New Bookmarks
Year 2001 Quarter 1:  January 1-March 31 Additions to Bob Jensen's Bookmarks
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

You can change the viewing size of fonts by clicking on the View menu item in your browser.
For the January 1-March 31, 2001 Additions and Summaries scroll down this document 
For the other editions go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
For the full set of Bob Jensen's Bookmarks go to http://WWW.Trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm
    (The full set is never up to date with the latest additions to my New Bookmarks.)
Click here to go to Bob Jensen's home page http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

Choose a Date for Additions to the Bookmarks File

March 30, 2001        March 16, 2001           March 9, 2001           March 1, 2001

February 23, 2001    February 16, 2001       February 09, 2001     February 01, 2001

January 26, 2001      January 19, 2001        January 12, 2001       January 5, 2001 

 

Scroll down this page to view this week's new bookmarks. 

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

I maintain threads on various topics at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
 This search engine may get you some hits from other professors at Trinity University included with Bob Jensen's documents, but this may be to your benefit.

Whenever a commercial product or service is mentioned anywhere in Bob Jensen's website, there is no advertising fee or other remuneration to Bob Jensen.  This website is intended to be a public service.  I am grateful to Trinity University for serving up my ramblings.

March 30, 2001

Quotes of the Week

If you're not riding the wave of change...you'll find yourself beneath it.
As quoted on the bottom of email messages from Steve Gilmore.

Epitaph:  Though I have passed on, salesmen phone my apartment around dinnertime.
From the Dead Letter Office (See below)

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

A pat on the back is only a short distance from a kick in the pants.

Every problem solved introduces a new unsolved problem.

Flying is hours, and hours, and hours and hours of sheer boredom interrupted by a few moments of stark terror.
Sgt. Merrill Manlove (after his single engine Beechcraft Bonanza iced up and forced a scary but successful landing in Terra Haute, Michigan.

A marriage is made in heaven, but . . . so are thunder and lightening.

Wow High Tech University and Wow Soaring Nation of the Week

I just returned from a week of lecturing in Mexico at both the Monterrey Tech onsite campus and the Monterrey Tech Virtual University.  I want to say that I am impressed by what is happening in Monterrey Tech and in Mexico in general.  See http://www.itesm.mx/ 

Adobe Systems on Monday announced Atmosphere, a set of new software and tools for authoring and viewing three-dimensional Web sites --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103274/2701258/ 

Have you experienced the beta version of Internet Explorer yet? IE 6 features all kinds of CSS and privacy enhancements, plus full support for the XSL 1.0 standard, a built-in MP3 player, the ability to turn off meta refreshes, and more --- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/download/preview/ie6/ie6preview.asp 

For CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/download/preview/ie6/ie6preview.asp 

For XSL (eXstensible Style Sheet) language see http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/ 

My links to MP3 can be found at  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm#Resources  
(You have to scroll down a bit after you arrive at the above spot.)

On the negative side of IE6, Web site privacy rating capability and cookie management features need work --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103271/2700809/ 

Education Technology Update From Syllabus News on March 27, 2001

eCollege Releases Campus Author Tool

eCollege, an eLearning software and services provider, recently announced the availability of its Campus Author tool, enabling administrators to change and update their online campuses in real time, without any knowledge of HTML. The tool is already being used by 12 institutions. Campus Author is another use of eCollege's Visual Editor tool that has already been implemented in its course delivery system and adopted by faculty to edit and format online courses. Campus Author provides administrators 24x7 (this means every hour of every day) access to and control of their eCollege-powered online campus, whether the institution uses the company's CampusPortal, Premium Campus Gateway, or Campus Gateway. Using the tool, administrators can view their edits in a preview mode before the changes go live.

For more information, visit http://www.eCollege.com .

Note that eCollege is a heavily capitalized company that serves up quality courses from various major state universities.
For courses available online see http://www.ecollege.com/student/ 

There are not many respected doctoral programs online, but eCollege led me to the Doctoral Program in Pharmacology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.  

How is the University of Arizona delivering searchable streaming video?

Education Technology Update from Syllabus News on March 27, 2001

Virage, Inc., a provider of software and services that enable video for strategic online applications, recently announced that the University of Arizona is using the Virage Internet Video Application Platform to provide searchable streaming video of select courses at a university Web site. The initiative, which is part of the university's Virtual Adaptive Learning Architecture (VALA) research grant and the Faculty Center for Instructional Innovation (FCII), demonstrates an improved method of capturing, containing, and circulating information within academic institutions. Under the initiative, professors have the option of videotaping classroom lectures and streaming the video content in a searchable online format from a University of Arizona Web site, where students can then search for specific course material and review lectures at any time. The university is currently streaming 8 classes and plans to expand the technology into the new integrated learning center when it opens for the Spring 2002 semester. In addition to university classroom activities, the project is also archiving programs from the local PBS affiliate including a daily news program.

For more information, visit http://www.virage.com/. 

A new accounting research paper entitled "The Knowledge Scorecard" is available from Baruch Lev at http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~blev/newnew.html 

Takeaway Points in the Paper

Top of the Line Evaluations of e-Learning Programs --- Lguide at http://www.lguide.com/ 
(The evaluations are not free, but the listings of programs are free.)

Lguide.com empowers e-learning decisions for business professionals. As a leading e-learning research and consulting organization, we offer in-depth, authoritative analysis of e-learning products and services. We have developed a sophisticated methodology for reviewing Web-based training, and have reviewed over 1,500 products to date. We leverage this industry expertise in several ways: we provide e-learning consulting services to corporate clients, and we offer a subscription site with access to a full library of e-learning research and analysis, and we publish stand-alone research reports on the e-learning industry. Leading associations, publications, and companies in the e-learning industry have come to rely on us as a definitive source of e-learning research and analysis, including the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), Online Learning magazine, Click2Learn, THINQ, and Headlight.com

You can sign up for a free trial view of Lguide reviews.  Categories of online courses in the area of "Business" are as follows:

Accounting and Finance
Communication
Customer Service
E-Business
Human Resources
International Business
Management Skills
Managing People
Managing Performance
Managing Teams
Organizational Development
Project Management
Safety and Health/OSHA
Sales, Marketing, and Business Development
Small Business and Nonprofit Management
Supply Chain Management

Lguide Releases the First Authoritative Analysis and Directory of E-Learning Publishers http://www.lguide.com/index.cfm?application=services&page=reports 
(The price is relatively high for academe --- $999.99.  Do you really want that penny back in change?  However, the report may be a useful reference in a college library, especially for colleges toying with content and delivery ideas for online courses.   This report provides rankings by content, which is something that is very difficult or impossible to find elsewhere at the present time.)

Report examines the present state of the industry and future trends, evaluating 40 top e-learning publishers and their courseware, and includes a comprehensive industry directory.

Tacoma, WA (March 12, 2001)-- Lguide, a leading independent e-learning research and consulting firm, today announced the release of a groundbreaking research report: "E-Learning Course Publishers: A Comparative Analysis and Industry Directory." The first of its kind, this report allows both e-learning consumers and industry members to understand who's who and which companies have the best products in a very confusing marketplace.

Reaction to the report from corporate training managers has been overwhelmingly positive.

"Lguide's E-Learning Course Publishers: Comparative Analysis and Industry Directory is an excellent source for ALL the information you need when considering the purchase of online training content," said Deborah Bauer, Director of Development Services for Dell Computer Corporation. "It provides in-depth information by content or vendor as well as graphs that give you an excellent overview by subject area. I've worked with teams of folks over many weeks just to compile a small fraction of all the data contained in this report."

Industry analysts are unanimous in their praise of the report. The report provides "a comprehensive roadmap," which "ought to result in the continued advance of e-learning," said Trace Urden, e-learning analyst for WR Hambrecht and Co. Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Marostica called the report a "very comprehensive, easy-to-follow resource, and a must have guidebook for anyone who is faced with the daunting challenge of evaluating the myriad of e-learning offerings on the market."

Wow Portals of the Week

Important Knowledge Portals for Business Educators and Researchers
Some of the portals added to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

Also see Bob Jensen's Threads on Knowledge Portals at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm 

************************************************************************************

Rutgers University's Research & Reference Gateway: Research Guides: Business
http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/busi/business.shtml 

While the Dana Library is designated the business research library of the Rutgers University Libraries, materials in business and related areas can also be found at the Alexander Library, with its strong United States, foreign and international documents collections; the Kilmer Library, serving the School of Business in New Brunswick; the Robeson Library, which supports the School of Business in Camden; and the School of Management and Labor Relations Library, which focuses on industrial relations.

For example, the Accounting option above leads you to the following links:

Page Contents:

************************************************************************************

Harvard Business School's Project Finance

I am repeating a notice on Harvard's Project Finance that I put in the March 16 edition of New Bookmarks, because this will one day be a very important portal even though its glossary disappoints me at the moment.

Harvard Business School Project Finance Portal http://www.hbs.edu/projfinportal/ 
     (the HBS Project Finance Portal's Glossary is at http://www.dbsa.org/privatesector/project_finance.htm
      I found this glossary to be very disappointing from a portal that is in other respects outstanding.)
     A better set of glossaries can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbus.htm 

Some of Harvard's Project Finance Portal links are called "General Project Finance Links" at http://www.hbs.edu/projfinportal/generalpfhtm.htm 

Global Development Project Finance & Project Management Information

InfrastructureWorld.com:  This site is designed to assist project sponsors, developers, service providers, and other professionals in completing project finance transactions.  It also contains 1000's of useful links.

Institute of International Project Financing

International Project Finance Association

Project Finance Glossary

PrivateFinance-i.com:  PrivateFinance is the ultimate resource for online PFI/PPP news, research and market information, and supports business-to-business services by uniting buyers and sellers and enabling online transactions.

Turin Group

The main Project Finance Website is at http://www.hbs.edu/projfinportal/ 

************************************************************************************

The University of Kansas International Business Resource Connection http://www.ibrc.bschool.ukans.edu/ 

The IBRC, a business outreach program of the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) within the School of Business at the University of Kansas, was created to encourage trade opportunities and expand international business education. Through strategic alliances with major partners (including the U.S. Department of Education and the Kauffman Foundation), private sector affiliates, faculty and students at the University of Kansas, the IBRC assists small and medium-sized Kansas companies explore available trade opportunities and broaden international business skills. Particular emphasis is placed on the emerging role of electronic communication resources (the Internet) in developing international business opportunities for firms located in the heartland of the United States.

Also, don't forget Paul Pacter's great international accounting site at http://www.iasplus.com/ 

************************************************************************************

Helpers for Marketing Students and Educators --- MarketingProfs.com --- http://www.marketingprofs.com/ 

Home Page

Home
Market Scope
e-Marketing
The Ivory Tower

Marketing Resources
Books

Tutorials

Marketing FAQs

Other marketing links can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

************************************************************************************

One opinion on the top 10 investment resource sites.
InvestMove.com --- www.investmove.com 

Top Ten Financial Portals
     1. Yahoo Finance
     2. MSN MoneyCentral
     3. Quicken.com
     4. Wall Street City
     5. Inter@ctive Investor
     6. Motley Fool
     7. Wall Street Research Net
     8. Morningstar
     9. Stockmaster
   10. Silicon Investor

Other top investment and finance portals

Yahoo's picks of the top finance web sites --- http://www.zdnet.com/zdsubs/yahoo/content/101most/101finance.html 

Top 50 Financial Websites --- Money.com http://www.money.com/money/depts/websmart/bestweb/index.html 

Advanced Stock Information http://www.stockadvanced.com/ (note that ratios are available)

Enter a symbol and click "go!" to get the following information: Stock Prices, Options, Stock Splits, Charts, Live Stock Quotes, Stock Performance, Earnings Estimates, Analyst Opinions, Company Performance, Stock Valuation, Broker Reports, Company Profile, Earnings Release Dates, Latest News, Fundamentals, Intraday Charts, Forum Discussions, Technical Charts, Annual Reports, Significant Events, Institutional Ownership, Financial Ratios, Insider Trading, SEC Filings, Financial Statements, Stock Dividends, Competition, Momentum Rating, Management Discussion, Conference Calls, Short Interest, and more.

From the Scout Report --- Business.com http://www.business.com/ 

The owners of this lucrative URL address have sponsored a Web directory created by a "team of 50 research analysts [that] has sifted through the Web to find relevant sites for our handcrafted Directory." All Websites in this 30-category directory have been annotated. The annotations, however, tend to be very terse and a bit vague. First time users are encouraged to skim over the excellent site guide, which gives a step-by-step manual for using the site as well as in-depth explanations of the terminology and taxonomy.

Financial Risk Links --- http://victoryrisk.com/ 

Center for Financial Research & Analysis, Inc.

CFRA, Inc. Launches Free On-Line Service for Academic Community

Rockville, MD - August 1 - The Center for Financial Research & Analysis (CFRA, Inc.), a leading provider of independent research to over 2,000 institutional investors, will now offer an academic version of its product to professors and their students. Since there is no cost for this service, its use is restricted for research and teaching purposes.

What's included with the Academic Version?

1. Access to all educational pieces in our database. 2. Access to selected company-specific reports that focus on quality of earnings issues 3. Weekly e-mail notification of new companies added to the database

Who qualifies for this service and how can you sign up?

All professors teaching courses in financial accounting, auditing, and finance qualify. To sign up, click on the URL http://www.cfraonline.com  and register. Then sign and fax the agreement to (301) 984 8617. Once activated, you will have access to the Academic Version of CFRA's database.

About CFRA

CFRA has become known internationally for its pioneering research ferreting out companies with operational problems that use unusual accounting practices to camouflage such practices. Founded in 1994 by Dr. Howard M. Schilit following a 20 year career as an accounting professor (author of FINANCIAL SHENANIGANS: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks and Fraud in Financial Reports) http://www.cfraonline.com/publications/publications.jsp#FinancialShenanigans  CFRA provides a daily on-line news wire of financial analysis and a database on over 900 companies. Its mission is to warn investors and creditors about companies experiencing operational problems and particularly those that employ unusual or aggressive accounting practices to camouflage such problems.

Howard Schilit
 http://www.cfraonline.com  
301-984-1001 ext. 105

Investment Tutorials and Glossary
From the Scout Report on March 22, 2001

Investopedia Tutorials http://www.investopedia.com/university/ 

Investopedia (reviewed in the September 7, 2000 _Scout Report for Business & Economics_) presents this wonderful collection of investment education tutorials. Tutorials are divided into two sections. The Building Blocks section provides investment basics including reading financial tables, retirement planning, and the P/E ratio. The intermediate tutorials offered in More Advanced Tutorials section include the Federal Reserve, inflation, and buying on margin. The tutorials are information-rich, clearly written, and link to terms found in the Investopedia glossary. However, they lack accompanying illustrations, save for a few charts and graphs.

Learn 2 Read the US Stock Market Page http://www.learn2.com/05/0522/05228.asp 

Mutual Fund Investing Helpers from Consumer Reports "Survival of the Fittest"  http://www.consumerreports.org/Special/Samples/Reports/0103mut0.html 

ABCs of  Figuring Interest http://www.chicagofed.org/publications/abcsinterest/abcsinterest.cfm 

Two federal laws have been passed to minimize some of the confusion consumers face when they borrow or lend money. The Truth in Lending Act, passed in 1968, has made it easier for consumers to comparison shop when they borrow money. Similarly, the purpose of the Truth in Savings Act, passed in 1991, is to assist consumers in comparing deposit accounts offered by depository institutions.

Provisions of the Truth in Lending Act have been implemented through the Federal Reserve's Regulation Z, which defines creditor responsibilities. Most importantly, creditors are required to disclose both the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) and the total dollar Finance Charge to the borrowing consumer. Simply put, the APR is the relative cost of credit expressed in percentage terms on the basis of one year. Just as "unit pricing" gives the consumer a basis for comparing prices of different-sized packages of the same product, the APR enables the consumer to compare the prices of different loans regardless of the amount, maturity, or other terms.

Similarly, provisions of the Truth in Savings Act have been implemented through the Federal Reserve's Regulation DD. These provisions include a requirement that depository institutions disclose an annual percentage yield (APY) for interest-bearing deposit accounts. Like the APR, an APY will provide a uniform basis for comparison by indicating, in percentage terms on the basis of one year, how much interest a consumer receives on a deposit account.

While federal laws make it easier to comparison shop for credit and deposit accounts, a variety of methods continue to be used to calculate the amount of interest paid or earned by a consumer. To make an informed decision, it is useful to understand the relationships between these different methods.

Education Statistics Quarterly_ http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/quarterly/winter/ 

For other links, go to "Education Statistics" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm 

Has anybody seen a comparison review of Endnote versus eGems? It would appear that Endnote is mainly focused on the writing of a paper or book, whereas eGems is more focused on ease of grabbing and classifying scraps (gems) of information that you encounter in Web browsing or computer document reading in general. As they say in Texas, I "fix'in" to try one or the other or both, but before doing so, it would be nice to get feedback from current users.

Endnote 4 is a software product used by authors to manage bibliographies.  You can download a trial version and a tutorial from http://www.endnote.com/ENhome.htm 

More than 250,000 researchers, scholarly writers, students, and librarians use EndNote to search online bibliographic databases, organize their references, and create bibliographies instantly and automatically. Instead of spending hours typing bibliographies, or using index cards to organize their references, they do it the easy way--by using EndNote! EndNote for Windows and Macintosh is a valuable all-in-one tool that integrates the following tasks into one program:

Remember my Wow Site of the Week on March 2.  It was eGems at http://www.egems.com/ 

Everyday, you come across valuable gems of information. The problem is, they're usually scattered far and wide — throughout web sites, emails, desktop applications, databases, graphics and virtual libraries.

eGems™ Collector Pro lets you change those rich nuggets of research into powerful gems of knowledge — quickly, easily and without losing their accompanying source. You simply "grab and drop" discrete pieces of information as you find and need them.

eGems™ Collector Pro helps researchers, writers, analysts, professors and students work faster and more efficiently. It's absolutely invaluable for anyone who re-uses verifiable information! Take a look at the many features and benefits!

Reply from Jim McKinney [mckinney@WAM.UMD.EDU] 

There is also ProCite, Endnote's direct competitor to consider.

The Procite homepage is at http://www.procite.com/ 

Reply from Roger Debreceny [rogerd@NETBOX.COM] 

Actually ProCite is now in the same stable as EndNote (see http://www.endnote.com/ENabout.htm ) along with Reference Manager .. ISI Research. EndNote was sold by Niles Research, the original developer.

I have been a user of ProCite and then EndNote for many years. I use it for every paper I write as well as for the preparation of teaching materials. I also make extensive use of the Internet connectivity.

A bibliographic database is one of the most important tools that an academic can use .. I'm always amazed how many colleagues have either not heard of EndNote or, if they have heard of it, don't use it. I can only assume that PhD programs do not have a skills element?

Idea Site of the Week

Although medreview.com is a medical review site, it has some features that academic associations and commercial providers (such as CPA Review providers) might consider implementing --- http://www.medrevu.com/ 

Chances are somewhere through your medical school career, you’ve used a gross anatomy book with blue boxes emphasizing clinical relevance, a pink checkerboard-covered review book for pathology, and a question/answer series of books that go by the name of “Recall.” That’s us…. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. For over 100 years, students have relied on us for quality medical school course and board review products. In fact, we make a science out of review.

Now, we meet your needs even further with medrevu.com. The purpose of the site is to be the Internet resource offering you personalized educational tools for your success through professional schooling and beyond. We offer a variety of online review products with the same high quality you have come to expect from our print products.

medrevu.com is partnered with Medsite.com, a leading service provider to the medical student community, to offer you even more.

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins is a global publisher of medical, nursing, and allied health information resources in book, journal, newsletter, looseleaf, and electronic media formats. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins is a unit of Wolters Kluwer International Health & Science (WKIHS). WKIHS is a group of leading publishing companies offering specialized publications and software in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, science, and related areas. WKIHS also includes Ovid Technologies, New York; Facts and Comparisons, St. Louis; Adis International, Auckland, New Zealand; and Kluwer Academic Publishing, The Netherlands. The Company is headquartered in historic Old City Philadelphia and continues to maintain offices in Baltimore, MD; New York, NY; Hagerstown, MD; as well as London, Australia, and Hong Kong. Medrevu.com is staffed out of the Baltimore office.

• Unlimited monthly access to the irevu Bank, a database with more than 5,500 questions for USMLE Step 1 and Step 2
• Personal assessment based on cumulative score tracking
• Diagnostic 180, a comprehensive 3-hour/180-question simulated test for both USMLE Step 1 and Step 2
• PDA downloads of our best-selling Recall Series for the Palm™, TRGPro™, Visor™, and Pocket PC

Take the tour or jump right in by visiting our product selection. From the publishers you trust for the best in review—Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

From Syllabus e-News on March 20, 2001

O'Reilly Network Provides JavaScript Web Resources

A new Web site provides developers with JavaScript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) resources, enabling them to create richer and more sophisticated Web sites. The site is part of the O'Reilly Network, located at http://www.oreillynet.com , an online resource for open and emerging technologies. The Java Script and CSS site features JavaScript experts' practical articles linked to a library of useful samples of programming code, as well as out-of-box solutions for applications. It also includes an RSS JavaScript feed pulling content from a wide variety of sites and newsgroups, the O'Reilly JavaScript/CSS book catalog, reader "Talk Backs," and feature articles. Two additional columns are the JavaScript and Web Design column, and the weekly JavaScript and CSS column.

* Increased Accessibility for Physically Disabled Computer Users

Gyration, a supplier of wireless, motion-sensing input devices, recently announced a new partnership with Boost Technology, a manufacturer of products for the assistive technology market. Boost Technology's signature product, a head-controlled computer mouse called the Tracer, will incorporate Gyration's GyroPoint Technology, a unique method by which an inertial motion sensor detects natural movement to control a cursor on a remote display. Users suffering from debilitating diseases and other physical conditions that make traditional means of cursor control difficult or impossible will enjoy precise control and a seamless user interface. The Tracer will also adopt Gyration's RF technology, providing reliable communication without line-of- sight limitations for the user.

For more information, visit http://www.boosttechnology.com/  or http://www.gyration.com .

Techlearn 2001 at http://www.techlearn2001.com/ features the following learning system demonstrations.

Technical Learning Demos Linked at http://www.techlearn2001.com/ 
Product demos
Building E-Business (Harvard Business School Publishing)
Element K (Element K)
KnowledgeNet EXPRESS (KnowledgeNet)
KnowledgeNet INTERACTIVE (KnowledgeNet)
KnowledgeNet LIVE (KnowledgeNet)
learningVista (TM) - a new learning management solution (GlobalLearningSystems)
Lectora Publisher (Trivantis Corporation)
Microsoft LRN Courses (CyberstateU.com) (CyberStateU.com)
MoneyMaker - The Simulator for Sales Professionals (Intermezzon)
Oracle iLearning - Learning Community Management System (Oracle Corporation)
Prime eLearning System™ (PrimeLearning.com™ )
SkillSoft NetUniversity, SkillPort and Web Based Courseware (SkillSoft )
VIS Custom e-Learning Services (VIS Corporation)

The Techlearn 2001 website also features a long listing of E-learning products and services at 
http://www.techlearn.net/elab/layout.cfm?header=mainheader&page=product_selector 

Assessment Tools
Associations
Audio Video Equipment
Auditing Tools
Books and Printed Materials
Collaboration Systems
Consulting Services
Courseware
Development Services
Enterprise Learning Systems
Instructional Design Services
Learning Management Systems
Learning Service Providers
Performance Support Systems
Simulations
Streaming Technology
Technology Delivered Learning
Testing
Videoconferencing
Virtual Classroom Systems

"Binge-Drinking-Related Consequences in College Students: Role of Drinking Beliefs and Mother—Teen Communications<"
by Rob Turrisi, Kimberly A. Wiersma, and Kelli K. Hughes in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, December 2000, 342-355.

The present research contrasted theoretical models depicting the nature of the relation among drinking beliefs, drinking tendencies, and behavioral consequences in 266 incoming freshman college students. It also examined the theoretical relations between mother—teen communications and drinking beliefs relevant to behavioral consequences. The findings revealed direct relations between binge-drinking consequences and the drinking beliefs: Alcohol can make positive transformations, can enhance social behavior, and can increase negative affect and normative approval. Direct relations were not observed between consequences and the drinking beliefs regarding physical risk and health orientation. Finally, the present research found consistent support for the relation between mother—teen communications and drinking beliefs relevant to binge-drinking consequences.

Rental software from e-academy.com --- http://www.e-academy.com/ 

We provide innovative digital distribution and content management solutions to administrators, faculty, and software/text publishers for higher education.

Our industry-leading technologies and full customer service are helping the academic community in the transition to the Internet age with secure electronic software distribution, volume license management, semester-based software licensing, and multi-media course materials.

Secure, simple and leading-edge, e-academy helps you bring digital content to higher education with a clear vision to reduce costs and enhance service to academic communities.

A Yahoo Pick of the Week on March 19, 2001

21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com --- http://www.mikedaisey.com/ 

Actor and playwright Mike Daisey witnessed quite a bit during his two-year stint at Amazon.com, and because his Non-Disclosure Agreement recently expired, Mike is free to share many of those experiences with the public. If you live in the greater Seattle area, you can go see the one-man stage show (through March 31st), but don't worry if you're not a denizen of the Northwest -- there's plenty of interesting fodder on the web site about the "slavishly love idealistic mouthbreathers, sixty-hour weeks, and the cult of personality that is Jeff Bezos." Don't miss the fan letters -- quite a few people write in with personal experiences of the dot-com rise and fall. And if you have about an hour to kill, watch the webcast of the show.

Forwarded by Dick Burr:

Author(s): Baker, Nicholson. 
Title: The author vs. the library. San Francisco Public Library's controversial weeding of collection 
Source: The New Yorker v. 72 (Oct. 14 1996) p. 50-3+ Journal

Abstract: The San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) is a case study of what can happen when telecommunications enthusiasts attempt to transform big old research libraries into high-traffic showplaces for information technology. Such changes, happening to varying degrees in a number of U.S. cities, devour unforecastably large amounts of money. For that reason, the SFPL is essentially broke, despite receiving a good percentage of the city budget each year from the "Preserving Libraries Fund." It would be churlish to highlight the shortcomings of the SFPL's plans to become a "library of the future" by moving to a new building were it not for the fact that it has, by a conservative estimate, sent more than 200,000 books to landfills. When it was realized that the New Main Library would not be able to house the present stock, let alone any new accessions, the solution was to "weed" the library's collection. Many of the discarded books were old, out of print, hard to find, and valuable. The writer discusses the library's tactics and his own efforts to combat them.

eLawyers?
LegalZoom Legal Documentation Service --- http://www.legalzoom.com/ 

Take care of common legal matters from your home or office! Created by top attorneys, LegalZoom uses the latest technology to help you prepare reliable legal documents online.

Once you complete a simple questionnaire, your documents will be prepared within 48 hours. We even review your documents and file them with the courts at no additional cost.

Choose a Procedure Copyrights Corporations Divorce Living Trust Living Wills LLCs Prenuptials Restraining Orders Trademarks Wills

Helpers in Tax Season from Scott Bonacker

This is some of the information I found on the internet, any additions to the list or comments would be welcome.

A survey of used clothing values can be purchased at: http://www.itsdeductible.com/  For their press releases see: http://www.itsdeductible.com/content/content_pr.html 

There are also some free guides at: http://www.salvationarmy.org/safaq.nsf/(all)/21D4E8A485DAB6D8802568F9006A045 

 http://www.cpasnet.com/mmm/1197.html 

Scott Bonacker, CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com

The new worm is capable of changing network settings, stealing passwords and eliminating security measures, setting up an infected machine for further attacks.  http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103232/2700665/ 

Computer security experts have unearthed a new worm that they say is spreading rapidly on the Internet and is capable of changing network settings, stealing passwords and eliminating some security measures, setting up the infected machine for further attacks.

Known as the Lion worm, the virus spreads through an application called "randb," which infects Linux machines running version 8 of the BIND DNS software, one of several iterations that are known to have numerous security vulnerabilities.

Lion scans random networks, probing TCP port 53, looking for potential targets.

The Columbia Encyclopedia is now online (free) at http://www.bartleby.com/65/ 

Also see the following from Bob Jensen's Bookmarks at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

Eyewitness Encyclopedia (over 40,000 pictures and 2 million terms) --- http://eyewitness.dk.com/ 
eBLAST : Encyclopædia Britannica's Internet Guide
Encyclopedia of the New Economy
The Funk & Wagnalls Knowledge Center
The Canadian Encyclopedia (History) http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ 
Alternative Cultures http://www.altculture.com/
NatureServe - an encyclopedia of North American plants, animals, and ecology. --- http://www.natureserve.org
SYMBOLS.com -- encyclopedia of Western signs and ideograms

Great resource site for educators

I think that everyone has hit the nail on the head. What is the purpose of a listserv, if you can't read the e-mails, get an idea or respond to an idea? I use the listserv, daily, in my job and it relates very nice to what I am doing. So, I do appreciate the listserv and the all of the recommended info. Speaking of all of that, here is a site where I find lots of great ideas: http://www.sitesforteachers.com/cgi-bin/autorank/rankem.cgi?id=jory 

Steven Gilmore [joryyroj@HOTMAIL.COM] 
Department of Education & Cultural Affairs Curriculum Technology Specialist 
700 Governors Dr. 
Pierre, SD 57501 (605) 773-2489...Office (605) 280-1248

Non-hierarchical Website Navigation

OLAP, as defined in my Technology Glossary, stands for Online Analytical Processing database designs in which data can be analyzed from a multidimensional point of view. A great example is given online at the FedScope Website of the U.S. Government. Whereas a relational database can be thought of as two-dimensional, a multidimensional database considers each data attribute (such as product, geographic sales region, and time period) as a separate "dimension." OLAP software can locate the intersection of dimensions (all products sold in the Eastern region above a certain price during a certain time period) and display them. Attributes such as time periods can be broken down into sub-attributes.

I recall that somebody requested information regarding non-hierarchical organization of data and information in Websites. For example, reference was given to The Brain at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm#TheBrain 

I stumbled upon a rather unique website that organizes data in a way that may interest some of you. It has possibilities for online training and education site designs. The site is called FedScope from the Office of Personnel Management of the U.S. Government --- http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/index.htm 

FedScope is an On Line Analytic Processing tool which provides a free and easy way to access and analyze a large array of Federal employment data on your own.  

FedScope uses multidimensional data sources called "Cubes".  A FedScope cube brings together 13 key dimensions (data elements) on the Federal workforce and lets you explore any combination of the data: up, down, and across the dimensions.

You can easily

Online Glossary of Online Terms from the Office of Personnel Management of the U.S. Government --- http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/glossary/index.htm
(This glossary has a somewhat unique design for online users.)

The U.S. Government has some other outstanding examples of Website design, including the revamped SEC site at http://www.sec.gov/  and the ever-popular IRS site at http://www.irs.gov/ 

From Phil Livingston in FEI Express on March 26, 2001

In case you missed it, FEI was featured prominently in Friday's Wall Street Journal. The subject was the growing use of pro forma earnings in press releases. In a recent meeting with the SEC, leaders from our Committee on Corporate Reporting agreed to explore the development of a best practices recommendation for earnings press releases. While many companies have legitimate reasons for employing pro forma earnings, many others are omitting or burying the actual GAAP results. Our best practices statement is in draft form, but should be available on our website ( http://www.fei.org ) within the next month. To read the article, search Friday's edition at http://www.wsj.com. 

Last week, I had the pleasure of moderating a great discussion with four leading CFOs. Harry Harczak of CDW Computers offered his insight into how CDW achieved and maintained its place on the list of America's best companies to work for. Rebecca Maskey of Click Commerce discussed her company's current search for a new enterprise financial reporting system, as well as the cost and the planning involved. Cary McMillan of Sara Lee talked about the CFO's role in providing "passionate objectivity" for the challenges facing management teams. And finally, Joan Ryan of Tellabs talked about the M&A environment in the telecommunications industry, and gave her thoughts about current market conditions. Three of the four interviews are available online today on our Video Center: http://www.fei.org/media/ . Check back for updates as we add more.

Kathy Zirolli of AETNA recently created a great summary of FEI/CCR responses to audit committee questions. It includes examples of what other companies are doing regarding the threshold for audit committee approval of non-audit services, and audit committee recommendations that the audited financial statements be included in the company's 10-K. Read the document on the FEI site, at http://www.fei.org/finrep/summaryauditcomm.cfm. 

Comic Strips
From the University of Southern Mississippi
This history of Curious George, The Life and Work of H. A. and Margret Rey --- http://www.lib.usm.edu/~degrum/virtualtour/opener.htm 

Comic Strips
Charles M. Schulz Museum --- Snoopy and the gang ---  http://www.charlesmschulzmuseum.org/  

Women In American History --- http://www.britannica.com/women/ 

What are ADRs?  http://www.global-investor.com/cgi-bin/shr/pascal.pl?sid=global-investor&pid=adrs_about 

Because there can be problems in dealing in unfamiliar foreign markets, Depositary Receipts were devised as a method of trading international securities (equity or debt) within the U.S.

This involves depositing the ordinary securities from the foreign market with a bank (called the depositary), who will then issue certificates in the U.S. that represent (and are backed by) the deposited securities. These certificates are freely traded and are commonly called American Depositary Receipts (or Depositary Receipts for short, or sometimes Global Depositary Receipts for marketing purposes).

The attractions of ADRs

The main appeal is that they are U.S. securities: this means that they are covered by U.S. securities regulations; trade and settlement is similar to any other U.S. security; and quoted prices and dividends are in U.S. Dollars.

Because of the above, investment by funds and institutions is possible, where perhaps they would otherwise be prevented from investing directly in foreign markets.

Investing directly in international securities may incur global custodian fees - these are not required with ADRs.

ADR prices and liquidity will track very closely the underlying security as any deviation will be quickly corrected by traders exploiting an easy arbitrage opportunity. Although ADRs may have been devised originally for U.S. investors, all of their attractions can be equally applicable for foreign investors.

For example, an investor in Kuwait may be interested in buying shares in Telefonica De Argentina, in which case the U.S. traded Depositary Receipts may be more attractive than dealing direct in the Argentine market.

In addition to the advantages above, the investor would be able to look at price history charts and follow real-time prices (as with any other U.S. security), transaction fees could be less and the foreign currency investment may be more competitive than converting funds to Argentine Dollars directly.

The types of ADR A similarity obviously exists between ADRs and covered warrants (or OTC options) As with the latter, there is frequently nothing to stop anybody buying some shares in a company and then issuing Depositary Receipts representing those shares - without consulting, or acting with the accord, of the company itself. These are termed unsponsored Depositary Receipts, and in the early days of the ADR market they were quite common. Today, however, nearly all ADRs are sponsored, whereby companies sign a Deposit Agreement with a bank acting as the depositary.

There are then a few different types (or levels) of ADR:

Sponsored Level 1: this is the simplest method for foreign companies to issue tradable securities in the U.S. markets. The ADRs are not listed, and are traded over-the-counter (OTC). The attraction to the companies of not listing is that they do not have to adapt any reporting procedures to comply with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) or Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure.

Sponsored Level 2: if the company wishes the shares to be listed then they have to satisfy the procedures mentioned above, and further comply with the listing rules of whichever exchange they choose. This stage actually comprises many different levels, depending on the type of visibility the company desires - and therefore the type of listing they choose.

Private placement (144A): instead of publicly traded securities, a company may wish to make a private placement to large institutional investors in the U.S. (which will not require SEC registration). The ADR market There are now over 1,500 ADRs from over 50 countries; and the majority of these are OTC (Level 1 type). In many cases the ADRs may constitute 5-15% of the total shareholder base for a company.

The depositaries for the ADRs tend to be concentrated among a very few banks; the most active of which are: Bank of New York, Citibank, and Morgan Guaranty Trust.

ADR Holders Find They Have Unequal Rights By Craig Karmin The Wall Street Journal, 03/01/01 Page C1

ARTICLE URL: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB983398241631137607.djm 

From WSJEducatorsReviews [WSJEducatorsReviews@dowjones.com] on March 8, 2001

TOPICS: American depositary receipts (ADRs), shareholder rights, financial accounting, financial statement analysis, managerial accounting

Holders of American Depositary Receipts in BP Amoco are finding that they don't have all the rights of local shareholders in the firm.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: 1. What is an American Depositary Receipt or ADR? How many foreign companies offer ADRs? What is the total value of these ADRs? How much did foreign companies raise through ADRs last year?

2. Read the short description of ADRs at the following website: http://www.global-investor.com/index.htm   about How many levels of ADRs are there? How do you think foreign firms choose between the different levels of ADRs?

3. Compare and contrast the rights of owning an ADR versus owning a share in the company. Why do U.S. investors find investing in ADRs more attractive than buying shares directly?

4. Why do you think ADR owners have different rights regarding sponsoring shareholder resolutions and voting on them than ordinary shareholders? Suppose they were given the same rights as ordinary shareholders, what voting rights should the financial institution issuing the ADRs (and owning the underlying shares) have? How should a conflict of voting desires between the ADR owner and the issuing institution be handled by the foreign firm?

5. What is the difference between a sponsored and an unsponsored ADR? Would your answers to the previous question (4) be affected by whether the ADR were sponsored or unsponsored?

Wow Idea to Help Educators:  A Message to All Journal Editors
The above WSJ service is great for suggesting how educators can use selected WSJ articles in the classroom.  The Journal of American History does something similar for using its articles in the classroom.  

Teaching the Journal of American History --- http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/index.shtml 

Teaching the JAH uses online tools to bridge the gap between the latest scholarly research in U.S. history and the practice of classroom teaching. JAH authors demonstrate how featured articles might be taught in a U.S. history survey course.

Speaking of history --- Everything Postmodern ---  http://www.ebbflux.com/postmodern/intro.html 

Dear Prof. Jensen

First a thank you for your efforts to share as much of your work and thinking as you can by way of what is served up on your website. As I worked to familiarize myself with changes in the accounting standards area as they relate to financial instruments and to think a bit about how and what to present to my fourth year undergrads in the last five sessions in a special topics in accounting course your site was invaluable.

My approach will lean heavily on the approach that Alex Milburn took when he updated the financial instruments section of Ross Skinners' "Accounting Standards in Evolution" for the revised Skinner and Milburn version - Why the interest, History of standard setting developments in this area including why Canadian standards are currently so far off the mark, Developments in the US including SFAS 133 and the Exposure Draft 204B. Finally I'd like to take up the JWG's Draft Standard.

