lower on the humanities and social-sciences side; the eight journals in question accepted about 11 percent of the articles submitted to them, while their STM counterparts' acceptance rate hovered around 42 percent.

All of that adds up to "significantly higher costs per peer-reviewed, published article" for humanities and social-sciences journals, the committee concluded in an overview released with the report.

"The cost per article of publishing in the humanities and social sciences appears to be almost four times the cost of publishing in the STM field," Mr. Davis said in an interview. "That creates a very different dynamic for figuring out models to support our programs."

One model not likely to provide that support is the "author-pays" approach, in which scholars come up with money to help journals cover the costs of publishing their articles. That template works well enough in STM fields, in which grant money is easier to come by—not the case in the chronically underfunded fields covered by the study. "Authors in the STM field have ways of financing the publication of their articles that authors in the humanities and social sciences simply do not have," Mr. Davis told The Chronicle.

The committee also drew attention to a finding that peer-reviewed research made up about 62 percent of what the eight journals published in 2007. The remaining 38 percent consisted of "other scholarly content," including book reviews. That content is "as vital to the system of scholarly communication" in the humanities and social sciences as peer-reviewed articles are, the committee said.

Such material does not come cheap, though; it must still be commissioned, edited, and put into production. It cost an average of $313,612 per journal in 2007, the study found. Under the author-pays model, Mr. Davis asked, who foots the bill for that type of content?

The study also appears to undermine the notion that doing away with print "would make the open-access model financial viable," the panel noted. So-called first-copy costs—"collecting, reviewing, editing, and developing content"—added up to about 47 percent of the total outlay among the eight journals studied. Abolishing print versions of the journals would reduce costs, the study found, but not enough. "Even if people were willing to give up print" in fields such as his, Mr. Davis said, "I still don't know how to finance my publishing program without some similar source as I'm now getting from my subscriber base."

Does that mean that the scholarly associations that participated in the study reject the idea of open access? Not at all, Mr. Davis said. Instead, the findings are "pointing us away from author-pays open access" toward figuring out what other open-access models could work for humanities and social-sciences journals. That's the next step. Will learned societies that publish such journals figure out how to take that step? "We will," Mr. Davis said, "because we have to."

The National Humanities Alliance will post the report on its Web site as soon as possible, Mr. Davis said.

Jensen Comment
No mention is made of the impacts of rising postal rates on global subscriptions. When I was on the Executive Committee of the American Accounting Association in the 1980s, rising postal rates for sending our three leading journals to all members was eating away at our budgets. This combined with declining membership gave rise to dues increases. In later years the AAA introduced alternatives where members could choose which journals they wanted and whether they wanted to pay the added cost for a mailed hard copy edition of each journal. Even though the AAA now has an option for choosing only electronic versions downloaded over the Internet, it still incurs the cost of hard copy publishing. The AAA does not rip off libraries with dual subscription pricing like many leading academic journals are ripping off libraries.

The acceptance rate of The Accounting Review annually ranges between 11% and 20% --- http://www.publishnotperish.org/module2/documents/Cabellssample.pdf
Some of the other AAA journals occasionally have lower acceptance rates, but I think this is partly due to occasional authors naively thinking they might have a better chance of getting an article published in one of the the other journals.

TAR acceptance rates would be lower if editors factored in the papers that they send back with excuses for not even having the submissions refereed. Sometimes the submissions are not deemed appropriate for TAR and should not always be viewed as rejections in the same sense that a refereed paper has been rejected. Sometimes the editor deems them too stupid to referee.

Bob Jensen's threads on open source learning are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Barf:  Stupid and Naive SMU Decision to Take Computers Out of Classrooms

"When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 24, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i42/42a00103.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled "smart" classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to "teach naked" — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they're going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

He's not the only one raising questions about PowerPoint, which on many campuses is the state of the art in classroom teaching. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. The survey consisted of 211 students at a university in England and was conducted by researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. "The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions," said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

It's worth pointing out that PowerPoint presentations are generally better than many older classroom technologies, like slate chalkboards or overhead transparencies filled with hand-scrawled notes that students struggled to decipher. So computers have probably led to a slight improvement in teaching. But technology has hardly revolutionized the classroom experience for most college students, despite millions of dollars in investment and early predictions that going digital would force professors to rethink their lectures and would herald a pedagogical renaissance.

Mr. Bowen is part of a group of college leaders who haven't given up on that dream of shaking up college instruction. Even though he is taking computers out of classrooms, he's not anti-technology. He just thinks they should be used differently — upending the traditional lecture model in the process.

Here's the kicker, though: The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen's ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix.

No Power in PowerPoint

Mr. Bowen delivers his pitch about "teaching naked" with the energy and confidence of a seasoned performer, which makes sense when you learn he has been on stage as a jazz musician for some 30 years. The administrator sported a suit jacket over a dark T-shirt while giving a recent talk about his approach at a conference on "Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning" put on by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group that encourages technology use in education.

Although he made a philosophical argument about the best way to engage students, he grounded it in his own classroom experiences using podcasts and video games about jazz history that he helped produce. He did not use PowerPoint, but he did use his laptop to show off one of his games, which lets students pick famous jazz musicians to play in a fictional supergroup.

His philosophy is that the information delivery common in today's classroom lectures should be recorded and delivered to students as podcasts or online videos before class sessions. To make sure students tune in, he gives them short online multiple-choice tests.

So what's left to do during class once you've delivered your lecture? Introduce issues of debate within the discipline and get the students to weigh in based on the knowledge they have from those lecture podcasts, Mr. Bowen says. "If you say to a student, We have this problem in Mayan archaeology: We don't know if the answer is A or B. We used to all think it was A, now we think it's B. If the lecture is 'Here's the answer, it's B,' that's not very interesting. But if the student believes they can contribute, they're a whole lot more motivated to enter the discourse, and to enter the discipline."

In short, don't be boring.

To help encourage his teaching theories, when Mr. Bowen arrived at Southern Methodist three years ago to become dean of its arts school, he decided to make some structural changes in 20 or so main classrooms.

He says most of those classrooms had two computers (a Mac and a PC), a DVD player, a VCR, and a tape deck, along with "one of those complicated control panels where you need a Ph.D. to figure it out."

Last summer Mr. Bowen had most of that gear removed — though he left in projectors so that professors could plug in their laptops and do PowerPoint presentations, if they must. He also took out the old desks and replaced them with tables and chairs that professors could move around to allow students to work in groups more easily.

One reason for the changes was financial. The classroom computers were old and needed an upgrade when Mr. Bowen arrived, so ditching them instead saved money. Plus, the move cut support costs — the school was able to eliminate one staff position for a technician who responded to calls from professors about the classroom systems.

To encourage the kind of technology use Mr. Bowen did want, the school gave every professor a laptop and set up support so they could create their own podcasts and videos.

Some professors have complained about lugging their laptops to class, but others have jumped in with both feet.

One of the fans is Maria A. Dixon, an assistant professor of applied communication. She's made podcasts for her course on "Critical Scholarship in Communication" that feature interviews she recorded with experts in the field. "Before, I was always complaining that I never had time to go in-depth and talk with my students," she says. "Now they come in actually much more informed about a subject than they would have if they had been assigned a reading."

Kevin Heffernan, an associate professor in the school's division of cinema and television, has also created podcast lectures — essentially narrated PowerPoint slide shows — for students to watch before class. During class he shows movie clips from his laptop and has students discuss them based on the background lectures.

"I don't have to explain to them how film censorship in America changed in 1968" during his class session on Midnight Cowboy, says Mr. Heffernan. "They have that information from the online podcast."

Student Resistance

Most students seem more attentive now, he says, though a few have been thrown off by the new system.

"Strangely enough, the people who are most resistant to this model are the students, who are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test," says Mr. Heffernan. "Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive. The only way we're going to stop that is by radically refiguring the classroom in precisely the way José wants to do it."

Ms. Dixon has seen similar reactions. "If you've spent years not speaking, you're going to be ticked off" when you are asked to participate, she says. "We have to move past that resistance."

The same sequence of events occurred at Miami University, in Ohio, where Mr. Bowen worked before coming to Southern Methodist, and which pioneered some of the same teaching strategies.

"Initial response is generally negative until students start to understand and see how they learn under this new system," says Glenn Platt, a professor of marketing at Miami who has published academic papers about the approach, which he calls the "inverted classroom." "The first response from students is typically, 'I paid for a college education and you're not going to lecture?'"

Whatever griping students do about being asked to participate in class, though, it's better than the boredom induced by a PowerPoint lecture, say fans of the new approach.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I consider the SMU decision to remove computers from lecture halls to be totally naive and dysfunctional. An analogy would be to block off the Interstate highway system because Interstate driving is boring and passengers cannot see the interesting towns and villages the same way drivers in 1935 could see the sights on the old Lincoln Highway.

What is naive is to assume one style lecture hall fits all.
Instructors can lecture in an electronic classroom without allowing the computers to be turned on and without using the computer in the front of the classroom. Instructors in a computerless classroom, however, cannot have a computer demonstration.