Have you some thoughts on that standard and how it might be fine-tuned for application within the US? What a fine opportunity for students to experience standard setting in action.

Now I must return to sorting out how I'll present the key conceptual developments so that my students have the basic concepts, issues and theory in place. I'd like for them to be able to wade into whatever application of the "global" standard that eventually confronts them with a some solid footings.

(Added in a second message)
Here are a couple of URLs for two files that will update you the Canadian side of FI issues and on where we were (are) with respect to standards for Financial Instruments.

http://www.camagazine.com/cica/camagazine.nsf/e2000-jun/regulars  http://www.cica.ca/cica/cicawebsite.nsf/public/E_14Dec00 

Ian Hutchinson [ian.hutchinson@acadiau.ca] 
Associate Professor 
Fred C. Manning School of Business 
Room 209, Rhodes Hall Acadia University Wolfville, NS B0P1X0

The book by Milborn and Skinner is as follows:
Accounting Standards in Evolution, 2nd ed., 672pp. 
ISBN: 0130880159 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: June 2000

For a summary of the JWG debates, go to the white papers noted below:

If an item is viewed as a financial instrument rather than inventory, the accounting becomes more complicated under SFAS 115.  Traders in financial instruments adjust such instruments to fair value with all changes in value passing through current earnings.  Business firms who are not deemed to be traders must designate the instrument as either available-for-sale (AFS) or hold-to-maturity (HTM).  A HTM instrument is maintained at original cost.  An AFS financial instrument must be marked-to-market, but the changes in value pass through OCI rather than current earnings until the instrument is actually sold or otherwise expires.   Under international standards, the IASC requires fair value adjustments for most financial instruments.  This has led to strong reaction from businesses around the world, especially banks.  There are now two major working group debates.  In 1999 the Joint Working Group of the Banking Associations sharply rebuffed the IAS 39 fair value accounting in two white papers that can be downloaded from http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen3_112.htm.

FASB's Exposure Draft for Fair Value Adjustments to all Financial Instruments On December 14, 1999 the FASB issued Exposure Draft 204-B entitled Reporting Financial Instruments and Certain Related Assets and Liabilities at Fair Value. This document can be downloaded from http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/draft/draftpg.html 

I want to thank Professor Hutchinson (see above) for reminding me of the important contributions of Ross Skinner.

Wow Accounting Theorist of the Week --- Ross Skinner, Retired Partner in Clarkson Gordon, now E&Y in Canada

Ross Skinner --- http://www.greengene.net/casestudy/GGDiscussionForum/SkinnerCritique.html#Skinner 

Ross M. Skinner, FCA has been for many decades the pre-eminent thought leader in the Canadian accounting profession. He was the National Director of Accounting for Clarkson, Gordon & Co. (now Ernst & Young) for fifteen years. He is a former Chair of the Accounting and Auditing Research Committee of The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, a former Chair of the Financial Disclosure Advisory Board of the Ontario Securities Commission, author of Analytical Auditing (1966), Accounting Principles: A Canadian Viewpoint (1972), Pension Accounting (1980), and Accounting Standards in Evolution (1987). He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Brock University in 1979, the Award of Outstanding Merit by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario in 1984, the Certificate of Merit of The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants in 1985, and was elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 1999. E-mail address: rmhbs@pobox.com

Note from Bob Jensen
Ross Skinner was inducted into The Accounting Hall of Fame in August 2000 --- http://gsma62.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/aen/fall00/item05.htm 

Dr. Hutchinson mentions Ross Skinner's work, so I thought it might be helpful to provide several of online items.

"GreenGene Comments," by Ross Skinner --- http://www.greengene.net/casestudy/GGDiscussionForum/SkinnerCritique.html 

"Judgment in Jeopardy:  Why detailed rules will never replace a chartered accountant's professional judgment in financial reporting," by Ross Skinner, CA Magazine, November 1995 --- http://www.camagazine.com/cica/camagazine.nsf/e1995-Nov/Features 

The subject of the critical editorial was the elasticity of generally accepted accounting principles. "Like a child's balloon, a company can make its earnings or assets grow bigger or smaller under GAAP, provided its accountants blow or suck hard enough," wrote Diane Francis in the January 29, 1994 issue of The Financial Post. "When challenged about a loose presentation, the accountant often replies, 'Show me where it says I can't do that.'" Her solution? "If the accountants are becoming rule-oriented, give them tighter rules within GAAP. That's the answer."

The complaint, then, is that those responsible for financial reporting are playing games with the rules or they are not applying proper judgment when there is room for judgment. The solution proposed by The Financial Post is to take away that room. But is there really a problem? Is it as simple as biased judgment? And if it is, will the proposed solution work?

Hard evidence is lacking to answer these questions, but the editorial correctly notes that some regulators are quite concerned about slanted financial reporting. If regulators and other knowledgeable people in the financial community are concerned, accountants should be concerned. But before a remedy is prescribed, a thorough diagnosis of the malady is advisable.

There is an IASB (formerly IASC) discussion paper on discounting at http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen3_22.htm 

Possible Outcomes of the Project

 

Scope

"Unaccountable Discounting" by Chris Robinson at http://panoptic.csustan.edu/cpa99/html/robinson1.html 

Financial accounting routinely discounts future amounts for financial statement presentation. Managerial accounting uses discounted cash flows as part of the decision-making process. Business has accepted this practice as the best way to make decisions, based on the net present value rule. Only technical details are debated. Discounting hides serious ethical and environmental issues, and there is a good case that we should not discount many future values at all. The ethical assumptions that are shown to be problematic are: perpetual growth; complete markets and intergenerational equity; and, technological externalities and their pricing in human society and Nature.

In my opinion, Professor Robinson's paper is an excellent paper for debate in the social sciences.   His argument in a nutshell is that the discount rate should be zero for R&D or other investments that may seriously harm or destroy future generations.  With a zero discount the "cost" of those harms will not be reduced to an amount that justifies investing and developing harmful products.

If companies reported environmental liabilities at undiscounted amounts, we would be less likely to ignore the message that we are destroying our future. Lest you think I am too alarmist, let me remind you of an aphorism that exists in different words in different societies:  Mother Nature Laughs Last

Examples of investments that worry Professor Robinson are nuclear power plants and developments of antibiotics (that may in turn lead to ever increasing strains of powerful microbes against which future generations will be defenseless). 

The fatal flaw in this argument lies inside finance theory itself. Arbitrage is possible only when markets are complete -- the identical consumption stream can be replicated in two markets, but at different prices. If there is no way to replicate a given consumption stream, then the market price is not necessarily "right," whatever right would mean. For example, there is no insurance policy available to pay the residents of my home city, Toronto, if a nuclear plant discharges a large quantity of radioactive waste into Lake Ontario. The entire area would become uninhabitable, many people would die and the damage would be incalculable. If we use the language of finance, we say that no Arrow-Debreu security exists that pays off in this specific state of nature.

Discounting the future damage is a silly exercise, but let me do it anyway. Suppose we estimated the damage at $1 trillion, real dollars. Further, let us suppose that it doesn't happen for 200 years, and so it is a future unborn generation that suffers the consequences of this radioactive spill. Finally, accept a real discount rate of 5% as reasonable, using current finance practice. If we are certain that the spill will happen, the expected present value is $57.8 million. If this were a standard capital budgeting problem, we would not invest more than that amount in additional safety systems, or in finding alternative energy sources.

The above illustration is indeed silly for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that investments in nuclear power cannot be evaluated with deterministic models that do not relate interactive and highly uncertain benefits with risks.  There are also environmental risks of not investing in nuclear power (e.g., global warming, depletion of oil and gas, energy prices that depress or destroy economic development and crop production, excessive migrations to temperate climates, destruction of rain forests for fuel and crop land, etc.)  

A better example not touched upon by Professor Robinson is the current issue of genetic engineering.  Seed can be genetically engineered to make production more bountiful and disease resistant.  For an example, go to the document called "Aussie Scientists Crack Barley" at http://www.csiro.au/communication/mediarel/mr96060.htm .  

Genetic engineering of crops (e.g., yellow rice correcting for Vitamin A deficiencies in nations having poor nutrition) can save millions of lives today and improve the nutrition of billions of hungry people.  But there are enormous risks of fooling with Mother Nature's ecosystem.  It is questionable whether Professor Robinson's  proposed zero discount rate in a deterministic cash flow model is an appropriate tool for such complex issues of how many present human beings to sacrifice for the sake of untold future human beings.  Of course his worry is that simplistic discounting (with nonzero rates) will be used without proper inputs for global risks.  This is food for thought in courses devoted to ecosystem worries.  The analytical paradox, however, lies in the lack of sophistication of any known tool, including present value discounting, in a very complex and highly interactive world where human sacrifices must be made to preserve a rather fragile ecosystem embedded in a present-day econsystem.

I wrote a module about the complex issues of genetic engineering in the January 19, 1999 edition of New Bookmarks at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q1.htm#011700 

  http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen3_26.htm 

On February 23 you should have received an email providing the URLs to slide presentations from Donald Gray from the University of Wisconsin Foundation speaking on fund raising and Robert Johnson from the Arthur Andersen office in Atlanta speaking on the new economy. 

We have just added a presentation from Liv A. Watson from BDO Seidman speaking on what financial executives need to know about XBRL. All the slides are available online from:

http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/aapg/2001/slides.htm 

Craig [Craig Polhemus, American Accounting Association]

Bill Gates on Monday unveiled a set of technologies that he hopes will advance Microsoft's .Net strategy and its goal of providing services anywhere --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103202/2698539/ 

From InformationWeek Online on March 20, 2001
Note Bill Gate's praise of the "XML Revolution."

** Microsoft To Launch HailStorm

Microsoft plans next year to launch middleware called HailStorm that would let its own applications and those built by independent software developers share data about a PC user's payment preferences, personal contacts, and calendar entries. It's the sort of behind-the-scenes communication between software programs that Microsoft calls .Net, which aims to expand the company's purview beyond Windows PCs to generate new revenue. Rather than tying information about a user's address, application settings, and other preferences to applications using the traditional Windows method of associating objects in a client-server architecture, HailStorm will rely on storing that data in XML documents, and calling it across the Internet via Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol.

"The kind of dreams people have had about interoperability in this industry will finally be fulfilled by the XML revolution," Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, said at an event to reveal the initiative Monday. "It's really a necessary part of this revolution that we have services like HailStorm."

On Monday, companies showed what these Web services could look like. American Express Co. showed an online bookstore application in which notifications of incoming orders would be displayed on a user's PC desktop running Microsoft's upcoming Windows XP operating system. XP would include Microsoft Passport, a digital wallet service available Monday that authenticates users with E-commerce sites and automatically fills in their payment information. And Groove Networks CEO Ray Ozzie demonstrated how users of Groove's peer-to-peer collaboration app could populate a list of people they wanted to invite to a session, from Microsoft's instant-messaging buddy list. HailStorm services could supply Groove with a central store of users and contacts, which the startup needs to propagate its app, Ozzie said.

The key to getting this type of integration to work across applications and platforms, of course, will be gathering a "critical mass" of software and customers, Gates said. "Stitching these islands together is about having a standard schema--in fact, a very rich schema--in which your information is stored." An early specification of the HailStorm schema, the set of XML fields that Microsoft and independent software developers need to agree upon to build apps such as these, is available today. Microsoft plans more complete alpha software by this summer, a beta version of the HailStorm schema by the end of this year, and live services on the Internet next year.

Microsoft's still working out pricing details, but plans to give away some services to consumers and implement fees for heavy users or those wanting special technical support. There'll be some revenue from licensing fees to developers and network service providers. And Microsoft may combine sales of HailStorm services with subscription versions of Office, which the company is developing. Such scenarios could be years away, though. First up: getting data from of Microsoft's MSN services such as Hotmail encoded into XML. Microsoft group VP Bob Muglia also promised not to mine, publish, sell, or target advertisements to data the company gathers while developing HailStorm.

Potential users of the platform are skeptical about Microsoft's commitment to openness, pointing to Java as an example of broken interoperability promises --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103234/2700449/ 

Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect outlined a brave new world at WinHEC, touting Windows XP, the Tablet PC, "HailStorm" and .Net. --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103272/2701114/ 

Forwarded by Aaron Konstam (I like the Windoze spelling)

I've been using UltraEdit on the Windoze end for years now. It automatically detects Unix format text files. If you open a text file in Unix format and edit it, it will be saved in the same format unless you tell it otherwise. You can also save DOS text files as Unix format files and vice versa.

Not only that, but it is a great programmer's editor, with syntax highlighting, smart indents, and the ability to use spaces instead of tabs; too many other features to mention here. (I'm already sounding too much like an advertisement.)

UltraEdit is shareware and can be found at http://www.idmcomp.com  .

Good luck, Jay DeKing

Embezzlement: How to Avoid Every Business Owner's Nightmare By John W. Stewart, CPA, CFE http://accounting.pro2net.com/x29791.xml 

It has been suggested that many employees view embezzlement as an informal employee benefit. Some sociologists have even suggested that chronic pilferage might actually have a positive effect on morale, and therefore increase productivity. So who is committing all these crimes? It may not be who you think.

Some statistics from a recent study conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners suggest the following:

1. Losses from fraud caused by managers and executives were 16 times greater than those caused by rank and file employees 2. Losses caused by men were 4 times greater than those caused by women. 3. Losses caused by people 60 and older were 28 times those caused by people 25 and under. 4. Losses caused by people with post-graduate degrees were 5 times more than those caused by high school graduates.

What is the common thread running through these findings? These are all people in positions of trust with access to the company's assets. One truism I have always followed is that your most trusted employee is often the one who is the embezzler. If you think about it for a moment that statement makes a lot of sense. The one you really don't trust won't be put into a position to have access to your assets but your most trusted employee already has access and now only needs a motive.

"Congressional audit takes IRS to task," By Troy Wolverton --- http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2697298,00.html 

Last year, the Internal Revenue Service left its e-filing system all but open to hackers, according to a report released Thursday by the General Accounting Office. Worse yet, the IRS had no way of telling whether its systems actually had been broken into, according to the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

"IRS did not adequately secure access to its electronic filing systems or to the electronically transmitted tax return data those systems contained," the GAO said in its report. "We demonstrated that unauthorized individuals, both internal and external to IRS, could have viewed and modified taxpayer data."

Secrets of the SAT http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/ 

Think your e-business doesn't owe sales taxes? Think again. States are gearing up to collect taxes already due. To avoid paying steep back taxes later, make sure you comply with current laws now --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103161/2693228/ 

Now they're really dreaming! (by the way, REM means Rapid Eye Movement during dreams)
"Turning Vivid Dreams Into Reality," by Donna Tapellini http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41478,00.html 

Researchers at Stanford University are now developing software to help people become aware that they are having a dream so that they can then live out their fantasies during REM sleep

Oneironauts, or lucid dreamers, are conscious when they are having a dream and can control how the dream develops. During lucid dreams, people are "awake" within their dreams, and can sometimes direct what happens next in the dream.

With enough practice you can fly, visit exotic places, experience vivid colors, or eat all the ice cream you want, all without taking your head off the pillow.

Being awake during a dream may seem like a contradiction, but to those involved in lucid dream research, it's all, well, crystal clear.

"Lucid dreaming lets you make use of the dream state that comes to you every night to have a stimulating reality," said Dr. Stephen LaBerge, founder of the Lucidity Institute at Stanford University, a research lab that teaches people how to have a lucid dream.

LaBerge said that controlling dreams can also have therapeutic value. Potentially, he said, people can overcome nightmares that haunt them repeatedly. It may even help a person improve in sports, enhance self-confidence or confront problems that elude being solved in waking life.

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, a book co-authored by LaBerge and Howard Rheingold, is one of many books to help wannabe lucid dreamers get started. The Lucidity Institute offers a variety of tools for people set on taking charge of their subconscious life.

The Institute's SuperNovaDreamer kit includes a copy of LaBerge's book, and the kit recommends reading a few chapters before getting started. The book asks that you learn to recognize "dreamsigns," or signals within a dream that alert you to your altered state. One common dreamsign: elements within your dream are out of context. Objects are not where they belong within a room, or certain people are in locations they normally wouldn't be -- how often do your parents drop in at the office?

The Munch Museum (Art History) --- http://www.museumsnett.no/munchmuseet/ 

One of the museum's main tasks is to display its vast collection of works of art to the public. Besides disseminating knowledge on the 'classical' Munch, the museum has organized a series of exhibitions on changing themes which help to fill in the gaps in our picture of the artist. Exhibitions such as Munch and Photography, Munch and His Models, Edvard Munch´s Portraits, Munch and France, Munch and Ibsen and Munch and the Workers were all based on new research.

Internal Accounting Engineering site at http://www.internalaccounting.com/ 

Dear Colleagues Lucia and Robert:

Greetings to you both - from me, Professor Emeritus, here in San Jose, California. During my years at San Francisco State University, I worked on my research project about Internal Accounting. Your names I got in the AAA information about new accounting development. Will you kindly see my website - which revers just to the need of changing the Internal - Managerial Cost accounting in our Universities.

Please click on this line: IAE Home Page

You will see my website - and I surely hope you will take time to read it. We here in USA need to start a new Internal accounting procedure - our dear Professors Horngren, Schillinglaw, Anthony, etc. are still teaching the same way they started some 25 years ago. Please, I believe that we have to change to more modern and more adequate presentation of Internal Accounting.

Le me hear from you.

God bless you there.

Sincerely yours, Emanuel Schwarz Professor Emeritus, Ph.D.

Author of the Research project: Internal Accounting Read about this extraordinary approach of managerial accounting http://1stbooks.com/cgi-bin/1st?partner~1st|type~3|Data1~3259 

Dover Publications (books, eBooks) --- http://store.doverpublications.com/ 

The only place on earth where you'll find Dover's entire collection of unique, value-priced books, in-stock and ready to ship. Our site presently accepts orders for shipment to U.S. addresses.

We’re busy converting some of your favorite Dover titles into e-book format. Sign up for our ebook update service and we’ll send you an email as soon as titles (and these great benefits) become available. Instant access to sample chapters. Complete collections right on your PC. Free ebooks that you can share with your friends.

Trinity University's Student Managed Fund --- http://www.trinity.edu/smf/ 

"Cloning Around," Mar 15th 2001, From The Economist print edition, March 15, 2001 --- http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=532577 

As to cost, Dr Trounson estimates that it will take at least $1m to clone a human, given the equipment, labour and hundreds of human eggs that will be required to get a single, live birth. There are enough infertile couples desperate to reproduce, enough small sects eager to keep their numbers up and their gene pools pure, and enough megalomaniacs intent on replicating themselves, to make money the least of would-be cloners’ problems. Indeed, Dr Zavos claims the consortium has more than enough cash to do its work, and up to 700 volunteers ready to take part. Few scientists believe that the group will reach its goal within the next two years, but many acknowledge that the technology will one day permit human reproductive cloning. Whether society will condone it is an entirely different matter.

WAP means web access by phone.

"Combating WAP's Bad Rap,"  by Elisa Batista http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,42421,00.html 

However, don't blame WAP as a technology for the lack of interest in the phones, analysts say. Perhaps WAP developers are to blame for over-hyping the technology and then receiving a black eye for it, but some think the real limitation of WAP is the lack of compelling content written in its wireless markup language (WML).

"Right now there are no services out there worth the incredible hassle to use," said Minerva Hobbs, a director at technology research firm Answerthink (ANSR). "No one has paid attention to the user. What do you users want? What's worth paying for?"

Added Jerry Kaufman, president for Alexander Resources in Dallas, Texas: "In reality WAP is nothing more than a standard protocol. It's important to view it in that context -- that it's one of many. It's not a product or service, though people talk about it as if it actually does something.... It's a way of skinnying down information and allowing people to access information and it does nothing by itself. What (critics of WAP) have been unable to do is differentiate the poor design of a website or content."

And that's exactly what WAP supporters are out to prove at this week's Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association trade show in Las Vegas. Over 800 exhibitors from all over the world will cram the Sands Expo & Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., this week to tout their handheld devices and sites offered in all protocols and standards, not just WAP.

But some businesses, including U.K.-based nGame are poised to woo and snag WAP users in America. NGame will work with U.S.-based AirFlash to offer users games they can play with WAP phones users in any part of the world.

NGame will also work with Yahoo, Sprint PCS, AT&T PocketNet and PowerTV to offer its games via digital television.

Curtis Wick, a director at handset manufacturer LG InfoComm USA, said the "black eye" WAP has received will "heal" when more content, especially location-based services like the ability to get directions or find a restaurant from where the user is standing, is developed.

"When the WAP Forum adopts next-generation (WAP technology) it will provide more graphics, and timing won't be a concern," he said.

The Dead Letter Office --- http://www.thedeadletter.com/ 
You can read the dead letters and even submit your own dead letter.  Categories include the following:

Saddest
Funniest
Most touching
Angriest
Most insightful

Interior Desecrating --- http://www.lileks.com/institute/interiors/ 

A quote from Larry Gindler
"Internet domain names are a wild and crazy thing. Anyone can register just about anything that isn't already taken. The "official" rules can be found at http://www.icann.org/  ."

The Hollywood 10 (from the era of communism paranoia) http://www.hollywood10.com/ 

Forwarded by STEPHEN DELVECCHIO [SDELVECCHIO@CMSU1.CMSU.EDU] 
Activities Based Costing 
ABC Technologies at http://www.abctech.com/company/default.asp 

Founded in 1989, ABC Technologies is, and has always been the leader in Activity-Based Costing and performance management software, services and solutions. We currently serve a global audience with our offices in 14 countries. Our products and services include Oros Analyitics, a suite of tools providing keen insights for decision-makers. Products are supported by a full range of client support services, training, education and project knowledge management solutions.

ABC Technologies solutions improve the effectiveness and accountability of major companies and organizations from manufacturing and services to public sector. As the world leader in Activity-Based management solutions, ABC Technologies has:

Approximately 60% of our staff are focused on product development, application services, and technical support.

The NY Times on the Web has improved navigation and search functionality.  See these new features for yourself at --- http://www.nytimes.com/?0319ep 

How far will John Freyer go?
All My Life For Sale http://www.allmylifeforsale.com/ 

Timeframes (History, Art, Photograpyhy) --- National Library of New Zealand http://timeframes1.natlib.govt.nz/ 

Photographs that bug you out!
Roger Eritja: Fotographia de Natura --- http://www.eritja.com/ 

Listen up ya'all (musical performances) 
South by Southwest 2001 --- hoe-downs deep in the heart of Texas --- http://www.sxsw.com/ 

Cognitors are not popular with Illinois CPAs
Forwarded by Linda Specht --- http://www.icpas.org/icpas/xyz/xyz.htm 

Dreamcatcher - listen to the latest from Stephen King --- http://www.time.com/time/dreamcatcher/ 
This Website has a great illustration of Flash animation design, audio.

Admit One --- the movie industry and film reviews http://www.admitone.org/intro.php3 
This Website has a great illustration of Flash animation design, audio.

The Role of Brand Names in Higher Education
Forwarded by Glenn Meyer

Interesting article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/26/opinion/26MYER.html 

"A Student Is Not an Input,"  by Michele Tolela Myers, NY Times, March 26, 2001

A business professor told a group of us at one recent conference that to run a successful organization you had better make decisions on the basis of being "best in the world," and if you couldn't be best in the world in something, then you outsourced the function or got rid of the unit that didn't measure up. Have we really come to believe that we can only measure ourselves in relation to others, and that value and goodness are only measured against something outside the self? Do we really want to teach our children that life is all about beating the competition?

As we in the academy begin to use business-speak fluently, we become accustomed to thinking in commercialized terms about education. We talk no longer as public intellectuals, but as entrepreneurs. And we thus encourage instead of fight the disturbing trend that makes education a consumer good rather than a public good. If we think this way, our decisions will be driven, at least in part, by consumers' tastes. Are we ready to think that we should only teach what students want or be driven out of business?

Physics is hard, it is costly, it is undersubscribed. Should it be taught only in engineering schools? I don't think so. Should we not teach math because everyone can get a cheap calculator? Should we stop teaching foreign languages because English has become the international language? And what about the arts, literature, philosophy? Many might think them impractical.

I think we have a responsibility to insist that education is more than learning job skills, that it is also the bedrock of a democracy. I think we must be very careful that in the race to become wealthier, more prestigious, and to be ranked Number One, we don't lose sight of the real purpose of education, which is to make people free — to give them the grounding they need to think for themselves and participate as intelligent members of a free society. Obsolete or naive? I surely hope not.

Those of us that have been on campus for more than 15 years can remember when the author of this article (Michele Myers) and her husband were both on the faculty at Trinity University. Michele Myers is now the president of Sarah Lawrence College.

Creative Kitchen from the U.K. --- http://www.creativekitchen.co.uk/ 

Delia also erves up the U.K. recipes --- http://www.deliaonline.com/ 

It is so sad to have such great recipes from the land where people are currently afraid of what they eat.

Tow Truck Driver Recovery Archives http://www.towtruckdrivers.com/recovery/ 

Sigh!  If they only had recovery archives for working papers in academe.

Dear Prof. Jensen:

I have provided below* a news article from the "Daily Tax Report" (3/19/2001) on the FASB derivatives panel's recent meeting on derivatives initiatives. Will you be writing up any of the DIG items for your Web page or doing anything on them that we might use in an upcoming issue of the "Derivatives Report"?

Thank you, Barbara Campbell

*Daily Tax Report No. 53 Page G-2 Monday March 19, 2001 ISSN 1522-8800 Tax, Budget & Accounting Accounting FASB Derivatives Panel Progress Limited During Last Meeting Chaired by Leisenring

NORWALK, Conn.--A special panel of the Financial Accounting Standards Board intended to help craft guidance on derivatives accounting made only limited progress March 15 in the last meeting of the group chaired by James Leisenring.

Left unresolved or partially resolved by the Derivatives Implementation Group were at least six issues arising from questions about how to apply FASB Statement No. 133. The standard went into effect for most companies in January.

Fully resolved was DIG Agenda Item No. 15-4. That item focuses on embedded derivatives and, more specifically, embedded volumetric options in contracts that might otherwise be outside the scope of FASB No. 133 because they amount to normal purchases or normal sales.

Partially resolved were two items:

[Image] No. 6-2, on impairment writedowns of long-lived assets and the interaction between FASB No. 133 and FASB Statement No. 121, on impairment of long-lived assets; and

[Image] No. 15-5, on when an embedded derivative in a preferred stock hybrid instrument should be split out and accounted for separately.

Item 15-5 was completed except for provisions on stock features involving participating dividends.

In other action at DIG's meeting, the group and FASB's staff elected to drop an issue, Agenda Item No. 15-6, on the application of paragraph 15 of the derivatives rules to trade contracts with emerging economies.

Leisenring's Swan Song at DIG

Leisenring, the former vice chairman of FASB, plans to leave the board's staff in April. At that time he will join the newly restructured International Accounting Standards Board. IASB has its offices in London.

Since stepping down from FASB last June because of term limits, Leisenring has served as the board's director of international activities. He retained chairmanship of DIG, a position he first took while he served as the board's vice chairman.

In noting his impending departure in introductory comments March 15, Leisenring talked of plans for more meetings of the derivatives group. A meeting may be held in April or, more probably, in June.

He sought to counter speculation that DIG would be folding up its tent. "The process continues," he said.

However, as companies have formally begun to apply the derivatives rules that were years in the making, the group and FASB's staff intends "to be increasingly selective" about which issues make it onto the panel's agenda, Leisenring said.

EITF Involvement Discounted

He discussed--and discounted--the near-term possibility of FASB's Emerging Issues Task Force taking on the arcane derivatives accounting questions that are the bread and butter of the derivatives panel. "We don't want to have EITF to be overwhelmed" with DIG issues, Leisenring.

Like the derivatives group, EITF is a group made up of professionals from accounting firms, investment and commercial banks, and financial services companies. The panels assist FASB and its staff in writing guidance on relatively narrow accounting issues. Some of DIG's members also serve on the Emerging Issues Task Force.

In a brief interview, Leisenring suggested to BNA that it is "absolutely inevitable" that new derivatives accounting issues are going to come up, particularly in the third quarter of this year, as firms begin to apply FASB No. 133 in earnest.

Timothy Lucas, FASB's director of technical activities, is to be the new chairman of DIG. Lucas also serves as the nonvoting chairman of EITF.

Board Clears DIG Guidance

In related action March 14, FASB cleared seven items of derivatives accounting guidance that were drawn up by FASB's staff with the assistance of DIG. FASB's formal clearance of such guidance renders the items final and part of authoritative accounting literature.

FASB altered the scope of one of those items (Issue No. B25), on embedded derivatives and deferred variable annuity contracts, before not objecting to it.

The cleared portion of that item addresses variable annuities that involve a period-certain payment and, separately, those that have a fully life-contingent payment, and not variable annuities marked by both elements. FASB plans to address those variable annuity contracts that have both features later.

The seven derivatives accounting items cleared by FASB are to be posted on the board's World Wide Web site between April 6 and April 10, said Robert Wilkins, the staff manager of the long-term effort that yielded FASB No. 133.

Other, more tentative guidance--including the few items resolved by DIG March 15--are to be posted on the site in coming weeks also, he said. [Image]

By Steve Burkholder

Barring an unforeseen "show stopper," Microsoft expects to release beta 2 to testers Friday. The OS is being pitched to consumers as the "next revolution."  http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103222/2700002/ 

Leaning Oak Forge (photographic history of the blacksmith trade) http://www.jefffettyironwork.com/ 

Forwarded by Dr. Wolff

Friends, 
This is a good website to bookmark. It gives background and advice re hoaxes --- http://www.nonprofit.net/hoax/hoax_big.html 

Trends of the U.S. population http://www.usatoday.com/news/census/index.htm 

Some books on web design --- http://www.newmedia.com/nm-ie.asp?articleID=2510 

Some books on Flash animations --- http://www.newmedia.com/nm-ie.asp?articleID=2516 

Some illustrations of flash cartoons --- Giantheads --- http://www.giantheads.com/ 

Some tips on helping kids learn (great Shockwave and Flash animations) --- http://www.iknowthat.com/noplugin.htm 

How to author flash animations --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/10/index4a.html 

Some Flash FAQs from FAY Studieos

View Most Frequently Asked Questions
View Most Frequently Asked Questions - Part 2
View Most Frequently Asked Questions - Part 3
View Most Frequently Asked Questions - Part 4
View Most Frequently Asked Questions - Part 5
View Most Frequently Asked Questions - Part 6
View Most Frequently Asked Questions - Part 7
View Most Frequently Asked Questions - Part 8
View Most Frequently Asked Questions - Part 9

Another Flash tutorial of possible interest --- http://www.flashnewz.com/ 

Other Websites devoted to Flash and Flash developers --- http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/flash_websites.htm 

Hi Amy,

See the above module for some Flash helpers.

Audio recording depends upon your hardware and your version of Windows at hand (I assume you are running Windows on a PC). Microsoft has an audio recorder in most versions of Windows, but for versions other than Windows ME, the dumb sound recorder is limited to 60 seconds of recording. There are ways of tricking it to record longer files (e.g., by recording over a longer WAV file), but these are all a genuine pain in the tail. I suspect the 60-second limit was a proud effort by Microsoft in the past to show that Bill Gates is not always trying to kill off competitors. In the case of audio recording the leading competitors are SoundBlaster (from Creative Labs) and Turtle Beach.

To find your sound recorder, click on My Computer, Control Panel, Multimedia. You should find the Windows Sound Recorder. Of course you will first have to find that little jack in the back of your computer where you must plug in a microphone. If you have a sound card such as SoundBlaster, by all means use this great hardware having its own plugs and software. If you don't have a sound card added to your computer, I suggest that you contact your tech support folks and ask them what they recommend. SoundBlaster is probably the best option. See http://www.creativelabs.com/ 

In the meantime you can try the hardware and software that came with your computer (other than the microphone that is not usually packaged with the computer).

Most Windows audio recorders record WAV files. These take up useless space, and it is a good idea these days to convert the WAV file that you recorded into an MP3 file.

My amateur tips on MP3 compression of WAV files can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm#Resources  
(You have to scroll down a bit after you arrive at the above spot.)

Audio/video recording is easier and better on a MAC, but then very few accounting educators run on a MAC these days.

To insert MP3 or WAV files into a HTM Web document, merely link to the audio file from a button or hotword.  To see a picture you link to the picture.  To hear an audio file, link to that file.  Making it play automatically without having to click on the file is much more complicated.

In Flash, you may have troubles with sound playback for a number of reasons.  Flash plays back wav files in certain sample rates : 11, 22 and 44 kHz - 8 and 16 bit stereo or mono. If the file does not play properly, it is possible that the WAV file was recorded differently. Sometimes WAV files will not run at all in Flash because of the way they were recorded

A tutorial that may help you with flash audio is available at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/10/index4a.html 
Especially note Page 7 of this tutorial with respect to inserting MP3 files into Flash files.

Another Flash tutorial of possible interest --- http://www.flashnewz.com/ 

Other Websites devoted to Flash and Flash developers --- http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/flash_websites.htm 

We look forward to "hearing" from you Amy.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: Amy Dunbar [mailto:ADunbar@SBA.UCONN.EDU]  

Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 5:10 PM 
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU Subject: How do you record audio

I hope this isn't a "duh" question, but I don't know how to make an audio clip. I want to just insert some audio clips on web pages. I can insert clips on pdf files using Acrobat, but I want to put the clips in flash files or other web pages. Any suggestions?

Amy Dunbar 
UConn

Reply from Ronald R. Tidd [rrtidd@MTU.EDU] 

A few additional links for anyone who shares Amy's interest in recording:

http://wdvl.com/Multimedia/Sound/Audio/streaming.html 

http://wdvl.com/Multimedia/Sound/Audio/index.html 

http://wdvl.com/Multimedia/Sound/Audio/include.html 

http://www.thedsc.com/wav_encode/realhelp.htm 

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/geektalk/97/04/index4a.html?tw=multimedia 

http://buzz.builder.com/cgi-bin/WebX?13@@.ee822bc/0  

To add background audio into the webpage, just use the embed tag like this: <embed src="youraudiofile.wav" loop="how many times you want to loop or infinite">

Also note that if you record narration in a PowerPoint slideshow, it generates a sound file that is separate from the slideshow. Thus, you could use that application's recording utility to record sound and it is not subject to the time limits of the MS Windows recorder. HOWEVER, they are huge files (WAV format).

Ron Ronald R. Tidd, Ph.D.,
CPA (inactive)

Reply from Scott Bonacker [scottbonacker@MOCCPA.COM] 

I bought a piece of software called "Total Recorder" at www.highcriteria.co . This little jewel will make WAV files from any source. I have plugged my handheld cassette into the audio in port and recorded old tapes, and I have even recorded realaudio as it was played from a website. Pretty much anything that gets sent to an audio output can be captured. Then, the file is yours to do with as you wish. This is just one of many such, but I chose it based on the descriptions I was able to find.

There is also a product called Text Aloud at

http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,,00173O,.html 

that you might want to take a look at.

Scott

Scott Bonacker, 
CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com

Reply from Richard J. Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU] 

Amy: Bob Jensen discussed how to create wav files. To convert wav to realaudio you need a product like RealProducer www.real.com  . You should have access to a Realserver and following are instructions from my web host to handle realmedia, that would be applicable to any web host:

Dear Customer,

RealMedia has been setup on your account. We have created a directory on our G2 server, which you will use to upload your Real Media (RM) files. The directory name is the same as your domain name. For example, if your domain is fastfood.com--we setup a directory called "fastfood.com"

You may use any ftp application to transfer your files to the RealAudio server: WS_FTP, CuteFTP, etc. When uploading your files, use realaudio5.interland.net as the remote host/address. Use the original username and password that Interland assigned you. Once logged onto the G2 server, you will need to find the directory that was setup for you. Double click on the directory and transfer the RM files to that location. You may create subdirectories within the domain directory in order to organize your RM files.

Once the RM files are on the G2 server, you will need to create a RAM file. The RAM file, when activated, points the RM files on the server. We call it the pointer file. Each RM file must have a corresponding RAM file. To create a RAM file, open any text editor such as Notepad and type:

1. rtsp://realaudio5.interland.net:554/yourdirectory/yourfile.rm 
Example: rtsp://realaudio5.interland.net:554/fastfood/hamburgers.rm

Save the file with .RAM extension (hamburger.ram). DO NOT SAVE IT AS A TEXT (.TXT) FILE! Now upload the RAM file to your web server, with the rest of your website files (.html, .gif, .jpg). Do not upload the RAM file to the G2 server--your media will not work properly.

Next you will need to create a link on your website to the RAM file, which points to the RA or RM files on the RealAudio server. To do this, simply use html code:

1. <a href="http://www.family-touches.com/hamburger.ram">MediaClip</a>

When the link is clicked on your website, it then links the hamburger.ram, which points the hamburger.rm on the G2 server. Here's how it looks:

1. <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/subdir/hamburger.ram">MediaClip</a> 
2. rtsp://realaudio5.interland.net:554/fastfood.com/hamburgers.rm 
3. hamburgers.rm is then launched in the browser.

*Remember that if you create subdirectories on the RealAudio server or your website, you must referrence them in your RAM file and html code:

RAM: rtsp://realaudio5.interland.net:554/fastfood.com/subdir/hamburgers.rm

HTML: <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/subdir/hamburger.ram">MediaClip</a> 

As far as Flash, you just create another layer in the fla file, and insert the sound file in the frame you want. Flash will convert the fla file to swf and create the html page to upload to your server. You can see a couple of examples of Flash embedded in a Toolbook DHTML page at www.VirtualPublishing.NET/fa2001.htm 

Richard J. Campbell www.VirtualPublishing.NET  
mailto:campbell@VirtualPublishing.NET 

Global Warming: Early Warning Signs --- http://www.climatehotmap.org/ 

The Sonoma State University  library has a new automated retrieval system that makes books easier to find. But the utterly random nature of the operation has some librarians unnerved --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,41905,00.html 

The online catalog system, called Snoopy, is Web-based, so students can order a book from anywhere and the machine will retrieve their chosen book. For example, a search for "trees" in the Snoopy database returns this book title, which is stored in the ARS: Trees and Shrubs of Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands.

If a student selects this book, computers in the ARS room are alerted.

A skinny yellow crane barrels down the track and rolls by what looks like a gigantic filing cabinet. It stops at the appropriate box, and a robotic arm pulls the bin out of the metal rack. The crane slides to the front, slamming to a halt in front of the librarian, and lowers the box to the workstation.