I cannot imagine teaching an Accounting Information Systems Course and Relational Database Systems without computer demonstrations in the front of a classroom. I cannot imaging engaging students on how to apply financial functions in Excel to solve a bond yield amortization problem or any other problem using discounted cash flows. For certain types of subject matter having students practice on the computer at various points in the lecture can have significant impacts on better learning. I found this out in my last two decades of teaching in electronic classrooms.

Does Dean Bowen honestly think that students do not benefit in certain lectures when an instructor takes them out live to a Website such as YouTube or maybe even performs a demonstration on how to more effectively use a search engine? Does Dean Bowen think that accounting students cannot benefit when an instructor takes them live into the FASB's Codification database?

Does Dean Bowen honestly think that Professor X's teaching evaluations will increase without the aid of computer alternatives in a lecture hall? If Professor X put students to sleep with computer demonstrations, then Professor X is going to get sounder sleep by "teaching naked."

Use of computers in an electronic classroom is a way of engaging students to learn more on their own while being guided by the instructor. This is not an ideal pedagogy for all subject matter or all instructor styles or all student learning styles, but it is an alternative that is demonstrably better in many, many instances.

If Dean Bowen really wanted to encourage instructors to experiment with less use of computers in the classroom, then he should think of creative incentives to have his faculty experiment with alternative ways to use electronic classrooms. He should not, however, tear up the Interstate highways because he personally likes to drive through small town USA.

July 20, 2009 reply from Harry Howe, SUNY Geneseo [howeh@GENESEO.EDU]

Hi Bob.

 It may be significant that Bowen is dean of a school of arts - while agreeing 100% with your points on teaching AIS and calculations that can be illustrated with Excel, ppt lectures are arguably less appropriate for literature & humanities.  I wouldn't go so far as banning the machines - there are always interesting and on-point visual supplements for any course of inquiry - but pushing faculty away from using slide lectures as a crutch is probably sound policy more often than not.

Edward Tufte is not a fan of ppt:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp

July 20, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Harry,

Luddites like Dean Bowen equate electronic classrooms with PowerPoint. That's truly naïve.

Your observations are appealing to a point, but virtually all lecturers in literally any discipline these days might find value Website modules inserted into a lecture, especially some of the great learning modules and humor modules in YouTube.

The point is that lecturers do not have to use computers in a classroom if they choose not to do so or are paid $100 by Dean Bowen for each lecture in which they "stand naked." But this does not justify pulling the computers out of lecture halls just to force faculty to "stand naked."

Some of my humanities colleagues at Trinity University make much more use of the electronic classrooms than the many of our business department faculty who never saw much need for requesting electronic classrooms on campus.

Across town (San Antonio) when UTSA built a magnificent new business school building with state-of-the-art and varied electronic classrooms, there were many complaints by business faculty that those classrooms did not have overhead (transparency) projectors from the old classrooms.

Meanwhile many of the humanities instructors at UTSA were drooling over the business school's new classrooms. An example of such a classroom is a central classroom where all students can sit surrounded by pods where students could break out in teams. An instructor could monitor each pod and interact with the pod computers. What a great team learning facility.

For years I've preached against PowerPoint lecturing day in and day out, but electronic classrooms are so much more versatile than PowerPoint technology. A lot of my usage was to demo Excel and MS Access applications. Students would then practice what I demonstrated since each one sat in front of a networked computer that I could monitor from the front of the classroom and even interact with on my keyboard.

I also used the electronic classroom very often to show short video modules on especially technical illustrations such as how to value interest rate swaps using a Bloomberg Terminal.

Thanks Harry,

Bob Jensen

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

Big Brother Really is Watching:  Amazon can sneak into your Kindle and erase your books
Owners of Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader have received a nasty surprise, after discovering that copies of books by George Orwell had been deleted from their gadgets without their knowledge. The books - downloaded from Amazon.com by American Kindle users - were remotely deleted after what the US company says was a request by the publisher, MobileReference.com. Amazon refunded the cost of the books, but told affected customers they could no longer read the books and that the titles were "no longer available for purchase". "Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store,"
Bobbie Johnson, "Amazon Kindle users surprised by 'Big Brother' move," The Guardian, July 17, 2009 --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jul/17/amazon-kindle-1984

1984 (free) by George Orwell --- http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/books/1984.html

Animal Farm (free) by George Orwell --- http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/books/animal.htm 

Free electronic books --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

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

Some interesting sites from Business Week

1. Education Reform by BusinessWeek

The phrase "Education Reform" should be the clickable link http://bx.businessweek.com/education-reform/ The text following - "by BusinessWeek" - should be plain text (not the clickable link).

2. Economic Recovery by BusinessWeek

The phrase "Economic Recovery" should be the clickable link http://bx.businessweek.com/economic-recovery/ The text - "by BusinessWeek" - should be plain text (not the clickable link). 

3.  Unemployment by BusinessWeek

The phrase “Unemployment” should be the clickable link http://bx.businessweek.com/unemployment/ The text following - “by BusinessWeek” - should be plain text (not the clickable link). 

President Obama's American Graduation Initiative
Some states and schools are rigging achievement tests to get more money and deceive the public

Will future college graduates in President Obama's home town be able to read and divide 37/13?

But they will be college "graduates" if community colleges lower standards like their K-12 counterparts.

From the Creative Commons on July 15, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15818

President Obama announced yesterday the American Graduation Initiative, a twelve billion dollar plan to reform U.S. community colleges. The initiative calls for five million additional community college graduates by 2020, and plans that “increase the effectiveness and impact of community colleges, raise graduation rates, modernize facilities, and create new online learning opportunities” to aid this goal.

A significant component of the initiative is the plan to “create a new online skills laboratory.” From the fact sheet,

“Online educational software has the potential to help students learn more in less time than they would with traditional classroom instruction alone. Interactive software can tailor instruction to individual students like human tutors do, while simulations and multimedia software offer experiential learning. Online instruction can also be a powerful tool for extending learning opportunities to rural areas or working adults who need to fit their coursework around families and jobs. New open online courses will create new routes for students to gain knowledge, skills and credentials. They will be developed by teams of experts in content knowledge, pedagogy, and technology and made available for modification, adaptation and sharing. The Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor will work together to make the courses freely available through one or more community colleges and the Defense Department’s distributed learning network, explore ways to award academic credit based upon achievement rather than class hours, and rigorously evaluate the results.”

It is important to note here the difference between “open” and simply accessible “online”. Truly open resources for education are clearly designated as such with a standard license that allows not only access, but the freedoms to share, adapt, remix, or redistribute those resources. The educational materials that make up the new open online courses for this initiative should be open in this manner, especially since they will result from a government plan. We are excited about this initiative and hope the license for its educational materials will allow all of these freedoms. Catherine Casserly, formerly in charge of open educational resources at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (now at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), writes,

“Today at Macomb College, President Barack Obama announced a proposal to commit $50 million for the development of open online courses for community colleges as part of the American Graduation Initiative: Stronger American Skills through Community Colleges. As proposed, the courses will be freely available for use as is and for adaption as appropriate for targeted student populations. The materials will carry a Creative Commons license.”

You can read the official announcement at the White House site on their blog and visit the briefing room for the full fact sheet.

Jensen Comment
Given the troublesome fact that 80% of U.S. college graduates seeking jobs could not find jobs requiring college degrees, there is much more needed that getting more students in the U.S. to graduate form college.

July 15, 2009 reply from AMY HAAS [haasfive@MSN.COM]

Excuse me for bringing up an often overlooked point, but getting students into community colleges is easy. Getting them to do the college level work needed to graduate is not! As a instructor at an urban community college for more than 16 years I find that they typical community college student lacks study skills and or the motivation to succeed. They will come to class but getting them do actually work outside the classroom, even with tons of online resources available is often like "pulling teeth". They do not make the time for it.

Amy Haas

July 15 reply from Flowers, Carol [cflowers@OCC.CCCD.EDU]

I am in agreement with Amy. This piece that Bob published implies to me that EVERYONE should have a college education. I think that is the problem with education. This mentality creates, once again, entitlement, not motivation. Society has taken the motivation that individuals once had, away. Why work for it when it, when it can be given to you! There is an old adage................you can lead a horse to water, but.......................................!!!

I see this as more tax dollars going to waste. I have robust epacks and online classes, and do students take advantage of it.....some do, most "don't have the time" -- they are attempting to carry full loads at two schools and work a full time job. Maybe, we should be funding time management and realistic expectations programs.

The two examples I had this Easter, were doing poorly -- one was carrying two full time jobs and a full school load; the other, two full time school loads and 1 1/2 work load . Both felt I was requiring too much and should drop my standards because of their poor time management. I worked full time and carried 12 units (no social life).............why not more units or work, because I wanted to be successful. If school takes longer than 4 years to complete, so be it. I received no help. My family couldn't afford it, so I realized if I wanted it I had to do it myself. I think many of us can tell the same story and don't feel it diminished but enhanced our motivation.

July 15, 2009 reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU]

The "time" factor is another issue entirely, I think. Many of my students (at a 4-year private university) also have jobs, ranging from 10-hour work study to fill time or nearly so, to afford our astronomical tuition. That's become life. Should there be more options for them? Yes, I think so. Many of them are very motivated - one of my summer term students is working full time while attending school ... and has a 4.0 GPA! Her mom is a single parent with limited means, so she has to help because she wants to be at this school. My own adult daughter is back in school. Her financial aid is not full tuition. She also works nearly full time - and remains on the Dean's List. I am meantime trying to figure out this year where my husband and I will find the money to meet the rest of the tuition, because I don't want her to have to drop out. So I completely understand students who are pressed for time because of work obligations. But the ones who really want to be there find a way to use the resources available to them to succeed. For the others, the lack of time to use what you provide is an excuse, nothing more. They need to find a better reason for not doing well.

July 15, 2009 reply from Ed Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU]

Amy et al.,

I kind of like Zucker’s article that I may have mentioned before:

http://www.ams.org/notices/199608/comm-zucker.pdf 

Ed

Ed Scribner New Mexico State University Las Cruces, NM, USA

Some states are rigging achievement tests to get more money and deceive the public
Will future college graduates in President Obama's home town be able to read and divide 37/13?
But they will be college "graduates" if community colleges lower standards like their K-12 counterparts.

"Second City Ruse:  How states like Illinois rig school tests to hype phony achievement," The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124786847585659969.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

When President Obama chose Arne Duncan to lead the Education Department, he cited Mr. Duncan's success as head of Chicago's public school system from 2001 to 2008. But a new education study suggests that those academic gains aren't what they seemed. The study also helps explain why big-city education reform is unlikely to occur without school choice.

Mr. Obama noted in December that "in just seven years, Arne's boosted elementary test scores here in Chicago from 38% of students meeting the standard to 67%" and that "the dropout rate has gone down every year he's been in charge." But according to "Still Left Behind," a report by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a majority of Chicago public school students still drop out or fail to graduate with their class. Moreover, "recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests . . . rather than real improvements in student learning."

Our point here isn't to pick on Mr. Duncan, but to illuminate the ease with which tests can give the illusion of achievement. Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states must test annually in grades 3 through 8 and achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. But the law gives states wide latitude to craft their own exams and to define math and reading proficiency. So state tests vary widely in rigor, and some have lowered passing scores and made other changes that give a false impression of academic success.

The new Chicago report explains that most of the improvement in elementary test scores came after the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was altered in 2006 to comply with NCLB. "State and local school officials knew that the new test and procedures made it easier for students throughout the state -- and throughout Chicago -- to obtain higher marks," says the report.

Chicago students fared much worse on national exams that weren't designed by state officials. On the 2007 state test, for example, 71% of Chicago's 8th graders met or exceeded state standards in math, up from 32% in 2005. But results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, a federal standardized test sponsored by the Department of Education, show that only 13% of the city's 8th graders were proficient in math in 2007. While that was better than 11% in 2005, it wasn't close to the 39 percentage-point increase reflected on the Illinois state exam.

In Mr. Duncan's defense, he wasn't responsible for the new lower standards, which were authorized by state education officials. In 2006, he responded to a Chicago Tribune editorial headlined, "An 'A' for Everybody!" by noting (correctly) that "this is the test the state provided; this is the state standard our students were asked to meet." But this doesn't change the fact that by defining proficiency downward, states are setting up children to fail in high school and college. We should add that we've praised New York City test results that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute also claims are inflated, but we still favor mayoral control of New York's schools as a way to break through the bureaucracy and drive more charter schools.

And speaking of charters, the Chicago study says they "provide one bright spot in the generally disappointing performance of Chicago's public schools." The city has 30 charters with 67 campuses serving 30,000 students out of a total public school population of 408,000. Another 13,000 kids are on wait lists because the charters are at capacity, and it's no mystery why. Last year 91% of charter elementary schools and 88% of charter high schools had a higher percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards than the neighborhood schools that the students otherwise would have attended.

Similar results have been observed from Los Angeles to Houston to Harlem. The same kids with the same backgrounds tend to do better in charter schools, though they typically receive less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools. In May, the state legislature voted to increase the cap on Chicago charter schools to 70 from 30, though Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has yet to sign the bill.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley deserves credit for hiring Mr. Duncan, a charter proponent. But in deference to teachers unions that oppose school choice, Mr. Daley stayed mostly silent during the debate over the charter cap. That's regrettable, because it's becoming clear that Chicago's claim of reform success among noncharter schools is phony.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

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

Why should the right balance be struck when it comes to regulating OTC derivatives?

Some OTC derivatives have been criticized for contributing to the financial crisis. But new proposals may affect how all derivatives are traded and designed.

Most financial derivatives have been safely and prudently used over the years by thousands of companies seeking to manage specific risks.

OTC derivatives are privately negotiated because they are often highly customized. They enable businesses to offset nearly any fi nancial risk exposure, including foreign exchange, interest rate, and commodity price risks.

Proposals to standardize terms for all OTC derivatives could inadvertently limit the ability of companies to fully manage their risks.

Jensen Comment
The reason that it would "limit the ability of companies to fully manage their risks" is that OTC derivatives are currently very popular hedging contracts because it is often possible over-the-counter to write customized hedging contracts that exactly match (in mirror form) the terms of a hedged item contract or forecasted transaction such that the hedge becomes perfectly effective over the life of the hedge.

If companies have to hedge with standardized contracts such as futures and options contracts traded on organized exchange markets it's either impossible or very difficult to obtain a perfectly matched and effective hedge. For example, corn futures are traded in contracts of 25,000 bushels for a given grade of corn. If Frito Lay wants to hedge a forecasted transaction to purchase 237,000 bushels of corn, it can only perfectly hedge 225,000 bu. with five futures contracts or 250,000 bu. with six futures contracts. Hence it's impossible to perfectly hedge 237,000 bu. with standardized contracts.

However, if Frito Lay wants to perfectly hedge 237,000 bu. of corn it can presently enter into one OTC forward contract for 237,000 bu. or an OTC options contract for 237,000 bu. If the hedged item is eventually purchased in the same geographic region as the hedging contract (such as Chicago), the hedge should be perfectly effective at all points in time during the contracted hedging period.

If the hedging contract is written in terms of a Chicago market and the corn is eventually purchased in a Minneapolis market, then their may be slight hedging ineffectiveness (due mainly to transportation cost differences between the two markets), but there is absolutely no mismatch due to quantity (notional) differences.

Why is customization so important from the standpoint of accounting and auditing?
Under FAS 133 and IAS 39, hedge accounting relief is available only to the extent hedges are deemed effective. The ineffective portion of value changes in the hedging contracts must be posted to current earnings, thereby increasing the volatility of earnings for unrealized value changes of the hedging contracts.

If new regulations requiring standardization of OTC derivatives, then the regulations themselves may dictate that many or most hedging contacts are, at least in part, ineffective. As a result reported earnings will needlessly fluctuate to a greater extent due to the regulations rather than because of economic substance. Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

In particular, students may want to refer to the hedge accounting ineffectiveness testing Appendix B Example 7 beginning in Paragraph 144 of FAS 133 and Appendix A Example 7 beginning in Paragraph 93 of FAS 133. Bob Jensen's extensions and spreadsheet analysis of the Paragraph 144 illustration are available in Excel worksheet file 133ex07a.xls listed at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/
Sadly, the FASB left both of these examples, along with the other outstanding Appendix A and B examples out of its sparse handling of accounting for derivative financial instruments in its Codification Database.

In particular, Examples 1 thru 10 in Appendix B of FAS 133 are the best places that I know of to learn about hedge accounting and effectiveness testing. My extended analysis of each example can be found in the 133ex01a.xls thru 133ex10a.xls Excel workbooks at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/ 
My students focused heavily on those ten examples to learn about hedge accounting. They also learned from my videos 133ex05a.wmv and 133ex08a.wmv files listed at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5341/

Teaching Cases:  Hedge Accounting Scenario 1 versus Scenario 2
Two Teaching Cases Involving Southwest Airlines, Hedging, and Hedge Accounting Controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/SouthwestAirlinesQuestions.htm

Six in 10 companies plan to skip Windows 7: survey
Six in 10 companies in a survey plan to skip the purchase of Microsoft Corp's Windows 7 computer operating system, many of them to pinch pennies and others over concern about compatibility with their existing applications. Windows 7 will be released October 22, but has already garnered good reviews, in contrast to its disappointing current version, Windows Vista.
Reuters via The Washington Post, July 13, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/13/AR2009071300583.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Jensen Comment
I find this surprising since Windows Vista has ever so many reported problems that Windows 7 claims to overcome. Either Windows 7 is predicted to add more problems than Vista or six out of ten companies are, like me, still on old Windows XP.

July 13, 2009 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

Bob et al:

OR....

it could be that this is another of those faulty survey reports so prevalent these days whose "conclusions" are screwed up by the popular press headlines. My personal take on this is that this was one of those surveys who offered a standard but nonsensical multiple-choice question such as: "Does your company presently: (a) plan to deploy windows 7 by June 2010, (b) plan to deploy Windows 7 by December 2010, (c) plan to deploy Windows 7 by December 2011, or (d) have no plans to deploy Windows 7.

The respondents of course work for companies which have not yet decided when to deploy Windows 7, so they naturally choose the corresponding answer (d), but the newspaper, again naturally, runs a headline which claims that they will never deploy Windows 7 -- because this headline will sell more papers than the headline "6 out of 10 companies don't know when they will deploy Windows 7 because it still isn't certain when Windows 7 will become available".