The bins are separated into six sections, with each section holding between 10 and 25 books. A computer has stored the location of each book by section. The librarian retrieves the information, then manually picks up the book.

The UN Works --- success stories exist in spite of the wrangling --- http://www.un.org/works/ 

Why don't you publish your own book?
Traditional book publishers said Juliet Waldron's book was too romantic, too historical, too something. So she self-published it, and now it's been honored with an Independent Ebook Award --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,42624,00.html 

Mozart's Wife was too romantic for one New York publishing house, and too historical for another. Others told her it was too sophisticated. Editors told her over and over that they loved her voice but had no idea how to position her book.

She finally realized that the problem was not with her book but with marketing issues. That's when Waldron looked into e-publishing, despite protests from her agent.

Waldron's belief in her work was rewarded Saturday when she won the Independent Ebook Award for best fiction. Mozart's Wife was one of five works, out of more than 200 submissions, honored at the first Independent Ebook Awards in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"There are not many readers yet, for the technology is still working itself out," Waldron said. "E-authors and e-publishers are like baby birds."

The awards are as follows. Fiction: Mozart's Wife, by Juliet Waldron (Online Originals).

Non-fiction: The Spirit of the Internet, by Lawrence Hagerty (Matrix Masters).

Children: Nessie and the Living Stone, by Lois June Wickstrom and Jean Lorrah (CrossroadsPub.Com).

Short Fiction: The Cavemen in the Hedges, by Stacey Richter (first appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story).

Digital Storytelling: Homecoming, by Pamela Gay (self-published).

Electronic Libraries

Six leading e-libraries are as follows:  

For more information, visit www.eduventures.com .

University of Chicago listing of electronic books and journals ---
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/f/dtml?dtml=/e/db/index.dtml 

The Michigan Electronic Library --- http://mel.lib.mi.us/ 

Electronic Texta and Publishing Resources --- http://www.loc.gov/global/etext/etext.html

For more information on electronic books and libraries, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Expedition to Galapagos --- http://www.mnh.si.edu/expeditions/galapagos/ 

From SyllabusNews on March 27, 2001

Maximized Software recently released beta 1 of GoPOP, a POP server that runs on a user's PC and enables remote access to Outlook e-mail from anywhere in the world with any standard remote e-mail client. Users can retrieve their Outlook e-mail with any type of device: PDA, cell phone, pager, or laptop. GoPOP also eliminates the need to keep multiple copies of e-mail messages on different servers. Without GoPOP, users need to set up inconvenient solutions in order to read e-mail while away from their computer. Common solutions include setting up a "shadow" account with Yahoo! or HotMail, or configuring Outlook to "leave messages on server." With the release of GoPOP, Microsoft Outlook becomes the single source for all of the user's e-mail.

GoPOP beta 1 is available for immediate download at http://www.maximized.com/products/gopop/ 

Moundville Archaelogical Park --- Native American History --- http://museums.ua.edu/moundville/ 

You can even buy a diploma for degrees not even available from "the" Trinity University or various other legitimate institutions with the name "Trinity College." For the snake oil diploma in four-to-six weeks, go to http://www.learnbymail.com/trinity/ 

Since this particular diploma mill seems to hail from the British Isles, it might even look like "ya got yer sheepskin from dat genuine Trinity College in Dublin me lad."  The fees are as follows:

Bachelors  (BA, BCom, BSc. etc) Degree      $ US 255 / £160
Bachelors Degree with honours      $ US 310 / £195
Masters Degree      $ US 440 / £275
Doctorate Award      $ US 600 / £375
Bachelors and Masters Degrees in the same subject      $ US 650 / £410
Masters and Doctorate Awards in the same subject      $ US 935 / £585
Bachelors, Masters and Doctorate in the same subject      $ US 1110 / £995
Self Study all inclusive MBA course      $ US 630 / £395
Self Study all inclusive MComm course      $ US 720 / £450
Transcripts      $ US 55 / £35*
Notarisation of Certificate      $ US 55 / £35**

************************************************** 
A quotation with "Ethical Considerations": 

It should be said that no-one is trying to "degrade" the efforts of those who have succeeded in completing a "traditional" degree course, especially in an Engineering subject or indeed any other subject for that matter. Rather many employers and agencies often fail to adequately answer that question as to why a degree qualification is preferable to a lifetime of experience in many subjects?

Clearly however, there are subjects where a formal degree qualification is a precursor to the practice of a particular profession, the Medical profession is probably the immediate example and Trinity does not award such degrees. However Trinity does award degrees in Alternative Medicine.

If your chosen subject is not listed please don't despair, Trinity will consider awarding degrees in any subject, given your experience. If you are unsure, email us.

Ethical Considerations

Is there an ethical question involved? Only in as much as there is no formal course or examination as the award is based on your previous studies, seminars, independent or correspondence course studies, workshops, language skills and any other learning process. And of course your life experiences with work. Read about " Non-Traditional Education <../nontra.htm> "

The pitfalls are that a potential employer must be sure that you know your subject, there is no point applying for a position in which you have no knowledge or experience of, yet why should you be precluded from having a chance at interview on the basis of a paper qualification.

With regard to potential UK "students" the British Parliament 1988 Education Act states that "The awards made by overseas educational establishments should be recognised, and the assessment and recognition of such qualifications would be a matter for the individual employer and professional bodies, other educational institutions, etc. in accordance with their own needs and criteria."

So there it is, you obtain a degree based on your CV/resume, it’s perfectly legal as long as it does not claim to be from a DES (Department of Education & Science - UK) registered establishment or British University http://www.learnbymail.com/trinity/main/degree_programme.htm  **************************************************

Usually I chuckle at adds for such things in the classified advertisement sections of magazines.  I once read one add where you could get a PhD degree in less than a week for $350 from some school in Salt Lake City. But when snake oil sellers commence to sell your diploma look-alikes online, it is no longer a chuckling matter. Trinity University officials are reporting communications from some very confused people around the world. One example is from a purported Trinity University "alumnus" is seeking help from the Career Counseling Department at Trinity University.:

Are there other such sites as this using the names of other legitimate universities? See http://www.learnbymail.com/trinity/ 

Dance Fundamentals --- http://raketik.com/workshop2/workshop.html 

Gleim Publications is now offering a CMA/CFM Academic Site License completely FREE to colleges and universities. This program is similar to the current Gleim CPA Academic Site License in that each school will receive their network version of the software. Each student will have his or her own log-in so each individual's performance history can be tracked separately. This will allow full-time students at your college or university to purchase Gleim's CMA/CFM Review books and software at approximately 50% off retail. Upon confirmation of the purchase of any 5 (book and software set), Gleim will donate one complete set of audio lectures for placement in the department office, media center, or library reserve. To read more about the program and to print the necessary forms, please visit http://www.gleim.com/Accounting/sitelicense/cmasitelicense.html  or contact scott@gleim.com .

OC3 Review Materials

OC3 works with college and university Accounting Departments to provide both live review programs and materials for CMA/CFM preparation. The company offers discount and revenue sharing arrangements tailored to the needs of your group. To learn more about these programs, please contact Mike McLean at mmclean@willamette.edu .

Rigos CMA/CFM Review

Rigos CMA/CFM Review offers CMA/CFM review courses through independent affiliate arrangements. The company is looking for colleges, universities, or groups of college professors who are interested in operating their own course. The company would grant an area exclusive agreement to represent Rigos CMA/CFM Review; the books would not otherwise be available in this market. The materials, provided at nominal cost, include a bound text, software containing practice questions and Magic Memory Outlines, and an instructional video (5 hours per exam part). For more information on these programs, please visit www.rigos.net <http://www.rigos.net> or contact Jim Rigos at jim@rigos.net  

Welcome to the March 20th edition of the ENews Internet Essentials newsletter for the financial professional. --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Makes XBRL History 
2. XBRL Launches in Spain 
3. Newtec Updates XBRL Demo 
4. Good News for PDA Road Warriors 
5. Updated XBRL Software Tools Page 
6. Steve Ballmer: XML is the "Next Revolution" 
7. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

Welcome to the March 25th edition of the ENews Internet Essentials newsletter for the financial professional. This week, the news features the IMA National Conference with three XBRL events, a polished 4.3 MB MP3 song about KPMG, IRS and XML news.--- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html :

1. XBRL Coming Events 
2. Big Plans for XBRL at IMA National Convention in New Orleans 
3. Is The IRS Auditing Less? Not Really 
4. KPMG Introduces (Insert Drum roll) an MP3 Song 
5. XML: A Brief Introduction 
6. Updated XBRL Tools Page 
7. How To View Over 100 Past Issues 
8. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

Forwarded by Dick Haar

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that "when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

In modern education and government, however, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing Riders.

3. Threatening the horse with termination.

4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.

5. Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.

6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

7. Reclassifying the dead horse as "living impaired."

8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.

10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.

11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.

12. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore, contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position

Forwarded by Aaron Konstam.  Blame him for the repeats from previous editions of New Bookmarks.

NEW PROVERBS

* If you're too open minded, your brains will fall out.

* Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

* Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away - and barefoot.

* Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a mechanic.

* Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

* A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

* A closed mouth gathers no feet.

* If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before.

* My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

* Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.

* It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

* For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.

The husband was not home at his usual hour, and the wife was fuming. Her outrage increased as the clock ticked later and later. Finally, at about 3:00 AM she heard a noise at the front door. As she stood at the top of the stairs, there was her husband - as drunk as a skunk and trying to navigate his way up the stairs.

"Do you realize what time it is?" she yelled.

He answered, "Don't get excited, I'm late because I bought something for the house."

Immediately her attitude changed, and as she ran down the stairs to meet him halfway, she asked excitedly, "What did you buy for the house, dear?"

"A round of drinks!" replied the drunken slob.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

March 16, 2001

There will not be an edition of New Bookmarks for March 23.  I will be conducting classes at Monterrey Tech in Mexico, March 18-24.  Please resist all urges to send me email during that week.  I will be out of contact while out of the country.

Please say a prayer for my very good close friend and neighbor Dr. Anthony (Tony) Digiovani who is now fighting for his life in the N.E. Baptist Hospital in San Antonio.

Quotes of the Week

Accounting standards are too important to be left to accountants.
A quotation by a U.S. member of Congress as quoted by Dennis Beresford in "Congress Looks at Accounting for Business Combinations," Accounting Horizons, March 2001, p. 73

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.
Author Unknown (forwarded by Dick Haar)

Now everything we never went to the library to look up, we can not look up in the convenience of our own home on the Internet.
Joe Martin, Willy 'N Ethel Comic Strip, March 11, 2001

You are never an expert in your own hometown.
An IT Director  said this to me in Salem Oregon when I was on a consulting trip.  She had a computer science degree from UC Berkeley.  I asked her why, given her advanced skills, her university brought me in as an IT consultant?

A consultant is an ordinary person a long way from home
Murphy's Law

If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
Murphy's Law

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Murphy's Law

If you're coasting, you're going downhill.
Murphy's Law

Whatever hits the fan will be evenly distributed.
Murphy's Law

Any story can be made to fit any facts by means of appropriate additional assumptions.
Murphy's Law
We might say the same things about economics, accounting, and finance research.

Assumption is the mother of all foul-ups.
Murphy's Law
I think my mother said something about assuming she could have a baby.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky
Murphy's Law

Half of being smart is knowing your're dumb at it.
Murphy's Law

If you can't convince (teach) them, confuse them.
Murphy's Law
This should be the sign over my office door.

Important Wall Street Journal Special Report, e-Commerce in Education, Section R, March 12, 2001 --- http://interactive.wsj.com/pages/ecommerce2001-2.htm 

This section should be read by all professionals in higher education.  It brings us up to date on trends in distance education both in private corporations and traditional colleges and universities.  It is a great source for updating my threads and road show on such topics at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

There is too much in this Special Report to summarize in one module of New Bookmarks.  The Table of Contents is as follows:

Big money is pouring into the business of education. But it's too soon to tell whether there will be any payoff.

Traditional universities are taking to the Net with a wide range of strategies.

A look at all the different ways companies hope to make money from online education.

Venture capitalists have dramatically increased their investments in e-learning.

Private virtual universities challenge many of the assumptions long held by educators. Their own challenge: survival.

Libraries aren't going away. But they are going to be very different.

Traditional academic publishers are scrambling to adapt to the online world.

An entrepreneur wants to bring U.S. universities to Spaniards -- in their own language.

The future of e-commerce will no doubt be littered with failed education companies.

Companies that teach English in Asia see their business quickly being transformed by the Web.

A Dutch university aims to teach students on the run, developing, in conjunction with several companies, Europe's first common wireless standard geared toward education applications.

Switzerland is putting the Internet to work to relieve crowded universities and improve teaching practices -- both while keeping down costs.

Thanks to technology, K-12 will never look the same. Companies are plying a host of new offerings -- from hardware and interactive software to Internet-related tools -- to schools.

Novelist Reynolds Price talks about teaching, writing and the literary merits of e-mail.

Online instruction gives people the chance to learn just about anything, from the comfort of their own home. Anybody want to be a beekeeper?

Online classes can be tough to find, hard to sign up for -- and a bore once you get there.

Schools may find they have the computer equipment, but no way to use it. Here's how one school and a networking firm found an answer. Do's and Don'ts Of Web Classes How can first-time Web students succeed in the world of online education? See a list of tips to embrace and pitfalls to avoid.

Fettes College plans to start broadcasting live and recorded classroom lectures over the Internet to paid subscribers by year's end. Will it succeed?

What was your online learning experience like? Can the online campus ever replace the real one? What improvements are needed? Join an online discussion.

What do you think the classroom of the future will look like? How can educators, parents and students make the best use of new technology? Join an online discussion.

Can online education companies be profitable and educate students at the same time? Which companies do you think will prosper in the online education field? Join an online discussion.

The Internet does not change everything. Some of the world's foremost thinkers ponder the intersection of technology and education.

Why some critics give Web-based education less-than-stellar grades.

What will college look like in the not-so-distant future? Crookston, Minn., provides an early glimpse.

Former Sen. Kerrey and current Rep. Isakson reflect on the government's role in fostering e-learning.

A few selected quotations are shown below:

Entrepreneurs and investors have jumped into the world of online education, pumping some $6 billion into the sector since 1990 -- almost half of it since 1999.

The knowledge-enterprise industry now measures some $735 billion, which includes spending on a host of things, such as textbooks, software and services, according to Merrill Lynch. Analysts there expect the online component of that to grow to $25.3 billion by 2003 from $3.6 billion in 1999. Within that, domestic online corporate learning is expected to grow fastest: from $1.1 billion in 1999 to $11.4 billion in 2003 -- a compounded annual growth rate of 79%. Two other key sectors -- kindergarten-through-12th grade and higher education -- anticipate annual growth rates of over 50%.

Consider what's happening at Westview High School in Poway, Calif. This time next year, classrooms there will be stocked with computers, and a wireless network will allow students to access the Internet through their laptops from anywhere on school grounds. In addition, hand-held devices will be ubiquitous, as will virtual classrooms, so students can log on to the Internet for assignments and participate in chat rooms with students from other schools across the globe

The potential for the K-12 e-learning market is huge, analysts say (shown in millions)

Segment Current Market Potential Market
Content $20 $4,000
E-commerce 175 657,000
Infrastructure 1,000 7,000
Supplemental services 10 5,000

 

What schools and parents spend on education, versus their total online spending, in billions

  Education Products/Services Online Spending 1999 Online Spending 2003*
Schools $70.00 $0.075 $2.00
Parents 7.00 0.050 0.75

*estimates

Sources: Merrill Lynch estimates; International Data Corp.

Their strategies are as varied as the schools. Some institutions, such as Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, have formed partnerships with e-learning companies like UNext.com (www.unext.com) of Deerfield, Ill., or Pensare Inc., based in Los Altos, Calif., to bring their courses and professors online. Others have decided to go it alone, developing and offering their own online courses. Some schools, including New York University and Cornell University, have spun off their e-learning programs as for-profit ventures.

With the economic slowdown and the venture-capital spigot turned off, the question now is a simple one: Can these marriages of conventional education and e-commerce survive? Can these for-profit arms actually turn a profit? And if so, at what price?

"If you have a good product and figure out how to market it and deliver it, then you should be significantly competitive in the marketplace," says Michael Goldstein, head of the educational-institutions practice at Dow Lohnes & Albertson, a law firm in Washington, D.C. "That will be difficult to do, and there are no clear models yet in the marketplace."

Consider Fathom.com (www.fathom.com). Launched last year with a $20 million investment from Columbia, Fathom offers a mixture of free information -- articles, reference works and links to other sites -- and access to for-fee online courses, all aimed at the "lifelong learner." (Fathom takes a cut of the fee as its payment.) On the handsomely designed site, a surfer can search among about 600 online courses offered by a variety of schools, including the University of Washington and Michigan State University.

Surfers can also follow "knowledge trails" -- a series of related links on such topics as arts and architecture, business and finance or science and engineering, among others.

Here's a safe-and-steady business plan. The nation's for-profit higher-education companies have been around for years, and they are nothing like a typical football-obsessed college. Students who enroll in these institutions care about one thing: classes. They are in their mid-30s. They don't want frat parties. They want better jobs. These schools read the want ads closely, and they respond by offering courses in subjects such as finance, management, nursing and information technology.

In this business model, student tuition fees are the primary revenue source. The beauty of this for investors is that the students are locked into a series of courses over an extended period, giving the companies a reliable income stream.

These companies "know where their revenues are coming from way in advance," says Jay Tracey, chief investment officer at Berger Funds. In an unsteady stock market, he says, "predictability and visibility become more important to investors than the rate of growth." The Denver mutual-fund concern has invested in DeVry Inc. (www.devry.com), a for-profit degree-granting enterprise, as well as SmartForce, in corporate training.

The largest private (and accredited) institution of higher education:

To get investors to pay more attention to its Internet business, Apollo Group Inc. (www.apollogroup.com), a Phoenix-based education holding company, issued a tracking stock last year for its University of Phoenix Online unit, which has served students over the Web for more than a decade. While some tracking stocks haven't fared well, this one did. Thanks largely to the fact that it's a proven, profitable business in a sea of Internet red ink, the IPO finished the year at more than double its September initial offering price of $14. And the parent company's stock jumped 145% for the year.

In the offline world, Apollo operates sites around the country to conduct classes, often in rented facilities. Classes are held mostly at night, so students can attend after work. When students "enroll in a degree program, we are counting on them taking five or six courses or more -- so that's a repeat-revenue model for us," says Terri Heddegard, an Apollo vice president.

Apollo says the online unit's enrollment has surged to 19,000 students, up 65% from a year earlier, out of a total of 83,000 students in all forums including physical class sites. The online students take classes at home, using e-mail and Web message boards to work on group projects. The online-class tuition cost runs $400 to $495 a credit, about 20% more expensive than tuition for the brick-and-mortar classes, Apollo says.

For the fiscal first quarter, ended Nov. 30, the online institution reported net income of $5.6 million, or six cents a share, on revenue of $34 million. Including results from its online arm, Apollo posted profit of $25 million, or 38 cents a share, on revenue of $177 million for the same period.

 

Wow Site of the Week --- ISWORLD at http://www.isworld.org/isworld/isworldtext.html 

[What's New] [Top Resources] [Research] [Teaching] [Professional Activities][Country Pages] [ISWorld List Digest] [About ISWorld]

We will provide information management scholars and practitioners with a single entry point to resources related to information systems technology and promote the development of an international information infrastructure that will dramatically improve the world's ability to use information systems for creating, disseminating, and applying knowledge. Our vision has been sharpened by several metaphors which are accessible. Below are our objectives and a overview of our target community.

I want to thank Gary Holstrum for reminding me that the ISWORLD Website is really a Wow site.

B-School Site of the Week

I was not aware that BusinessWeek maintained such an extensive Website called B-Schools --- http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/index.html

Getting Into B-School
MBA Rankings & Profiles
Business Week's exclusive B-School rankings — new for 2000! — plus information on MBA programs worldwide

Part-Time MBA Profiles
Business Week's profiles of 250 part-time and distance-learning MBA programs in the U.S. and the world

ROI Calculator
Find out what an MBA is really worth compared with other investments

Admissions Q&As
Interviews on admissions — as well as financial aid and career placement — with administrators from 50 programs
Search
• MBA Programs
• Executive MBA Programs

Compare
• MBA Programs
• Executive MBA Programs

Facts & Figs
Create your own comparison tables using our new interactive database packed with statistics on MBA programs worldwide

GMAT Prep
Improve your score! This brand-new area features information on how to conquer the GMAT. You'll find expert advice, sample questions, and more
B-School Life
MBA Journals
Students with a variety of backgrounds and different objectives report regularly on their B-School experiences

Reading List
What are some of today's top professors and executives reading for work or pleasure?
Financial Aid Q&As
Interviews on financial aid with administrators from dozens of MBA programs
Career Moves
Career Advice
BW Online's career channel

Executive Programs
BW's ranking of the top 20 exec-ed providers worldwide, and more

Placement Q&As
Interviews on career placement with administrators from dozens of MBA programs
Company Research
Check out a potential employer with information on more than 4,000 companies.

Compare Salaries
Does your pay match the market rate? How much should you ask your new employer for? Find out here

 

"Brain Drain at the B-Schools:  Why they're scrambling to find qualified faculty," by Jennifer Merritt,  BusinessWeek, March 5, 2001, p. 106

A figure in this article shows the growth in PhD degrees as follows over the past decade:

What is more amazing is the fact that only 1,104 PhDs were granted in 1999, and only half of those individuals entered academe for a career.

I don't have the 1999 data for accounting PhDs, but Jim Hasselback reports the following PhD accountancy degrees awarded:

Source:  Prentice Hall Accounting Faculty Directory,  2000-2001, Page -2
Year

1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1991
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998

 New Accounting PhDs

136
173
178
160
161
171
188
201
205
209
173
193
197
199
196
163
152
146
124

There seems to be a downward supply in a market of rising demand.  It appears that accounting education is in even worse shape that business education in general.

A passage in the above BusinessWeek article reads as follows:

On top of dwindling PhDs, faculty are being lured away by big salaries at consulting firms, think tanks, and even other B-schools.  "We're getting into a sort of worldwide free agency," says Edward A. Snyder, dean of University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration.  With several schools competing for the same people, B-schools are learning about the war for talent the hard way.

Just ask Nancy Rothbard, an assistant professor of management at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.  The 1998 PhD had interviews at 13 schools and got offers from seven when she hit the job market in 2000 after a two-year fellowship.  "There are so many choices now, it's a little overwhelming."  Just to snare someone like Rothbard means offering a salary upwards of $130,000, not including research support and other perks.  That's nearly double the starting salary of, say, a history PhD.

When faculty positions don't get filled, B-school professors are often asked to teach extra classes, leaving less time for research, a must-have for achieving tenure.  "We spend a lot of time recruiting--time we could spend doing what we're here to do," says Craig R. Fox, an associate professor of management at Fuqua, where many professors have pitched in during the school's expansion.

Reply from Zane Swanson

Hi, My email system setup will not let me post messages to AECM. That Business Week article selection was missing a key point. You should consider the large proportion of business faculty who are eligible for retirement or approaching retirement or in phased retirements. Deans are probably estatic about the stock market crash because the decline in portfolio value of senior faculty will discourage them from retirement. On the hand, a future turn around in the stock market will intensify the loss of senior people.

Zane Swanson [Swansonz@esumail.emporia.edu] 

Reply from Cathy Sowden [Cathy_Sowden@hotmail.com] 

Dear Bob 

We are suffering the self same crisis in South Africa, probably exacerbated by the tumbling currency. What educational institutions need to overcome is not only the competition from commerce and industry in the local arena, but also the fact that staff are living in a global village now and that when they retire, it is more likely than not that they will be living in a country different to the one in which they were born. They will need sufficient savings and in a 'real currency' in order to 'survive old age'. As a result countries in Africa (especially SA) are suffering a severe brain drain leaving very few properly qualified staff to man the large govt institutions that are growing in tandem with the exploding population.

Research???? What is research???

I am a chartered accountant who has been in academics for 8 years out of a passion for education, but whose passion is beginning to wilt through frustrated attempts to study further (8 years and no sabatical - I have given that idea up and am planning to do it at night), financial constraints (we're generally paid roughly one tenth of the figure you quoted) and physical exhaustion.

I run 1 class (academically and administratively) of 600 students, and a smaller class of 200. Marking alone is a nightmare!

Our School of Financial Accounting has roughly 2 500 mainstream students and is run by 6 academics and 2 admin staff. The area of management is burgeoning and the biggest money spinner at our university, but compensating staff for the extra burden is still savagely argued by those in the Arts etc. Within 2 years, out of our staff complement of 6, 4 have left (admittedly replaced - but only after a few months of anguish) - but the question remains of how long they will hold out?

Lecturing in the field of management it seems means: extra admin and more contact time with classes no research, which means job security is lost you are well qualified to join Commerce and Industry but have opted for education, at huge opportunity cost to yourself lecturing in SA means that you take a salary knock almost on a monthly basis as the currency tumbles and have to consider what will happen in your old age when your meagre savings turn into peanuts! Anyway - it was nice to offload a little of my frustrations - hope you found it useful info though.

Kind regards - Cathy 
Senior Lecturer servicec@nu.ac.za 

International Accounting Standards

Thank you Stela Colun

Hello, Mr Jensen

PricewaterhouseCoopers has on its web site a draft entitled "International Accounting Standards - Illustrative Financial Statements". I will send it to you. Please have a look on it and tell me what means LC. I suspect that this is the reporting currency of the group which may be chosen by one's person.

Thank you, 
Stela Colun [scolun@mail.mfinante.ro] 

Although Stela attached a copy of the great document, she did not provide the PwC link, I found the link to be http://www.pwcglobal.com/ch/eng/ins-sol/publ/abas/international.html 

Incidentally, if you are interested in a mass of documents and illustrations on international accounting standards, go to the PwC homepage and conduct a search for "international accounting."  This is a knowledge portal of sorts, although an index and/or mapping to categories would help a great deal.  The PwC homepage is at http://www.pricewaterhouse.com/ 

The soaring problem of accounting for intangibles.

Unseen Wealth by Steven M. H. Wallman, Brookings Task Force on intang, Margaret M. Blair,

Intangibles are harder to measure, harder to quantify, often more difficult to manage, evaluate, and account for than tangible assets. There is no common language for sharing information about intangible sources of value, and the language used tends to be descriptive rather than quantitative and concrete. Unseen Wealth stresses the importance of developing standards for identifying, measuring, and accounting for intangible assets, and recommends actions to government and business for improving the quality and quantity of available information about intangible investments. The book articulates a three-pronged set of reforms to help companies construct better business and reporting models, improve the quality of financial reporting, and clarify intellectual property right laws.

Unseen Wealth was developed by the Brookings Task Force on Intangibles, which includes business leaders, consultants, accounting professionals, economists, intellectual property lawyers, and policy analysts --- 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0815701136/qid%3D984615076/sr%3D1-7/ref%3Ds/102-4268033-9192148 

  Roger Debreceny [rogerd@NETBOX.COM] 

A great website for papers on accounting for intangibles is the Baruch Lev website at http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~blev/ 

Thank you for sharing Ulrich Hommel --- http://www.real-options.de/ 

Real options capture the value of managerial flexibility to adapt decisions in response to unexpected market developments.

Companies create shareholder value by identifying, managing and exercising real options associated with their investment portfolio.

The real options method applies financial options theory to quantify the value of management flexibility in a world of uncertainty. If used as a conceptual tool, it allows management to characterize and communicate the strategic value of an investment project.

Traditional methods (e.g. net present value) fail to accurately capture the economic value of investments in an environment of widespread uncertainty and rapid change.

The real options method represents the new state-of-the-art technique for the valuation and management of strategic investments.

The real option method enables corporate decision-makers to leverage uncertainty and limit downside risk.

This site is maintained by Ulrich Hommel and the Chair of Investment and Risk Management of the European Business School (Oestrich- Winkel) as a free service to the scientific and management community. 

Also see Bob Jensen's Threads on Real Options, Option Pricing Theory, and Arbitrage Pricing Theory --- 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/realopt.htm 

A lawsuit filed late last week against Oracle and its Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison alleges the software company overstated earnings potential and understated operating problems, causing its shares to decline sharply --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103135/2695780/ 

Also at issue is the nearly $900 million in Oracle shares that Ellison dumped shortly before Oracle's third-quarter projections were released.

The suit, filed in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleges that Ellison "had the motive and opportunity to perpetrate the fraudulent scheme and course of business" to sell his shares as high as $32 per share -- 50 percent higher than the $15.75 price at which Oracle's shares closed on March 2.

From The Washington Post, March 11, 2001 --- http://www.washtech.com/news/media/8228-1.html 

You download the disposable-card technology and an icon at the bottom of the computer screen tells you it's there. The next time you're Web shopping and see something you want, you carry the item to the site's checkout page. But instead of entering your own, permanent credit card number, you click on the icon for your disposable card.

The card pops onto your screen and you enter your name and password. You then get a one-time number for the single purchase you intend to make. Once used, it isn't good any more. Your real number is hidden away at the bank, where you hope hackers can't go.

It's like writing a check. "It can't be put through twice," said research analyst Moriah Campbell-Holt of Gomez Advisors in Waltham, Mass., which rates Web companies. Hackers who steal the number steal air.

Only holders of real cards from Amex, Discover and MBNA can sign up for these free disposable cards. If the cards turn out to be popular, you can count on other banks to offer them.

An important finance  and economics site from Harvard University

From the Scout Report on March 8, 2001

Project Finance Portal http://www.hbs.edu/projfinportal/ 

The Baker Library at the Harvard Business School (HBS) has created this all-encompassing portal intended to serve as a reference guide for project finance students, faculty, and researchers. The resources on the site are divided into two main sections. The Research and Publications list is directed at the academic community and includes bibliographies of articles, books and book chapters, and trade magazines, as well as syllabi from business and law school courses from the top schools around the world, case studies, and rating agency information. The other section, Project Finance Links, functions as a standard portal, with over 800 annotated links to related Websites. All references to books, case studies, and articles are linked to the Harvard Business School online catalog for easier access by the HBS community. For librarians and Webmasters, the Project Finance Portal will serve as a stellar model of a portal for a library community.

Bob Jensen's threads on resources ar  haphazardly maintained at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/newfaculty.htm#Resources 

Wow Accounting Professor's Bookmarks --- Alan Sangster's links at http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/alans/alans.htm 

 Artificial Intelligence Pages on World Wide Web
 

Information Systems Pages on World Wide Web
 

Edweb - a must visit site or all WEB users
 

Engines for Education The Institute for Learning Sciences hyper book
 

NCET - The National Council for Educational Technology
 

Information Technology Training Initiative
 

St John's Gopher (Learning Styles - especially Dunn & Dunn)
 

American Accounting Association Gopher
 

Computer Science Bibliographic Database
 

The International Journal of Applied Expert Systems
 

New Review of Applied Expert Systems Home Page
  

IEEE - CAIA 95 Workshop on World Wide Web
Web World Conference 1995
 

Information for HTML writers
HTML Assistant Files
Weblint HTML code checker
 

City Net Browser Checkup
 

Carlos' FORMS Tutorial
 

Internet Tools

 ELM - Electronic Mail for Unix

 

WWWSTAT and GWSTAT - statistics and graphic statistics generator for URL usage

 

Roadmap for the Information Superhighway: Internet training workshop Well worth visiting for everyone using the Internet, not just beginners!

 Internet Tools

ELM - Electronic Mail for Unix

WWWSTAT and GWSTAT - statistics and graphic statistics generator for URL usage

 Roadmap for the Information Superhighway: Internet training workshop Well worth visiting for everyone using the Internet, not just beginners!

Thank you for sharing Alan.  The links you provide in each category are tremendous!

I want to thank Gary Holstrum for reminding me that Alan Sangster's  Website is really a helpful website.

Wow Accounting Professor Course Materials of the Week --- from Jushua Livnat at NYU

Course materials for an E-Commerce accounting and valuation course are available http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~jlivnat/ 

Joshua Livnat [jlivnat@stern.nyu.edu] 

Course materials include the following topics:

1. Introduction.

2. Evaluation of business models.

3. Valuation of E-Commerce companies.

4. Bricks & clicks.

Thank you Joshua for sharing these materials.

Hi Bob,

Great Site!!!!!!!!!

I am a two-time Emmy winner, novelist and attorney (big deal)

I would love you to review my novel, Mahogany Row, which just became available on Amazon.com and will be nationally released soon. It has been an e-book at fictionworks.com and is now a paperback.

If you want more informaton or would like to read the first chapter, you can check it out at www.fictionworks.com .

You can check me out and the book at www.medialawman.com 

Can I send you a copy? Please provide your snail mail address.

Thanks, Wayne Keeley

Hi Bob,

Just found your site. What a great resource! I'd like to invite you to check out XC Publishing http://www.xcpublishing.com  for possible inclusion on your web page. We offer high-quality fantasy, science fiction, romance, mystery, historical, adventure, cross-genre novels and selected nonfiction e-books to our readers. Our e-books are provided in as many file formats as possible. We also offer special book-related extras such as maps, games, newsletters and more at our website.

I noticed that your site seems to focus on non-fiction. If you ever decide to include fiction, however, we'd be delighted to find room on your page.

BTW, my day job is in the Finance dept. of city government. ;-)

Best,

Xina Marie Uhl [xinamarieuhl@earthlink.net] 
XC PUBLISHING - http://www.xcpublishing.com  
Your Source for XC-lent eBooks & More!

The "site" that Ms Uhl refers to contains my threads on electronic books --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Hi Dan,

I think you make some good points, and you've covered all bases by allowing for combined use of CDs and the Web. However, the year is no longer 1910 for CD-ROMs and the Web. It is more like 1950 with superhighways and jet planes on the drawing boards. There will be no CD horses on the superhighways of the Year 2010.  However, you may be positioned properly for the Year 1950 (Webwise).

You're assuming it's still the year 1910 when new-fangled automobiles frightening horses drawing carriages on the street. The "horseless carriages" in 1910 were in many ways inferior (they had to be crank started, they were slow, and they had flat tires about every ten miles). One problem faced by horseless carriages was that the roads were built for horses rather than automobiles. By analogy, the Web is still inferior (for multimedia) to that horse carriage called the CD-ROM. One reason is that the Internet roads were not suited for multimedia (although Internet 2 superhighways are under construction) --- see  http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Internet_2___Abilene_Project/ 

Someday I would like to pit you and Barry Rice in a heavy debate. Barry has never, to my knowledge, held forth much hope for the future of CD-ROMs. In fact he repeatedly claims their future is dead.

Seriously Dan, you make some good points. Since your materials do not contain heavy audio and video, I'm not certain that CD-ROMs offer all that much crucial advantage to your otherwise outstanding Financial Accounting Tutor. One problem is that to do some of the things you want to do, DHTML or JavaScript code must be written for everything that Toolbook will do automatically. 

I think that you will find that most things that you do in Toolbook can be done on the Web. However, you will have to abandon Toolbook to get them to work due to the limitations of Neuron for Toolbook playback. And you may have to write more code. For example, for JavaScript drag-and-drop, see http://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/it/dragconcepts/dragconcepts.html For an illustration, see http://146.83.4.9/SunSITE/java/docs/tut-java122-sun/dnd/sheetal.html 

Your points should make for some interesting debate on the AECM. I hope readers will go to http://www.almaris.com/fact/fact-web.htm 

Keep up the good work. Note that you were my Wow Accounting Professor of the Week on February 23 at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q1.htm 

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

-----Original Message----- 
From: Dan Gode [mailto:dan.gode@almaris.com]  
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 7:27 PM 
To: rjensen@trinity.edu Subject: Your comments will be appreciated

Bob:

I have created a document to defend why I am still CD-ROM based. You may not agree with everything in the document but I would still very much appreciate any feedback that you may have. The document is at: http://www.almaris.com/fact/fact-web.htm 

Please let me know what you think.

Dan

Reply 1 from Dan Gode

Bob:

I was away in London for a week. So I missed your Feb 23 post. Thanks a lot for nominating me.

My point is not CD-ROM vs the web, my point is really about Windows Native application vs. one running entirely within the browser. I agree that the CD-ROM as a distribution medium will go away shortly. In fact, I would very much prefer if the CD went away tomorrow and everyone agreed to a secure download format that could not be resent over the net to others. This will help us reduce the inventory nightmare.

However, I am not at all enthusiastic for a browser only application at least for the next 2-3 years. An application that uses the full power of an operating system will always be superior to one that relies solely on a browser. I am waiting for .Net from Microsoft to see how much of the operating system can be harnessed via the web. Making an application work entirely in a browser via a corporate firewall is a nightmare, and I am talking from actual experience with corporate clients.

I am going to rewrite the document tonight because it looks like I am advocating CD-ROMs for distribution, which I am not.

I have yet to see a serious application written to work entirely within a browser that offers the full set of interactivity features. I will try Javascript but I believe that you need an authoring system of some sort. Writing code without a good authoring system results in a maintenance nightmare.

In five years, the bulk of the browsers on the net may be powerful enough so that a browser only application will work. History tells us that tools without scripting can never produce the quality that one can get with scripting. And, good scripting requires good tools and I have yet to see one specifically designed for on-line learning.

Thanks for your comments. They will help me rewrite the page.

Dan

Bob:

I have updated my page at http://www.almaris.com/fact/fact-web.htm  based partly on your comments. This page is not about whether CD-ROM or the web should be used for distributing applications. This choice is pretty clear. For large applications (> 30 Mb) that do not require frequent updates, CD- ROMs are better while for smaller applications requiring frequent updates the web is better. We would actually prefer to make FAcT downloadable via the web if the downloads could be protected from redistribution. (The Napster controversy is a current example of the debate.) This is why our trial version is downloadable but not the full version.

This page is about the choice between applications that run directly on an operating system ("Native applications") and applications that run with a browser ("Browser-based" applications). Industry incorrectly refers to this choice as CD vs. the web and I simply used that language in my earlier message to you.

I am not sure if the wagon vs. cars analogy is correct. I have been hearing that everything will be distributed via the web for a while. As the networks get faster, the applications get bigger, and the media capacities also get bigger. Yesterday, we had CDs and now we have DVDs that can store upto 4 GB. I simply do not foresee how 4 GB will be easily downloadable via the web in the near future. Yes, my application is not large now but it will be after I am done adding some audio and video.