This is a common "flaw" of many, if not most, -- if not practically all -- surveys I've seen reported in newspapers: "not presently having plans to deploy it" is not the same as *planning to skip it*, a nuance seemingly lost on newspaper editors, headline writers, and reporters.

David Fordham

The Dangling Man (Isaac Rosenfeld)
The writer "will have to play,” said Rosenfeld, “the role that is not a role; to be the living man, the one left alone at three o’clock in the morning, when it’s always the dark night of the soul; to be the man whom one encounters when there is no longer any uniform to wear… to be the man who is naked, who is alone, and the man who pretty much of the time is afraid: the man who sees himself as he really is in this flesh and in these bones and in these feelings, in these impulses, in these emotions; the man who confronts himself in his dreams and his reveries; the man who sees himself walking across the street, thinking there but for the grace of God go I, or in his envy: there but for God’s disdain of me I could have gone…. He has to see the light and the truth that can be seen even in our phony and artificial age.” . . . Saul Bellow recalled that his friend, who did graduate work in philosophy at New York University in the early 1940s, had abandoned that path when he discovered Herman Melville. After reading Moby Dick, logical positivism seemed too blinkered a take on the world. Rosenfeld turned into an intellectual equivalent of Bartleby the Scrivner, saying, “I would prefer not to,” over and over, as the years slipped past. This was not a good way to live. But then what is? The question is not rhetorical but real -- the kind that is waiting at three o’clock in the morning.
Scott McLemee, The Dangling Man (Isaac Rosenfeld)," Inside Higher Ed, July 15, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee250

Lessons from Katrina:  How to milk the tit of Yankee taxpayers

"Honore: Ex-La. governor halted hospital reopening," by Cain Burdeau, Google News, July 15, 2009 --- http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hGU2Oagz2xa9B-Kt7PrecSEM8hcAD99EE5B00 

Weeks after Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans and worsened the medical plight of the city's poor, then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the publicly run Charity Hospital would not reopen, even though the military had scrubbed the building to medical-ready standards, the retired Army general who oversaw the work said.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said Blanco told him in late September 2005 the 20-story building that served the region's poor residents would not reopen.

"'Ma'am, we got the hospital clean, my people report ... if you want to use it,'" Honore recalled telling Blanco. "Her reply to me: 'Well general, we're not going to open it, we're working on a different plan.'"

Honore's revelation raises questions of whether state officials used Katrina as an excuse to leverage federal financing for a new public hospital.

It comes as state and federal officials continue squabbling over how badly the hospital was really damaged and how much federal recovery funding should be allocated to it.

The state wants $492 million for a new hospital to replace the Depression-era building as part of a proposed $1.2 billion medical complex. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has offered $150 million for repairs. The dispute is on appeal at FEMA headquarters.

Blanco said she could not remember the conversation with Honore. She said she didn't know the military had scrubbed Charity until she was contacted by the AP.

But she said Honore's comments struck her as out of context. "I would not have made that statement because I would not have the first idea of having other plans for Charity at that moment," Blanco said.

Honore suggested that money, not medical judgment, was at the heart of the decision.

"This is about business, man," Honore said. "This is about rich people making more money. This is not about providing health care."

Keith Twitchell, president of the good-government Committee for a Better New Orleans/Metropolitan Area Committee, said "anything he (Honore) says must be given credence," but it seemed improbable that state officials hatched long-term plans so quickly.

"Two, three weeks after Katrina, it's hard to imagine anyone at the state level was thinking, 'Oh, boy, this is our chance to shut down Charity,'" Twitchell said.

Charity's closing forced needy residents to turn to the few overcrowded, private hospitals still operating, which financially stressed them.

FEMA also spent more than $90 million to open temporary facilities, including a hospital in a shopping mall.

In documents filed with FEMA, the state said a damage assessment was done at Charity within the first two weeks after Katrina. Citing floodwater in the basement, wind damage to the roof, widespread mold and human and medical waste, they claimed the hospital was destroyed.

Blanco said she was told Charity was contaminated because the air conditioning and heating systems flooded and "affected the core operations of the entire building."

She said she relied on the advice of Jerry Jones, director of State Facility Planning and Control, an office that oversees public buildings. Jones did not return repeated telephone calls seeking comment.

When the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in the ravaged city in early September 2005, Charity was identified as key. It was in the center of town and provided a lot of people care, said the division's commander, Gen. William Caldwell.

About 150 soldiers and a team of medical professionals worked to get the hospital running, Caldwell said.

Meanwhile, a German military team's pumps sucked water out of the basement. Air sampling found no contamination — a concern, considering the flooding and bodies in the flooded morgue, Caldwell said.

Caldwell recalled telling Honore the hospital was nearly ready to receive patients. "We were actually thinking of having a ribbon-cutting ceremony, give a thumbs up and turn it over to the health care professionals," Caldwell said.

But then, Caldwell said a decision came to stop the cleanup.

Dr. James Moises, a former Charity emergency room doctor who helped clean the hospital after Katrina, said Charity was made useable, and the medical staff was eager to see it back in use.

Moises said state officials used Katrina as an excuse to close Charity and ask FEMA for the money to build a new medical complex. Moises said: "It was their orchestrated plan. It was, 'How can we manipulate the disaster for institutional gains?'"

"How to predict Apple’s gross margins," July 18, 2009 ---
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/18/how-to-predict-apples-gross-margins/

Apple’s (AAPL) fiscal third quarter earnings are due out Tuesday, July 21, and once again the Street is focused on the big numbers — revenues, earnings and units sold for the Mac, iPhone and iPod.

But savvy analysts will be paying closer attention to the number that is the best measure of a firm’s profitibilty: gross margin, expressed as the ratio of profits to revenues. Or

(Revenue – Cost of sales) / Revenue

Apple’s gross margins, which have averaged 34.8% over the past eight quarters, are the envy of the industry. Dell’s (DELL) first quarter GM, by contrast, was 17.6% and the company warned Wall Street last week that it is expecting a “modest decline” next quarter.

In its April earnings call, Apple low-balled its guidance numbers as usual, forecasting a sharp drop in gross margins over the next 6 months. Specifically, it warned analysts to expect no better than 33% in Q3 and “about 30%” in Q4.

But Turley Muller, for one, doesn’t buy those numbers, and he should know.

Muller, who publishes a blog called Financial Alchemist, is one of a small group of amateur analysts who track Apple closely and publish quarterly estimates that are as good as — and often better than — the professionals’. In fact Muller’s earnings estimates for Q2 were the best of the lot, missing the actual results by just one penny (see here.)

For Q3, he’s expecting Apple to report earnings of $1.35 per share on revenue of $8.3 billion — far higher than the Street’s consensus ($1.16 on $8.16 billion).

Why the discrepancy?

“Again the story appears to be gross margin,” he writes. “Just like last quarter, when Apple blew out the GM number with 36.4% (just as I had predicted) this quarter’s GM (3Q) should be roughly the same as last quarter.

The secret, he says, is in the profitability of the iPhone, “which is through the roof.”

“Apple tries to deflect that,” he says, but the evidence is right there, buried in a chart he found in Apple’s SEC filings (see below). It shows Apple’s schedule for deferred costs and revenue for the iPhone and Apple TV, which for legal reasons are spread out over 24 months rather than being recorded at the time of sale. Because Apple TV revenue is so small relative to the iPhone, this chart is a pretty good proxy for the iPhone alone.

This is complicated stuff, but the bottom line, as Muller points out, is that iPhone profitability has been rising to the point where gross margins on the device are over 50%.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's investment helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

Garbage Research in Stock Pricing Correlations and Equity Premiums
Seriously that smelly kind of garbage you pay to have hauled away
A new measure of consumption -- garbage -- is more volatile and more correlated with stocks than the standard measure, NIPA consumption expenditure. A garbage-based CCAPM matches the U.S. equity premium with relative risk aversion of 17 versus 81 and evades the joint equity premium-risk-free rate puzzle. These results carry through to European data. In a cross section of size, value, and industry portfolios, garbage growth is priced and drives out NIPA expenditure growth.
Alexi Savov, University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "Asset Pricing with Garbage, SSRN, February 17, 2009 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1345470 

This is a little like the historic 0.63 correlation between stork nests and birth rates --- http://www.jstor.org/pss/2983064

Video:  Nassim Taleb Talks About The Book “Dancing With Chance” ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/nassim-taleb-talks-about-the-book-dancing-with-chance/
Also see http://www.cnbc.com/id/31706523

Bob Jensen's threads on the EMH are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#EMH

NYC Invests $1 million in Old-Style Typewriters
(now looking for a deal in buggy whips and Cadillac fender fins)|
When we look upon the typewriter, we tend to think of it as a somewhat romantic, antiquated technology for the English major in us to write that great mystery novel we've been toying with -- not something we'd imagine anyone would still be using in a professional setting. Unfortunately for New York's boys in blue, that's exactly the situation they find themselves in. According to NY Post, the city has plunked down $982,269 in a contract with New Jersey-based Swintec to provide thousands of new manual electric typewriters bound for NYPD offices over the next three years, with another $99,570 going to a company for maintaining the current lineup. While arrest reports have thankfully gone the way of computers, property and evidence vouchers continue to be written up out the old fashioned way, with officers complaining about having to seek out ribbons when they (often) run dry. In some way, it's kind of funny... but mostly, it's just sad.
Ross Miller, "NYC keeps ahead of the curve, invests $1 million into typewriters," Engadget, July 14, 2009 ---
http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/nyc-keeps-ahead-of-the-curve-invests-1-million-into-typewriter/ 
 

Jensen Comment
Even if instant printing is desired, this investment is absurd. Whenever an error is made, the typist must haul up a bottle of white-out or an ink erasure. And it's only possible to digitally store typed pages as pictures at about 10,000 times the cost of computer text storage. Also scanning stored photographs is very difficult and monumentally ineffective compared with computer text storage. I think some NYC official must have a girl "friend" who works for or owns Swintec.
Maybe the NYC Police Dept is trying to encourage officers to write Sam Spade novels.