Another analogy is instructive. Hard disks were supposed to go away and we were supposed to get thin clients with all applications running on the networks. At least this is what Sun and Oracle badly wanted and still hope for to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. However, hard disks have gotten bigger and faster and are still with us and Microsoft applications come on CD-ROMs.

"Everything on the web" was part of the mantra that drove NASDAQ to 5,000. We are now faced with a sobering reality. Web-based e-learning was supposed to be the next "killer app" according to CISCO CEO John Chambers (a person who obviously wants all data to flow through the networks repeatedly). I believed in web-based e-learning too. However, none of the pure play e- learning companies that are publicly listed make any money and I am beginning to doubt if people correctly estimate the costs of developing and marketing e-learning materials.

I did check out the Javascript drag-and-drop that you mention. However, it still does not support what I want. I also looked at the Javascript API at http://dynapi.sourceforge.net  but the authors claim that it has problems with Netscape browsers and that it is difficult to modify or debug.

I don't want to sound like I am stuck in 1994 before the internet arrived. I am constantly on the lookout for browser-based solutions but I have not yet found something that can be used to support a reliable application that can be made available today at a reasonable cost. I have limited funds and cannot be like Amazon that has been losing money for the last five years in order to "build" its business.

Dan Gode, Stern School of Business [dgode@STERN.NYU.EDU] 

What kind of language is XSLT? --- http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt/?dwzone=x 

An analysis and overview Michael H. Kay (mhkay@iclway.co.uk) 

February 2001

What kind of a language is XSLT, what is it for, and why was it designed the way it is? These questions get many different answers, and beginners are often confused because the language is so different from anything they are used to. This article tries to put XSLT in context. Without trying to teach you to write XSLT style sheets, it explains where the language comes from, what it's good at, and why you should use it.

I originally wrote this article to provide the necessary background for a technical article about Saxon, intended to provide insights into the implementation techniques used in a typical XSLT processor, and therefore to help users maximize the performance of their style sheets. But the editorial team at developerWorks persuaded me that this introduction would be interesting a much wider audience, and that it was worth publishing separately as a free-standing description of the XSLT language.

What is XSLT? The XSLT language was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and version 1.0 of the language was published as a Recommendation on November 16, 1999 (see Resources). I have provided a comprehensive specification and user guide for the language in my book XSLT Programmers' Reference and I don't intend to cover the same ground in this paper. Rather, the aim is simply to give an understanding of where XSLT fits in to the grand scheme of things.

The role of XSLT XSLT has its origins in the aspiration to separate information content from presentation on the Web. HTML, as originally defined, achieved a degree of device independence by defining presentation in terms of abstractions such as paragraphs, emphasis, and numbered lists. As the Web became more commercial, publishers wanted the same control over quality of output that they had with the printed medium. This gradually led to an increasing use of concrete presentation controls such as explicit fonts and absolute positioning of material on the page. The unfortunate but entirely predictable side effect was that it became increasingly difficult to deliver the same content to alternative devices such as digital TV sets and WAP phones (repurposing in the jargon of the publishing trade).

Drawing on experience with SGML in the print publishing world, XML was defined early in 1998 as a markup language to represent structured content independent of its presentation. Unlike HTML, which uses a fixed set of concepts (such as paragraphs, lists, and tables), the tags used in XML markup are entirely user defined, and the intention is that they should relate to objects in the domain of interest (such as people, places, prices, and dates). Whereas the elements in HTML are essentially typographic (albeit at a level of abstraction), the aim with XML is that the elements should describe real-world objects. For example, Listing 1 shows an XML document representing the results of a soccer tournament.

Bob Jensen's threads entitled XML, XHTML, XBRL, XForm, XSLT, and RDF Watch can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/xmlrdf.htm 

Blackboard Tips on Exam/Quiz Security
I added the following messages to my tips on Blackboard at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/blackboard.htm 
Look under "Scenario 2 --- Professor Quizalot."

A useful feature in Blackboard is that it allows quizzes that randomly select question blocks from question pools. As long as the question pools are larger than the quiz, each student gets a different quiz. Multiple pools can be accessed for each quiz so that topical coverage and difficulty is consistent across students. I use blackboard for weekly quizzes to motivate students to stay current, but the midterm and the final are administered in class.

I also find essay questions on blackboard to be useful for days that a case discussion is scheduled. I can review students' answers before class to see how they are thinking about a case. I have blackboard randomly select from a question pool of pre-assigned questions so students don't know which specific questions they are going to see but they can prepare answers to a larger set of question before starting the quiz. I have received very positive feedback from students that it helps them to be better prepared for class discussion. It is also less work and easier to administer than continuously collecting, grading, and returning case write-ups.

****************************************
 Leslie Kren
Associate Professor
School of Business University of WI - Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI 53201 office: 414 229-6075 fax: 414 229-6957
 lkren@uwm.edu    http://www.uwm.edu/~lkren/ 
****************************************

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Stone
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
Sent: 3/13/01 8:27 AM Subject:
Re: AECM Digest - 11 Mar 2001 to 12 Mar 2001 (#2001-65)

Hi all,
Re: the blackboard question. I do all quizzes and exams (including the final) in class using blackboard and laptops. Students love this because they get immediate feedback on the objective portions of the exam -- we go over the exam as soon as everyone completes it. I love it because the grading is automatic.

Security is no more or less of an issue than for in-class paper exams. The major risk is the network / system. If it goes down then you've lost the class session (unless you generate paper copies of the exam -- which I do for major exams). To date, I've been lucky and had no major network problems.

****************************************
Dan Stone,
Gatton Endowed Chair of Accounting,
Univ. of Kentucky,
Von Allmen School of Accountancy, 355 Business & Economics, Lexington, KY 40506-0034 * internet: dstone@pop.uky.edu   www: http://gatton.uky.edu/GattonPeople/People/DepartList/AccDeptList/AccFac/ accf ac_14.html  phone: 859-257-3788, fax: 859-257-3654, office: 425G Business & Economics office: 425G Business & Economics
****************************************

David Winter's exhaustive archive of FAQs, historical essays, equipment photographs, and biographies digs deep into the history of video games.  
Pong-Story --- http://www.pong-story.com/ 

Ultimate Arcade --- http://www.ultimatearcade.com/ 

How to avoid (not avoid) being audited by the IRS
From the AccountingWeb on March 9, 2001

In case you were looking for a good way to get the attention of the IRS, here are 16 red flags that the IRS claims will trigger an audit faster than you can say, "Greetings, Taxpayer..." http://www.accountingweb.com/item/40235/101 

The IRS will automatically disallow these items if they appear on your tax return:

To stay buried comfortably inside the huge pile of 2000 tax returns, mind the following:

With a claim for $6 billion, Minnesota firm Department 56 Inc. is attempting to lay blame on (Arthur) Andersen for a consulting job that went awry. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/40154/101 

There has been an explosion in web-based accounting resources and accounting related services. What can you do to utilize the Internet to maximize your business and to help your clients succeed? Tim Anglim of the Forensic Group shared his ideas on this timely topic in an AccountingWEB workshop presentation. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/38450/101 

Helpful accounting and business links from the Texas Society of CPAs --- http://www.tscpa.org/linksresource/ilinks.html 

Hello XXXXX,

For your help with rules in 53 countries, in another message I will provide you with some information regarding a document called GAAP 2000: A Survey of Accounting Rules in 53 Countries.  That may help you compare accounting rules between countries.

There are two types of traded securities in stock exchanges and debt markets: (1) Financial Instruments and (2) Derivative Financial Instruments.

Financial instruments are accounted for in the U.S. primarily under FAS 115 rules with changes the accounting with respect to classifications as to whether the financial instruments are to be held-to-maturity, available-for-sale, or trading securities (when accounting for a securities dealer). The FAS 115 standard is not free, but can be purchased from http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/fasb/map/index.html 

The main international standard for financial instruments is IAS 32 from the IASC. This is not a free document, but you can order it from http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen2_1.htm 

FASB's Exposure Draft for Fair Value Adjustments to all Financial Instruments On December 14, 1999 the FASB issued Exposure Draft 204-B entitled Reporting Financial Instruments and Certain Related Assets and Liabilities at Fair Value. This document can be downloaded free from http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/draft/draftpg.html 

If an item is viewed as a financial instrument rather than inventory, the accounting becomes more complicated under SFAS 115. Traders in financial instruments adjust such instruments to fair value with all changes in value passing through current earnings. Business firms who are not deemed to be traders must designate the instrument as either available-for-sale (AFS) or hold-to-maturity (HTM). A HTM instrument is maintained at original cost. An AFS financial instrument must be marked-to-market, but the changes in value pass through OCI rather than current earnings until the instrument is actually sold or otherwise expires. Under international standards, the IASC requires fair value adjustments for most financial instruments. This has led to strong reaction from businesses around the world, especially banks. There are now two major working group debates. In 1999 the Joint Working Group of the Banking Associations sharply rebuffed the IAS 39 fair value accounting in two white papers that can be downloaded from http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen3_112.htm .

Financial Instruments: Issues Relating to Banks (strongly argues for required fair value adjustments of financial instruments). The issue date is August 31, 1999. http://www.iasc.org.uk/pix/banksjwg.pdf .

Accounting for financial Instruments for Banks (concludes that a modified form of historical cost is optimal for bank accounting). The issue date is October 4, 1999 http://www.iasc.org.uk/pix/jwgfinal.pdf .

Derivative financial instruments have their own accounting rules apart from the rules for financial instruments. Derivative financial rules are specified in FAS 133 in the U.S. and IAS 39 in the international standards of the IASC (which has now become the IASB). You can read more about these two standards at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm 

Of course the topic of accounting for securities is covered in various other IASB and FASB standards. You may want to do an advanced search in Google using such exact phrases as "Securities Accounting" and "Financial Instruments Accounting." The search site is at http://www.google.com/advanced_search 

I hope this helps.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: XXXXX
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 2:37 AM To: rjensen@trinity.edu 
Subject: Doctorate thesis

Dear Dr Jensen,

My name is XXXXX and I'm BB years old. I work at YYYYY Bucharest, Romania and in the same time I'm doing a doctorate thesis entitled "ZZZZZ" regarding accounting of securities. One of its chapters is dealing with using the accounting information in stock exchange analysis. What I would like to ask you is that: can you advise me what to read and where I can find books regarding the mentioned subject? If you can help me, I will be very glad, in fact I am already grateful for using your Investment Words Dictionary which I printed form the www.trinity.edu site.

I will also would like to speak with you about equity and debt securities, derivatives etc.

Thank you, your sincerely XXXXX.

I use the Perry and Schneider text in my Accounting and Information Systems course.  It is a great text if you want to introduce MS Access relational database applications into accounting information systems.

From Double Entries March 7, 2001

This week’s news in Double Entries is sponsored by South-Western’s Accounting Team. Visit http://accounting.swcollege.com to learn more about James T. Perry and Gary P. Schneider’s Building Accounting Systems Using Access 2000 (2001 South-Western), teaching students how to develop, audit, and use accounting systems so the information contained within them can then be used by managers and decision makers.

Thank you to everyone, who helped me put together my plan. This list has been a great wealth of information for me, and I really appreciated all of your help. While I filtered through your suggestions, the two best sites I came accross that answered all of my questions were these. I thought I would share them with you to return the favor.

www.happyteachers.com 

and the other site was sites for teachers at

http://www.sitesforteachers.com/cgi-bin/autorank/rankem.cgi?id=jory 

Again, all of you have been a huge help. Thanks for everything.

Sincerely,

Jory Pai joryyroj@hotmail.com  Dallas HS Dallas, TX 75025

Most accountants probably have no idea how much space it takes to store money.  Let's start with pennys.
The MegaPenny Project --- http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/ 

From the Scout Report on March 6, 2001

The Journal Locator in Psychology and the Social Sciences http://www.wiso.uni-augsburg.de/sozio/hartmann/psycho/journals.html  

US Mirror http://telehealth.net/armin/  

UK Mirror http://ctiwebct.york.ac.uk/journals/journals.html 

Canadian Social Research Links http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/ 

National Anthropological Archives (Smithsonian) --- http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/ 

Also from the Scout Report on March 6, 2001

Online Papers on Consciousness http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/online.html 

Created and maintained by David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, this Website offers a directory of links to over 700 online papers on issues of consciousness. The table of contents offers the papers in 34 loose categories such as the concept of consciousness, materialism and dualism, the self and personal identity, consciousness and artificial intelligence, the Turing test, consciousness in the history of psychology, visual consciousness, and implicit learning. The site also provides links to bibliographies of about 2,000 papers posted on other sites. Held primarily at University and institutional Websites, most of the papers seem to be in HTML or ASCII formats. Some papers may be in .pdf or other text display formats.

The Small Business Administration web site has good information on how to do a business plan. In my view most of the books are useless because they focus on the mechanics of the business plan. A business plan is a story about a venture you are trying to create, so it is a story about what you plan to do.

Here is the SBA site.

http://www.sba.gov/starting/indexbusplans.html 

Germain Boer [Germain.Boer@OWEN.VANDERBILT.EDU] 

Palo Alto Software has a product called Business Plan Pro. It walks you through the creation of a business plan. You can view sample plans on their website ( www.paloaltosoftware.com ). There may be enough sample material on the site to walk your student through the process and the major components of the plan.

Tom Romaniak 
Acquisitions Editor 
Atomic Dog Publishing, Inc. tomr@atomicdogpub.com  www.atomicdogpub.com  (608) 286-1531

Art history --- Musee Marmottan Monet - hosts the world's largest Claude Monet
collection. --- http://www.marmottan.com/ 

Bambi Live
The now-famous photograph snapped by a firefighter in the Bitteroot National Forest in Montana --- http://pokersnippets.homestead.com/6.html 

From Phil Livingston, President of Financial Executives International (FEI)
On the subject of the FASB Exposure Draft (ED) on Revised Exposure Draft: Business Combinations and Intangible Assets—Accounting for Goodwill issued February 14, 2001.

* The ED requires impairment testing of goodwill at the "Reporting Unit" level, which makes the definition of a reporting unit a key concept in the ED. The ED defines a Reporting Unit as "the lowest level of an entity that is a business and that can be distinguished, physically and operationally and for internal reporting purposes, from the other activities, operations, and assets of the entity" and the Board notes that a Reporting Unit is "often the lowest level of an entity at which operating plans are prepared and profitability is measured for assessing management performance." CCR believes that the time and effort necessary to comply with the requirements of the Benchmark Assessment (see below) which have to be performed for each Reporting Unit (and updated for changes in conditions) makes it important that each company be able to determine the appropriate level that balances benefits and costs. The Committee believes that for most large companies the right level should !

be reportable operating segments determined under FAS 131, the FASB's segment reporting standard. CCR further believes that companies should be permitted to define Reporting Units at a level beneath the reportable operating segment, provided that the company documents its policy for determining Reporting Units and applies that policy consistently.

* The ED requires a "Benchmark Assessment" to be performed for all Reporting Units within 6 months of the ED's effective date (quite likely this will be July 1, 2001). In performing the Benchmark Assessment, a company must (1) define what its Reporting Units are, (2) identify the goodwill, assets and liabilities associated with each Reporting Unit, (3) document the key expectations related to future performance of the Reporting Unit, (4) document the model and key assumptions that will be used to measure the fair value of the Reporting Unit, (5) measure the fair value of the Reporting Unit as of the date of acquisition or reorganization or the adoption of the new standard, (6) compare the carrying amount of its net assets (including goodwill) with the fair value of the Reporting Unit calculated in step 5. (7) If the carrying amount of net assets exceeds the fair value of the Reporting Unit the company must reassess its valuation model, assumptions, and the amount of goodwill!

allocated to the reporting unit. If appropriate, changes are made and the fair value is recomputed. If at the end of this process the fair value of the Reporting Unit is still less than the carrying amount of its net assets, the Reporting Unit should be tested for impairment. CCR believes that the Benchmark Assessment process will costly and time consuming to perform even for a relatively small number of reporting units. CCR observes that cost/benefit considerations increasingly come into play as the number of Reporting Units grows. In addition, when Reporting Units are defined at a low level, it is much more likely that organization changes will precipitate a new round of Benchmark Assessments. CCR also questions whether the fair value measurement of the Reporting Unit is a necessary step in the Benchmark Assessment, unless there is evidence that an impairment exists.

* The ED provides an extensive list of impairment indicators that would precipitate testing of goodwill for impairment. CCR requests that the Board clarify the context for assessing whether the existence of such indicators are "significant". Specifically, CCR believes that is only in those circumstances in which the events in question are expected to result in a significant decrease in net cash flows that an assessment should be undertaken. Without such guidance, the occurrence of certain events may require companies to perform impairment assessments when it is clearly unnecessary. For example, the introduction of a similar product by a competitor that is expected to significantly reduce revenues for a very low margin product, even if the gross revenues were significant, would not normally be an event that would warrant impairment testing.

* In measuring the amount of the impairment loss, the ED requires the following steps: (1) measure the fair value of the Reporting Unit (including goodwill) (2) measure the fair value of the Reporting Unit's net assets (excluding goodwill) (3) The implied fair value of goodwill is deemed to be the difference between these two values. The amount of the impairment write-down is the difference between the implied fair value of goodwill and its carrying amount. CCR believes that it is untenable to expect companies to regularly estimate the fair value of individual recognized assets and liabilities in attempting to determine the implied fair value of goodwill. While the objective of the exercise may be conceptually appealing to the Board, CCR's experience with such appraisals in the context of business acquisitions would suggest that any benefit from more precise impairment measurements is far outweighed by the prohibitive costs of retaining and regularly engaging outside valuat!

ion experts. It would be far more reasonable, practical and cost effective to use book values of reported assets in determining the amount of the impairment.

* The ED requires a separate intangible asset to be recognized if it meets the definition of an asset in Concepts Statement 5 and (a) control over the future economic benefits of the asset results from contractual or other legal rights or (b) the asset is capable of being separated or divided and sold, transferred, licensed, rented, or exchanged. CCR believes that the Board needs to further clarify that definition. While adding the concepts of separability, legal/contractual rights, and ability to sell to the definition is helpful, the ED then muddies the waters significantly by stating that such intangibles need not meet the latter requirement individually - they would still meet the definition if they could be sold as part of a group of related assets. CCR understands that this nuance is intended to capture core deposit intangibles but suspects that it will sweep in other intangibles as well that really should be part of goodwill.

* The revised ED does not address the categories of intangibles (limited life intangibles vs. those with indefinite lives) defined in the original ED issued in 1999. CCR is aware that the Board has reached new decisions in this area but has, for whatever reason, chosen not to expose them for public comment. We believe that the definition of intangibles with indefinite lives from the earlier ED should be clarified to include those intangibles that, while specifically identifiable, share the same characteristics as goodwill.

* The ED's transition requirements preclude accounting change treatment for the inevitable impairments that will result from this significantly different approach to recognizing impairment of goodwill. CCR understands that the Board followed a similar approach to transition when it issued FAS 121. The Committee had two observations on this decision: first, the undiscounted impairment trigger under FAS 121 was unlikely to result in many "instant" impairments upon adoption since it was an approach that was followed by most companies; second, if the recognition of an impairment is not an accounting change then what is it? It is not a change in estimate or a change in the reporting entity. And yet there can be no doubt that the ED's fair value impairment trigger will result in pervasive and potentially significant impairment write-downs upon adoption. CCR also believes that companies will require a longer transition period to perform the Benchmark Assessment to all of its Reporting Units than the 6 months provided for in the ED. CCR believes companies should be allowed at least one year to complete this assessment.

Watch for the full comment letter on our site http://www.fei.org. 

From Bob Jensen:  You can download the Amended Exposure Draft free (in PDF format) from http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/draft/edwebintro.html 

Dynamic page content is often invisible to most search engine spiders, so it never gets indexed. Increase the traffic to your dynamic site by making your valuable content visible to search engine spiders. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2547 

Do you know what your students are doing at this moment?  --- Zilo knows all --- http://www.zilo.com/ 
This is (great? questionable?) source material for a college newspaper.

National IT Salary Survey (Careers) --- http://www.cicresearch.com/Proj01508/default.htm 

This survey was prepared by the editors at InformationWeek, InternetWeek, Network Computing, Planet IT, TechWeb, Wall Street & Technology, Insurance & Technology, Sys Admin, Dr Dobbs, and Software Development with technical assistance from Hewitt Associates LLC, a global management consulting firm that regularly conducts professional compensation and benefits studies.

The data will be used to support upcoming stories about IT compensation, job responsibilities, and job satisfaction. We’ll also publish the results on the Web beginning in late April in a format you can use to compare your salary and benefits with those of your peers. It’s a great way to prepare for your next salary review - or that of the people you manage. Until then you can view the 2000 results. This 27-question survey takes about 10 minutes to complete.

To fill out the questionnaire, Go to: http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCt40BcUEY0Vz0DJBD 

The Year 2000 results are posted at http://salaryadvisor.informationweek.com/ibi_html/iwsal00/ 

Art of Magic --- http://aom.bethsoft.com/ 

Is today's Internet damaging the integrity of content? There's some great stuff, sure. However, it's vastly outweighed by badly written, out-of-date, inaccurate, and sometimes deliberately misleading content. http://clickz.com/article/cz.3481.html 

Humpback Whales ---- http://www.jasonproject.org/expeditions/whales2001/ 

Despite the recent buzz around Napster and the potential of peer-to-peer networking, most IT managers are taking a wait-and-see approach to the new technology --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103081/2690985/ 

Online music beyond Napster ZDNet Downloads guru Preston Galla offers up a grab bag of great programs for listening to and handling digital music online. http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/prespick/0800/index.html 

Bob Jensen's P2P threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Kyocera just released a PDA smartphone, starting a trend that looks like it'll be hot by year's end. But will consumers adopt the new gadgets or opt to carry multiple devices?  http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,42266,00.html 

Devices that include the dual functions of personal digital assistants and cell phones are apparently the next wireless craze, but even the industry admits these new toys won't replace cell phones and handheld devices anytime soon.

Nonetheless, Verizon Wireless (VZ) now sells Kyocera Wireless' (KYO) converged PDA cell phone powered by the Palm (PALM) operating system. The phone has received much fanfare; ads are popping up everywhere.

"A lot of people's initial reaction is it's a little big, but when they play with it they say it's cool," said Delly Tamer, president and CEO of comparison shopping site LetsTalk.com. "It has a lot to offer for its size –- it's intuitive to learn and for business professionals it's a good device."

BizModel.com Email Newsletter --- March 12, 2001

Computer hardware and software store CompUSA knows its customers are generally more tech savvy than those of other businesses, so when the time came to update its marketing strategy, an answer became clear: mobile digital coupons.

CompUSA has teamed with AvantGo, a provider of mobile infrastructure and services, to provide the coupons. They appear on AvantGo users' handheld devices, which can be brought into a CompUSA store and shown to a cashier for discounts.

CompUSA says handheld users are important customers. "We find that a customer who buys a handheld is very involved in technology and interested in finding out what's available not just for the handheld, but what's the latest and greatest technology," says John Lostroscio, VP of merchandising/ general merchandise manager at CompUSA in Dallas. "This is a great way to get to them."

Already 28,000 customers have seen the ad and 11,000 have saved the channel in their handheld devices to have promotions automatically routed to them from CompUSA, the company says. "Then there will always be a path to that channel," says Lostroscio, "and as we change out the products and stuff, those customers will always get that download."

BizModel.com Email Newsletter --- March 12, 2001

Drug and alcohol abusers can now get counseling online. 
EGetgoing, a for-profit affiliate of CRC Health, last week 
launched Web-based, anti-drug and alcohol E-learning and support 
programs for people new to dependency treatment and those seeking 
to extend treatment they've already had.
Participants are shipped CD-ROMs, headphones, and a microphone 
for use in anonymous online group therapy. They can see and hear 
the moderator and be heard by other participants. They also get 
their own Web page for personalized help, and have one-on-one 
access to their counselor if need be. 
EGetgoing's program isn't meant to substitute for residential 
treatment when it's available, stresses Barry Karlin, founder and 
CEO of eGetgoing and CRC. Customers are mainly companies, 
treatment providers, and criminal justice programs.
The Web address is http://www.egetgoing.com/

Send a Rude Mountain animated card --- http://www.rudemountain.com/ 

Chinese Women: An Introduction to the English Language Literature on Women's Studies in China -- University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/bibliogs/chinaws.html 

Gateway to America's Capital
Explore DC  (Washington DC travel, sites, events) http://www.exploredc.org/ 
Our nation's capital is one of my favorite places to spend vacation time.  

Addiction Search and Research ---  http://addictionsearch.com/addictionsearch/ 

Making Sense of Modern Art (animations and video) --- http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma/ 

Now this is more to my liking!
Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives http://www.nara.gov/exhall/picturing_the_century/home.html 

A Literary History of the American West --- http://www2.tcu.edu/depts/prs/amwest/ 

Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm 

The Author's Guild is planning a formal protest against Amazon.com, which puts cheaper, used book offerings alongside the new ones. Also: Poor fiction sales prompt AtRandom.com to go nonfiction, a publshing house offers free downloads and other sites give authors more control --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,42350,00.html 

The Story of Africa -- History from the BBC ---  http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index.shtml 

What do most personal computers spend most of the time doing? Absolutely nothing. But quite a few small vendors are out to change that—by tying thousands of PCs together in order to create a virtual supercomputer.

This approach of distributed computing (sometimes called parallel computing) is best known for SETI@Home. The University of California at Berkeley program invites us all to lend our computing resources—now said to total three million computers worldwide—to analyze data from radio telescopes trained to listen for extra-terrestrial intelligence. (The software acts as a screen saver, doing its business in the background.)

Closer to home, startup vendors now compete to sell aggregated computer services and the necessary infrastructure to businesses. A few even have paying customers in compute-intensive industries such as bioinformatics and financial analysis.
http://www.techreview.com/web/essex031201.asp 

Hi Bob

As the current Chair of the AICPA Professor / Practitioner Case Development Program Task Force, I want to thank you for your past contributions to the program. Despite the "sunset" last year of the AICPA Accounting Educator's Conference, the Case Development Program continues to be alive and well. This program has been well received in the past, and as we re-energize our promotion of the Program we would like your assistance in updating our files. We want to ensure all materials distributed under this program are current and effective. Our focus is to:

· Make all cases available electronically through the AICPA's website, for greater educator access; · Ensure that the available cases and solutions are "current" with regard to professional guidance.

Please take a moment to complete the attached questionnaire regarding your case(s).

In the future, case submissions will be considered for presentation opportunities (with AICPA support) at such meetings as the AAA Annual Meeting, the Colloquium on Change in Accounting Education organized by Paul Solomon, and the annual Federation of Schools of Accountancy meeting. In addition, existing cases that are updated or current will also be considered for presentation opportunities as one of our "classic" cases. We appreciate your past participation in the program and hope you will provide future case submissions.

Please return the questionnaire to Leticia Romeo at the AICPA ( lromeo@aicpa.org) by March 30, 2001, or indicate by when you can reply.

To respond electronically to this survey, first save the document (e.g., to your hard drive), open the file in Word and insert your response, and save again before attaching as a file to your e-mail.

Sincerely,

Lynford Graham lromeo@aicpa.org 

Linda Specht, who teaches auditing at Trinity University, called my attention to the article below.
Today's CPA (From the Texas Society of CPAs, Jan/Feb 2001, pp. 26-30, Ames, Lindberg, & Razaki, "Auditing the Internet" ). This provides a good example of application of the attestation standards,

Divorce is a messy business! Only this time the new single dropped the first name rather than the last.
Goodbye Arthur, Hello Andersen --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x29658.xml
Goodbye Andersen Consulting, Hello Accenture

The firm was originally named for its founder, an accounting professor at Northwestern University who moved into public accounting in 1913. The Big Five firm said it will phase out the use of Arthur Andersen in the coming months.

Everything under the Andersen umbrella, including its business consulting practice, will be branded under the Andersen name going forward, spokeswoman Julie Hallinan said. The move officially retires the Andersen Consulting name, which AA won the rights to under the historic August ruling by Guillermo Gamba. 

Founder Arthur Andersen

Gamba's decision forced Andersen Consulting, which became Accenture Jan.1, to give up the Andersen name and required the consulting firm to pay about $1 billion to the partners at Arthur Andersen. That money, which consisted of regularly scheduled payments between the firms, had been held in escrow since the arbitration began in December 1997.

"Using Andersen as our global brand better aligns with our strategic commitment to continually enhance the breadth and depth of our capabilities," Joseph F. Berardino, managing partner and chief executive officer, said in a statement. "We want to be known for our total commitment to client service and our unique ability to provide sophisticated, integrated solutions."

The acronym for Arthur Andersen was once AA
Now it's just an A
Andersen Consulting had its day
Accenturate entered the scene with its own A
The divorce gave forth to an AA and an A
Now we have an A and another A
Sometimes things just go that way

But Department 56 owners think naming is all just play
What they insist, if they have their way,
Is that A must pay, and A must also pay.

And by any name, there is a new $6 billion (Senator Everett Dirksen would have called that real money) lawsuit to light up the lives of global lawyers:

In a 69-page complaint, Department 56, a collectibles company known for its line of holiday and home décor products, alleges that the company was crippled as a result of the battle between Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting (now known as Accenture). Department 56 alleges that Chicago-based Arthur Andersen was more interested in building its own information technology consulting business to compete with Andersen Consulting and didn't have the experience to lead the project.

Department 56 thought it was getting the expertise of Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting when it proceeded with Arthur Andersen's plan in 1996 to replace the company's world-wide operating systems only to find the system didn't work when it was turned on in January 1999.

In a prepared statement, Department 56 Chairwoman and CEO Susan Engel said, "Lulled by their reputation and portrayal of self-proclaimed expertise, only too late did we learn that Arthur Andersen didn't have the qualifications to do this type of work and was actually forbidden from accepting it based on agreements it had signed with its partner firm Andersen Consulting and documents filed with the SEC."

That's not "Accenturating the positive" --- its more like "Decenturating the negative."   And don't mess with Mr. In Between.

EXPERT ADVICE: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU BUY http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?83549:2700840 

Find a house or house sitter for your sabbatical leave -- http://www.sabbaticalhomes.com/ 

Helping academic communities around the world find or list houses or apartments for rent, exchange or house-sit when on sabbatical leave, research trip, exchange program, relocation or vacations.

From InformationWeek Email Newsletter --- March 12, 2001

E-mail filters are great for stemming the flow of unwanted pornography and ads, but are they too good? We here at the InformationWeek Daily last week got a peek at one possible filter future when hundreds of our newsletters were bounced back because of a story we wrote.

Software at Nortel Networks, Motorola, and Citicorp scanned our March 7 Daily and said "no, thanks." And while we'd love to tell you about the offending content, we really want loyal readers at those companies to get this edition, too. Let's just say that one of the words rhymes with "fire us." The story also mentioned, shall we say, the L*ve B*g.

John Pescatore, a Gartner analyst, says even individual characters and character strings are spooking the watchdogs. The problem is that filters--increasingly common components in our lives--are too unsophisticated, Pescatore says. Most see no difference between a newsletter story about "uncouth coding" and real, live "unrequested malicious programming," if you get our drift.

The solution is behavioral filters, or software that doesn't just scan E-mail; it watches what it does or what its attachments do once activated and (presumably) before any damage is done. "It's almost like we are becoming Web psychologists," says Pete Lindstrom, a Hurwitz Group analyst. The good news is that behavioral software is already out from companies such as Finjan Software, Pelican Security, Aladdin Knowledge Systems, and Okena, he says.

The bad news is that IS departments literally don't know what they're missing when using more dogmatic filters, says Tom Bartel, Web-design director of E-mail-distribution house MessageMedia Inc. In the meantime, bear with us when you read sometimes-cryptic stories about "criminal cracker products" like the most recent "rhymes-with-rude wife" outbreak.

The National Infrastructure Protection Center says organized attacks on e-commerce sites have resulted in the theft of more than 1 million credit-card numbers --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103094/2694098/ 

Lots and lots of data --- 
National Center for Charitable Statistics  http://nccs.urban.org/ 

From Syllabus News on March 13, 2001

Recognix recently made available on its Web site ( http://www.MathXpert.com ) a free service to help high school and college students master the intricacies of mathematics. MathXpert is a learning tool which shows students how to solve an algebra, trigonometry, or calculus mathematics problem. Students may practice with MathXpert problems, which are included with the program, or they may enter their own problems. The program was developed by Professor Michael Beeson of San Jose State University (a graduate of Cal Tech and Stanford Universities) after fifteen years of research. From a set of approximately 800 operations, the logic engine of the MathXpert programs is able to select the sequence of mathematical operations that need to be applied to arrive at a solution. MathXpert is available as a free online service to students, as a single user application program to be installed on the user's computer, and as a net- work application to be installed on a school network. For more information, visit http://www.mathXpert.com .

Epoch Integration Inc., a consulting and development company, today announced the launch of PageMeBack, a free Web-based service that allows individuals and businesses to publish Internet content for users with wireless e-mail devices. Located at http://www.pagemeback.net , PageMeBack is built on Epoch Integration's Ellipse platform, a Java- and XML-based architecture that enables transaction processing from, and content delivery to, any device that supports e-mail. By visiting the site, anyone can build a PageMeBack Web site that can be accessed by millions of wireless e-mail device users. No HTML coding or programming of any kind is required, and users do not have to worry about setting up any hosting.

Internet Catalogue (Shopping, Marketing) --- http://catalogue.bized.ac.uk/ 

Spencer F. Katt marvels at Microsoft's misleading open-source machinations --- http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/filters/katt 

Canadian Financial Network http://www.CanadianFinance.com/ 

Trojans on one type or another have been getting us into trouble since the glory days in ancient Greece

From InformationWeek Online on March 15, 2001

Virus writers too busy to learn assembly or Visual Basic Scripts now have a new tool to help them orchestrate system attacks without having to know the first thing about programming. Developers of the ubiquitous back-door hacking program SubSeven, which gives cybervandals nearly carte blanche over a victim's computer, have made version 2.2 of their software generally available. Version 2.2 sports new support for proxies, the ability to monitor any random port, a new graphical user interface, and will broadcast compromised system information to various Web sites using the Common Gateway Interface. SubSeven creators also plan to release a software developers' kit that will provide a modular development approach, making it easier for users to sneak past antivirus software.

Because of the new proxy support, "hackers will also have less to worry about when it comes to being traced," says Chris Rouland, director of the X-Force vulnerability research team for Internet Security Systems Inc.

SubSeven has been used in the past to create "zombies" on remote systems that are "awakened" in unison to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack. The new notification features, SubSeven developers hope, will provide a widely used manifest of SubSeven-infected systems that can be distributed among users of the development tool, potentially creating larger and more dangerous attacks than previously possible.

Once a machine is infected with SubSeven, the Trojan installs itself to the Windows directory with the identical name of the file from which it originally ran. Then it installs its dynamic link library to the Windows system directory. It also alters the Windows registry so SubSeven is executed every time Windows boots. Rouland says the new version also provides a way for each keystroke on a victim's system to be logged and E-mailed back to the attacker. "This is a way they can gather passwords and other data," he says. "From a hacker perspective, it's really a useful toolkit.

eLabs Report, March 13, 2001
"Technology Freedoms Are Eroding," By Jim Rapoza 

A recent story suggested that Microsoft barred an unnamed lab from publishing the results of tests it ran-tests that purportedly showed SQL Server 2000 running better on Windows NT 4.0 than it did on Windows 2000.

Microsoft isn't alone in this kind of behavior: Oracle acted similarly many years ago when independent, unbiased benchmarking exposed its databases as complete performance dogs. Following Oracle's lead, most database vendors began including terms in their licensing agreements that precluded the publication of benchmark results. The legality of these restrictions is dubious, but few individuals or labs would risk challenging the vendors. Ziff Davis publications have published benchmarks without vendor approval, and our decisions have often led to icy relations with vendors.

The other downside to these vendor impositions is that comparative tests of rival databases on similar hardware configurations have become almost extinct. A business can run tests itself, but most companies lack the resources that large testing labs have. So would-be buyers and other interested parties are forced to rely on either trustworthy but incomplete testing by objective small internal labs or on thorough tests using specific configuration and tuning parameters preapproved by vendors. Never mind that the vendors' carefully engineered settings might be unmatched in any real-world implementations.

The other issue that is bothering me is also an old one, but with some new twists. Many of you might remember the legal case against DeCSS, a program that made it possible to play DVDs on a Linux system. The thorny issue with this program was that to make it possible to play a DVD, the program had to break the DVD's encryption protection. A court fight ensued, and a misinformed judge ordered sites to stop providing or linking to the DeCSS code.
To read more about the DeCSS controversy, please click here.

March 11th edition of the ENews Internet Essentials newsletter for the financial professional. --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. XML joins the IT workforce 
2. XML THE LAST SILVER BULLET 
3. ebXML Comes Clean with SOAP 
4. An XML Query Language Is Born 
5. Michael Kay: How XSLT Works 
6. XML: HTML Done Right 
7. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

The best place to start (for learning about XML) is a Scientific American article, http://www.sciam.com/1999/0599issue/0599bosak.html  written by Jon Bosak and Tim Bray. Bosak and Bray were on the original XML working group. The article is short, readable and lays out the basic concepts of XML.

Next, try my XML resource page, located at http://web.bryant.edu/~nhannon/xbrl/xml.htm . At that site, I have gathered several articles that focus on the users side to XML. For books, I recommend XML, A Manager's Guide by Kevin Dick (Addison Wesley). Good luck.

Forwarded by my Norwegian cousin

Varning! Nort Dakotuh Norvegian e-mail virus!

Computer Virus Warning!

By opening dis message you have just received da "NORVEGIAN VIRUS." Since ve do not haf any programming experience and do not know how to actually damage your computer, dis Virus verks on da honor system. Please forward dis Virus to eferyvone on your mailing list and den manually delete all of da files on your hard drive.

Tank you for your cooperation.

Sven and Ole

Forwarded by Dr. D.

Hello, welcome to the Psychiatric Hotline.  
If you are obsessive-compulsive, please press 1 repeatedly.
If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2.
If you have multiple personalities, please press 3, 4, 5, and 6.
If you are paranoid-delusional, we know who you are and what you want --- just stay on the line until we can trace the call.
If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press.
If you are manic-depressive, it doesn't matter which number you press --- no one will answer.

Phoons illustrate how silly things can get on the Internet!

This pose is called the "Phoon". You can find at least one Phoon in every picture of
every category below. People from around the world send in their Phoon pictures. You can,
too!