July 16, 2009 reply from Peters, James M [jpeters@NMHU.EDU]

Sorry to be a cranky old man, but this sort of story usually sets me off. The implication is that NYC made a stupid decision; typical of governments. However, I would bet money that if you knew all the details and their rationale, you would find that it was a logical, and probably low cost, solution to a problem they faced even if it seems stupid on the surface. Of course, these sorts of stories only fuel the public's (in my opinion, miss) perception that governments are stupid and inefficiently run.

Let me cite a concrete example from my personal history of much bigger proportions. When I was at CMU, I was on a PhD committee of a major in the air force who did his thesis on the procurement efficiency of the defense department. Most of your eyes are probably starting to roll as you think about all the $1,000 toilet seat purchases you have read about. The student pursued the science in two ways: archival data on actual purchases and qualitative review of news stories covering things like purchasing $1,000 toilet seats. Without boring you with the details, in every case where he reviewed a popular press article, he found that the article was highly deceptive or just plain wrong and either the item covered was never purchased or it was purchased as part of a contract where the government actually saved the tax payers money by paying a high price on one or two items in exchange for much lower prices on the bulk of the items in the contract. When he reviewed the archival data, he compared common items the defense department purchases with for-profit firms. He excluded specialized equipment for which there was no private sector comparable item (like recorders in fighter jets that are similar to standard recorders, but must be hardened). His results were that the defense department's prices were 18% lower than the best private sector purchaser. His conclusion was that, stories aside, the defense department has a very efficient and effective purchase process that saves the taxpayers a bundle over private sector purchasing departments.

I appreciate that there is a ton of details behind his research, but, as a member of his committee, I can verify that his methods were sound and his conclusions well supported.

Now the punch line, he was never able to publish any of his results because the secretary of the air force blocked it. He was still an active duty officer and had to follow orders. Why would the secretary of the air force block publication of solid piece of research that placed the defense department is such a positive light? Because he was a George H.W. Bush appointee who wanted to discredit the "bureaucrats" so that he could push his outsourcing agenda.

This is a true story for which I have first hand evidence, but it happens all the time and, in my opinion, is a large part of why Americans have such a negative impression of government, much, in not most, of which is not deserved.

In America, governments have become such a fun punching bag and we all tend to pile on, but it has serious social policy implications. For example, the debate on health care reform includes scare tactics designed to eliminate any possibility of a government run health insurance program. Statements like "Do you want a bureaucrat between you and your doctor?" However, I have about a half a dozen bureaucrats between my doctor and me now, most of whom are being paid to find ways to deny me treatment. Hard data show that private health insurance companies spend over 20% of their revenues on overhead and administration while the Medicare program only spends 3% on overhead. Simple stated, the hard data show that private health insurance companies are much more wasteful and inefficient that public ones, but you would never know that from the popular press articles.

Sad that the truth gets lost in all the fun poked at our public servants.

Jim Peters

July 16, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Jim, 

Thanks. It's nice to have some new voices on the AECM.

I think it would be an interesting course project for a student team in NYC to write a case on this particular business decision in the NYC Police Department. Why did they go for electric manual typewriters in place of cheaper refurbished computers?

Those $1,000 toilet seats for government contracting result from overhead that the government agreed to pay one way or another. If a customer went to Wal-Mart and purchased $12.95 toilet seats the overhead would just be buried somewhere else such that the government may actually waste that $12.95 added cost for each Wal-Mart toilet seat. The issue should instead be back flushed up the chain to see why the overhead itself is a legitimate charge under the contract. The fact that overhead was arbitrarily allocated between toilet seats, toilets, sinks, tubs, floors, vanities, and light fixtures is irrelevant.

As far as manual electric typewriters go, it's hard to envision a benefit-cost justification relative to alternatives today now that refurbished computers (not necessarily laptops) and printers are so cheap. I remember having my thesis typed with six carbons where the last copy was pretty difficult to read. Also every time my typist made a mistake, she had to make the correction on each of the seven copies --- slow, slow, slow and messy, messy, messy. Stanford did not accept purple mimeograph copies.

I racked my brain on what could justify the expenditure of $1 million for new manual typewriters in 2009. One possibility is that nursing home across the street. Aged secretaries that never did learn computers might each pop a couple of Celebrex tablets and type 60 wpm for the Police Department as a public service.

It's hard for me to believe that a new electric manual typewriter costs less than a refurbished PC that can probably be purchased less than $50 bucks each complete with a working small-screen monitor. One cheap, cheap printer can serve multiple computers.

As far as tech service goes, it's probably harder to find a typewriter repair technician these days than it is to find a clockmaker who can repair your antique Swiss watch. But since the Police Department also uses computers, it must already have service arrangements for computers. Hence having to add a service arrangement for typewriters seems like an unnecessary expense.

Another reason for typewriters is security. To my knowledge there was never a typewriter virus. However, there are subtle security problems with typewriters. Each key on a typewriter is a little like a fingerprint such that messages can and often were traced back by police to the typewriter that typed a key piece of evidence such as an extortion message.

There also is risk of "shadow memory" of a typewriter. Computers have shadow memory. When a user erases a criminal message on a computer, techies can often examine the hard drive and recover erased messages. The same thing can happen on a typewriter.

I apologize for repeating a message that I share previously on the AECM about an incident in a university where I worked. When our Department changed from typewriters to computers, we kept two of our old IBM Selectric typewriters --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter

One of the typewriters was kept in our office for purposes of typing addresses on envelopes, which at the time was easier on a typewriter than it was on our computers since printers were not as versatile in the early days. The other typewriter was stored in a closet. One of our professors, Professor X, received permission to take that typewriter to his home where he typed most of his research papers and private correspondence.

One year we extended an offer to a woman, Professor Y, to become a tenure track assistant professor of auditing. Before accepting our offer she received a threatening message that bad things would happen to her if she accepted our offer. The Campus Police investigated every computer in our office. Since I was a friend of Professor X, the police asked me to go to his house and retrieve the borrowed typewriter.

An investigation of the type-key ball of that typewriter indicated that that typewriter was not used to type the threatening message. However, the police went a step further looking for the typewriter's shadow message. IBM Selectric typewriters have a relatively large ribbon cartridge. When that ribbon was backed up the police found the threatening message on the ribbon. Professor X had replaced the type-key ball but neglected to replace the ribbon as well.

Professor Y joined our faculty, and when confronted with the ribbon of evidence, Professor X resigned.

Hence, typewriters have shadow memory somewhat like computers.

Bob Jensen

July 17, 2009 reply from

Here's a comment from http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/54529/nyc-invests-nearly-1m-intypewriters/

 

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

.....That's the scoop from the New York Post, which found out that the City of New York signed a three-year, $982,269 contract last year with Swintec, a New Jersey office equipment firm that specializes in … you guessed it: manual and electric typewriters. The city also plans on spending tens of thousands more in maintenance fees.

 

....New York City cops are stuck using typewriters—electric, if they're lucky—to pound out property and evidence vouchers on

(incredibly) carbon-paper forms, which are pulled apart to create duplicates. (Other documents, such as arrest reports, have long since been computerized, the Post notes.)

 

.... it's not fair to blame the cops themselves for burning precious time tapping out paper reports in triplicate; after all, they're just dealing with the outdated equipment they've been given. "It's very inconvenient—you have to find ink, you have to find this, find that,"

one officer told CNN.

 

...And as far as the NYPD is concerned, we're not just talking about replacing aging typewriters with spiffy new computers; the real cost lies in replacing paper-based filing systems (in this case, for property and evidence vouchers, for starters) with new, digital ones.

 

Doing so saves time and money in the long run, but the initial outlay is always steep—and good luck snagging the funding from New York's dysfunctional state senate, which can barely be bothered to keep the NYC subway running.

 

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

 

So the real story is perhaps about the capital cost of the systems change  and the reluctance of the politicians to pay for it (no votes in police computer systems)....

Jensen Comment
But millions of people generate tax return forms on their computers and file their taxes with software that fills in these forms. Why can't the NYPD buy refurbished computers that will generate the evidence forms and fill them out in triplicate for hard copy filing?

"BOUNDED RATIONALITY," by Bryan D. Jones,  Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 1999. 2:297–321 --- http://www.princeton.edu/~smeunier/JonesBounded1.pdf

Video 3:  Yale's Robert Shiller (slightly over one hour of video lecture)
Behavioral Finance: The Role of Psychology --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZLNbxWH8Lc

"SEC Charges Four With Fraud," by Kathy Shwiff, The Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124751046687234157.html#mod=todays_us_money_and_investing

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Seattle securities lawyer David Otto, three other individuals and two companies with conducting a fraudulent "pump-and-dump" scheme in which they secretly unloaded more than $1 million in "penny stocks" of a company touting a nonexistent antiaging product.

The complaint says the defendants violated antifraud and other provisions of federal securities laws. The SEC is seeking disgorgement and financial penalties.

The agency said misleading news releases and Web profiles touting beverages and nutritional supplements pushed the stock price of Seattle-based MitoPharm up more than four times to above $2.30 although MitoPharm's products were in the developmental stage. Two key products didn't exist, according to the complaint.

The SEC said Mr. Otto sold his shares for more than $1 million while Houston-based stock promoter Charles Bingham generated proceeds of $300,000 before heavy selling caused the price to fall to a nickel by November 2007.

The SEC's complaint, filed in federal court in Seattle, charges Mr. Otto, associate Todd Van Siclen of Seattle, Mr. Bingham and his company, Wall Street PR Inc., along with MitoPharm and its chief executive, Pak Peter Cheung of Vancouver.

Mr. Otto's attorney, Jeff Coopersmith said Mr. Otto committed no intentional violation of securities law. Mr. Bingham's attorney, Ronald Kaufman, said his client is as much a victim as any other shareholder. Mr. Bingham said his firm lost money on the work it did for MitoPharm, adding he had no way of knowing the products, which were being manufactured in China, weren't as described. The other defendants couldn't be reached for comment.

Bob Jensen's threads on securities frauds are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#SecuritiesFraud

New York's Pretty Young Things Are Turning to Crime
Robin Katz is a "sexy 25-year-old financial planner working at Chase's Midtown headquarters," according to the New York Post, who allegedly ripped off a client to the tune of $110,000 so she could spend it "shopping" and "going out." Katz is a graduate of Smith College, and to judge by her Facebook friends—who hail from Yale, Harvard, Wellesley, Princeton, the Phillips Exeter Academy, etc.—she is pretty firmly ensconced in the ranks of America's elite youth. She certainly seemed pedigreed and trustworthy enough for her clients to entrust her with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mistake!
John Cook, Gawker.com, July 21, 2009 --- Click Here

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

"Megapost & Collection-Edward Chancellor: Author of, Devil Take The Hindmost," Simoleon Sense, July 14, 2009 --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/edward-chancellor/

(Disclosure most these articles are free but several require payment…I recommend paying to read them.
 

1. The Seven Pillars Of Folly - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

The oil exporters of the Persian Gulf are flush with cash. Some of that money is going towards acquiring P&O, the British shipping concern, thus sparking off the heated controversy over foreign control of U.S. ports. This has led people to worry that Arab petrodollars might be scared away from the U.S. In fact, unlike during the last oil boom of the late 1970s, relatively little of the current Arab oil surplus has been directly invested in U.S. assets or even deposited in the international banking system. This time much of the oil money has remained at home where a classic speculative mania is now being played out.

2. Inefficient Markets - Corporate Eugenics - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

It is becoming clear that corruption at Enron was not confined to the higher echelons, but was widespread throughout the firm. This corruption appears to have been engendered by a combination of overly-demanding profits targets and management’s practice of weeding out supposedly “underachieving” employees. Such practices have become commonplace among America’s top companies. In Enron’s case it seems that the crooks cooked up the profits, while the honest objectors were let go.

3. Look Out This Crunch Is Serious - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Incipient panic has reigned in U.S. financial markets over the past couple of weeks, and no wonder. Some hedge funds have blown up, the country’s second-largest mortgage lender has come close to collapse and stocks have fallen. On Friday, the Federal Reserve Bank lowered a key interest rate to help calm things down.

4. Ponzi Nation - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Credit has grown rapidly in recent years. This expansion has come in many forms, from home mortgages to newfangled structured products created by clever financial engineers. There are, broadly speaking, two views about these developments. The conventional wisdom — held by most economists and denizens of Wall Street — is optimistic. Higher rates of credit growth and increasing levels of leverage, they maintain, are reasonable in light of increasing economic stability.  An opposing view — held by a miscellaneous bunch, including some notable investors and Wall Street observers — holds that the massive buildup of debt augurs ill. Drawing on the work of a little-known, deceased economist named Hyman Minsky, the pessimists contend that the recent calm has induced people to take on too much risk. “Stability is unstable,” this group says, quoting Minsky.

5. Ponzi Nation Topples - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

On August 14, David Viniar, the chief financial officer of Goldman, Sachs & Co., struggled to explain why two hedge funds managed by his firm had suffered severe losses during the first few hectic days of the month. He came up with the rationale that the markets had been hit by a rare “25 standard deviation event.” In other words, an occurrence so rare that a person living since the dawn of time would be lucky to have witnessed it. The comment was, of course, far-fetched. History shows that financial crises are as inevitable as death and taxes.

6. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy: What Would Minsky Do? - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

A year or so ago, the work of the late economist Hyman Minsky was known to only a small band of devoted followers. All that has changed since the onset of the current financial crisis. Today, Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis — the notion that economic stability encourages behavior on Wall Street and beyond that renders the financial system increasingly fragile — is attracting far more attention. Yet Minsky was interested not only in the buildup to a crisis but also in how depressions could be avoided and what measures were necessary to prevent future crises from occurring.

7. When the Credit Crunch Comes to Main Street - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Three centuries ago, the novelist and sometime tradesman Daniel Defoe described what happened when credit collapses: “If private Credit falls off, the Stock, the Trade, and, by Consequence, the Wealth of the Nation decays.” Modern economists tend to be more sanguine. As long as prices remain stable and the financial system continues to function, they see little lasting damage to the economy from a credit bust.

8. Spiraling Losses: Lloyd’s Unheeded Lessons - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

In the recent years the business of lending has converged with that of insurance: Banks can insure the loans they make against default; securitization, which allows for risk to be divided up and parceled out, borrows much from traditional insurance practices; credit-risk models emulate actuarial calculations; and the risk premiums on loans aren’t much different from the policy premiums charged by conventional insurers.Insurance, like lending, is a highly cyclical business. When premiums are high and losses low, capital flows into insurance. But over time competition drives down policy rates. Premiums decline to the point where they are insufficient to cover liabilities. A crisis occurs that can only be resolved through losses and capital contraction.

9. Model Failure - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

The Current Credit Crunch  is the first in which mathematical models have played an important role. Common flaws in risk models link the failure of rating agencies to predict the level of defaults on subprime mortgages, the freezing up of the market for complex debt securities and problems at several dozen hedge funds and a handful of banks, including the U.K.’s Northern Rock. We handed over the job of assessing financial risk to mathematicians and physicists — and they failed.

10. Crisis Hazards - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

The governor of the Bank of England has come under fire from all sides. First, at the onset of this summer’s credit crunch, he made himself unpopular by being less accommodating than his peers in Europe and the U.S. Then, after King agreed to provide emergency funding to the stricken Northern Rock, Britain’s fifth-largest mortgage lender was,he was accused of fostering moral hazard. This assistance inadvertently sparked the first bank run in England in over a century

11. Devil’s Dictionary - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Roughly A Century Ago- the American writer Ambrose Bierce compiled The Devil’s Dictionary. In his celebrated lexicon, Bierce displayed a profound understanding of finance, which he defined as “the art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager.” …Although Wall Street’s ethos has not changed since Bierce’s time, it is time to update and enlarge the Devil’s Dictionary of…

12. Part 2 Of Devil’s Dictionary of Finance - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

M * Mark-to-model: The use of a mathematical model to value complex securities. “The combination of precise formulas with highly imprecise assumptions can be used to establish practically any value one wishes” (Benjamin Graham). Useful to investors who wish to delay the recognition of a loss. See CDOs.

Master limited partnership: A clever corporate structure favored by private equity and hedge funds for going public. Provides investors with few governance safeguards while allowing asset managers to avoid paying corporate taxes on their earnings.

13. The Case For Crash - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Never before in recent  history have the prospects for investors appeared so dismal. This statement may seem absurd. After all, economies around the world appear more stable than ever. Stock markets aren’t so evidently buoyed by irrational exuberance as they were in the late 1990s. Furthermore, the alternative-assets revolution has greatly expanded the range of potential investments. But that’s no comfort when just about every major asset class is perilously overvalued.

14. A Very Private Matter - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

A letter from Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and chief executive, regarding the proposed buyout of Blackstone Group June 1, 2012 The Blackstone Group 345 Park Avenue New York, NY 10154 Dear Shareholders: I am, together with funds managed by our Þrm, pleased to propose to acquire, for a purchase price of $15 in cash per unit, all of the Þrm’s outstanding common units, representing limited partners’ interests in Blackstone Group L.P. (the “Group”). We are also offering to purchase the Chinese government’s minority stake on the same terms. Our proposal provides a substantial premium to the current price for all of the Group’s common unit holders.