Forwarded by Bob Overn

This is a true story and it won the 1999 Criminal Darwin Award.

This is why lawyers and insurance companies are so popular.  A Charlotte, NC man, having purchased a box of very rare, very expensive cigars,insured them against fire among other things. Within a month of having smoked his entire stockpile of cigars and without having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the man filed a claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the man stated the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires."  The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason: that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion. The man sued...and won!

In delivering the ruling, the judge agreed that the claim was frivolous. He stated nevertheless that the man held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure against fire, without defining what is considered to be "unacceptable fire," and was obligated to pay the claim.

Rather than endure a lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid the man $15,000.00 for the rare cigars he had lost in the"fires."

HERE COMES THE GOOD PART!!

After the man cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON. With his insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the man was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail, along with a $24,000.00 fine.

Forwarded by Aaron Konstam

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

A statistician is someone who is good with numbers but lacks the personality to be an accountant.

A programmer is someone who solves a problem you didn't know you had in a way you don't understand.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

A psychologist is someone who watches everyone else when a beautiful girl enters the room. (Yeah, sure!)

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.

A committee is a body that keeps minutes and wastes hours.

Archeologist: A man whose career lies in ruins.

Forwarded by Debbie Bowling

Dr. Jensen, here's another story I had to pass on to you. It's such a touching story.

Debbie

-----Original Message----- From: brian.proctor@attcanada.net [mailto:brian.proctor@attcanada.net]  
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 3:06 AM 
To: dbowling@trinity.edu 
Subject: Insight of the Day

March is disability awareness month. This weeks story comes from the movie "Kids Like These".

Welcome to Holland

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability to try and help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this...

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may even learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

HOLLAND?!?!?!? you say. What do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy.

But, there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. You must learn a whole new language. You will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It's just a different place. It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for awhile and you catch your breath, you look around. You begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

Everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there and for the rest of your life you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned." And the pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But, if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

---------------- Insight of the Day - it's Free!

And that's the way it was on March 16, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

March 9, 2001

Quotes of the Week

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Andre Gide

Only three things can happen with a forward pass, two of them are bad.
Woody Hayes expressing his preference that his Ohio State University teams drive ahead on the ground.
I always wondered where offensive and defensive pass interference penalties could fit into this threesome of "Completed," "Intercepted," or "Incomplete.".  Perhaps Coach Hayes thought they offset each other.

In any hierarchy, each individual rises to his or her level of incompetence and then remains there.
Murphy's Law

It does not matter if you fall down as long as you pick up something from the floor while getting up.
Murphy's Law

The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.
Murphy's Law

On a beautiful day like this, it's hard to believe anyone can be unhappy --- but we will work on it.
Murphy's Law

Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Murphy's Law

People can be divided into three groups:
those who make things happen,
those who watch things happen, and
those who wonder what happened.
Murphy's Law
The fourth is comprised of those who are unaware of most things that happen

The idea is to die young as late as possible.
Murphy's Law

A man should be greater than the sum of his parts.
Murphy's Law

Heavy Duty Theory for the Week

Many moons ago, Stewart Myers and I were in a doctoral program together at Stanford University.  After graduation, Stewart became one of the most outstanding economics and financial researchers of the world --- http://mitsloan.mit.edu/vpf/facstaff.cfm?ID=95&ProfType=F&sortorder=name 

The term "real options" can be attributed to the Stewart Myers ("Determinants of Capital Borrowing", Journal of Financial Economics, Vol..5, 1977).  The theory of real options extends the concept of financial options (in particular call options) into the realm of capital budgeting under uncertainty and valuation of corporate assets or entire corporations.

The real options approach is dynamic in the sense that includes the effect of uncertainty along the time, and what/how/when the relevant real options shall be exercised.  Some argue that real options do little more than can be done with dynamic programming of investment states under uncertainty, real options add a rich economic theory to capital investing under uncertainty.

The real options problem can be viewed as a problem of optimization under uncertainty of a real asset (project, firm, land, etc.) given the available options.  Since I have been asked to teach a bit about real options theory while I am lecturing at Monterrey Tech March 18-23, I thought I might share a bit of my source material that I discovered on the Web.

Thank you for sharing Ulrich Hommel --- http://www.real-options.de/ 

Real options capture the value of managerial flexibility to adapt decisions in response to unexpected market developments.

Companies create shareholder value by identifying, managing and exercising real options associated with their investment portfolio.

The real options method applies financial options theory to quantify the value of management flexibility in a world of uncertainty. If used as a conceptual tool, it allows management to characterize and communicate the strategic value of an investment project.

Traditional methods (e.g. net present value) fail to accurately capture the economic value of investments in an environment of widespread uncertainty and rapid change.

The real options method represents the new state-of-the-art technique for the valuation and management of strategic investments.

The real option method enables corporate decision-makers to leverage uncertainty and limit downside risk.

This site is maintained by Ulrich Hommel and the Chair of Investment and Risk Management of the European Business School (Oestrich- Winkel) as a free service to the scientific and management community. If you have any information on the real options method that you wish to make available to the public via this web site, please contact

M.Sc. Dissertation Abstract: Real Options in R&D Capital Budgeting - A Case Study at Pharmacy & Upjohn. By M.Sc. Gunnar Kallberg and M.Sc. Peter Laurin, from Gothenburg School of Economics and Commercial Law, Department of Economics, Sweden. The abstract can be found under Item 5 at http://www.puc-rio.br/marco.ind/contrib1.html 

Despite the wide use of the traditional capital budgeting techniques NPV, IRR, and Payback time among organizations, criticism have been raised against the static use of them. The techniques only use tangible factors and do not take into account intangible factors such as future competitive advantage, future opportunities, and managerial flexibility. A relatively new technique to capital budgeting is the real option approach. This approach has the potential to include the value of the project from active management and strategic interactions using the valuation technique for financial options.

The main objective of this thesis is to numerically analyze the value of an option approach in the capital budgeting of R&D investments. The results of the option approach will be compared with the results from traditional NPV approach. This will be done by constructing a valuation model and this model will then be numerically applied to a pharmaceutical R&D project at Pharmacia & Upjohn.

The model that we have constructed includes both the binomial and the Black & Scholes formula for the valuation of options. The binomial method is used in valuing the development phase of the R&D project and the Black & Scholes formula is used when valuing a follow-on project. A common spreadsheet program has been used to construct the model.

If you can overlook some of the English grammar mistakes (mainly when the authors' native language is something other than English), take a look at the following helpful free documents on the use of real options in capital budgeting.  

Real Options --- http://www.puc-rio.br/marco.ind/multimid.html#Chicago2000 

A great Website on real options --- http://www.puc-rio.br/marco.ind/main.html 

Note especially the Visual FAQ's on Real Options --- http://www.puc-rio.br/marco.ind/faqs.html 

Underlying all of this is Options Pricing Models and Arbitrage Pricing Theory.  In that realm, I have an aged (yellowed?) 1984 working paper that journal editors claimed they could just not understand and would not touch with a ten foot pole.  Am I the only one who finds my stuff to be crystal clear?

Working Paper 149
Does a Ross Economy Lunch Really Cost as Much as Hirshleifer Cuisine Complete With Sigma Squared for Dessert? 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/149wp/149wp.htm  

You can find more about such things in papers and books that really did get published in such journals as those listed below:  

It seems to be a Trinity University connection in the March 2001 edition of New Bookmarks.  Dick Burr is the Chair of the Department of Business Administration and Alistair Fraser spent a memorable year (while on leave of absence from Penn State) on the Trinity University campus.

"External Resources for Business Administration," by Annette Craven, Pat LeMay Burr, and Richard M. Burr, Syllabus, March 2001, 33-36. The article is not yet online, but eventually it will be posted to http://www.syllabus.com/ 
This article is filled with links in such categories as the following:

"Web Visualization for Teachers," by Alistair B. Fraser, Syllabus, March 2001, 18-20.  The article is not yet online, but eventually it will be posted to http://www.syllabus.com/ 

That computers and the Web will have a powerful influence on teaching now seems evident.  Teachers use the Web to post syllabi, assignments, and notes; offer links to supporting resources; and use course management systems to handle quizzes, administrative feedback, scheduling, and chats.

Yet there is little in these uses that provides anything new -- they merely represent a different, sometimes more convenient, way of doing what had previously been done satisfactorily by other means.  For example, for most instructors, the Web has provided a high-technology way to transfer the cost of printing lecture notes from the teacher to the student.

Further, rather than being pedagogically significant, our instructional use of the Web is primarily for course administration and distribution.  But what we administer and what we distribute remains essentially unchanged -- material conceived under the inherent constraints of a much older medium of communication.  It is reasonable to ask, rather than moving already created content to the Web, how can we use this new communications medium to provide pedagogical value added?

To bring the distinction between Web pedagogy and Web distribution into sharper focus, I repeat the rule I published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Aug. 6, 1999, B8): The extent to which a student gains the same pedagogical benefit from a printout of your Web resources as from the resources themselves is the extent to which one has accomplished nothing of pedagogical value by using the Web.

Wow IT Solution of the Decade --- The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)  and Supply Chain Management System at the University of Illinois System (Chicago, Urbana-Champaign, and Springfield).  Interestingly, the system chosen is not (as of yet) a well-known ERP system.  After a careful study of alternative systems, the relatively unknown SCT ERP system was chosen..  See http://www.ecominfocenter.com/index.html?page=/b2b/erp.html 

This system is under development and will eventually cover over 250 fields of study, 5,000 faculty, and nearly 50,000 employees.   Like its counterpart in industry, this ERP system will drill down from the top to the very bottom of the organization in organizing, planning, administration, and delivery of education, research, and service.

See http://www.aits.uillinois.edu/publications/erpfinal_article.html 

The University Administrative Systems Project (ASP) -- to select and implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution -- is progressing well. In the last three months we have gathered a great deal of information about how integrated software suites really work at other universities. We have also engaged in extensive discussions with our functional and technical experts about whether and how our University might benefit from such a solution. The project remains on schedule with the plan we presented in our May newsletter article on ERP systems. In that article we also explained the apparent advantages of ERP software systems and the reasons for the University's interest in them. What we have learned suggests that these systems, while complex and challenging to implement, do deliver attractive capabilities that warrant thorough investigation.

Campus and University leadership have monitored the project closely, and continue to support the plan to replace all financial, human resources, and student information systems with a single, integrated suite of software applications. The next steps in this process will provide the detailed information required by management in order to make an informed systems replacement decision. The following ERP project status update discusses recent activities and previews future steps.

Recent Activities

The System Strategy Assessment Team (SSAT) and related functional teams have completed the information-gathering process and are moving to the evaluation phase. During the information-gathering phase, team members visited other educational institutions that are implementing ERP solutions, to discuss product capabilities, and the challenges presented by such an undertaking. Project teams studied other schools' Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for ERP systems, examined a cross section of the vendor product market, and prepared requirements lists.

A major project milestone just reached is the issuance of a University of Illinois RFP for an ERP software suite. This is significant for two reasons. First, the RFP is the culmination of efforts of more than one hundred University employees representing student administration, human resources and payroll, business affairs, and AITS, working together to document the vision for the ERP. This is the largest and most successful collaborative effort of administrative and student services units conducted at the University of Illinois in recent memory. Second, this is the first time the University has issued a major RFP via electronic posting and the first time we have encouraged vendor response in kind.

Information-Gathering Stage and Lessons Learned

The information-gathering stage brought our teams into contact with other institutions in the ERP implementation process. Perhaps the most valuable information we gathered relates to "Lessons Learned"-- what to do and what not to do in assessing and implementing ERP products. Our colleagues at other schools were quite candid about their experiences. They provided information to help appraise what we need in a system and what today's systems can provide. They gave us advice and told us of pitfalls. While they confirmed that ERP implementations are difficult, in every case they expressed agreement with the decision to pursue the integrated suite solution.

One particularly significant recommendation was to create an effective decision-support system to complement the new transaction processing systems. Transaction processing is an ERP product's strong point. In the June article on Data Warehousing, we explained that the University is assembling resources and a steering structure to implement a decision-support environment. Tightly linked to the ERP effort, this environment will complement the ERP and consolidate our vast stores of historical data.

Evaluation Stage

We have completed our preliminary information-gathering and progressed to the project's formal evaluation phase. We have issued an RFP, and will evaluate vendor responses in terms of their product's ability to meet our stated needs. The RFP contains both a Crucial Requirements and a Scenarios section. Responses to crucial requirements are designed to reveal general product suitability with respect to functionality and potential improvement in services. The scenarios are designed to elicit more detailed information about product functionality and performance in an environment like ours. The evaluation stage extends from the receipt of completed proposals in early September, through the end of the scenario presentations by vendors in mid-October. Completed proposals will pass through multiple evaluation phases, each designed to assess vendor and product in increasing detail. In the last phase, those vendors that meet the University's general requirements will present their scenarios. Finally, the SSAT will recommend its vendor selection to the Vice Presidents and their respective University management teams. The President and University Officers will review the information presented to them and recommend action to the Board of Trustees at its November meeting.

Future Steps and a Look Back

Now that the ERP RFP has been issued, the SSAT and functional teams are laying the groundwork for the ERP implementation. We are drafting a companion RFP to acquire services from Implementation Partners (IPs), who will be needed to assist with the organization and execution of the system after it is chosen. The RFP for IP services will detail specific requirements relating to project management, business process re-engineering, and training administration. Our goal is to maximize reliance on University personnel to manage and execute the project by acquiring only need-specific supplemental support from consultants. This approach will also help University staff develop product expertise in a timely fashion, and allow them to assume progressively more responsibility for system operation and maintenance.

Enthusiasm remains high among team members as we begin the evaluation and selection processes. A great deal of work remains to be done, but everyone involved shares the belief that it is important and will yield positive results. Be assured that we will continue to provide updates as the project progresses.

For a brief summary see "Enterprise Resource Planning:  An IT Solution, Syllabus, March 2001, p. 40. The article is not yet online, but eventually it will be posted to http://www.syllabus.com/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on ERP can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245glosap.htm 

I grew up as a Norwegian descendent where most Iowa farms were owned by Scandinavian immigrants.  We always knew the Swedes were different --- looks like they're still different.

They're inventing, designing and creating things at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm. It's all pretty freeform -- a place where bright people get together and build stuff. --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41928,00.html 

To researchers at the semi-private Interactive Institute, these aren't frivolous pursuits. They're part of a unique partnership between scientists, artists, computer programmers and others aimed at creating new paradigms for incorporating technology into daily life.

The institute does not have a vision," said Michael Thomsen, the institute's research director. "We don't have one person saying this is the way things are going to go. We have a bunch of people wondering how the hell things will turn out."

By contrast, Thomsen says, the MIT Media Lab -- an early role model for the institute -- has been deeply influenced by Nicholas Negroponte's vision of convergent computers, entertainment and publishing. Unlike MIT, none of the researchers at the Interactive Institute have academic duties associated with their work there.

"There's an explicit orientation (at the institute) toward doing things that are not just technologically advanced or commercially viable, but that also connect to contemporary social needs and problems," said Lucy Suchman, professor of sociology and technology at Lancaster University in England. "That's quite different from the approach in the United States."

The Future of the Web

"Web develops amazing new tangles," by Kevin Many, USA Today, March 1, 2001 --- http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-03-02-webfuture.htm 

Up to now, the Net has been almost completely about viewing content or buying products over the Web, using a browser on a personal computer. In the next wave, the browser will no longer be a solo act. It will become part of an ensemble of software and hardware that uses the connections of the Internet to do much more than has yet been possible. "It's a movement to a more holistic and complex environment," says Kim Polese, chairman of Marimba, which makes software that helps run computer networks. "People think the Internet and the Web are the same thing. They're not."

A couple of years out:

Here's a more detailed look at how the Internet experience is changing.

Most users connect to the Internet to get on the Web and get their e-mail. But saying the Web is the Internet is like saying that broadcast TV is the same as over-the-air radio waves. Obviously, that's not true. Radio waves can carry many kinds of signals, from FM radio to cellphone conversations to the cries of babies over wireless monitors in homes. Broadcast TV is just one big, compelling piece of the radio pie.

Much more than Web pages

The Net carries Web pages, but it can also carry much more — in fact, almost anything that can be made digital. So far, the browser has been used as a gateway for almost any kind of Internet use. For instance, you play music from Internet radio stations by using a browser to find the station, then clicking on a link to pull the signal into your computer.

But Internet radio is a good example of how the browser-and-PC model is becoming less necessary. Kerbango makes a stand-alone Internet radio. 3Com bought Kerbango for $80 million last year and plans to make a major push. The device, which costs $300 and looks like an art deco radio, finds Net radio stations using its own software, then plays the music on its speakers. The Kerbango radio does nothing else. But it's certainly an Internet device.

"Browsing isn't bad, and it won't go away. But the browser will become part of a larger context," says Craig Mundie, executive vice president of Microsoft.

On PCs, non-browser software will become more a part of using the Net. Existing examples of this kind of software are the RealPlayer, which pulls in and shows Internet video, and Napster, which uses the Internet to find and download music. Once either of those is loaded on your PC, they work independently of the browser. They use the Net to do one task very well.

More such software is coming, some big and some incidental. On the big scale is Groove, the new software from Ray Ozzie, inventor of Lotus Notes. Groove lets groups of users — all of whom have to have Groove — work together or share digital stuff over the Internet. It's like supercharged ICQ: Once everyone's on, the group can chat, draw, work on a document, talk by voice or view the same photos. The browser, in fact, gets subsumed by Groove. One function allows a Groove user to lead a browsing session. The other users will see the same thing on their browsers. Analysts believe Groove could be as important a development as Lotus Notes was in the early 1990s — and Notes now has 68 million users.

On the incidental scale are little marketing gadgets created for brands such as Miller Lite and Absolut vodka. Miller's Beer Pager lets you shoot a message to a group of friends, presumably to get everyone to meet for beer. They're no more than Internet toys, but they're spreading quickly.

Look for more stand-alone Net gadgets over the next year. Some will be peer-to-peer search engines that look for information on other PCs instead of only on big servers. Others might be focused on such areas as fantasy sports leagues. As is always the case with new Net inventions, some will be busts and a few will turn into winners.

Web sites that work

While an officer at Oracle, Marc Benioff wondered . . .  
More at http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-03-02-webfuture.htm 

The dot-com debacle turns into a boon for business schools as droves of pink-slippers head back to class --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,42006,00.html 
This is an audio (interview) file that asserts a rise in demand for online business education.

From the Brookings Institution
Government's 50 Greatest Endeavors (from the years 1950-2000)--- http://www.brook.edu/GS/CPS/50ge/50GE_hp.htm 

The top ten are as follows:

Helper Site of the Week
British Columbia (Canada) Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology --- http://www.c2t2.ca/ 

Curriculum Development

Educational Technology

Learning Outcomes

PLA

Secondary to Post-secondary Transitions

In particular, note Bruce Landon's summary of Online Delivery Applications systems which I have been referencing for some time --- http://www.c2t2.ca/landonline/evalapps.html 

Also see ---  http://www.c2t2.ca/landonline/ 

Table of Contents

Introduction
Peer Review Group
Integrated & Component Applications
Comparison Tables
Evaluation Engine Approach
Comprehensiveness and Extensibility
Case Studies
Resources
Acknowledgements

Introduction

This project was initiated in 1996 by a call for proposals to the B.C. post-secondary system from the Standing Committee on Educational Technology (SCOET). Dr. Bruce Landon's proposal was selected as it provides quantitative and qualitative data on online instructional software applications. His original and rigorous research model allows:

The evaluation data was obtained by soliciting raters from across North America and beyond to evaluate the software applications. Raters were asked to complete a short electronic survey that was submitted to Bruce Landon. Information was also gathered from software vendors and from examining case studies at various educational institutions.

After the site had been functioning for a year several facts became evident. The general organization of the site was appreciated by many of those who used the site and over 100 related sites that have linked to this site. Also that the application feature comparisons were visited most often by users of the site. It also turned out that the attempt to solicit raters for evaluation data had produced only a very small sample - too small to be meaningfully used in evaluating applications.

Using the site traffic data and the e-mail comments from users and sponsors the site was redesigned in the fall of 1998 to better accommodate the way that was being used and to accommodate additional online applications using a Side by Side feature and Technical Information comparison approach in place of dividing the applications into integrated and component groups so that they would fit on a table. By tracking the usage of the side by side comparisons it is now easier to identify the more popular comparisons and orgainize the list around actual user interest.

The evaluations ratings are now tied to the side by side comparisons so hopefully the Evaluation Engine will be more useful to those users needing to make a choice as a stand alone form that can be downloaded and used locally. The feature weightings can be customized to the needs of the specific decision.

Bob Jensen's threads on course software can be found at the following websites:

Wow Accounting Helper Site of the Week
Paul is a former student during my years at Michigan State University and has been project director of various FASB and IASC accounting standards before joining Deloitte on special assignment in Hong Kong.

Hello Bob,

As part of my work at Deloitte here in Hong Kong, I have developed IASPLUS, which is both a web site (http://www.iasplus.com) and a quarterly printed newsletter (the latter is available on the website in electronic form).  The website and newsletter are devoted to the development, dissemination, understanding, and use of International Accounting Standards.  Both include country-specific information -- currently limited to Asia but soon to be expanded to include Europe and beyond.

I thought these might be of interest for your bookmarks.

I enjoyed our panel together at the AAA.  I hope to see you this summer at the Atlanta meeting.

Paul Pacter

Reply from John Phillips [jphillip@UOG9.UOG.EDU] on March 7

This is a great site it provides details not only on IAS but on the countries of the world as to their accounting standards and CPA organizations

From CIT Infobits Newletter (edited by Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] ) on March 2, 2001

In January 2001, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) released DISTANCE EDUCATION GUIDELINES FOR GOOD PRACTICE, a "set of quality standards for distance education in colleges and universities . . . based on both a survey of [200] AFT members who teach distance learning classes and previous studies by AFT." The entire report and the practitioner survey is available online (in PDF format) at http://www.aft.org/higher_ed/technology/ 

Is Anyone Making Money on Distance Education?  

The answer is that enormous revenues are being generated by the most prestigious universities that ventured into both degree and training programs (such as Stanford, Columbia, and Duke universities) --- see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245prest.htm 

"Is Anyone Making Money on Distance Education?  Colleges struggle to figure out how much they are spending on online programs. by Sarah Carr, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 16, 2001 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i23/23a04101.htm 

"From the very beginning, we had to combat the myth that online learning is cheaper to produce and cheaper to deliver than face-to-face curricula," says Robert E. Myers, the executive vice president of the University of Maryland's University College. "But I think we are finding that as people become more sophisticated and knowledgeable about the online-education space, there are fewer and fewer people out there that you have to disabuse of the myth that online is cheaper."

In fact, several distance-education leaders predict that some administrators will slow or stop their expansion into online learning as they develop a better sense of the costs.

And many college officials are at least trying to explore various assumptions about distance learning by focusing on costs. "There probably have been some that felt that this was the panacea, the silver bullet for responding to increasing demands for higher education," adds Bruce N. Chaloux, the director of the Southern Regional Education Board's Electronic Campus. "But I don't know that anyone has reached the conclusion that this is indeed the case. That is why the whole issue of what it costs to do this has become so important."

The twin issues of the cost of online education and its potential profitability are analyzed in detail by six new studies commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Reports based on the studies, which were among the first of their kind, explore the financial costs and potential profitability of distance learning at six universities, all of which have received grants from the foundation's Asynchronous Learning Network to develop online programs. The reports were presented at a seminar last summer.

The researchers who conducted the studies tackled the issues in strikingly different ways, but their reports point to two broad conclusions: The universities aren't losing a lot of money on distance learning, but they aren't making much either -- at least not yet. And how well the programs appear to be doing depends, in part, on how their costs and revenues are defined. Those often-thorny questions are increasingly important as institutions decide whether it is financially feasible to expand their fledgling distance-learning efforts over the next few years.

Most of the reports -- based on studies conducted at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland's University College, and Drexel, Pace, and Pennsylvania State Universities -- reveal that the universities are hovering close to the break-even point with their distance-learning programs.

In most cases, the studies relied on estimated-cost projections because university accounting procedures were not always well suited to a case-study approach.

"Author Says Colleges Must Reallocate Money to Academic Technology, By Florence Olsen, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 2001 --- http://chronicle.com/free/2001/02/2001022701t.htm
From an interview with A.W. Bates, author of Managing Technological Change: Strategies for University and College Leaders published by Jossey Bass in November, 1999. His previous book, Technology, Open Learning and Distance Education, Routledge, 1995, won UCEA’s Charles Wedemeyer award for the best book on distance education published in 1995.  Tony Bates has been responsible since June 1995 for developing distance education programs and flexible delivery of credit and non-credit programs at the University of British Columbia,

Q: Some proponents of information technology say their aim is to broaden access to higher education, enhance its quality, and lower the cost of teaching and learning. Which of these aims might be the most difficult to achieve?

A: (Bates) Reducing costs is the hardest part, at least initially. It's like retooling an industry. You have to do things differently, and there are high costs in doing that. The second reason is the amount of time that faculty have to spend learning how to use the new technology. It has to be done, but it means that people aren't doing other things like research and standing in front of a class teaching.

Q: Course-management systems, then, really haven't automated course production to the level yet where faculty members can just focus on the content?

A: (Bates) Quite the opposite. What they've done is drag a lot of faculty into activities that they're not trained for and that take them away from their research and teaching. It's misleading of companies like WebCT and Blackboard to advertise, Get your course up in 15 minutes. Sure you can get it up in 15 minutes, but after that you can spend the rest of your life trying to get it right.

Q: Will there be a time when academic programs can save money by using information technology?

A: (Bates) I think so. But again, it won't be as great as we think, because the technology keeps changing. Organizations will get better at managing this. The real problem at the moment is that most faculty don't have enough technical support.

A few institutions, like the University of Central Florida, have managed to move [technology for teaching] into the mainstream by making it relatively easy. Professors can see the benefits of working in a different way, which is encouraging, and it hasn't led to huge extra costs for the university.

One area that interests me is the indirect impact of learning technologies on cost savings. Although we have a very large campus at the University of British Columbia, we have a limitation now on how many new buildings we can put up. If you cut down from three lectures a week to one lecture a week, and you do this systematically, then you might be able to reduce considerably the use of classroom space and car-parking space. But very often it would mean going outside the academic budget and into other budgets. We need a lot more research into the consequences of that.

I'm sure we're not very different from most big research universities. Nearly half of our teaching budget involves indirect costs -- heating, lighting, classrooms, the library, and so on. We don't know what the indirect costs are for online teaching. There are infrastructure costs, but a lot of the costs we see listed as necessary indirect costs for classroom teaching don't apply to online teaching.

The other problem with [reallocation] in a university is that you can't do it in a top-down way. So a lot of what we're trying to do is get [people to buy in to the idea, particularly faculty members]. We feel in a way we've done that now. Over the last 12 months, we've had a lot of consultation, we've had faculty workshops on learning technologies, on where those fit into their overall teaching plans.

Bob Jensen's threads on costs and faculty compensation in distance education can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/distcost.htm 

Journal of International Forum of Educational Technology & Society and IEEE Learning Technology Task Force --- http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_1_2001/v_1_2001.html 

"Prospect of a Technology-based Learner Interface for Schools,"  by Arthur Recesso, Educational Technology & Society 4(1) 2001 ISSN 1436-4522 --- http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_1_2001/discuss_summary_nov2000.html 
(Includes a module on development costs.)

The International Forum of Educational Technology and Society (IFETS) hosted an online discussion about the potential for the development and widespread implementation of a technology-based learner interface. The following is a summary of the discussion, which took place from October 23 to November 9, 2000 on the IFETS listserv. This was an open forum with participant's backgrounds ranging from private industry to public education academia. In the context of a K-12 school implementation there were several issues raised. A technology-based learner interface to be used successfully in a classroom would have to overcome barriers presented by teacher training, costs, and providing a system conducive to facilitating effective instruction.

Many of the top search engines now accept payment for improved listings or fast appraisal of your site for inclusion in their directories. One expert believes the payments are commercially worthwhile. Here he looks at the options for six top search engines. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2527 

Google --- http://www.google.com/ 

Google.com is one of the largest and most used engines. It is fast, accurate, and one of the most visited Web sites today. Literally thousands of searches are conducted on Google every day for your keywords related to your site. You can now advertise on Google very affordably using their AdWords program. Your AdWords text ads appear on search result pages for the keywords you buy, and can be targeted by language and country. So, to reach collectors of tin toys you might buy the keywords "toy collector," "tin toys," etc.

Pricing for AdWords is based on the position in which they're shown. Google positions your ad based on how many users click on it over time. Current rates are $15, $12, $10 (per thousand ads shown) for positions 1, 2, and 3 respectively, and $8 per thousand for positions 4 through 8. Accounts are opened with a credit card and no minimum deposit is required.

The trick is to choose very targeted keywords that will trigger your ad (yes, you can do that). Which means that only very targeted buyers will ever see your ad and your conversion ratio will be incredibly high. You can set how much you wish to spend. Google takes the money from your credit card after you owe $50, by which time your ad will have been displayed roughly 5,000 times. If your keywords are highly targeted, many of the people who see your ad will become buyers and you will get your return before you even pay Google!

Because there are thousands of searches a day, Google alone can be one of your biggest sales drivers with its great AdWords program. For more details, see the Google AdWords pages - they have plenty of tips. Your listing shows up in about an hour. Remember, it is more effective to target about 20 keywords, specific and related to your site, than it is to use just one.

Goto --- http://www.goto.com/ 

Goto.com is another powerful pay-per-listing search engine. The trick is to pay for the top position, or at least a top three position. Depending on your product, how much gross profit you make out of it and what your conversion ratio is, you may be able to profit from the top spot.

Why is the top spot so important? Goto.com is actually a relatively small search engine compared to the others. Its power does not come from people searching the Goto.com site itself. It comes from the Goto.com partners. Their top search results reach 75% of all Internet users through their affiliate partner network, which includes America Online, Microsoft Internet Explorer, EarthLink, Lycos, and AltaVista. But these partner sites only show Goto.com's top one to three results for any search. So look for the top spot if your gross margin can allow it.

The good thing about Goto.com is that they only charge you for a click-through, so you only pay when someone clicks on your link. Top spots can cost you anything from 0.01 cents to over $4 depending on the keyword. Your listing shows up in about 3 days. Again, it is more effective to have about 20 keywords than just one.

DMOZ --- http://www.dmoz.org/ 

Although strictly speaking it is a directory rather than an engine, DMOZ.org, or the open directory project, powers the search results of several of the top search engines. It is free to get listed and takes about 3 weeks to get indexed once you submit, then a couple of months for your listing to start showing up on the engines that use DMOZ. The most important thing to try to do is to have a domain name that is high on the alphabetic order (starts with a number or an 'a') and also include your primary keyword phrase - the one most people use to find your site - in your Web site name (title) and its description.

Yahoo --- http://www.yahoo.com/ 

Yahoo has immense reach. Without doubt, you must be in Yahoo. It can bring you up to 50% of your traffic or more! Fortunately, you can now get listed in Yahoo in seven days for a cost of just $199 - often worthwhile. You should get back your investment in a matter of days. The most important thing is to have a domain name that is high on the alphabetic order (starts with a number or an 'a') and also to include your primary keyword phrase - the one most people use to find your site - in your Web site name (title) and its description.

Once you get listed, you should also sign up to have your site become a sponsored site within Yahoo. It costs $25 to $300 or more a month at the time of writing, depending on the category. Sponsored sites appear in a separate, clearly demarcated listing box, located on appropriate category pages in the Directory at the top - which means more traffic.

LookSmart --- http://www.looksmart.com/ 

LookSmart may not be used much directly, but its listings reach over 83% of the Internet through its partner network. Its listings actually reach a much wider audience than Yahoo!.  LookSmart currently provides its search solutions to leading Internet portals, 370 ISPs and 600,000 Web sites including the Microsoft Network, AltaVista, Excite@Home, iWon, Time Warner, Sony, British Telecom, US West, AltaVista, Netscape Netcenter and NetZero. Now that is power! Again, without doubt, you must be in LookSmart, and being in it can bring up to 50% of your traffic or more.

Fortunately, you can now be listed in LookSmart in 2 days for a cost of $199 - very worthwhile for what LookSmart will give you. Its partner sites will pick your listing up shortly after you are listed, usually within a few days or weeks. Again it's best to have a domain name that is high on the alphabetic order (starts with a number or an 'a') and also to include your primary keyword phrase in your Web site name and its description.

DirectHit/AskJeeves --- http://www.ask.com/

DirectHit/AskJeeves also has a paid text ads system similar to Google's. Your link appears alongside their search results for every search topic you sponsor, right where Ask Jeeves users are looking for the best link to follow. Your link also appears alongside search results on Web sites that participate in the Jeeves Text Sponsorship Network, including MSN, Searchalot, Bomis.com, SuperCyberSearch, and Direct Hit. Your ads appear in a few days and you just need a minimum deposit of $25 to start.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

Physics Today (Good stuff from  American Institute of Physics) --- http://www.physicstoday.org/ 

What good is wireless Internet access if you can't access anything with it? Two companies are looking at very different ways for wireless Web surfers to get to the addresses they want. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2523 

You can bet that there's probably one or more music distributions run by students at your university!

"Crackers Attuned to Schools" --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,42083,00.html 
Colleges are sanctuaries for students and crackers alike. Indiana University discovers a music distribution service running on its network. Also: Judge Jackson gets railed for his behavior in the Microsoft antitrust trial, and face-scanning technology heads to the polls in Uganda.

Reading on a PDA or e-book may never be the same. With new electronic ink displays, handheld devices may become lighter, thinner and easier to read than ever before --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,42056,00.html 

E Ink and Philips Components announced plans this week to jointly develop high-resolution electronic ink displays for handheld devices such as PDAs and electronic books.

The high-contrast, low-power displays could lead to PDAs, cell phones, pagers, e-books and other handheld devices that are lighter and more readable than ever before, said Russ Wilcox, vice president and general manager for E Ink.

Under the agreement, Philips Venture Capital and Philips Components will invest $7.5 million in E Ink to help advance research and development.

In return, Philips Components secured exclusive global rights to manufacture and sell handheld devices using E Ink's technology. The companies plan to develop a prototype later this year that they expect to be available to consumers by 2003.

As anyone who has arduously squinted while reading text on a laptop or Palm handheld knows, the electronic display industry has been dominated by liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that can be difficult to read.

Electronic ink, which combines the look of ink on paper with the dynamic capability of an electronic display, could revolutionize the way that text is displayed, Wilcox said.

E Ink's technology contains millions of black and white particles in microcapsules that, when electrically charged, either sink to the bottom or float to the top. The ink can be coated over large areas cheaply and continually updated with new information, and it works on virtually any surface, from plastic to metal and paper.

Last year, E Ink became the first company to bring electronic ink to market, beating Xerox PARC's Gyricon Media, which researched the technology for more than two decades.

In mid-December, Lucent Technologies and E Ink unveiled their first commercial product called Immedia -- large indoor signs that can be changed automatically by remote two-way pagers controlled through the Internet.

So far E Ink has focused on developing these large text displays. But the agreement with Philips marks a fundamental shift toward creating high-resolution, graphical electronic displays.

E Ink hopes to use Philips' global reach to seep into the handheld display market, which is expected to exceed $10 billion over the next few years, according to DisplaySearch.

The e Ink homepage is at http://www.eink.com/ 

Electronic ink products are redefining how information is displayed. Information that was once static can now be dynamic. And the dynamic information of today will no longer be confined to rigid flat glass screens. With electronic ink, information can be displayed on any surface, wherever it's needed.

With such a vast range of opportunities, E Ink has chosen to focus product and technology development on three major needs:

Immedia™

Personal Devices

Publishing with Paper 2.0

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

AECMers: A preview of etextbook publishing using Adobe Acrobat / softlock.com (now digitalgoods.com ) / PDF merchant technology - not all links and resources are up and running yet.

www.VirtualPublishing.NET/fa2001.htm 

You will need the current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. www.adobe.com 

But here is how it works: 1. You can download the sample, (1.0 megs) view a few pages, and click the Buy button to unlock the product. 2. On the page listed above I have other resources, that will be locked up after a preview period. 3. The movie 600K is downloadable to your hard drive.

I will be announcing a live web conference on "techie teaching tips" sometime next week. Anyone who wants to participate should email me privately with "Web Conference" as the subject.

Richard J. Campbell www.AccountingEbooks.com www.VitualPublishing.NET  mailto:campbell@VirtualPublishing.NET 

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

NASA's Visible Earth (Astronomy, Science, Photography) --- http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/ 

Barnes & Noble Wizes Up

Barnes & Noble College Bookstores will actively market WizeUp Digital Textbooks at many of the colleges and universities it serves through both in-store and cyber-store promotions. The promotions include sampling of collateral materials, displays, product placement, promotional shelf-talkers and other co-branded signage, Internet marketing, and seamless e-commerce integration between the two companies for specific university class programs.

WizeUp Digital Textbooks produces digital editions of some of the largest and most prestigious college textbooks that professors use in classrooms around the country every day. Applying its advanced e-publishing technology to the printed textbook, WizeUp has been able to establish partnerships with virtually every major publisher in higher education including Pearson Education, Thomson Learning, Harcourt College Publishers, McGraw Hill, among others.

WizeUp follows the printed textbooks page-by-page, graphic-by-graphic, but provides students with technological features such as a powerful search tool, electronic note taking, a digital highlighter, bookmarking for creating custom hyperlinks, and additional multimedia enhancements and capabilities. WizeUp produces textbooks across virtually every major discipline including liberal arts, sciences, and business.

About WizeUp Based in New York City, WizeUp Digital Textbooks ( www.wizeup.com ) is the leading developer of digital educational content-including digital textbooks, training materials, and other related educational content-for both the higher education and corporate marketplaces. The company is dedicated to serving the educational community with innovative new e-learning solutions. Additional information is available by visiting www.wizeup.com. 