15. Structural Flaws- By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

When banks discovered how to securitize loans, they inadvertently created a sexy alternative investment. Looking for an asset that isn’t correlated to the stock market? Then invest in mezzanine tranches of collateralized debt obligations. Or better still, give your money to a credit hedge fund that promises to produce double-digit returns. Rampant demand for structured securities has been a boon to bankers, homeowners and private equity firms. It has also led to the mispricing of credit risk. But participants in this brave new world of finance have little cause to worry about that. Last year some $304 billion of collateralized debt obligations were issued in the U.S., according to Credit Suisse. That represents a 58 percent increase over the previous year.

16. Shaky Foundations - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Pension funds are looKing for investments that will perform even when the stock market is doing badly. They also want long-lived assets to match the payments they must make in years to come. Inflation-protected government bonds, especially those with long durations, fit the bill. The trouble is that yields on such bonds have declined dramatically in recent years.

17. Fixated on Friedman - By Edward Chancellor - C
lick Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

The severity of the credit crunch has taken the world’s central bankers by surprise. But they might have foreseen it had they not been intellectually enslaved by the ideas of the recently-deceased über-economist, Milton Friedman.

18. A Sucker’s Rally- By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Some argue that the stock market downturn was too shallow

19. Misplaced US Optimism - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below
Two months ago, the stock market was telling us that deflation was on the way and that the US economy would be leading the world into a global recession. Since then the market has staged a strong rebound and people are feeling more optimistic again. My feeling, however, is that the excesses of the late 1990s bubble have only partly been dealt with and that until they have properly worked their way out of the system, the real recovery will remain elusive.

20. A Golden Age - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed runaway inflation, a variety of speculative bubbles and a succession of currency crises. Is there no way to escape this mayhem, which spreads its misery from the day-labourers of Buenos Aires to the pensioners of New York? In fact, one solution offers itself; an idea so unpopular that only a handful of cranks nowadays even dare consider it. In order to rid the global economy of its chronic instability, we must return to our golden fetters.

21. Corporate Crisis -  By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Don’t blame the scandals  After the string of corporate scandals in the US, the public is blaming the destruction of trillions of dollars of “shareholder value” on the malfeasance of top management. This is misguided.

22. Perverse Incentives - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Shareholder value and stock options for senior managers have ruled big business since the 1990s. But they have led to costly mistakes and endless scandals

23. Daniel Defoe On RailTrack - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

In last month’s Prospect, Richard Lambert, the former editor of the Financial Times, asked why the press had failed to see Enron coming. He acknowledges that part of the failure lies in the mood of the times. Unfortunately, he does not go far enough. It was, after all, a TMT (technology, media and telecoms) boom, and the Financial Times was at the heart of it. Just over two years ago, Pearson, owner of the FT, was applauded by the market for raising hundreds of millions of pounds to invest in internet ventures: FT.com was soon followed by FT Marketwatch.com, FTyourmoney.com, and so on.

24. A Bad Time For Pundits - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Bad year for forecasters  Like Christmas trees, economic forecasts should be discarded early in the new year. Anyone who retains a forecast too long will find it wilting more rapidly than an ageing spruce. At times of heightened economic uncertainty, such as we have recently been living through, forecasts have even shorter sell-by dates.

25. City Slackers - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

When foreign financiers stripped London of its snob class, the money woke up. But to stay slick, the city needs to regain an old honour system

26.  Alan’s Bubble - By Edward Chancellor - C
lick Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Alan Greenspan, the second most powerful man in the US, adheres to the “radical capitalist” of Ayn Rand. But by following rather than leading the markets he has created a bubble

27. Millenial Market - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

The stock market was unperturbed and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed a point up on the day of the attack, at 88.63. However, the economy was suffering from the post-war slump and over the next 12 months shares lost half their value. No one was ever prosecuted for the “outrage,” as it became known, although many suspicious-looking foreigners were arrested in the months and years that followed. As time passed people’s fears waned, and soon the great bull market arrived. On the ninth anniversary of the bombing, the Dow Jones stood at 372, up more…

28. Tacit collusion - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Prisoner’s dilemma at Sotheby’s  Alfred Taubman, the majority shareholder and former chairman of Sotheby’s, was recently sent to prison for his part in a conspiracy to fix prices with rival auctioneer, Christie’s. Sotheby’s former chief executive, Diana “DeDe” Brooks, was also convicted. The trial judge accused the two of many failings, including arrogance, greed and deceit. From a business perspective, their real crime was stupidity.

29. Housing blarney - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

House prices and the planners  House prices are overvalued, say the experts. At least, that’s what they said last year. In the last 12 months, however, the average price of a British home has risen by a further 18 per cent. This doesn’t mean that the housing bears were wrong. Rather, it is a reflection on the inefficiency of the housing market, which in this country might have been designed specifically to provide an endless cycle of booms and busts.

30. Lessons Of Depression - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

In a recently published book, Rethinking the Great Depression, economic historian Gene Smiley catalogues the errors of both the Federal Reserve and federal government during the 1930s. In July 1931, the Fed raised interest rates in order to fulfill its obligations under the gold standard (despite the fact that Britain had already abandoned it). Five years later, prompted by fears of inflation, the Fed doubled the reserve requirements of its member banks. Both of these actions were followed by a severe contraction of the money supply, which induced a further collapse of the stock market and economy.

31. Technology & Path Dependency - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below
 

Does the best technology always win out? Some economists say no. They have argued in recent years that chance often plays a decisive role in the adoption of technologies and that advantage normally goes to the first-movers in a new market. During the bull market, such views were widely accepted and served to hype the tech bubble. In more sober times, the same claims are receiving the scepticism they deserve.

32. The Croupier Takes Too Much - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

The greatest problem facing equity investors today is not the bear market or the weakness of the global economy. Nor has it anything to do with the possibility of war, high levels of corporate and consumer indebtedness, or any of the other problems one reads about regularly in the business pages. The real problem is the low levels of expected returns for most stock market investors. This is due primarily to the high levels of fees extracted by a bloated and parasitic financial services industry. Charlie Munger, the right-hand man of Warren Buffett, refers to these fees as the “croupier’s take.” Let us attempt to gauge its size.

33. Shares have been in a bear market for years. We just haven’t noticed until now - By Edward Chancellor -
Click Here To Read The Article - Excerpt Below

Bear markets are naturally unpopular: people dislike seeing their investments go up in smoke. They are also misunderstood. It is commonly believed that bear markets are short-lived, ending after a few unpleasant months. That’s true of little bears, but great bears can hang around for a decade or more. They are characterised by the savage crushing of investors’ hopes. Most commentators argue that British and US investors hadn’t until very recently experienced such a market for more than quarter of a century. Actually, we are already some years into one.

Plus The Entire Collection Of Edward Chancellor Articles On BreakingViews

Bob Jensen's threads on the economic crisis are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

From the Scout Report on July 17, 2009

TheWorld Browser 2.4.1.2 --- http://www.ioage.com/ 

In a world with increasingly diverse options for wandering around the Internet, TheWorld Browser offers a visually stimulating change from some of the more staid browsers. This version has some rather nice tool options for blocking ads and also features built-in mouse gestures to move around pages a bit more smoothly. Additionally, this version also contains such commonly found features as a "favorites" list and a download history device. This version is compatible with computers running Windows XP or Vista.

---

CheckUp 2.5 --- http://www.app4mac.com/ 

If you're concerned about the care and feeding of your Mac, you may want to check out this handy application. CheckUp 2.5, which is a multipurpose maintenance utility designed to monitor CPU usage, disk drive activity, and network adaptors. Users of this application can view detailed information about all running processes, and also tweak the application to remind them when certain conditions are met as regards to a specific resource. This version is compatible with computers running Mac OS X 10.5 and this is a trial version that can be used at no charge for thirty days.

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

The Global Book Project --- http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/books

The Global Text Project is further along at this point than I had envisioned.

Another open text project is as follows:

Community College Open-Textbook Project G
Especially note the open sharing sources being used

The Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting in California," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2008 --- Click Here

At the meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability,” according to a news release. They will initially review four providers of free online educational resources: Connexions, run by Rice University; Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin offering free textbooks online next year; the University of California’s UC College Prep Online, which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.

The open-textbook project was paid for by a $530,000 grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Education Tutorials

World Clock and World Facts --- http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University --- http://www.ethics.harvard.edu/

Understanding Records and Archives: Principles and Practices ---
http://michigan.educommons.net/school-of-information/understanding-records-and-archives

Inspiration:  Games Versus Teachers
"Creator of 'The Sims' Talks Educational Gaming," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/media/video/v55/i41.5/wright/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Introduction to (video) Game Design 2009 --- http://pod.gscept.com/intro2gd2009.xml
Bob Jensen's threads on networked learning simulations --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Simulation
Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and learning games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Bob Jensen's threads on virtual worlds in education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife

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

Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Laboratory Technique Videos --- http://www.chem.ualberta.ca/~orglabs/Techniques.html 

The Agnes Chamberlin Digital Collection (Botony) ---  http://chamberlin.library.utoronto.ca/

Magnetic Resonance Online Texts --- http://www.ebyte.it/library/refs/MROnlineTexts.html

Bill Gates purchased the rights to lectures by Richard Feynman and has initially made seven of them available free at http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
The catch is that you must install the Microsoft Silverlight browser add on (at no charge).
Richard Feynman is a very famous physicist --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

MedlinePlus: Diets --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/diets.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

Devolution --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution
BBC Special Reports: Devolution Decade
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/scotland/2009/devolution_decade/default.stm

Psychotherapy Networker --- http://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/ 

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

Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University --- http://www.ethics.harvard.edu/

Ethics Updates --- http://ethics.sandiego.edu/

Understanding Records and Archives: Principles and Practices ---
http://michigan.educommons.net/school-of-information/understanding-records-and-archives

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

Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Art New Media (multimedia) ---  http://www.lacma.org/art/webindex.aspx 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Conservation --- http://www.philamuseum.org/conservation/

History of Multiple Topics From War to Cooking
Virginia Tech: Special Collections' Digitized Manuscripts --- http://spec.lib.vt.edu/mss/pdf/index.html 

American History
DuBoisopedia --- http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/duboisopedia/doku.php 

Bill Gates purchased the rights to lectures by Richard Feynman and has initially made seven of them available free at http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
The catch is that you must install the Microsoft Silverlight browser add on (at no charge).
Richard Feynman is a very famous physicist --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

Understanding Records and Archives: Principles and Practices ---
http://michigan.educommons.net/school-of-information/understanding-records-and-archives

Devolution --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution
BBC Special Reports: Devolution Decade
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/scotland/2009/devolution_decade/default.stm

National Book Critics Circle --- http://bookcritics.org/

Caldwell Lighting: Shedding Light on New York --- http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/Caldwell/

"The Obsolete New York Model:  Where a tax-eating majority votes itself a permanent income," by Myron Magnet, New York's Tomorrow, July 2009 --- http://city-journal.org/2009/nytom_taxes.html 
Jensen Comment
This is a great and concise historical piece that zings in famous philosophers and economists. Good work.

From the Scout Report on July 17, 2009

Debates about the content and focus of United States history courses continue on in Texas The Culture Wars' New Front: U.S. History Classes in Texas http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124753078523935615.html 

Board of Education may face controversy over new curriculum http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/local/50619491.html 

Curriculum debate marred by ideologues http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/localnews/columnists/jfloyd/stories/071409dnmetfloyd.3d10b0e.html 

Texas Education Agency: Social Studies Expert Reviewers [pdf] http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/teks/social/experts.html 

Smithsonian Source: Resources for Teaching American History [Flash Player, pdf] http://www.smithsoniansource.org/ 

TeachingAmericanHistory [iTunes, Real Player] http://teachingamericanhistory.org/

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

Music Tutorials

UCSC Electronic Music Studios: Technical Essays
http://arts.ucsc.edu/ems/music/tech_background/tech_background.html

Red Hot Jazz Archive --- http://www.redhotjazz.com/

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

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/

July 14, 2009

• Statin Drugs May Cut Dementia Risk
• New Alzheimer's Disease Gene Identified
• Safer Tubs Needed for Fewer Bath Injuries
• Exercise Cuts Decline in Mental Skills
• Condoms Help Cut Risk of Genital Herpes
• New Implantable Lens Corrects Nearsightedness
• Regina Benjamin Picked as Surgeon General
• Menstrual Periods: Clues to Ovarian Cancer
• Go Ahead and Curse! It May Ease Your Pain
• Vegetable Protein Lowers Blood Pressure
• Fish Oil Supplements Boost Memory
• Drug Has Potential to Slow Aging

July 15, 2009

• Medtronic Recalls Insulin Infusion Sets
• Salmonella Risk Spurs Nature Valley Recall
• Overdose Warning for Pain Drug Propoxyphene
• FDA Warning on Stop-Smoking Drugs
• FDA May Restrict Acetaminophen
• Beef Recalled Due to E. coli Risk
• FDA Warns of E. coli Risk From Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough
• Dunkin' Donuts Suspends Certain Drinks
• Stamina-Rx Supplements Recalled
• 4 Asthma Drugs Get New Precaution

July 16, 2009

• Medtronic Recalls Insulin Infusion Sets
• Salmonella Risk Spurs Nature Valley Recall
• Overdose Warning for Pain Drug Propoxyphene
• FDA Warning on Stop-Smoking Drugs
• FDA May Restrict Acetaminophen
• Beef Recalled Due to E. coli Risk
• FDA Warns of E. coli Risk From Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough
• Dunkin' Donuts Suspends Certain Drinks
• Stamina-Rx Supplements Recalled
• 4 Asthma Drugs Get New Precaution

July 17, 2009

• Swine Flu Vaccine Fast-Tracked to September?
• Circumcising Men With HIV Won't Protect Women
• Naproxen May Help Prevent Alzheimer's
• FDA Checking Heart Risk of Xolair
• New Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough Safe
• Are You Breaking Swine Flu's Golden Rule?
• Brain Tumors: New Gene Clues
• Alzheimer's Gene Test: No Harm?
• DASH Diet Combats Mental Decline
• Pesticides May Raise Alzheimer's Risk
• Spouse Has Dementia? You're at Risk, Too
• U.S. Homes Losing Battle of the Germs

 

July 20, 2009

• FDA Checking Heart Risk of Xolair
• Medtronic Recalls Insulin Infusion Sets
• Salmonella Risk Spurs Nature Valley Recall
• Overdose Warning for Pain Drug Propoxyphene
• FDA Warning on Stop-Smoking Drugs
• FDA May Restrict Acetaminophen
• Beef Recalled Due to E. coli Risk
• FDA Warns of E. coli Risk From Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough
• Dunkin' Donuts Suspends Certain Drinks
• Stamina-Rx Supplements Recalled

July 21, 2009

• Beastie Boy Adam Yauch Has Salivary Gland Cancer
• Cut Hypertension Drugs With Low-Salt Diet
• Teethers Recalled Because of Bacteria Risk
• Swine Flu Vaccine: When?
• Curcumin May Prevent Clogged Arteries
• Tonsillectomy Helps Children Breathe, Sleep
• Americans Expect Serious Swine Flu Outbreak
• New Rankings of the Best U.S. Hospitals
• Strenuous Exercise Linked to Memory Loss
• FAQ: Making Sense of Health Care Reform
• DASH Diet Combats Mental Decline
• Circumcising Men With HIV Won't Protect Women

 

 

 

World Clock and Medical Facts --- http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

Radiation Sickness Cure Can't Come Too Soon for the People of Israel

"Cure for radiation sickness found?"  Ronen Bergman, Israel News, July 17, 2009 ---

Exclusive: Dramatic discovery by Jewish-American scientists could change world; anti-radiation medication proves effective, safe in tests. Further experiments to be fast tracked, FDA approval possible within 1-2 years

Medication that can protect humans against nuclear radiation has been developed by Jewish-American scientists in cooperation with a researcher and investors from Israel. The full story behind the dramatic discovery will be published in Yedioth Ahronoth's weekend edition.

The ground-breaking medication, developed by Professor Andrei Gudkov – Chief Scientific Officer at Cleveland BioLabs - may have far-reaching implications on the balance of power in the world, as states capable of providing their citizens with protection against radiation will enjoy a significant strategic advantage vis-à-vis their rivals.

For Israel, the discovery marks a particularly dramatic development that could deeply affect the main issue on the defense establishment's agenda: Protection against a nuclear attack by Iran or against "dirty bomb" attacks by terror groups.

Gudkov's discovery may also have immense implications for cancer patients by enabling doctors to better protect patients against radiation. Should the new medication enable cancer patients to be treated with more powerful radiation, our ability to fight the disease could greatly improve.

Dramatic test results The process that led up to the medical innovation dates back to 2003, when Professor Gudkov came up with the idea of using protein produced in bacteria found in the intestine to protect cells from radiation.

. . .

The experiment's results were dramatic: 70% of the monkeys that did not receive the cure died, while the ones that survived suffered from the various maladies associated with lethal nuclear radiation. However, the group that did receive the anti-radiation shot saw almost all monkeys survive, most of them without any side-effects. The tests showed that injecting the medication between 24 hours before the exposure to 72 hours following the exposure achieves similar results.

Another test on humans, who were given the drug without being exposed to radiation, showed that the medication does not have side-effects and is safe. Prof. Gudkov's company now needs to expand the safety tests, a process expected to be completed by mid-2010 via a shortened test track approved for bio-defense drugs. Should experiments continue at the current rate, the medication is estimated to be approved for use by the FDA within a year or two.

Continued in article

MedlinePlus: Diets --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/diets.html

Psychotherapy Networker --- http://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/ 

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Nothing like a good Bible story to make your day.

How Adam Got Eve

Adam was hanging around the garden of Eden feeling very lonely.

So, God asked him, 'What's wrong with you?'

Adam said he didn't have anyone to talk to.

God said that He was going to make Adam a companion and that it would be a woman.

He said, 'This pretty lady will gather food for you, she will cook for you, and when you discover clothing, she will wash them for you

She will always agree with every decision you make and she will not nag you, and will always be the first to admit she was wrong when you've had a disagreement.

She will praise you!

She will bear your children and never ask you to get up in the middle of the night to take care of them.

'She will NEVER have a headache and will freely give you love and passion whenever you need it.'

Adam asked God, 'What will a woman like this cost?'

'An arm and a leg.'

Then Adam asked, 'What can I get for just a rib

Of course the rest is history............!!!!

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 and World Facts --- http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

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

The Master List of Free Online College Courses --- http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

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