Beth Taylor [btaylor@wizeup.com] 

You can read more about Wizeup and other electronic book alternatives at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm  

The latest in personal finance: Now you can have your own offshore bank for only $9,999 and without a background check -- or so the Internet ad promises. Senate investigators smell a money-laundering scheme --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,42089,00.html 

This U.S. Department of Commerce Website has a wealth of data and news --- http://www.doc.gov/ 

Commerce Organizations
•  Office of the Secretary
•  Bureau of Export Administration
•  Economics and Statistics Administration
  •  Bureau of Economic Analysis
  •  Bureau of the Census
•  Economic Development Administration
•  International Trade Administration
•  Minority Business Development Agency
•  National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
•  National Telecommunications & Information Administration
•  Office of Inspector General
•  Patent and Trademark Office
•  Technology Administration
  •  National Institute of Standards & Technology
  •  National Technical Information Service
  •  Office of Technology Policy

Assistance
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Grants, Reference

Business Development
Contracting Opportunities, Disadvantaged Businesses, Publications, ...

Economic Analysis
Bureau of Economic Analysis, Demographics, Economic Data, ...

Economic Development
Innovative Programs

Environmental Management
Conservation, National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), Publications, ...

Industries
Exporting, Industries and Sectors Information, Technology

International Trade
Bureau of Export Administration, Defense Trade, Export Controls and Regulations, ...

Electronic Commerce
Programs/Initiatives, Publications and Reports, Statistics

Employment and Internship Opportunities

Laws and Regulations
Economic Development, Exporting

Patents and Trademarks

Programs and Initiatives
Quality, Relief and Reconstruction

Science and Technology
Internet, Science, Spectrum Mgmt, ...

Statistics and Research
Publications

 

Dear ABE Members:

On Behalf of the Board of Directors of the Academy of Business Education, I am pleased to announce the appointment Prof. Donald P. Robin (pronounced "row’ban") as the new editor of the Journal of the Academy of Business Education. Don is the J. Tylee Wilson Professor of Business Ethics and Professor of Marketing at Wake Forest University.

Effective April 2, 2001, all manuscript submissions to the journal should be sent to the new editor at:

Donald Robin The Wayne Calloway School P.O. Box 7285 Reynolda Station Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7285 Phone: 336-758-5904 Fax: 336-758-6133 Email: robind@wfu.edu

I am very confident that the journal will rise to new heights under Don's editorship. He is an accomplished scholar that brings many talents to the job. I hope you will all support Don in whatever way you can.

Regards,

Jean Heck ABE President

Note from Jensen
I hope many of you will join us in listening to speakers and wild Elk at a ski lodge near Jackson Hole, Wyoming during the ABE annual meetings September 20-22, 2001 --- http://www.abe.villanova.edu/
I like ABE meetings, because many of the presentations are interesting war stories about learning and technology in education. 

From Neal Hannon

Hi Bob,

Jim Kaplan, owner of Audit.net, has compiled an updated Napster site from the auditor's viewpoint. The information should make a nice contribution to your already comprehensive files on Napster. The site takes file sharing risks seriously and exposes the risks companies take on when users open their systems to virtually anyone.

Excerpt:

What should you be doing as an AUDITOR? · talk to your computing management about just how secure the firewall is in your organisation · if they say it's "all under control" make sure you CHECK that it is! · you have no firewall? then make sure all the shares are REMOVED when connecting to the Internet. · start examining WHAT is installed on your PC's i.e.; is it authorised, legal and the sort of software tools you want installed on your PC's · increase your vigilance over software auditing and desktop management · re-inforce desktop compliance policies over software downloading and use of unauthorised/illegal software · conduct spot raids to ensure software compliance · repeat the audit cycle on a regular basis

http://www.auditnet.org/articles/have_you_been_napstered.htm 

Neal

Bob Jensen's Threads on the P2P, PDE, Collaboration, and the Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/Pointera/FreeNet Paradigm Shift in Web Serving and Searching are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Australian Travel Posters 1930s - 1950s (Marketing, Graphics Art, Photography) --- http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/sun/ 
(I liked the section on "Uniquely Australian.")

From the American Accounting Association ( Janet Cassagio [cassagj@sunynassau.edu] )

The Teaching and Curriculum Section is pleased to announce that the Winter 2001 edition of The Accounting Educator, the Section Newsletter, is available on the T&C web site at:

http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/tccomm/newsletters/index.htm 

Thank you Bette for sharing your story about your neighbor's cat.

Thoughts on Partnering from Bette Kozlowski, Vice-Chair - Practice 

On a recent visit, my father shared with me the most unbelievable story about the neighbor's cat. My parents were putting groceries away and somehow the neighbor's cat climbed into the freezer. After discovering the cat in the freezer a short time later, much to their relief, the cat still showed signs of life, though the breathing was very faint. They called the vet who told them to put a drop of gasoline on the cat's tongue. My father placed the drop of gasoline on the tongue and the cat jumped up and ran all around the garage. My father was amazed at the transformation; however, without warning, the cat arched in the air and fell over. It ran out of gas.

I share this tale with you because there are a lot of analogies to our profession. Is your accounting program frozen requiring an injection of some magic potion to bring it back to life? Are your students running around like scared cats afraid to commit to the accounting profession? The talk at many of our conferences this year has been about the decline in the number of quality students choosing accounting as a major.

I don't need to tell you that this is a huge concern to both practitioners and academians. The issue also provides us with wonderful opportunities to partner together as a profession to educate potential students about the unlimited opportunities that an accounting degree affords them. It is not unusual for me to have a faculty ask me to talk to a sophomore unsure of the profession or to host a student for an office visit to get a taste of the profession. Fortunately, to date, the tactic is successful and accounting is chosen as the major. How long has it been since you've invited a practitioner into the classroom to teach a subject, critique group presentations, or share their work experiences? What is the drop of gasoline that you're putting on your students' tongues to wake them up to accounting? As a profession, we need to put on our sales hats to reach out to high school programs, freshman and sophomores, together. Exposing and educating students to the profession is but one way we will reclaim our position as the business degree of choice.

Are teens what the media makes them to be (marketing, advertising, culture)

The Merchants of Cool --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ 

The FEI Express, March 1, 2001 --- http://www.fei.org/news/IPO2001.cfm 

Risk Management - Earnings At Risk, Value At Risk
Kelsey Biggers, CEO of measurisk.com, spoke at length about the processes involved in measuring earnings and value at risk and his company's role in the measurement process. Biggers, a former Bankers Trust executive, noted that measurisk.com provides market risk exposure measurement and hosts that information on an application service provider (ASP), issuing regular reports to clients.

Biggers said measurisk allows "forward-looking stress testing across all asset classes" and products, including foreign exchange, equity, commodities and interest rates. While those used to be considered silos, he urged the audience not to set up separate hedges across all these areas because some are not well-correlated, leading to the creation of "natural hedging" that can minimize losses across larger portfolios.

He argued that measuring risk can give companies: 1) an understanding, and control, of potential losses; 2) better support for line managers and improved transparency; 3) an opportunity to build an optimum combination of businesses; 4) hedging of aggregate exposures. He noted, however, that the variable that can be measured is risk, not reward, calling risks "exposures you willingly or unwillingly take."

Biggers said the market is evolving from a world of positions to a world of exposures, with positions simply representing an accounting of what you own, while exposure can give a picture of potential gain and loss in the P&L statement.

The measurisk CEO urged the audience to tie exposures to pricing models, then determine risk factors correlated and assessed in terms of correlations. With that information, he said, companies should create large correlations matrices, then run Monte Carlo simulations-thousands of what-if scenarios - to create a distribution of possible outcomes. Earnings at risk, he said, takes value at risk to the earnings statement.

Keynote - Geoff Merszei, VP and Treasurer, Dow Chemical
Merszei noted the enormous changes that treasury has undergone since he started more than 20 years ago. Treasury is now far more than cash management, he said, though the challenges of global competition, the Internet, etc. can be viewed as opportunities, in his view. He ticked off a list of areas where he thinks treasury can now add value - areas like M&A, venture capital, risk management. In addition, "the Internet is a great enabler, allowing us to do more with less."

Risk management is a key function, Merszei said, focusing on the need for treasury to identify, measure and manage risk. Hedging is an important tool here, he said - arguing that failure to hedge is in itself a position. He related Dow's experience with combining the efforts of its Hydrocarbon & Energy business with treasury; the subsequent hedging strategies have paid big dividends.

Merszei touted the enterprise risk management approach, consisting of financial, business/market, operational and "fortuitous" risks, but warned his audience that "no instrument will hedge all your exposures."

The Dow treasurer recapped the company's widely publicized auction of corporate bonds on the Internet, a process he says was bad-mouthed by investment bankers leery of losing "exorbitant" fees. The Dutch auction, done last August, created very different pricing and allocation from a traditional bond offering, but Merszei said he was "thrilled" with the results, adding that the transparency improvement was dramatic.

Merszei argued that integration has become a cornerstone of the technology strategy, surpassing functionality - though he argued that they should coexist. He also urged his audience to think entrepreneurially, which is not the way treasurers are accustomed to thinking. "I would encourage you to experiment, even if it means making mistakes," he said.

David Ross, SFMOMA's director, is the visionary behind "010101: Art in Technological Times." He plays a large role in championing digital art, but he is no stranger to controversy. With a reputation for being too trendy, he irks many in the snooty art world --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,41973,00.html 

Ross believes the contemporary museum's role today is no longer purely as a vehicle for showcasing art, but also as a space to discuss the contrast of values and ideas.

"Art museums around the world today are serving increasingly central roles in their city," Ross said. "At the beginning, I don't think people thought it was going to be that kind of a place. But it's comfortably grown into that role."

"Setting the Standard:  XML On Campus," by Mike Rawlins, Syllabus, March 2001, 30-32 --- the article will eventually be posted to http://www.syllabus.com/ 
This is a nice short summary of XML (very readable) and the two roles that XML will play in academe:

For all of the gloom-and-doom stories we've heard lately about dot-coms and e-commerce firms, a panel of experts at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. recently proclaimed that the death of electronic commerce has been "greatly exaggerated." ---  http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2521 

The Internet companies that have made it this far have learned a few things about marketing. Here, the CEO of iPrint talks about building a customer base, e-mail marketing, banner ads and the myth of "Internet time." http://adres.internet.com/feature/article/0,,8961_598221,00.html 

Art history, Photography, Albumen from Stanford University --- http://albumen.stanford.edu/ 
(I suggest that you begin with The Gallery, then watch about how the process involves the cracking of eggs.)

Concerns about XML from J. S. Gangolly [gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU] 

I do not share the author's misgivings regarding XML, though I do have some concerns having to do with the interdependencies between the various languages in the alphabet soup. However, I do have grave concerns about XBRL, though for other reasons.

As new xml applications are developed, interdependencies between them arise. This occurs because each application expects services of other applications. In the absence of contracts between them, much of the functionality desired of the applications collectively by the users falls between the cracks (the usual its-not-my-problem syndrome).

I have no misgivings whatsoever regarding the support for standards by software vendors. Even a sneaky ruthless vendor as Microsoft has xml in its genes now.

I do somewhat agree that business processes can be company-specific. However, XML alphabet soup can exist remarkably well even in the absence of business processes standardisation. Such standardisation can lead to code reuse and economies, but they are not absolutely a must for XML to prosper.

I do have serious misgivings about XBRL, and have stated them elsewhere occasionally (in the XBRL listserv). With my colleagues and a researcher at GE Corporate R&D, we are now in the process of building an alternate model to support XBRL, and hope to have something to share by the end of May. Our work will include a formal model to support a tagset, browser/parser extensions to validate accounting-specific documents

Respectfully submitted,

jagdish

XML link from E. Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU] 

If you're interested in XML standards development, you might like to skim the ZDNet editorial at: http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/main/0,10228,2689765,00.html 

Folk Art in Bottles --- http://www.sdjones.net/FolkArt/ 

Corporations are under increasing pressure to monitor employees, and employment experts say employees should expect a lot less privacy at work --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,42029,00.html 

Screenshots Description A series of drawings from an isometric perspective, in the style of a computer game. The subject of each drawing is the image, or images, that created a popular cultural event. Historical events (like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel) are used interchangeably with fictionalized events (like the picnic scene from The Sound of Music). --- http://www.whitelead.com/jrh/screenshots/ 

Dear XXXXX,

Actually I do not have a mailing list per se, but most of my announcements can be followed by subscribing to the AECM at http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/ 

The New Bookmarks newsletter can be viewed simply by clicking on http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

The latest (March 2) edition went out today at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/booknew.htm 

Thank you for your interest in my ramblings.

Bob Jensen

"Australia goes stark raving mad over Net censorship," by Kieren McCarthy, The Register, March 6, 2001 --- http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/17303.html 

The South Australia Parliament is pushing an Internet censorship bill that will make it an offence for anyone to post any information deemed offensive to children anywhere on the Internet. And it's the police that get to decide what is and isn't offensive.

In what is clearly politicians gone barking mad, fines of up to $10,000 can be levied against any individual that posts material seen as unsuitable for minors. The country's film certification system will be used to rate how strong material is - but the police will NOT have to go through an independent adjudicator, they can decide themselves whether the posting breaks the law.

It is expected that the Bill will be pulled into all other Australian states' legislation in the future.

The basic premise of the legislation appears to be that since kids are able to access Internet sites at any time, then everything on the Internet ought to be acceptable to children. This is clearly bonkers thinking seeing as Australia's laws will have no effect on the rest of the world - which contains more than its fair share of "unsuitable" material. Unless of course Australia is thinking of going China's route and running ISPs through the government and blocking any sites outside the country.

Even crazier is that removal of the content is no defence to the legislation. If it goes up at all, you are guilty. The only exception is ISPs - otherwise the entire Internet in Australia would grind to a halt.

Microsoft wireless OS on new path
Late to the smart-phone operating system game, the company is focusing its forthcoming mobile OS on its loyal customer base: the enterprise --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102262/2689584/ 

Compare salaries by trade and by city --- http://www.salaryexpert.com/ 

Top-rated backup and restore utilities --- http://www.zdnet.com/swlib/hotfiles/backup.html 

First Monday is probably a site that we all should visit at least once each week.  The main feature is a peer-reviewed and highly respectable  journal called First Monday.  That and other First Monday services are devoted to information technologies, social aspects of the Web, and economics of the Web.  The March issues feature off-site linking behaviors of commercial and non-commercial sites, a look at the current state of online community bonding.

The First Monday homepage is at http://www.firstmonday.dk/ 

In particular, note the book reviews at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/current_issue/reviews/index.html 
I provide you a summary of books currently having reviews that are either short or quite detailed.  In any case, I find the reviewers are quite perceptive and critical:

France Belanger and Dianne H. Jordan.
Evaluation and Implementation of Distance Learning: Technologies, Tools and Techniques.
Hershey, Penn.: Idea Group Publishing, 2000.
paper, 256 p., ISBN 1-878-28963-2, US$69.95.
Idea Group: http://www.idea-group.com

For anyone already using information technology for distance learning I doubt this book would offer anything new. In fact some might find it somewhat simplistic in parts. I found it didn't add anything new to my understanding. It would undoubtedly be of some use to distance educators considering using some of the technology to "reinvent" their courses or those wishing to develop distance education through the use of technology. For those groups it gives a reasonable overview of the issues and processes they will have to consider, though some may be alienated by the jargon and detail. Unfortunately, though worthy, it is not a book that enthuses me for technology based distance learning. - Wendy Clark

Christine L. Borgman.
From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.
cloth, 340 p., ISBN 0-262-02473-X, US$42.00.
MIT Press: http://mitpress.mit.edu

The final chapter considers how we can develop from the present-day Internet to the global information infrastructure. "The first [challenge] lies in scaling the technology, the economics, and the behavior to a network that supports several orders of magnitude more users. The second is to provide access to information in this environment. And the third is to transfer the technology and services to parts of the world with different traditions" (p. 225). Some of the necessary approaches are indicated in the trends for a research agenda for digital libraries that Borgman herself identifies (p. 167). Given the opportunities that computer networks offer for information access, the need for libraries may be questioned. However, libraries play a vital role in information infrastructure, and also fulfill the social role of promoting learning.

Even so, the picture that Borgman paints is of an infrastructure that can be accessed by people in a wide variety of situations for a wide variety of purposes. "Information technologies are converging, computer networks are extending their reach, digital libraries are proliferating, and the user community is growing exponentially. These developments combine to make vastly more information resources available to many more people in many more places" (p. 266).

The challenge that the book sets out is to ensure that the technological challenges are confronted in ways that recognise all the other factors that combine to allow a successful development of the infrastructure. Borgman's book performs a useful service in giving a broad overview of all the kinds of issues that need to be addressed. - Peter J. Beech

Linda Lau (editor).
Distance Learning Technologies: Issues, Trends and Opportunities.
Hershey, Penn.: Idea Group Publishing, 2000.
paper, 264 p., ISBN 1-878-28980-2, US$69.95.
Idea Group: http://www.idea-group.com

This was a difficult book to review; in progressing through the book, the reviewer was beset by hope and frustration in equal measure. It covers the field well enough with a spread of academic, business and government settings to pick from, the authors seem well enough versed in their fields, there is plenty of detail. Yet the overall feeling is one of curious disappointment, a sense that the contributors did not have their thinking caps on when they wrote their pieces. Much is said about learning theory and much is said about distance learning technology, but the two never seem to meet up in an integrated way.  Robert Parsons

Daniel P. Bovet and Marco Cesati.
Understanding the Linux Kernel.
Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates, 2000.
paper, 702 p., ISBN 0-596-00002-2, US$39.95.
O'Reilly & Associates: http://www.oreilly.com

Michael H. Brackett.
Data Resource Quality: Turning Bad Habits Into Good Practices.
(Addison-Wesley information technology series)
Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2000.
paper, 354 p., ISBN 0-201-71306-3, US$39.95.
Addison-Wesley: http://www.aw.com/cseng/

Russell Chun.
Macromedia Flash 5 Advanced for Windows and Macintosh.
(Visual Quickpro Guide)
Berkeley, Calif.: Peachpit Press, 2000.
paper, 440 p. with CD-ROM, ISBN 0-201-72624-6, US$29.99.
Peachpit Press: http://www.peachpit.com

Steve Clarke and Brian Lehaney.
Human Centered Methods in Information Systems: Current Research and Practice.
Hershey, Penn.: Idea Group Publishing, 2000.
paper, 241 p., ISBN 1-878-28964-0, US$69.95.
Idea Group: http://www.idea-group.com

Derek Franklin and Brooks Patton.
Flash 5! Creative Web Animation.
Berkeley, Calif.: Peachpit Press, 2000.
paper, 540 p. with CD-ROM, ISBN 0-201-71969-X, US$39.99.
Peachpit Press: http://www.peachpit.com

Robert D. Galliers, Dorothy E. Leidner, and Bernadette S. H. Baker (editors).
Strategic Information Management: Challenges and Strategies in Managing Information Systems.
Second edition.
Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999.
paper, 590 p., ISBN 0-750-63975-X, US$42.95.
Butterworth-Heinemann: http://www.bh.com/

Michael Gurstein.
Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies.
Hershey, Penn.: Idea Group Publishing, 2000.
paper, 596 p., ISBN 1-878-28969-1, US$139.95.
Idea Group: http://www.idea-group.com

David Harel.
Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can't Do.
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
cloth, 221 p., ISBN 0-19-850555-8, US$25.00.
Oxford University Press: http://www.oup.com

Robin Williams and John Tollett.
The Non-Designer's Web Book.
Second edition.
Berkeley, Calif.: Peachpit Press, 2000.
paper, 303 p., ISBN 0-201-71038-2, US$34.99.
Peachpit Press: http://www.peachpit.com

Internet Week March 2, 2001 (email message)

Merrill Lynch Institutionalizes E-Biz

Merrill Lynch was a reluctant latecomer in offering consumer brokerage services on the Internet, but the company is asserting itself as a Wall Street leader in delivering debt, equity, investment banking and other products electronically to institutional clients. How Merrill's Corporate & Institutional Client Group arrived at that perch--and where it's headed in the coming months--is a study in IT management, relationship building and old-fashioned arm twisting.

CICG, a $12.5 billion division that accounts for almost half of Merrill's revenue, has big e-commerce aspirations. The group wants to expand Merrill's base of institutional clients while giving them more personalized information; create a flow of real-time information to all clients; give institutions access to research and other information produced by competing firms; boost demand and liquidity for existing debt and equity instruments; and create new venues for issuing securities.

CICG is building scores of systems and applications to support those efforts. It's also spearheading industry e-marketplaces. --Robert Preston And Jeffrey Schwartz

Read the rest: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eClC0Bdl6n0V30LPDt 

And don't miss the online exclusive interview with business development chief Laurence Tosi: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eClC0Bdl6n0V30LPEu 

Despite Napster's setbacks, peer-to-peer networking remains a promising technology that could help solve serious problems, says John Taschek --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103016/2688165/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on P2P are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Muppet World --- a great site for grownups and kids --- http://www.muppetworld.com/ 

The flash animations with audio are fantastic.

FAS 133 News

Hi Angela,

Congratulations on getting the Journal of Accountancy lead article entitled "Practical Issues in Implementing FASB 133." (March 2001) --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2001/hwang.htm 

Now you have an added incentive to finish up the draft on our tutorial paper on FX hedging.

Bob Jensen

Some important new articles on FAS 133 --- http://www.gtnews.com/risk/home.html 

FAS 133 and All That Hedging. Recent new articles in the GTNews Risk section include:

FAS 133 Update from XXXXX

Dr. Jensen,

I appreciate the update. If you are scheduled to speaker later in the year, please let me know.

There are a couple of new things that I am seeing that may be of interest:

* There is mandate that the hedge transaction be documented at the inception of the hedge. It was more relaxed prior to FAS 133. The SEC is now on board with this also. 

* Deloitte & Touche is requiring that Cash Flow hedge have a regression slope of between .80 and 1.20. This eliminates some hedging transaction from being considered hedges under the new rules. It may also eliminate some of the problems (unexpected results) associated with the using the dollar offset method to calculate the ineffectiveness. 

* The future accounting for transition adjustments and related disclosures. There are going be some surprises here especially associated with interest rate swaps. The rules were not that clearly defined prior to FAS 133. 

XXXXX

I didn't see a bar with beer nuts and dry martinis.

Reebok University (customized workouts for health and fitness) --- http://www.reeboku.com/ 

USA CityLink (Travel and Other Information About U.S. Cities, including hotel reservations, car rentals, etc.) --- http://usacitylink.com/ 

The Academy Awards (Current and History) from Lycos
OSCAR GUIDE ---  http://client.lycos.com/r.asp?CB&m6y8KukGw2APA982949033 

Consumer Information Guides --- http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/ 

Games for money --- http://www.gamesville.lycos.com/cgi-bin/homePage 

Sightseers Guide to Engineering (Pick a state and discover what to see in your travels in that state) --- http://www.engineeringsights.org/ 

Developers currently testing the new wireless version of Flash Player say it will open doors for building business and entertainment applications --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103022/2691534/ 

Famine in Afghanistan (Time Magazine provides you with a guided tour) --- http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/afghan/ 

Financial Risk Management (Forwarded by Scott Bonacker)

The Management Development Institute at the state university here hosts a series of "Breakfast with Champions" meeting during the fall and spring terms. The speaker for the meeting this week was the risk manager for Delta Airlines, and he gave a very clear description of what the function involves, and how it can improve company survival. This is an area that would fall within a CFO's responsibility, and as he explained the planning is not limited to dramatic events like plane crashes (as important as that is) or other insurable events. For example, the majority of business failures are apparently caused by the risk of insufficient revenues becoming a reality.

A web search yields several interesting sites, and if someone could suggest titles of relevant college textbooks I would appreciate it.

Scott Bonacker, CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com 

Risk & Insurance Management Society, Inc. http://www.rims.org/rmmag/ 

The Risk Center (requires registration for limited free trial) http://www.riskcenter.com/index2.html 

Nonprofit risk management http://www.nonprofitrisk.org/index.html 

Rogers Ross & Associates (Operational Risk) http://www.rogersross.com/operationalriskmanagement.htm 

Risk Management Association http://www.rmahq.org/Ed_Opps/pubs/oprisk_execsum.html 

Operational Risk Resources http://www.oprisk.freeserve.co.uk/ 

Send voice messages.

Impress and freak out your friends, family, or business associates by sending mass robotic phone messages (you choose the voice, male or female!) to up to fifty people via email, your PDA, or your WAP-enabled phone -- courtesy of ImBot, "your Internet messaging robot." Just sign up for the demo, and send up to three messages, free. --- http://www.imbot.com/ 

"The Webcaster Toolkit," by Chris Courtney at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/09/index3a.html 

Believe it or not, setting up a live Webcasting system doesn't need to break the bank. The key to putting together an effective, low-cost rig is figuring out exactly what you need, and where to find it.

I will focus on a live Webcast setup that will provide acceptable, if not excellent results. Webcam video balls and a cheap old laptop can perform a live Webcast, but if you're at all serious, it's best to aim higher than that. Many people doing live Webcasting are using the same video equipment as those producing video for television, but this is total overkill.

I am using the 300k stream as the average live stream and will discuss audio/video production gear needed to create a good looking stream. This is the equipment we used in the good old days of Webcasting, and it worked well and was reliable. We used RCA jacks instead of (professional) XLR and BNC connections for audio and video, and you knew the serious Webcaster by his or her extensive knowledge of Radio Shack gear.

In this article, I will discuss the basic components of a Webcasting rig, and how these parts work together. The components include cameras and microphones, audio/video monitors, audio/video mixers, audio/video distributors, and encoders.

A British company says it has technology that will connect your car, your toothbrush, your baseball cap -- and lots more -- to the Net, all for the cost of a cheeseburger --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,42104,00.html 

The idea of connecting every toaster, cereal packet and clock radio to the Net has been around for many years, but as long as the hardware to do it cost more than the toaster itself, it wasn't going to happen.

But now a British firm has developed a tiny operating system capable of running on very inexpensive, near-ubiquitous microcontrollers. Other so-called "embedded" operating systems run on much more expensive chips.

Live Devices' unnamed operating system can be shrunk as small as 8 kilobytes -– about the size of a very small graphic on a website -– and still connect to the Net.

"Anything with electricity running through it could be empowered by an embedded operating system of some sort," said IDC analyst Al Gillen. "(Eight kilobytes) is pretty small. You could put it in your belt buckle or your watch."

Live Devices' operating system runs on 8-bit microcontrollers, which are general-purpose chips found in all kinds of electronic products, from thermostats and curling tongs to pagers and cars. They are churned out in the millions at a cost of a few dollars each.

The chips are so inexpensive, Live Devices said Internet connectivity could be added to almost any product for next to nothing. It may even save money by allowing manufacturers to skimp on other components.

In fact, it may sometimes be cheaper to use the Net than ordinary wires.

Live Devices officials say it could cost less to put wireless chips in light switches and light sockets and turn the lights on using the Net than it is to hire an electrician to run wires between them.

From Information Week Newsletter on March 6, 2001

The future is wireless, or so we're told. While vendors work out the formula for devices and services that will put wireless clients into every consumer's hands, at least one wireless networking technology has moved out of the early-adopter stage. Wireless Ethernet, defined by the 802.11b standard, is coming into its own as a common technique to connect clients to networks. It is this genuine maturity that new technologies are pushed to achieve. This is the magic place on the product life curve when companies can begin ordering and installing the technology as a solution rather than as an experiment.

We took five separate 802.11b systems to the Review Bunker at the University of Hawaii's Advanced Network Computing Lab to see whether these products truly are as mature as they seem. We wanted to see whether the wireless networking systems would be easy to integrate into an existing network and easy to forget once they were installed. In short, we wanted to find out whether wireless networking systems can replace standard 10Base-T with no performance or management penalties for users and administrators.

Five companies accepted our invitation to this lab test. Cisco, Enterasys Networks, Intel, Proxim and Symbol Technologies brought network access devices, management software and wireless PC cards to the Review Bunker and helped us put the systems through their paces. In the end, we found that there's a lot of good news in wireless networking, along with one little detail that will cause you some trouble. --Curtis Franklin

Read on to find out how they performed: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCoW0Bdl6n0V30LWBN 

*************************************************** 

Providers Overcome Bluetooth Blues

Bluetooth--a technology that backers in the wireless and computer industry promise will enable cheap, short-range wireless networking--is set to become a reality after more than two years of development.

By this summer, wireless operators will be selling phones with Bluetooth transceivers, small chips that can communicate at distances up to 30 feet and wirelessly connect to PCs and PDAs.

Wireless service providers are excited about the prospects. They expect gadget fans and road warriors to use their cellular networks to connect Bluetooth-enabled devices to the Internet and corporate LANs.

The coming of age of Bluetooth means more traffic over the network and more demand for wireless services, say wireless operators. --Jonathan Collins, tele.com

Read on: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCoW0Bdl6n0V30LWCO 

To speed up software development on its new mobile device architecture, Texas Instruments is investing $100 million in next-generation wireless apps --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103055/2692288/ 

Sprint, Compuware take on wireless Web

Hoping to make the wireless data experience less cumbersome, the companies are working together to develop customized business apps for the Sprint Wireless Web --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0103051/2692286/ 

With the grand hope of making the wireless data experience more productive and less cumbersome, Sprint PCS Group and Compuware Corp. are working together to develop customized business applications for use on the Sprint Wireless Web.

But the new tools, which will include a variety of vertical and general business applications such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management), will face continued resistance from users still wrestling with the usefulness, efficiency and security of wireless applications.

Scheduled to begin rolling out later this year, the tools will be customized according to client needs, said officials at Sprint, in Kansas City, Mo. For example, Compuware will provide advisory, design and implementation services to customers to help them create programs that include wireless meter reading and real-time vehicle tracking for the transportation industry.

In addition to ERP and CRM, applications already in development include sales force automation and remote user support.

Despite the advances, users and vendors agree that the new applications alone won't solve the logistical problems of the wireless-Web carriers.

"If you look at the usability that exists within [Wireless Application Protocol] today, it's horrible," said Paul Toenjes, director of professional services at Compuware, in Farmington Hills, Mich.

Some of the blame for that falls to the carriers, which sold home screen space to numerous portal vendors. As a result, when a cell phone user attempts to access a Web home page on a Sprint phone, he or she must first click through links to America Online, The Microsoft Network, Fidelity, Yahoo or those of several other sites.

Scott passed along the message that our Big Chief is dead!

Gone, but never to be forgotten.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/WhatIs_Definition_Page/0,4152,512952,00.html 

Scott Bonacker, CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com 

NEW FEATURES from The Wall Street Journal

Dear Professor Jensen

The company research area of The Wall Street Journal Online has recently been expanded, more than tripling the amount of information available to you to research companies and potential investments. This all-new, easier-to-use version of our popular "Briefing Books" expands our stock quotes and research coverage to more than 25,000 companies world-wide.

This is a deep resource for corporate researchers, personal investors or just plain news junkies. From your first click into the Briefing Books you will get a detailed page that summarizes a company's latest stock price information, news headlines and other key facts. From there, the research stretches on for dozens of pages, covering everything from 10 years of quarterly earnings to insider holdings to executive biographies to audio from analyst conference calls.

As always, the research area is accessible from a search box on the top right of nearly every page in the site, as well as from company links found in articles and portfolios and from the advanced search page http://interactive.wsj.com/documents/bbsearch.htm.

The Briefing Books tap a variety of authoritative sources for financial data and multimedia features. Expanded fundamental data and analytics are provided by Market Guide, a Multex.com Inc. company. Thomson Financial provides earnings estimates and insider holdings and transactions. CCBN (Corporate Communications Broadcast Network) provides live and archived audio webcasts of analyst conference calls. BigCharts provides the interactive charting and historical stock quotes.

The improved navigation to the company research area also includes links to several supplementary sources of information, including SEC filings, premium research from Multex Investor and archived news and information from Factiva, an online compendium of leading business publications.

And, of course, all these resources are tied to the exclusive news coverage of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, making the new Briefing Books the best place on the Web to research companies around the globe.

The upgrade to Briefing Books is the first in a series of improvements we'll be making this year to provide you with the most efficient access to the news and information you need. As always, these changes are based on the comments we get from you, our subscribers. So, keep letting us know what you want by writing to feedback@interactive.wsj.com.

Regards,

Neil Budde Editor and Publisher The Wall Street Journal Online
WSJ.com Editors [update@LISTSERV.DOWJONES.COM] 

Some Wives are Dangerous
Destructive virus detected on March 6, 2001.  From Information Week Online on March 7.

The latest social engineering attempt by virus writers appears to be pornography. Another Visual Basic virus, discovered Tuesday and called W32/Naked@MM, lures potential victims with the subject line "Naked Wife." The message body reads: "My wife never look like that! ;-)". It carries an attachment, NakedWife.exe.

People clicking on the forbidden fruit and hoping to watch a Flash movie will instead end up sending the virus to all E-mail entries in their Windows address books. The virus then tries to delete all .bmp, .com, .dll, .exe, .ini, and .log files in the Windows and Windows\System directories.

Patrick Nolan, a virus researcher with McAfee's Avert Research Center says that so far, about 18 companies--including some Fortune 500 firms--have reported infections. "This virus has a destructive payload," Nolan says.

He says he's unsure whether this virus will spread like other recent Visual Basic viruses such as the Love Bug. "It's been about an average virus as far as the number of infections reported to us today," he says. One of the virus' mitigating factors is that it requires Visual Basic 6 or higher runtime files. Most major antivirus software can detect it, including McAfee, Sophos, and Symantec. - George V. Hulme

Jochem Hendricks uses an eye scanner to "draw" with his eyes, which are then digitally produced on paper. His work, currently on display at SFMOMA, is part of the new exhibit, "010101: Art in Technological Times." --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,42149,00.html 

"XBRL Sets Stage for Real-Time Financial Reporting," By: Jeffrey Marshall --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x29363.xml 

"Right now this is really just raw potential. That's all it is," says Danaher. But given that the development hurdles look like a matter of time rather than interest, the day of real-time sharing of full financial statements may be close at hand.

Bob Jensen's threads on XML and XBRL are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/xmlrdf.htm 

March 4th edition of the ENews Internet Essentials newsletter for the financial professional. This issue is one of the best so far this year. New XBRL London insights, objective assessments of XBRL status, great article about flying and much more --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. Report Writers Join XBRL; XBRL Status Check 
2. Dave Garbutt from FR Solutions on XBRL London 
3. XBRL Overview: PP slides from London 
4. Gail Perry on Creating Excel Macros 
5. PWC sets Date for Split of Consultancy Group 
6. The View From Above 
7. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

 A TEACHER IN THE 21ST CENTURY  

Let me see if I've got this right.   You want me to go into that room with all those kids and fill their  every waking moment with a love for learning. Not only that, I'm to  instill  a sense of pride in their ethnicity, behaviorally modify disruptive  behavior,  observe them for signs of abuse and T-shirt messages.  

I am to fight the war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, check  their backpacks for guns and raise their self-esteem. I'm to teach them  patriotism, good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, how and where  to  register to vote, how to balance a checkbook and how to apply for a job.  

I am to check their heads occasionally for lice, maintain a safe  environment, recognize signs of potential antisocial behavior, offer  advice,  write letters of recommendation for student employment and scholarships,  encourage respect for the cultural diversity of others, and, oh yeah,  always  make sure that I give the girls in my class 50 percent of my attention.  

I'm required by my contract to be working on my own time summer and  evenings at my own expense toward advance certification and a master's  degree; and after school, I am to attend committee and faculty meetings  and  participate in staff development training to maintain my employment  status.  

I am to be a paragon of virtue larger than life, such that my very  presence  will awe my students into being obedient and respectful of authority. I  am to pledge allegiance to supporting family values, a return to the  basics,  and to my current administration. I am to incorporate technology into the  learning, and monitor all Web sites while providing a personal  relationship  with each student.   I am to decide who might be potentially dangerous and/or liable to commit  crimes in school or who is possibly being abused, and I can be sent to jail  for not mentioning these suspicions.  

I am to make sure all students pass the state and federally mandated  testing and all classes, whether or not they attend school on a regular  basis or  complete any of the work assigned. Plus, I am expected to make sure that  all of the students with handicaps are guaranteed a free and equal  education, regardless of their mental or physical handicap. I am to  communicate  frequently with each student's parent by letter, phone, newsletter and  grade card.  

Then, I'm to do all of this with just a piece of chalk, a computer, a few  books, a bulletin board, a 45 minute more-or-less plan time and a big  smile, all on a starting salary that qualifies my family for food stamps  in  many states.

And in spite of all this, I am not allowed to pray while doing my many duties.

Your child's teacher!

Note from Dick Haar to his wife Gerry:

Husband's note to his wife:

"Doctor's office called: Said Pabst beer is normal."

Say what?

This one is a HILARIOUS solution to an otherwise vexing problem!
Forwarded by Dr. D

 A middle school in Oregon was faced with a unique problem.  A number of girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom. That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints.
 
 Finally the principal decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man.
 
 She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night.
 
 To demonstrate how difficult it was to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance guy to clean one of the mirrors.
 
 He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it into the toilet and then cleaned the mirror.
 
 Since then there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

      There are teachers and then there are Teachers....
      There are principALS and then there are principLES.

Forwarded from Auntie Bev

It seems a man in Topeka, Kansas decided to write a book about churches around the country. He started by flying to San Francisco, and started working east from there.  He went to a very large church and began taking pictures, etc. He spots a golden telephone on a wall and is intrigued with a sign which reads "$10,000.00 a minute." Seeking out the pastor he asks about the phone and the sign. The pastor answers that this golden phone is, in fact, a direct line to Heaven and if he pays the price he can talk directly to God. He thanks the pastor and continues on his way.

As he continues to visit churches in Seattle, Boise, Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, Atlanta, and on around the United States, he finds more phones, with the same sign, and the same answer from each pastor.

Finally, he arrives in Texas. Upon entering a church in Austin, lo and behold, he sees the usual golden telephone. But THIS time, the sign reads "Calls: 25 cents." Fascinated, he requests to talk to the pastor. "Reverend, I have been in cities all across the country and in each church I found this golden telephone, and have been told it is a direct line to Heaven and that I could talk to God, but, in the other churches the cost was $10,000.00 a minute. Your sign reads 25 cents a call. Why?" The pastor, smiling benignly, replies, "Son, you're in Texas now, it's a local call!"

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Useful stuff your Mom should have told you, but didn't.......

1. Stuff a miniature marshmallow in the bottom of a sugar cone to prevent ice cream drips.

2. Use a meat baster to "squeeze" your pancake batter onto the hot griddle and you'll get perfectly shaped pancakes every time.

3. To keep potatoes from budding, place an apple in the bag with the potatoes.

4. To prevent egg shells from cracking, add a pinch of salt to the water before hard-boiling.

5. Run your hands under cold water before pressing Rice Krispies treats in the pan and the marshmallow won't stick to your fingers.

6. To get the most juice out of fresh lemons, bring them to room temperature and roll them under your palm against the kitchen counter before squeezing.

7. To easily remove burnt on food from your skillet, simply add a drop or two of dish soap and enough water to cover bottom of pan, and bring to a boil on stovetop.

8. Spray your Tupperware with nonstick cooking spray before pouring in tomato-based sauces and there won't be any stains.

9. When a cake recipe calls for flouring the baking pan, use a bit of the dry cake mix instead and there won' t be any white mess on the outside of the cake.

10. If you accidentally over-salt a dish while it's still cooking, drop in a peeled potato and it will absorb the excess salt for an instant fix me up."

11. Wrap celery in aluminum foil when putting in the refrigerator and it will keep for weeks.

12. Brush some beaten egg white over pie crust before baking to yield a beautiful glossy finish.

13. Place a slice of apple in hardened brown sugar to soften it.

14. When boiling corn on the cob, add a pinch of sugar to help bring out the corn's natural sweetness.

15. To determine whether an egg is fresh, immerse it in a pan of cool, salted water. If it sinks, it is fresh, but if it rises to the surface, throw it away.

16. Cure for headaches: Take a lime, cut it in half and rub it on your forehead. The throbbing will go away.

17. Don't throw out all that leftover wine: Freeze into ice cubes for future use in casseroles and sauces.

18. If you have a problem opening jars: Try using latex dishwashing gloves. They give a non-slip grip that makes opening jars easy.

19. Potatoes will take food stains off your fingers. Just slice and rub raw potato on the stains and rinse with water.

20. To get rid of itch from mosquito bites, try applying soap on the area and you will experience instant relief.

21. Ants, ants, ants everywhere ... Well, they are said to never cross a chalk line. So get your chalk out and draw a line on the floor or wherever ants tend to march. See for yourself.

22. Use air freshener to clean mirrors. It does a good job and better still, leaves a lovely smell to the shine.

23. When you get a splinter, reach for the scotch tape before resorting to tweezers or a needle. Simply put the scotch tape over the splinter, Scotch tape removes the splinters painlessly and easily.

24. Now look what you can do with ALKA Seltzer. Clean a toilet. Drop in two ALKA Seltzer tablets, wait twenty minutes, brush, and flush. The citric acid and effervescent action clean vitreous china.

25. Clean a vase. To remove a stain from the bottom of a glass vase or cruet, fill with water and drop in two ALKA Seltzer tablets. Polish jewelry. Drop two ALKA Seltzer tablets into a glass of water and immerse the jewelry for two minutes. Clean a thermos bottle. Fill the bottle with water, drop in four ALKA Seltzer tablets, and let soak for an hour (or longer, if necessary). Unclog a drain. Clear the sink drain by dropping three ALKA Seltzer tablets down the drain followed by a cup of Heinz White Vinegar. Wait a few minutes, then run the hot water.

And that's the way it was on March 9, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

March 2, 2001

Bob Jensen's New Bookmarks on March 2, 2001
Bob Jensen at Trinity University 

Quotes of the Week

Knowledge is never neatly organized.
Fathom's Learn About Knowledge Trails --- http://www.fathom.com/ 

History is salted with mathematician and musician prodigies, but never were there fourteen year old chemists of note.
This is not an exact quotation, but it is the spirit of something said by one of the distinguished invited speakers at Trinity University some years ago.  I am embarrassed to admit that I cannot remember who the speaker was, but his lines to this effect linger in my mind ever since he spoke in Laurie Auditorium.  There are also no fourteen year old accountants of note.  I guess accounting and chemistry knowledge bases are not in the human genetic code.  Put another way, some disciplines thrive on nature's talent whereas others require nurturing's lifetime of drudgery.

As an institutionalist of sorts, he (Walter Adams)  was well aware that, with the passage of time, events and policies were moving against him.  Academic journals now publish the kind of theoretical, highly mathematical articles that he --- a case-study man --- had little use for.  The Nobel Prize has been awarded more for the contributions to economic science than to political economy (in keeping with its official title of "Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel") and perhaps even, as Barbara Bergmann wrote recently, in honor of theoreticians uncovering the obvious."
Roger Spencer, "A Road Less Traveled:  The Institutionalist Walter Adams," Challange, Vol. 44, No. 1, January/February 2001, p. 118.
(For more about "theoreticians uncovering the obvious," scroll down this edition of New Bookmarks.)

A quote forwarded by E. Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU] 

"The real world is only a special case, and not a very interesting one at that."
--C. E. Ferguson

The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
William Butler Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

Congratulations to Dan Collins (University of Iowa) and Jerry Weygandt (University of Wisconsin) for being selected as the Year 2001 winners of the American Accounting Association's Outstanding Accounting Educator Awards --- http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aen/winter01/item01.htm 
Their teaching, leadership, and writings have inspired many in our profession.  

Bob Jensen will be presenting a pre-conference workshop on e-Business and e-Education in Rio.

Our web address has been changed

Due to the change in the conference web address, we would like to bring your attention to the 13th Asian-Pacific Conference call for papers and detailed information to the following web address www.craig.csufresno.edu/conasia 

Lana Kadoshnikov [sk133@csufresno.edu] 

Paul is a former student during my years at Michigan State University and has been project director of various FASB and IASC accounting standards before joining Deloitte on special assignment in Hong Kong.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: Pacter, Paul (HK - Hong Kong) [mailto:paupacter@deloitte.com.hk]  
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 3:05 AM 
To: 'rjensen@trinity.edu' Subject: New international accounting website

Hello Bob,

As part of my work at Deloitte here in Hong Kong, I have developed IASPLUS, which is both a web site ( http://www.iasplus.com  ) and a quarterly printed newsletter (the latter is available on the website in electronic form). The website and newsletter are devoted to the development, dissemination, understanding, and use of International Accounting Standards. Both include country-specific information -- currently limited to Asia but soon to be expanded to include Europe and beyond.

I thought these might be of interest for your bookmarks.

I enjoyed our panel together at the AAA. I hope to see you this summer at the Atlanta meeting.

Paul Pacter

Wow Flash of the Week --- http://www.thefullmontyonbroadway.com/ 

Wow Site of the Week 
A colleague at Trinity University clued me onto this intriguing-sounding  software --- http://www.egems.com/ 

Everyday, you come across valuable gems of information. The problem is, they're usually scattered far and wide — throughout web sites, emails, desktop applications, databases, graphics and virtual libraries.

eGems™ Collector Pro lets you change those rich nuggets of research into powerful gems of knowledge — quickly, easily and without losing their accompanying source. You simply "grab and drop" discrete pieces of information as you find and need them.

eGems™ Collector Pro helps researchers, writers, analysts, professors and students work faster and more efficiently. It's absolutely invaluable for anyone who re-uses verifiable information! Take a look at the many features and benefits!

Simple, Non-obtrusive Interface:
Do all your research without leaving your application! eGems Collector automatically works alongside you as you collect information. It integrates seamlessly with your favorite applications without embedding itself in their interface.

Drag and Drop Research:
Wherever you find important data, eGems Collector lets you collect and drop it wherever you want--while keeping its source path intact. It's as simple as highlighting a passage.

Organize Your eGems:
Build your own digital library rich with "trays" and "chests" full of gems of information. Attach notes. Aggregate and personalize your findings in any way you wish.

Find Data Easily:
Use eGems Collector Pro's advanced search tools to quickly locate the data you need, when you need it.

Share eGems with Others:
Send individual eGems via email or share whole chests or databases. Collaborate with colleagues, family, friends and co-workers.

Automatically Source Your Work:
Keep track of original sources and create automatic bibliographies. Never lose a source or track down citations again.

Expand Your Resources:
Take advantage of pre-compiled "chests" of information, including Shakespeare's Sonnets, the Mark Twain's Maxims and the Constitution of the United States. Experts are compiling more "chests" every day!

Get Great Service and Support Including:

 

 

I ordered my copy for under $60 and cannot wait to try it out!

Former Wow Site of the Week --- Things keep happening at Fathom.  There are over 60,000 authenticated references to experts and this knowledge portal is growing exponentially.  Fathom deepens as academia's top knowledge portal --- http://www.fathom.com/  

Fathom's member institutions present their immense wealth of knowledge across every area of interest—from business to global affairs, from arts to technology.

Fathom brings you:

Lectures, interviews, articles, performances and exhibits by faculty, researchers and curators from our member institutions. Reference content spanning all disciplines and fields of study. Trails, a new visual way of organizing knowledge thematically by topic. You can use Trails to intuitively navigate content according to your own interests. A community of knowledge seekers gathering in Fathom's Forums. Online courses from Fathom's course partners, offering the best in online education from top research institutions. Recommended books and products to deepen your knowledge. 

Don't miss Fathom's Online Course Demonstration and Learn About Knowledge Trails

Knowledge is never neatly organized.

Founders and Partners of Fathom are High in Prestige

Member Institutions
Columbia University
Cambridge University Press
London School of Economics
The New York Public Library
University of Chicago
University of Michigan
The British Library 
RAND
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
Victoria & Albert Musume
Science Museum
Natural History Museum
American Film Institute

For more on portals, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm 

There are very few U.S. Government Websites that are not excellent.  Both the IRS and the SEC are great examples.  And they keep getting better.

Bob,

You might want to note in Bookmarks that the SEC has a new and improved web site. It allows accountants to go directly to matters that might be of most interest to them. The site is sec.gov.

Now if only the AICPA would finish its promised upgrade.

Dennis Beresford [dberesford@terry.uga.edu] 

In fairness to the AICPA, the Institute has made some courageous and helpful decisions regarding the AICPA Website, not the least of which is to provide both the current and back issues of The Journal of Accountancy for free downloading.

The improved SEC website has a much better table of contents for locating a vast amount of information.  The site is at http://www.sec.gov/ 

Helper Site of the Week (Thank you for sharing Gail)
From Gail Perry on TheAccountingWeb --- http://www.accountingweb.com/ 

Excel Tips
In a recent workshop, CPA and author Gail Perry shared some of her favorite Excel tips. Here are some highlights from that workshop. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/38957/101 

"Creating Excel Macros" http://www.accountingweb.com/item/36664/101 

Tax Scams
Don't fall victim to these save-taxes-quick schemes that always seem to crop up this time of year. Be sure your clients steer clear of these scams as well! http://www.accountingweb.com/item/38955/101 

The AICPA's Year 2000 Supply and Demand for Accounting Graduates  http://ftp.aicpa.org/public/download/career/00supply.pdf 

Following are some of the more significant findings from the report:

• A total of 47,895 accounting bachelor’s and master’s degrees were awarded in l998–99, which represents a 20% decrease from the total number reported for l995–96. The percentage decrease of bachelor’s degrees awarded is almost twice that of master’s degrees.

• Females are increasingly outnumbering males at the bachelor’s level (57% to 43%). For the first time in this series of studies, females outnumbered males also at the master’s level (54% to 46%).

• Minorities accounted for 19% of the total number of accounting bachelor’s and master’s graduates, down from 23% in l995–96. However, the percentage of minority PhDs has increased from 12% to 16% for the same period.

• The percentage of bachelor’s graduates finding jobs in business/industry has dropped relative to those entering public accounting (26% and 34%, respectively). The percentage of master’s graduates entering public accounting (61%) is triple the percentage going into industry (20%).

• Accounting enrollments in bachelor’s and master’s programs have dropped dramatically (22%) from l995–96. Enrollments had already begun to drop from l994–95 to l995–96. A majority of responding schools expect enrollments in accounting bachelor’s programs two years from now to be the same, and they expect enrollments in accounting master’s programs to increase.

• The number of candidates sitting for the CPA exam continued the downward trend from l993, except for an upward surge in l999. This is likely attributable to the fact that the 150-hour law became effective in more than a dozen states in the year 2000. Candidates for the May and November exams in l999 totaled 126,769.

• The total number of accounting graduates with bachelor’s degrees hired by CPA firms decreased slightly in l999, while master’s degrees hires increased.

• The percentage of new accounting graduates hired by the firms was about one-third the percentage of non-accounting graduate hires in l999. 

• Fifty-four percent of the new graduate hires were female; 46% were male.

• Twenty percent of the new graduate hires were minorities, up from 16% in l996.

• The percentage of female CPAs employed by the firms is 34%; minorities accounted for 5% of CPAs employed by the firms.

• Eighty-five percent of the largest firms reported hiring more experienced recruits in l999 than in l998; 53% of the next largest firm-size group said they hired more experienced recruits than in l998.

Although demand for accounting graduates is high and rising, the supply of graduates is DOWN

Snafu's in print (from factual slips to funny spellings in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and elsewhere)
Human Spell Check --- http://humanspellcheck.com/ 

The daley wurd: led:  My mentor led me to believe I could perfect the lead by getting the lead out.

The daley wurd: your:  As in, "you're not going to misuse YOUR again, are you?"

The daley wurd: principle:  As in, "The school principal said, 'It's the principle of the thing'."
(To say nothing about the principal is $1,000 per bond in your portfolio.  Isn't English fun?)

Aside from the grammar confusion, do the folks at Budweiser really think this is going to keep the kids out?

Snafus TV-Style
What Were They Thinking (Television's poorly designed and scripted sitcoms) --- http://www.tvguide.com/features/thinking/ 

Example:  The Premise
Family man Dave Crabtree (Jerry Van Dyke) discovers that his mother, Gladys, has been reincarnated as a talking 1928 Porter. In one episode, Gladys sends her son out for friction oil for her "carthritis." When asked if she wants to take a catnap, she cheekily responds, "You mean a carnap." Also starring: Maggie Pierce, Avery Schreiber, Ann Southern.

Snafus Wordwize
Banished Word List --- http://www.lssu.edu/banished/2000.html 

The Business Eccountant is aimed at collegiate educators and students --- http://www.businessed.net/ 

Welcome to The Business Eccountant magazine published by BusinessEd.net. This website contains weekly business news designed to be of interest to students.

The Business Eccountant tracks news from 40 companies world-wide, as well as giving other business news in brief. You can also access our archive facility dating back to the first issue on December 5 1999.

College educators and librarians can get The Business Eccountant by e-mail each Sunday night. Check out the site for more details and contact information.

Professor of the Week (thank you for sharing, Ralph)
Online Economic Resources from Englishman Ralph Lazer
Rationalexpectations.com http://www.rationalexpectations.com/ 

Insiders

Who's Who

Global directory of economics, finance. Covers more than 1000 institutions in OECD countries & Emerging Markets

Conferences

Continually-updated conference calendar (economics, finance & related fields)
Jobs Academic, professional & official positions globally, as well as graduate placements & student summer internships
Glossary Economics & Financial Glossary (Macro, Micro, Financial Markets, Significant Events, Environmental/Resource)
Central Bank
Resources 		 Continually updated survey of Central Bank Policies (Monetary & Exchange Rate) in OECD & Emerging Markets.

Academic

University Economics Departments, University Research Groups, Business Schools

Professional

Economics Forecasters & Consultants, Investment Banks, Stock-brokers, Asset Managers, Media, Research, Think Tanks

Government/Official

Central Banks, Finance Ministries, Economy Ministries, Gov't Statistics Offices, Gov't Agencies, International Organisations

Publications

Teaching & Learning Resources, Economics Working-papers, Economics Journals

Macroeconomic Data

Macro data by country & region: OECD & Emerging Markets

Financial Market Data

Equity Markets, Bond Markets, FX Markets, Commodity Markets: OECD & Emerging Markets

Your input

Submissions

Submit sites to the links database, events to the conference channel, positions to the jobs channel, personal details to the Who's Who directory, and terms to the glossary. All submissions assessed by webmaster before being posted

I found the following article interesting.  

"Gift for the Gab," Clay Shirky on new software agents that evolve language --- http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1626 

More importantly, the researchers found that successful predators evolved language more efficiently if their communication was limited in length in the beginning and grew over time, rather than being uniformly large from the beginning. Expanding the available message size after the predators learned to use shorter "words" allowed the agents to evolve a functioning language much faster. Limiting the message length also seemed to lead the predators to evolve "words" that had different meanings in different situations. (The authors compared this to the word drive, which is a noun or a verb depending on use.) Most astonishing of all, the authors of the study could not always decipher the agents' language. They knew the predators were saying something useful to each other, since they were getting better at chasing down the prey, but finding a Rosetta Stone for human-agentese proved impossible.

The scientific overlaps in this experiment are enormous -- computer science, linguistics, evolutionary theory, even genetics, as the authors encoded the agents' programs into "chromosomes" and shuffled those chromosomes between generations in a process modeled on reproduction. Practical applications for this work are some time off, but its easy to see how Net-crawling agents with evolved language could become part of the Internet's infrastructure.

With Google indexing only a fraction of the Web's content, agents instructing one another about relevant documents could make superior indexing crawlers. With airline tickets fluctuating in price by the minute, traditional purchasing agents have been ineffective because they prevent supply and demand from being measured in one place and real time. A group of agents that can talk to one another, however, can bring the Chicago Solution -- leave the corn in the fields but aggregate the prices in Chicago -- to distributed electronic markets. And with the growth of peer-to-peer networks like Gnutella and Freenet that resist any sort of centralization, such agents may become a necessary accoutrement to making the network user-friendly, or even user-usable.

Bob Jensen's P2P threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

I am afraid that I don't have a quick and easy answer for stock pay dividends and for working out your specific calculation.  I also hesitate to give advice on the discount rate. 

For some general guidance on the stock pricing analysis, you might try the calculators (or leads to calculators) at following websites:

Calculating volatility --- http://www.retailenergy.com/archives/shimko2.htm 

Peter Hoadley's Options Strategy Analysis Tools: Black-Scholes Pricing Analysis ---  http://www.hoadley.net/options/optiongraphs.asp  

Black-Scholes price for a stock-index option --- 
http://sci.vu.edu.au/~drw/hull/ch14/greeks2.html  

Summary: Stock options/Black-Scholes --- 
http://www.hronline.com/forums/hrnet/9801/0108.html 

The following websites may be useful for you for Black-Scholes calculators:

Online calculators --- http://www.cba.bgsu.edu/fin/facstaff/chughen/Finance%20Links.htm 

Summary Analysis --- http://www.blobek.com/black-scholes.html 

A Black-Scholes European Option Calculator --- http://mscf.gsia.cmu.edu/bsop.html 

A Black-Scholes American and European Calculator --- http://www.zerodelta.com/BlackScholes.html 

Various (exotic options) http://www.axone.ch/JavaCalculators.htm 

-----Original Message----- 
From: XXXX
 Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2001 12:02 PM 
To: rjensen@trinity.edu 
Subject: Valuation of call American call options

I sure hope you can help me! I have read several papers and Investment Books ( Bodie, Kane and Marcus ) regarding the valuation of options. I got your e-mail address off a web site ). Everything seems fine when I reviewing examples but now I have to actually compute the value of several different options. I understand the Black Scholes Formula and can work through the example ( the long formula ) as long as there are no dividends. I am trying to find a formula for an American option assuming the stock pay dividends. I did find a web site (Dailystocks.com) that calculates the value of the option by keying in the following variables. I would like to see the formula behind this calculation so that I may explain it to the CEO of my company. Do you have a paper on this or a web site that you can direct me to? Or.... can you send me the formula with the following variables in it? I really would appreciate you help! 

Can you answer the following questions for me? I am trying to value the following Option: ( the underlying stock is a dividend paying stock and pays dividends every quarter ) Current stock price = 55 exercise price = 35 Time to expiration = 4.5 years ( the original term = 10 years ) Volatility = 16.5% Risk free rate = 4.5% ( I have assumed this price ) Assume I have 10 options that I have to value and all of them range from 1.76 to 9.5 years to expiration, what is the best security that I can use to obtain the different risk free rates necessary for each option? Div. yield = 3.49% ( .48 each qrt, 55/.48 * 4 = 3.49%)

Also, I plan on comparing the option value to the Adjusted Intrinsic value....so should I take the current price of $55 less exercise price of $35 less the PV of the dividend payments for the next 4.5years? So, for this last part, do I assume the 48 cents will be paid out each quarter for the next 4.5 years and discount this back to today? What discount rate should I use? Again, Thanks for your help.

Thanks
XXXXX

An accounting theory question raised by The Wall Street Journal Interactive for Accounting Educators

What would be the proper accounting if a utility company entered a hedge transaction specifying the price at which it would purchase electricity versus the spot price?

ARTICLE 1 Power Vacuum: An Issue Briefing On California's Electricity Crisis WSJ.com News Roundup 01/23/2001 --- 
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB978456167288728710.djm 

* ARTICLE 2 Capital: California Sheds Light on Regulation By David Wessel 02/08/01 Page A1 --- 
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB981596525191942357.djm 

* ARTICLE 3 'Microturbines' May Get a Surge From Power Crisis in California By Rodney Ho 1/23/01 ---  
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB980204234300505379.djm 

RELATED ARTICLE: Anatomy of a Jolt: A Timeline of Key Events in California Utility Deregulation Source: The Wall Street Journal and Associated Press 02/08/01 ---:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB979814605988678769.djm 

RELATED ARTICLE: New Coal Stoves Offer an Alternative As Prices for Natural Gas and Oil Soar By Robert Guy Matthews 1/30/01 Page B1 --- 
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB980812186405240764.djm 

RELATED ARTICLE: California Needs Deregulation Done Right By Daniel McFadden, University of California, Berkeley 02/13/01 Page A26 --- 
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB982022781915157918.djm 

Internet Economy Indicators (e-Commerce) http://www.internetindicators.com/ 

Dear XXXXX

In the bottom of this message, I supply you with some software links to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and some other alternatives to AHP. The problem with AHP is that in spite of the endless expounding of eigenvector scaling as "the AHP scaling" by Saaty and Vargas, there are other scaling alternatives such as those pointed out in my paper "COMPARISONS OF EIGENVECTOR, LEAST SQUARES, CHI SQUARE, AND LOGARITHMIC LEAST SQUARES METHODS OF SCALING A RECIPROCAL MATRIX" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/127wp/127wp.htm. The problem is that choice of a scaling method is somewhat arbitrary. This is OK as long as you know (and disclose) the advantages and disadvantages of your choice for AHP scaling.

If you get into this big time, there is expensive software and consulting for AHP. Examples are shown below:

http://www.expertchoice.com/ 

http://www.logicaldecisions.com/ 

http://www.aliah.com/site/aliah-intro.html 

When life gets complicated you sometimes need complicated and expensive software.

Hope this helps.

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

New Additions to ERIC Digests Database http://www.ed.gov/databases/ERIC_Digests/index/2001-2-6.html 

Resources for library assessment http://www.ala.org/acrl/resjan01.html 

Librarians are increasingly turning to the Internet and electronic resources to provide patrons with new services. As electronic resources and services become an increasingly large segment of all library resources and services, librarians must find ways to adequately report their usage.

Finding adequate and accurate measures becomes more important as libraries experience a decline in traditional services such as questions at the reference desk. For many libraries, electronic resources represent an area of growth, and so reflecting their use in library statistics is key to justifying budget requests and demonstrating the importance of the library.

There are many ways of measuring library usage: typically librarians count books circulated, volumes shelved, money spent on acquisitions, gate counts, and questions answered at the reference desk. While these measures are widely accepted, they do not reflect electronic services. To accurately reflect this usage, libraries must at a minimum be able to count and report Web hits, database sessions and searches, and e-mail contacts. Counting these things will force librarians to look at some new tools for assessment.

In this climate, where electronic and print resources and services co-exist, libraries seeking to perform careful analysis of usage and funding will need to use both traditional and new tools. Indeed, this new climate may represent an opportunity for librarians to review all the data that they gather and all of the tools they use to analyze that data. Some of the tools librarians may find helpful are available via the Internet, including software packages for studying Web usage and for performing statistical analyses, sites that provide data for use in benchmarking with comparable libraries, and sites that can help with studying demographics in their community.

Sex On TV: Content and Context ---  http://www.kff.org/content/2001/3087/SexOnTV.pdf 

Now that the tax-filing season is underway, visit NYTimes.com's newly launched "Your Taxes," a comprehensive guide to many of the questions you may have, not only about the existing tax code, but also on the proposed Bush tax cuts. In collaboration with the experts at TurboTax, "Your Taxes" contains tax forms, calculators and step-by-step information on filing --- http://www.nytimes.com/taxes?0221 

Bob Jensen provides links to other Websites for help in filing taxes.  Go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

From InformationWeek Online on February 22, 2001

The big three online tax filing firms--H.D. Vest Inc., H&R Block and Intuit Inc.--have geared up for the 2001 tax season with a flurry of Web initiatives.

Intuit dominated the electronic filing market last year, preparing 70 percent of all online federal tax returns. Intuit, which makes most of its $1 billion in revenue on off-the-shelf software, acquired on Feb. 12 Apps.com Inc., an online directory for small businesses listing about 5,000 Web applications providers and ASPs, and began making application program interfaces available to software developers through its developer.intuit.com site. The goal: fuel development of add-on applications for small businesses.

H.D. Vest's strategy is to attract taxpayers to its site. Then, should customers need help or further services, Vest turns them over to tax professionals who then pay a part of their professional fee to H.D. Vest. For business clientele, the company last November unveiled MyHDVEST.com, through which it sets up cobranded Web portals for Vest-affiliated certified public accountants, agents and financial planners.

No. 3 H&R Block, whose $2.8 billion in revenue comes almost entirely from its 9,200 storefronts, had a disastrous 2000 tax season. Performance and scalability woes forced the company to take the entire $18 million cost of its in-house online project off the company's bottom line (InternetWeek, Aug. 28, 2000). This year, company officials insist that Block is back in e-business. --David Lewis

Find out more: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCej0Bdl6n0V30DdhF 

Best Management Practices (U.K Government Website) ---  http://www.dti.gov.uk/mbp/index.html 

"Cell Phones:  Not Just for Calling" --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41873,00.html 

Cell phones are the next informational storehouse, yet travelers who need them can't access them on airplanes. Elisa Batista breaks down why the cell phone is banned on airlines, the latest innovations in wireless technology and some rather novel uses for the phones.

Almost everybody in Hong Kong has a cell phone; therefore, discourteous use of the devices is rampant. The government is thinking about installing jamming devices in some public places --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,41975,00.html 

Developers have begun building enterprise applications on a new wireless platform from Qualcomm. Whether users buy into the technology is another matter --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102214/2687045/ 

Census 2000 Data Access and Use http://www.proximityone.com/cen2000.htm 

Companies need to make consumer privacy a higher priority --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102215/2685112/ 

Sexual Harassment Resources --- http://library.uncg.edu/depts/docs/us/harass.html 

Can John Doe Stay Anonymous? In what could have been a watershed case for Internet privacy and free speech activists, a somewhat inconclusive conclusion puts a damper on a victory. By Jeffrey Terraciano. in Politics --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41714,00.html 

Art History

Over 8,000 Reproductions
Web Gallery of Art http://gallery.euroweb.hu/welcome.html 

The Glory of Chinese Printing http://www.cgan.com.hk/english/cpg/indexen.htm 

Freenet's Free Thinker by Farhad Manjo --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41918,00.html 

Freenet maybe be Napster's lesser-known brother, but creator Ian Clarke says his still-evolving service will offer anonymity that protects users from prosecution.

Farhad Manjoo spoke with Clarke about censorhip, privacy, and how Freenet can be used to help open-source software development.

Bob Jensen's threads on P2P and file sharing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

A Glossary of Political Economy Terms http://www.duc.auburn.edu/~johnspm/glossind.html 

For other online glossaries, go to the following:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbus.htm 

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm 

Interactive TV catches on in Europe --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/531965.asp#BODY 

      Interactive TV has primitive Web-searching and surfing capabilities compared to an Internet-connected computer, but the service enhances a medium with which people are comfortable.

       Beyond its rich video foundation, iTV is also getting a boost from offerings that leverage the power of networking and instant communication.

       European users can click through to text that enhances video news, check weather forecasts and participate in virtual game shows. Some even bet - in real time - on sports. Or they get notified when a goal has been scored in a soccer game on another channel, in time to switch for the replay.

       Globally, the number of interactive TV connections is expected to grow from 13 million in 2001 to an estimated 226 million in 2006, says Shirley Brown, an analyst at Ovum Consulting.

       The interactive satellite system of Britain’s BSkyB - controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. - boasts nearly 5 million subscribers. The comparable service of France’s Canal Plus has 1.5 million users, and Canal Plus operates similar services in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Scandinavia and parts of Africa.

       Ovum predicts the number of households worldwide capable of receiving interactive television will grow from 62 million to 357 million by 2006 - while revenue from sales made over interactive TV will grow from about $58 million last year to $44.8 billion.

Pride in the U.S. Flag --- http://home.flash.net/~skyangel/ourflag/ourflag.html 

From Syllabus News on February 20, 2001

AcquireX, an e-procurement network, recently launched a Web-based education supply marketplace that combines three separate pur- chasing options in one system. AcquireX provides one-stop pro curement by meeting all K-12 and higher education purchasing regulations, whether buying through AcquireX's network, through the institution's preferred vendors, or through bids and quotes. AcquireX also provides comprehensive customer support, inclu ding the handling of returns and other issues.

Following a successful six-month pilot period, feedback from beta customers such as American University in Washington, D.C., and the Spring BranchSchool District in Houston, Texas, led to AcquireX's creation of the three-tiered purchasing options. AcquireX customers may purchase goods and services directly from AcquireX as a "super supplier/aggregator,'' use the AcquireX sealed bids and quotes modules when legally required, or pur-chase goods and services using the AcquireX facilitation module. This module is primarily tailored to accommodate an institution's local vendors and its established sup plier contracts.

For more information, visit www.acquirex.com .

The President's Agenda for Tax Relief http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/reports/taxplan.html 

Recognizing the possibility of confusion between Statement 125 and its updated requirements in Statement 140 -- both titled "Accounting for Transfers and Servicing of Financial Assets and Extinguishments of Liabilities," the Financial Accounting Standards Board has issued a special report to respond to common questions about what has changed.

Summary --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x29400.xml 

The FASB document is at http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/news/index.html 

Internet Growth Forecasting --- http://www.netsizer.com/ 

Internet Economy Indicators  --- http://www.internetindicators.com/

I hope you enjoyed the recent APLG Meeting in Fort Lauderdale. The slides from Donald Gray from the University of Wisconsin Foundation speaking on fund raising and Robert Johnson from the Arthur Andersen office in Atlanta speaking on the new economy are available online.

The Donald Gray presentation (4,444k) is posted at: http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aapg/2001/DonGray.ppt 

The Robert Johnson presentation (429k) is posted at: http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aapg/2001/Economy.ppt 

Both PowerPoint slide presentations are linked from the APLG program at: http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aapg/2001/program.htm 

Craig Polhemus [aaacraig@packet.net] 
American Accounting Association]

Taxation Aspects of Electronic Commerce ---  http://www.oecd.org/daf/fa/e_com/public_release.htm 

Chartres, Sanctuaire du Monde --- http://www.chartres-csm.org/ 

It always amazes me when communism and socialism cannot tolerate freedom of the press and other forms of communication.  Fidel Castro controls Cuba's only Internet gateway and all four ISPs. He restricts access to government officials and academics, all of whom know that they are being watched. And yet, Cubans find a way --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41940,00.html 

USFL - United States Football League (Trivia, Sports History) http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Field/8520/ 

Guidelines for studies of the social and economic impact of HIV/AIDS -- UNAIDS  http://www.unaids.org/publications/documents/economics/costeffec/JC326 

"CRM Vendors Pull String on Speech." By Gina Fraone, BuzStrategy Newsletter, February 22, 2001

Consumers have historically shown a natural affection for devices that speak like humans, so it's no wonder that several CRM (customer relationship management) product vendors at DCI's annual CRM conference last week were trying to seduce attendees with the power of speech. Some were showing products that allow salespeople to interact with CRM applications by talking to them. Others were touting applications that allow Web sites to interact with consumers using speech.

Although the idea of applying speech to CRM in this way makes sense, many of these new products suffer from two problems: Speech recognition technology still has holes, and speech-driven applications require more bandwidth than many networks and Web sites can muster.

Two products being demonstrated at the DCI show illustrated these shortcomings. JustTalk, of Ann Arbor, Mich., offers a product that integrates with CRM software so that traveling sales folks can capture, access and share data using speech recognition technology over any phone.

And LipSinc, of Morrisville, N.C., helps businesses create "virtual agents" that can interact with Web site visitors to provide one-way automated voice responses or give live two-way visual communication. LipSinc can even create a digital image of an employee or other character that will interact with Web site visitors.

Online retailer Walmart.com ( http://www.walmart.com/ ) allows buyers to listen to 30-second snippets of every track before purchasing a CD. Also: Surfing SafariDog goes streaming, an SDMI hacker becomes a security agent, and digital rights management goes cellular. All in Brad King's notebook --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41982,00.html 

Also see
Labels to Napster: Download This
Napster's Billion Dollar Blues
Antartica Rocks Out on Ice
The State of Music Security
Find it: Lycos Music's MP3 Central

American Song-Poem Music Archives (American History) http://www.aspma.com/ 
The images and maps are remarkable.  Note Frank Thomas' diary.

Brazil's government is subsidizing a plan to develop stripped-down computers that will cost only $300. Just another example of the country's aggressive attitude toward getting its people connected --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,41785,00.html 

United Nations Environment Network ---- http://www.unep.net/ 
(Water, Climate, Land, Biodiversity by Country) 

Tobacco Control Archives ---  http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/ 

See the accomplishments of the World Bank (actually this site can be classified under Photographic Art) ---  Photo Library http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/emps/photo.htm 

American Song-Poem Music Archives --- http://www.aspma.com/ 

Cost Accounting 101

Convenience Stores Create Software To Boost Profitability and Cut Costs," by Ann Zimmerman, The Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2001--- http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB982192092270056655.djm 

The convenience-store industry, under siege from mounting competition, has collaborated to create a software program to cut inventory costs and boost profitability following a yearlong study among retailers, distributors and manufacturers.

The software tool helps retailers more accurately assess an item's profitability by factoring in the operating, labor, inventory and overhead costs of each item. Previously, the industry looked mainly at a product's gross profit, which is the retail price of the item minus its wholesale price.

. . . 

With time at a premium, convenience stores are facing more competition from supermarkets, drugstores and even membership warehouse clubs, which have added gas pumps and quicker checkout methods. The convenience-store industry needs to cut costs to increase its competitive edge.

Previously, "retailers didn't consider the cost of handling a product, which is very significant, but not obvious," says Bill Bishop, president of Willard Bishop Consulting, which conducted the study. "Once you see that an item is not making money, it's easier to make the hard decisions."

Hank Armour, president of West Star Corp., which operates Washington-based Now convenience stores and truck stops, learned from testing the software that he was losing 50 cents on every auto fuse and bulb he sold. A follow-up survey convinced him that customers were willing to spend more on the product, and he raised the price by a dollar.

Before the study, Mr. Armour carried three kinds of laundry detergent. The data convinced him to eliminate two brands and increase the display of the remaining brand. His sales in the category increased 20%, while at the same time his costs fell because he could order the product by the case.

Secrets of the Pharaohs (Egypt, History, Archaeology) --- http://www.pbs.org/wnet/pharaohs/ 

"Firms Must Disclose Effect of Accords Rescinding Stock Purchases, SEC Says," Michael Schroeder and Jonathan Weil, The Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2001 --- http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB981076676647230798.djm 

The Securities and Exchange Commission has advised accountants that companies must disclose the financial impact of special agreements that allow employees to back out of soured stock purchases.

At the request of accounting firms, the SEC recently offered guidance on how such transactions should be explained to shareholders in company financial reports.

The issue applies to employees who decided early last year to exercise the purchase of company stock granted as options at prices much less than the market price at the time, thus creating a big tax bill. But as stock prices declined throughout the year, employees still had the original tax liability. Some companies agreed to bail out the employees by wiping out the transactions as if they hadn't occurred.

In its review, the SEC said companies must disclose how the transactions affected profits and earnings per share, and, in some cases, must be discussed in the "management's discussion and analysis" section of a company's annual financial reports.

I was already going to send a message to the list with this URL:

http://users.erols.com/tushnet/law/fanficarticle.html 

Because it is an interesting discussion of copyright issues.

Then I found a link to another copyright website through a link at the bottom of this screen:

http://stlouis.bcentral.com/stlouis/stories/2001/02/05/daily7.html 

Click on the permission for reprint link at the bottom and take a look at what you get. I'm not sure if that is a way for an author to make some money from posting articles on the WWW, but it might take care of the honor system followers.

Scott Bonacker, CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com  

Time Magazine tells the story of Aids in Africa --- http://www.time.com/time/2001/aidsinafrica/ 
Misery marches on.

EPA Green Vehicle Guide (my 1980 Ford stationwagon gets a whopping seven miles to the gallon and puts up a smokescreen) --- http://www.epa.gov/autoemissions/ 

No joke!  With a little help from the "Rich."
Clinton Presidential Center (Under Construction) http://www.clintonpresidentialcenter.com/ 

Two competing specifications for sending electronic messages are converging thanks to the decision by the group pushing ebXML to integrate SOAP in its work --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102233/2689465/ 

Fear of terrorism might give federal agencies an excuse to spy on networks. Is it warranted? http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102235/2685659/ 

From On The Web in the T.H.E. Journal, January 2001, p. 40 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3259.cfm 

 

www.meritmoney.com

This Internet-based service instantly connects students and their families with colleges that offer academic scholarships. Its proprietary database and search technology allow students with a B average or higher to match their academic profile against millions of dollars in academic scholarships available from over 1,100 colleges nationwide.

www.language-course-finder.com

This Web site lists language courses at more than 6,200 institutions teaching 71 different languages in 85 countries. Free access to all sections of the Web site is provided in 24 languages. Detailed search facilities let students select study preferences such as location, course type, extracurricular activities, special services, and additional programs. Each school is listed with full contact information and background details.

www.lessonbank.com

This site offers complete lesson plans for classroom teaching in language arts, social studies and science. Each unit comes with a step-by-step instructional guide, handouts, and a comprehensive bibliography. Each unit costs $15.95.

www.cleverisland.com

Clever Island is a subscription-based educational Web site for children ages 3 to 8. It provides pre-readers and young learners a way to learn fundamental math, reading and computer skills using educational games and activities. Designed by teachers, the site adapts to a child's current skill level based upon the child's age, yet allows the difficulty level to be adjusted as the child masters new abilities. New activities are added on a regular basis.

MeritMoney.com --- http://www.meritmoney.com/college/Default.htm 

MeritMoney.com was founded on the belief that, to make the best college selection possible, students deserve to know which colleges have scholarship money they could be eligible for!

Karin Brough, President/CEO of MeritMoney.com is an expert in the financial aid industry with nearly a decade of experience helping thousands of students prepare for college.

The need for MeritMoney.com came to her attention as she witnessed the popularity of “private scholarship searches” among her students, while they unknowingly qualified for thousands of dollars in merit scholarships from the colleges themselves. Students would spend hours applying for private scholarships, only to find out that the scholarships from the colleges were decreased if they actually won a private scholarship!

After watching hundreds of families make this fascinating oversight, she knew something was missing in the college preparation industry – somehow students and parents did not know about this vital source of free money for college.

She searched high and low for a centralized, searchable, and reliable resource on college-specific scholarships….and found nothing! Knowing there had had to be a better way, Karin started MeritMoney.com.

Reply from Marilynn Allain

Bob,

Thank you for your inquiry. Yes, you (Trinity University) are already participating in our database. We will be contacting Aspen Heckmann soon for an update! If you have any more questions, please feel free to call or email me!

Sincerely,

Marilynn Allain Research Director MeritMoney.com

From Syllabus News (email) on February 27, 2001

Teachers Honored for Technology Innovation Two community college professors whose creative use of tech- nology has enhanced learning for disabled, non-traditional, and pre-college-aged students have been selected as leaders in their field for 2001. The two will receive the first-ever David R. Pierce Faculty Technology Award, sponsored by the Microsoft Cor- poration in cooperation with the American Association of Com- munity Colleges (AACC).

Vicki Duggan, instructor in the Information Technology Institute of Montgomery College, Md., and Michelle R. Wild, instructor in the Special Education and Computer departments of Coastline Community College, Calif., were selected in a nationwide competition among the over 1,100 U.S. community, junior, and technical colleges. Professor Duggan is working to bring both older adults and elementary school aged girls into high-demand Information Technology fields. Professor Wild is an innovator in the design and integration of online instruction and has become an expert in the use of technology to rehabilitate brain-injured adults.

Designed to recognize exemplary teaching models, the Pierce award includes a $5,000 stipend for each of the awardees and national recognition at the AACC's annual meeting, scheduled April 4-7 in Chicago, Ill.

From Syllabus News (email) on February 27, 2001

New Technology to Run Future Wireless Handset Devices

According to Cahners' In-Stat Group, a high-tech market re- search firm, sales of Internet-ready wireless phones will surpass 1 billion units annually by 2004. This growth will be fueled by consumer demand for new applications on Internet access de- vices and handheld devices that combine everything from streaming video and audio, location-based services, speech recognition, and mobile e-commerce.

Texas Instruments is putting its money behind industry efforts to support this trend. The company recently announced plans to invest up to $100 million, over the next 12-18 months, to boost development of high-performance software applications that use TI's DSP-based OMAP technology. The funds for this invest- ment program are in addition to the $1.7 billion TI already spends annually on R&D.

The goal of the OMAP Investment Program is to fuel access to high-quality mobile Internet services, by helping software de- velopers to create applications like digital audio, mobile video streaming, mobile commerce, location-based services and voice recognition. OMAP is a combination of software and a dual-core hardware architecture built with DSP and RISC pro- cessors. For the consumer, this means high performance, long battery life and the flexibility needed to support both current and future standards. The OMAP architecture supports all 2G, 2.5G and 3G wireless standards and is compatible with TI's DSP-based digital baseband, used in more than 60 percent of today's digital wireless handsets.

Recently a friend asked about training courses for her high school student during the summer in San Antonio.  I suggested the followingL

For self help, I am truly impressed with the videos and CD training resources at http://store.learn2.com/basket/default.asp?affid=1082  
These are somewhat expensive, but it is possible to do all the studying at home.

For San Antonio onsite courses, there may be some summver courses available at St Phillips College that he can take. Try http://www.accd.edu/spc/spcmain/spc.htm 

There are some very interesting free online courses from Barnes & Noble University at http://www.barnesandnobleuniversity.com/AllCourses/1,2668,25015__,00.html 

ZDNet SmartPlanet --- http://smartplanet.zdnet.com/fp.asp?layout=new_home 

It's not whether IT matters; will knowing more about IT help you? http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102275/2687519/ 

Bravo and Happy Birthday Barry

I can't let February end without pointing out that AECM was begun seven years ago this month. It never ceases to amaze me when I think about how far the Internet has come in that period. I did extensive searches of the Internet in late 1993 and early 1994 trying to find ANYTHING related to "accounting", "CPA", etc. using Gopher and other techniques available at the time. THERE WAS NOTHING!!

Thanks to all of you for helping make AECM so successful. As the homepage says, "Over 1000 subscribers from more than 30 countries have participated in the forum." I have been particularly pleased to see it evolve from just discussions of technology to discussions of anything remotely related to accounting education.

If you have a friend or colleague whom you don't think is a member of AECM, please consider forwarding this message to them as a way to invite them to subscribe. They should go to http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/  for complete information.

E. Barry Rice, AECM Founder Loyola College in Maryland http://www.barryrice.com/ 

Abolish the Nobel Prize for Economics

“But he has nothing on at all,” said a little child at last. “Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child,” said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. “But he has nothing on at all,” cried at last the whole people.
"The Emperor's New Suit," by Hans Christian Andersen, 1837 --- http://hca.gilead.org.il/emperor.html 

Abolish the Nobel Prize for Economics
From an article by the same title by Barbara Bergmann, Challange, Vol. 42, No. 2, March/April 1999, 52-57.

Of course, the profession eminently deserves to look ridiculous, and will improve only if it wakes up and realizes it. The world needs the insights and remedies that an economics worthy of being classed as a science could provide, instead of the "science" we have. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that economics today is in the situation medicine was at the end of the Middle Ages -- it consists of a set of theories invented without reference to any actual systematic observation, and the treatments it prescribes not infrequently do more harm than good. (Witness the recent accusation emanating from the economists of the World Bank that the IMF economists' prescriptions had worsened the Asian crisis.)

Since medieval times, medicine has advanced by making observations, and new theories have been suggested by what was found through the observations. In turn, the theories have inspired still more observations. Economics fails to advance because we economists have cut ourselves off from doing any real observing, using the false excuse that "we can't do experiments." When we decide to work on some topic–the rate of interest, consumers' saving behavior, foreign exchange, business behavior in setting prices or wages or making investments-- we don't try to look around the world to see what is actually going on. Instead, we retire to our studies and think up some simple version of what might be going on.  
http://mai.flora.org/forum/22161  

Abolish the Nobel Prize for Economics
From an article by the same title by Barbara Bergmann, Challange, Vol. 42, No. 2, March/April 1999, 52-57.

Since the 1950s, part of the profession has occupied itself in producing regression software that "corrects" for deficiencies in the data. Collecting more pertinent data more directly has gotten little attention. In conversing once with a famous monetary economist, I suggested that monetary economists should talk more to bankers. He was very short with me, said I was wrong, that he talked to bankers all the time and never learned a thing from them. On reflection, I concluded that he probably talked to them about his business, which was formulating and purveying theories about the macroeconomy, about which, indeed, they had little to teach him. It may never have occurred to him to talk to them about their business, which was deciding when to make loans, and at what price.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to the economic historian Robert Fogel for running regressions in a subfield where regressions had not been run before. But it can't be given for that too often. So the Prize has to be awarded mostly for the only other activity the academic part of the profession indulges in: sitting in the study and inventing a simple version of how some process might work. This being the case, the criterion for the award cannot be verisimilitude; it has to be cleverness. Of course, a line of thought can be very clever, yet fail to capture important elements of what really goes on. Most of the laureates are awesomely clever people, yet they know very little about the actual economy out there, and have very little interest in it. They are interested in the play of their own thoughts, not the thoughts of real actors in the economy. The profession attracts people who want to do applied math, and who would not enjoy the messy business of actual observation. There are very few economists like Alan Greenspan, who has a real interest in the workings and state of the actual economy. But you don't get a Nobel for achievements like his -- his only chance at a Nobel would be to get the Peace Prize, which perhaps he deserves, since his work has avoided pain and deprivation for millions.

The Nobel Committee has had a distressingly tin ear for ethics, awarding a prize to Robert Fogel's demonstration that slavery was a jolly good business, at least to those with the whip hand (and so, he might have added, were apartheid and the Holocaust). It rewarded Becker's paean to a form of the family frequently oppressive to women. But Fogel's and Becker's awards were not just in bad taste. Those prizes honored work that distilled complicated and sometimes painful phenomena into simplistic representations of cheeringly optimal processes, in the one case by regression-running, in the other by representing affairs of the heart by supply and demand curves, in both cases throwing a lot of vital issues out the window in the process.
http://mai.flora.org/forum/22161  

Abolish the Nobel Prize for Economics
From an article by the same title by Barbara Bergmann, Challange, Vol. 42, No. 2, March/April 1999, 52-57.

The central parts of our discipline – micro and macroeconomics–have seldom benefited from close observational work. In the 1930s Hitch and Hall surveyed business people and found that marginal cost and marginal revenue never crossed their minds when setting prices. The economics profession received this news with pained condescension and strove mightily to forget it. Alan Blinder's recent surveys of business people, asking them how they decide to change their prices, may breathe new life into the aborted Hitch and Hall revolution, and take us to a microeconomics that incorporates realities. If he can do that, he'll deserve the Prize.
http://mai.flora.org/forum/22161

Reply from Richard Newmark, Old Dominion Universit [rnewmark@ODU.EDU] 

I sent Bob's message to a couple of economists that I know. Here is one of the responses that I received, which I think puts some of Dr. Bergmann's comments in perspective.

Richard

Unfortunately, the article which suggests abolishing the Nobel prize for economics makes some good points. (Not that I agree with the final recommendation.) Most of the fields in economics simply ignore aspects of behavior that are too 'messy' to model. Sometimes the results o our simple models are not affected by these omissions, sometimes they are. 

What I do not understand about the author is that she uses Gary Becker as an example of an immoral something, I can't recall. Becker is one of the first, well-known economists to study normal, everyday behavior like crime, marriage, divorce, etc. and to develop models that describe people's incentives to engage in these activities. The author apparently likes the 'idea' of modeling real-life behavior until someone actually does it. Then she allows her 'feelings' to cloud the interpretation of Becker's subjective model. Surprisingly for an economist, she has not learned how to separate her 'feelings' and 'opinions' from the logical, objective results of models like Becker's. 

For example, in development economics we model the decision of how many children to have in several ways. One is to assert that children are pure investments. Investments for old age when you lack the resources or access to formal retirement, public assistance, etc. Children are also laborers for small, poor farmers in developing countries. The number of children you have is also determined, in part, by the probability that a child will die before they reach the age of 5. When you have 6 sick children and you can only afford health care or medical services for a couple of them, who do you choose? The boys. They are more valuable to the family, physically stronger, greater earning potential in the market, boys provide for their parents later in life, etc. Girls are too costly, they rarely have access to education, well-paying jobs, and they will marry someone one day and care for his family, plus the dowry that will be required. So using cost benefit analysis - families, when faced with the choice, choose the boys every time. 

Do I think this is moral - who cares. This behavior takes place and economists just describe why it happens. Now if we want to stop this behavior we know the incentive structure that should be changed. Abolish dowries, provide retirement, disability, insurance, health care coverage, etc. to these families. Actually if you look at the new policies o the UN and the World Bank they address most of these issues.

Reply from J. S. Gangolly [gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU] 

Boy, is this arrogant. The divide that separates 'feelings' and 'opinions' from the 'logical,...' exists only in the minds of economists on their way to being defunct. Even Bertrand Russell, then an avowed logical positivist, once asked why is it that the rats studied by German scientists seemed serene and reflective while those studied by American scientists were extroverted and fidgety. We do not have to study rats to answer his rhetorical question. If economists are SO objective, why is it that reported results in journals always support the received wisdom of the schools of thought sponsoring the journals? I speak from experience as a past reviewer of economics 'scholarly' journals, and briefly as a faculty member in an economics department at a small college. Still not convinced? Read Ian Mitroff's book on the study of Appollo moon scientists. Even in the sciences objectivity is illusory.

It is my understanding that the study of economics divorced from politics and philosophy makes one a rather poor economist if one at all. I myself had to overcome the impediment put forth by my old teachers in college in India, many of them students of Lord Robbins at LSE.

The German philosopher Apel once observed that there are three sciences: philosophical, natural, and human, and that their objectives are to know, explain, and understand. It is hard to imagine economics as being one of the first two kind, but we often pretend that it is of the second kind. Explanations, explanations, explanations at any cost; never mind understanding. I am here reminded of the observations of Joan Robinson about the esoteric work of the American Keynesians -- their arguments are so flimsy that they had to put mathematics into it.

It is politically correct in most circles, and convenient in terms of prestige bestowed by society on such sciences.

One only needs to read Richard Feynmann to realise the disdain in which physican scientists hold them, or the unfortunate controversy surrounding the conferring of the Nobel on the brilliant mathematician John Nash (the other mathematicians to win them include Kantorovich and Selten), all heroes of mine.

Respectfully submitted,

jagdish

Note from Bob Jensen:  I quote a selected part of Richard Newmark's private message to me below:

One of the inaccuracies my colleague pointed out to me was Dr. Bergmann's belittling of Robert Fogel's contribution for his work "running regressions." The way it was explained to me, Fogel was able to find a way to model individual differences in behavior (some type of heterogeneity) so that these differences could be removed from the error term and added to the regression equation. In my opinion, a model that can account for individual differences is quite a breakthrough--and apparently, much more knowledgeable scholars agree with me.

(Later Richard stated that it was Jim Heckman who first invented running regressions.)

Reply from Tony Tinker

Actually, Bob, the article by Barbara Bergmann is a pretty unremarkable piece, and was a bit surprised that you gave it such prominence. We've both been in the business long enough to see the neoclassical dogma fudge its way past far weightier challenges. Consider for example, the Cambridge Controversies (Samuelson, Dobb, Sraffa, etc.) that demonstrated the theoretical indeterminacy of the macroeconomic realm, or the closer-to-home Carnegie/Simon-inspired challenges to hyper-rationality.

If neoclassical economics was really judged by its theoretical veracity, it would have been dumped years ago. But as many of those occupying 'named-and-paid-for-chairs' in accounting know, 'the great intellectual tournaments of economics ended around 1830, and thereafter, the prizefighters took over' (Volume I, Guess Who!). As capitalism assimilates large sways of academia (including those of accounting and economics) academics are learning to sing the right songs. Stigler acknowledged as much in his captive theory, as did Watts and Zimmerman in their dumbed-down version for accountants: the "Market-for-Excuses" theory. Doesn't Barbara Bergmann know that her candidate for a Nobel Prize, Allen Greenspan, received $25,0000 from Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loans?

The sale of Academia to "the economic" is one reason for the lamentable state of accounting doctoral education to which Paul Williams rightly refers. I'm constantly amazed at the amount of bullying and cajoling that goes on in doctoral programs to 'get the message across'. This ranges from euphemistic warnings to students, not to avoid "high risk" research (i.e, steer clear of what might seem morally and ethically appropriate) to the more blatant threat that deviants 'don't get the job'. So much for our ideology of individualism and non-conformity. Doctoral studies in accounting are about as coercive and conformist as you can get.

Fraternally,

Tony Tinker Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Reply from Paul Williams,

Bob, 
Tony isn't the only one. That Tony is singled out is indicative of the hold that economic reasoning (?) has on the accounting imagination. Economics inability to solve fundamental problems scientifically has been embraced by academic accounting and its empirical ineptness is now the principal content of doctoral education in accounting. (And increasingly, undergraduate education). Becoming amateur economists simply because the ideological shoe fits so comfortably for so many has not been particularly conducive to the intellectual vitality of accounting as a discipline within the academy. Perhaps we should all take these shortcomings of neo-classical economics as seriously as Tony does?

Paul Williams [williamsp@COMFS1.COM.NCSU.EDU] 

A quote forwarded by E. Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU] 

"The real world is only a special case, and not a very interesting one at that."
--C. E. Ferguson

Reply from Ramsey, Donald [dramsey@UDC.EDU] 

Intriguing. Who was Ferguson, and what was the context of his remark?

Was he referring to the "world" of theory as being more real than the practical world? Or to the "real world" as a collection of variations built on a foundation of really interesting and hopefully immutable or slow-changing generalizations? Much of the search for truth is actually a search for security; we get outside our comfort zones amazingly fast when dealing with slippery stuff. The world seems to have put a special burden on accountants to provide something reliable, especially as conceived of (fantasized?) in the Securities Acts. Heaven forbid, if the greater reality turns out to be the slipperiness.

Or was he just being funny?

Reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU] 

I don't know that anyone is ever "just" being funny: reality has many layers, and some are amusing, but true, and sometimes a little frightening, at the same time.

Answer from E. Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU] 

Possibly someone on the list knows about C. E. Ferguson. I've just "always" heard that quip attributed to him. A Google search on CE Ferguson turns hits on his book written with Gould. There is some discussion at

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/secCint.html 

Ed

Reply from Denise Stanley [adstanle@EHC.EDU] 

I believe Robert Fogel won the Nobel Prize in economics. Fogel received criticism for his assertion of slavery's profitability.

Slavery was unprofitable in a broad economic sense in that its social costs eventually overpowered its revenues, but as a business, slavery was often quite a successful enterprise. Thus, slavery ceased to exist in the United States as a result of politics instead of economics. In fact, one of the reasons slavery existed so long was its profitability.

Reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU] 

I suppose Fogel's experience (the criticism, not the prize) is an example of the need to learn how to write what we want to say in the right terms. Who was it that said that a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell, and make you feel pleased to be on your way?

For Fogel, his premise was an interesting one. The problem was to phrase what he wrote in such a way that it came through as an exploration of the economics of a period in our history, and not an endorsement of the practices. In fact, it could probably have been couched in language that actually condemned the practice, while showing how some might have been tempted to prolong it because of the economic gains.

 

The February 25th edition of the ENews Internet Essentials newsletter --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. How Does Technology (like XBRL) Become Accepted? Part III 
2. XBRL Insights from London   
3. XBRL COOL TOOLS 
4. XBRL Champion Award January: Tom Pollack, Urban Institute 
5. Donate Your Excess PC Power 6. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

Sign over my neighbor's bar:  Sex is the best two minutes of my day!

Forwarded by Dr. D

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ."

This was sent by a friend, and I think we all know someone we can share it  with and make them feel better!   

An elderly woman and her little grandson, whose face was sprinkled with  bright freckles, spent the day at the zoo. Lots of   children were waiting  in line to get their cheeks painted by a local artist who was decorating  them with tiger paws.    

"You've got so many freckles, there's no place to paint!" a girl in the  line   said to the little fella.   Embarrassed, the little boy dropped his head. His grandmother knelt down next to him. "I love your freckles. When I was a little girl I always wanted   freckles," she said, while tracing her finger across the child's cheek.   "Freckles are beautiful."    

The boy looked up, "Really?"    

"Of course," said the grandmother. "Why just name me one thing that's prettier than freckles."    

The little boy thought for a moment, peered intensely into his grandma's  face, and softly whispered, "Wrinkles." 

Forwarded by Professor X

Martha Stewart's tips for Rednecks

GENERAL: 1. Never take a beer to a job interview. 2. Always identify people in your yard before shooting at them. 3. It's considered tacky to take a cooler to church. 4. If you have to vacuum the bed, it is time to change the sheets. 5. Even if you're certain that you are included in the will, it is still rude to drive the U-Haul to the funeral home.

DINING OUT 1. When decanting wine from the box, make sure that you tilt the paper cup and pour slowly so as not to "bruise" the fruit of the vine. 2. If drinking directly from the bottle, always hold it with your hands.

ENTERTAINING IN YOUR HOME 1. A centerpiece for the table should never be anything prepared by a taxidermist. 2. Do not allow the dog to eat at the table, no matter how good his manners are.

PERSONAL HYGIENE 1. While ears need to be cleaned regularly, this is a job that should be done in private using one's OWN truck keys. 2. Even if you live alone, deodorant is not a waste of good money. 3. Use of proper toiletries can only delay bathing for a few days. 4. Dirt and grease under the fingernails is a social no-no, as they tend to detract from a woman's jewelry and alter the taste of finger foods.

DATING (Outside the Family) 1. Always offer to bait your date's hook, especially on the first date. 2. Be assertive. Let her know you're interested: "I've been wanting to go out with you since I read that stuff on the bathroom wall two years ago." 3. Establish with her parents what time she is expected back. Some will say 10:00 PM. Others might say "Monday." If the latter is the answer, it is the man's responsibility to get her to school on time.

THEATER ETIQUETTE 1. Crying babies should be taken to the lobby and picked up immediately after the movie has ended. 2. Refrain from talking to characters on the screen. Tests have proven they can't hear you.

WEDDINGS 1. Livestock, usually, is a poor choice for a wedding gift. 2. Kissing the bride for more than 5 seconds may get you shot. 3. For the groom, at least, rent a tux. A leisure suit with a cummerbund and a clean bowling shirt can create a tacky appearance. 4. Though uncomfortable, say "yes" to socks and shoes for this special occasion.

DRIVING ETIQUETTE 1. Dim your headlights for approaching vehicles, even if the gun is loaded and the deer is in your sights. 2. When approaching a four-way stop, the vehicle with the largest tires does not always have the right of way. 3. Never tow another car using panty hose and duct tape. 4. When sending your wife down the road with a gas can, it is impolite to ask her to bring back beer too. 5. Do not lay rubber while traveling in a funeral procession.

===========================================================================================

OLD IS WHEN.....

"OLD" IS WHEN..... Your sweetie says, "Let's go upstairs and make love," and you answer, "Honey, I can't do both!"

"OLD" IS WHEN..... Your friends compliment you on your new alligator shoes and you're barefoot.

"OLD" IS WHEN..... A sexy babe catches your fancy and your pacemaker opens the garage door.

"OLD" IS WHEN..... Going bra-less pulls all the wrinkles out of your face.

"OLD" IS WHEN..... You don't care where your spouse goes, just as long as you don't have to go along.

"OLD" IS WHEN..... You are cautioned to slow down by the doctor instead of by the police.

"OLD" IS WHEN..... "Getting a little action" means you don't need to take any fiber today.

"OLD" IS WHEN..... "Getting lucky" means you find your car in the parking lot.

"OLD" IS WHEN..... An "all nighter" means not having to get up to pee!

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Harry Truman

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

"If A Dog Was Your Teacher"

If a dog was your teacher, you would learn stuff like:

* When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.
* Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride.
* Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.
* When it's in your best interest, practice obedience.
* Let others know when they've invaded your territory.
* Take naps and stretch before rising. * Run, romp, and play daily.
* Thrive on attention and let people touch you.
* Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.
* On warm days, stop to lie on your back on the grass.
* On hot days, drink lots of water and lay under a shady tree.
* When you're happy, dance around and wag your entire body.
* No matter how often you're scolded, don't buy into the guilt thing and pout .. run right back and make friends.
* Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.
* Eat with gusto and enthusiasm. Stop when you have had enough.
* Be loyal. * Never pretend to be something you're not.
* If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it. And MOST of all...
* When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by and nuzzle them gently.

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Why its Good to Be A Man

*Your last name stays put.
*The garage is all yours.
*Wedding plans  just take care of themselves.
*Chocolate is just another snack.
*You can  be president.
 
*You can wear a white t-shirt to a water park.
*Car mechanics tell you the truth.
*You don't give a rat's X## if someone  notices your new haircut.
*The world is your urinal.
*You never have to  drive to another gas station because this
*one's just too icky.
 
*Same work.....more pay.
*Wrinkles add character.
*Wedding dress $5000.  Tux rental $100.
*People never stare at your chest when you're talking to  them.
*The occasional well-rendered belch is practically expected.
 
*New shoes don't cut, blister or mangle your feet.
*Your pals can be  trusted never to trap you with "so, notice anything different?"
*Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat.
*You know stuff about tanks.
 
*A five-day vacation requires only  one suitcase.
*You can open all your own jars.
*Dry cleaners and hair  stylists don't rob you blind.
*You can leave the motel bed unmade.
*You  can kill your own food.
 
*You get extra credit for the smallest act  of kindness.
*If someone forgets to invite you to something, he or she can
*still be your friend.
*Your underwear is $8.98 for a three-pack.
*If  you are 34 and single, nobody notices.
*Everything on your face stays its  original color.
 
*You can quietly enjoy a car ride from the  passenger seat.
*Three pairs of shoes are more than enough.
*You don't  have to clean the house if the maid is coming.
*You can watch a game with a  buddy for hours without thinking, "he must be mad at me"
*You don't mooch  off other's desserts.
 
*You can drop by to see a friend without  bringing a gift.
*You are not expected to know the names of more than 5 colors.
*You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a bolt.
*You almost never have strap problems in public.
*You are unable to see  wrinkles in your clothes.
 
*The same hairstyle lasts for years,  maybe decades.
*You don't have to shave below your neck.
*Your belly  usually hides your big hips.
*One wallet and one pair of shoes, one color,  all seasons.
*You can "do" your nails with a pocketknife.
 
*You  have freedom of choice concerning growing a moustache.
*You can do Christmas  shopping for 25 relatives, on December 24th, in 45 minutes.

And that's the way it was on March 2, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

February 23, 2001

The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour.
Virginia Wolff, Kew Gardens

Gardeners of the Week
Each tulip is like a brilliant goblet this week on my street in San Antonio.  Few streets in America compare with my street in late February.  Every year my neighbor down the way, a retired school teacher named Christine Ressman, brings the magic of bright colors into our early Texas springtime.  Normally she plants over 1,500 tulips, but this year she slipped up and planted, with the help of her steadfast brother, only 1,471 tulips around the perimeter of her magnificent garden.  

An efficiency expert, possibly a cost accountant, would benchmark this as a waste of time and money.  How long will her  blooms last --- two to three weeks?  What is the cost?  Each year all her bulbs are imported from Holland.  Then comes the careful working of the soil, the planting of the bulbs, the careful nurturing, the covering of each patch with heavy wire to keep out the squirrels, opossums, and armadillos --- and all for what? --- a geasly two weeks?  No!  A magnificent two weeks of pride and joy to have Christine Ressman and her brother Dick as fine neighbors who give us something to look forward to in each season of blooming, something to behold each time we drive or walk down our street, and something to remember each time we pass by the Ressman house.  

In early March, beneath the spectacular Technicolor of her high azalea bushes and redbud trees, Christine will crawl about on hands and knees removing each withered tulip, work the soil up once again, and plant the longer-lived beds of impatients and caladium around the perimeter of her garden that spreads out for nearly an acre.  But for those two weeks in February, we awaken to the springtime jolt of each brilliant tulip.

The most valued joys in life are fleeting moments --- the date a child is born, the day you receive a diploma, the unexpected  encounter with a long-lost friend, the climax of a live symphony, the discovery of a poem that brings a smile or tear, the solving of a problem that has vexed you for years, and the time of the tulips.  And to all the Yankees and Canadians knee deep in snow and shivering in the cold winds of the north, your time of the tulips is coming (later).

We thank Christine and Dick Ressman for sharing the beauty of the tulips with all who pass by their home.   (We might also call Christine the Mary Poppin's bird lady since she also feeds hundreds of doves and other wild birds from her huge feeders).

Quotes of the Week

The impact of information technology will be even more radical than the harnessing of steam and electricity in the 10th century.  Rather it will be more akin to the discovery of fire by early ancestors, since it will prepare the way for a revolutionary leap into a new age that will profoundly transform human culture.
Jacques Attali as quoted by James J. Duderstadt in "Technology," Educause Review, Jan/Feb 2001, p. 48 --- http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm011w.html 

Reform the environment;  stop trying to reform the people;  they will reform themselves if the environment is right.
Buckminster Fuller as quoted by Ron Bleed in "A Hybrid Campus for the New Millennium," Educause Review, Jan/Feb 2001, p. 16 --- http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm011w.html 

The precursor of vector software for art and graphics
Study lines, draw lots of lines, either from memory or nature, and you will become a good artist. 
(Advice given by Ingres to Degas) --- http://www.theartgallery.com.au/ArtEducation/greatartists/Degas/about/ 

No one can go back and make a brand new start. Anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.  Disappointments are like road humps, they slow you down a bit but you enjoy the smooth road afterwards.  Don't stay on the humps too long. Move on!
Author unknown.

You can't make someone love you, all you can do is be someone who can be loved, the rest is up to the person to realize your worth.  We spend too much time looking for the right person to love or finding fault with those we already love, when instead we should be perfecting the love we give.
Author unknown.

Remember the five simple rules to be happy:

1. Free your heart from hatred. 
2. Free your mind from worries. 
3. Live simply. 
4. Give more. 
5. Expect less.

Professors Ali Peyvandi and Professor Benjamin Tai have organized another event.  This time it is with the help of Prof. Dr. Edson Luiz Riccio Faculdade de Economia Administracao e Contabilidade Universidade de Sao Paulo.

THIRTEENTH ASIAN-PACIFIC CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTING ISSUES (October 28-31)--- Home Page:  http://www.ltsi.fea.usp.br/13APC/13APC.htm 

I will be presenting a four-hour, pre-convention e-Commerce October 27 workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Congratulations Jim!

Follow your instincts and remember the immortal wisdom of Colin Powell that reads" "Being responsible means sometimes pissing people off." Taken literally, this means that Ken Arrow's theorem applies and that you cannot do what is best for the organization and every individual and every student simultaneously. Sadly, that kind of optimization only exists in heaven (or so I'm told.)  I think the main advice I can give you is to hang tough and don't take your critics too personally. And remember Bill Clinton's advice --- everything belongs to you when you leave office. Take it all home! It's your meager reward for all the X#$A you have to take before your term is up.

For more guidance from Colin Powell, go to my http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q4.htm#122000 

Don't overlook Lanny's much more realistic reasons (especially the Number 1 reason) for becoming a department chair that I included in my February 16 edition of New Bookmarks. Forwarded by Lanny Solomon [SolomonL@umkc.edu]  
As presented by him at the American Accounting Association APLG meetings in Ft. Lauderdale on February 5, 2001

TOP 10 REASONS WHY PROFESSORS BECOME CHAIRS

10. Because you don't want someone else to do it even if you don't.

09. Because you are burned out teaching the same thing over and over again for 20 years and writing articles that two people in the entire country read.

08. For the money.

07. For the petty power, having, in middle age, experienced a precipitous decline…and needing an alternative thrill.

06. Because you lack imagination and can't think of anything better and more original to do.

05. Because you have imagination and fantasize about all the things you will do back to your peers that they did to you while they were chair.

04. Because some dean has made you an offer you can't refuse.

03. Because your peers elect you to slow down your rate-busting activity by loading you up with administrative trivia.

02. Because your peers elect you, thinking you are useless at research and teaching, and this way you can at least fill out the related administrative reports.

01. Because you temporarily became insane, forgetting why you came into academics in the first place, momentarily in a state of confusion, mistaking your department for the next Microsoft or Dell Computer, thinking you will climb the ladder for your successes.

Good luck! Villanova is a great university. You, more than most accounting professors I know, can help Villanova adapt to the new era of technology in education.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: James P. Borden [mailto:james.borden@VILLANOVA.EDU]  
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 9:52 PM 
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU 
Subject: Characteristics of successful department chairs

I will become the chair of our Accounting Department beginning this Fall, and while fellow faculty members are not sure whether to offer their congratulations or condolences, I am quite excited about the opportunities and challenges that such a position offers. I just hope that I do not turn out to be living proof of the Peter Principle!

Anyway, since I have only worked with a couple of department chairs during my career, and I found them both to be highly effective at what they did, I would like to broaden my horizons and find out from all of you what characteristics you think make for a successful (or not so successful) chair. I hope from your responses that a few key criteria keep popping up so that I can then be sure to focus on those criteria.

This group has always given sound technical advice, I guess now I am looking for some "soft" advice. Also, if anyone is aware of any articles that may have been written on this very topic, I would appreciate the reference to such an article(s).

Thank you in advance for your help and guidance!

Jim Borden Villanova University

FEI/DUKE-Fuqua School of Business Corporate Outlook Survey archives (Quarterly outlook of Chief Financial Officers) --- http://www.duke.edu/~jgraham/fei.html 

Wow Accounting Professor of the Week --- Dan Gode from NYU --- http://dgode.stern.nyu.edu/ 

Bob:

I have finalized my almaris.com site. It is now live at http://www.almaris.com 

I learned quite a few things about choosing hosting companies along the way. Had to change three hosts before settling on Verio.

Dan Gode [dgode@stern.nyu.edu] 

Dr. Gode and his wife have spent thousands of hours developing a multimedia tutorial for basic accounting.  It can be used with virtually any basic accounting textbook.  You can read the following at the Almaris (Affordable Logical Multimedia Accessible Rigorous Interactive Self-paced) Website ---   http://www.almaris.com 

We provide accounting and finance content and services for e-learning that meet the highest academic and corporate standards. Since 1996 we have been producing the Financial Accounting Tutor (FAcT), an interactive e-text that covers all topics in a high-quality financial accounting and reporting course. FAcT provides more than 100 hours of instruction and has been used very successfully for top quality undergraduate, MBA, and corporate education. In spite of the breadth and depth of FAcT, it is one of the most affordable products because we know how to use technology effectively and efficiently.

FAcT is an ideal learning solution whether you are learning accounting for the first time or wish to review it before studying financial statement analysis in an undergraduate, MBA, CFA (certified financial analyst) preparation course, or a corporate training seminar.

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., the leading publisher of educational and professional materials worldwide, publishes FAcT for the academic and retail markets. More than 30,000 users have enjoyed our content in these channels making FAcT the most successful e-learning product for financial accounting so far.

We publish an enhanced version of FAcT for the corporate market and also provide custom e-learning solutions. Click here for a flash version of our name.

I found the above search engine for PDF files to be quite feeble.  It is better to go to Google.

A helpful bit of information from Dan Gode

Google is adding PDF search ability to its engine.

Dan Gode

Note from Bob Jensen:  Google is (in my viewpoint) the leading search engine at http://www.google.com/

Note from Bob Jensen:  Google is (in my viewpoint) the leading search engine at http://www.google.com/ 

I suspect that this search engine for PDF files will be much better than the feeble search engine provided by Adobe.  You can read more about search helpers at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

You can read my threads on PDF files at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acrobat.htm 

-----Original Message----- 
From: Ramsey, Donald [mailto:dramsey@UDC.EDU]  
Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2001 10:57 AM 
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU 
Subject: Really Round Tables

I've begun to think that group work might be enhanced by using round tables in the classroom instead of conventional seating. Any comments?

Donald D. Ramsey, CPA, 
Associate Professor of Accounting, 
School of Business and Public Administration, 
University of the District of Columbia, 4200 Connecticut Avenue, N. W., 
Washington, D. C. 20008. 
Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics, 
Room 404A, Building 52 (Connecticut and Yuma St.)

Reply 1 from Bob Jensen

Hi Don,

This is a very roundabout reply to your question concerning round tables in the classroom.

Ray Sommerfield was the 1986-87 President of the American Accounting Association, a long-time tax professor at the University of Texas, and (for a number of years) a partner in the Big-Eight accounting firm of Arthur Young.

Before Ray died tragically, he told me a true story about Professor X and College Y. Professor X was arguably the best lecturer in College Y and won various campus-wide teaching awards even though he did not have a Ph.D. (I suspect he was a CPA/Attorney).  His campus-wide popularity is especially remarkable since Professor X was a tax professor.

Professor Y decided to go to the University of Texas and eventually earned a Ph.D. degree under Dr. Sommerfield's guidance.

Upon returning to College Y with his Ph.D. in hand, Dr. X declared that, in his former years of teaching tax at College Y, he'd been lecturing "toward obsolescence."  He requested that the desks in his classroom be taken away and replaced with round tables. Each round table held a team of students who were responsible for learning the course material on their own and for teaching the course material to each other. My understanding, the team earned the grade of the lowest scoring member of the team. Professor X no longer lectured and made students learn virtually everything on their own. His job was to set down the course objectives, help guide students to where they might find answers, administer the examinations, and assign the grades.

Can you guess what direction the student evaluations headed for this (formerly) most popular professor in College Y? You guessed it! The evaluations went south --- all the way to the South Pole.

Student comments on the evaluation forms read as follows:

     "What are you being paid for? Whatever you get, its a waste of money at College Y."

     "Everything I learned in this course, I learned by myself. Why didn't you try to teach us something."

Ray's ending comment regarding the last student's  comment above, was "case closed!"

There is a bit more involved here than round tables. I do suggest that you do the following:

Bob Jensen
Trinity University

Reply from Professor Beresford

The following appears in an article from today's issue of Barron's magazine. The article discusses An individual named Norman Zadeh who earned his PhD in economics at 22 but didn't do well in an academic career. He's now an investment adviser and also publishes a "skin magazine" and apparently makes lots of money.

"Apart from some temporary teaching appointments, Zadeh's academic career went nowhere. His lectures were too clear, he claims, adding that other professors thought him dumb because they could understand what he said."

Denny Beresford 
University of Georgia

Reply from Donald Ramsey

My initial reaction was, "Prof. X had finally succeeded in getting the students to learn." So it is not clear to me whether Dr. Sommerfield was defending the student or the teacher. I once had a situation a little like that, in a classroom, and my response to the student was "Now you're getting the idea."

OTOH, there is a real problem when the expectations of the students and those of the instructor differ. Many students expect the instructor to be the active element. They expect to be taught. Even if they are wrong, it's hard to produce results if the instructor and the students are not tuned to the same wavelength, so to speak. (Kind of like convincing them that accrual basis is better than cash basis. Often the main thing they come away with is that accountants are crazy, this course is not worth any effort because I'll never understand it, and please let me out with a C. This situation is not helped by the fact that we use dollars as a counting unit, but count things not involving cash; and also mix old dollars with recent dollars. In terms of common sense, realization means cash.)

Donald D. Ramsey, CPA, 
Associate Professor of Accounting, 
School of Business and Public Administration, 
University of the District of Columbia, 4200 Connecticut Avenue, N. W., Washington, D. C. 20008. Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics, Room 404A, Building 52 (Connecticut and Yuma St.)
Ramsey, Donald [dramsey@UDC.EDU] 

Reply 1 from Andrew Priest

Hi Bob

I find this example rather interesting and a bit short sighted view of the opportunities inherent in using alternative seating arrangements. I wonder if the problem with Professor X's evaluations was more to with they way he didn't teach than the seating arrangements! I use a very much student driven learning environment which involves both myself AND my students in the learning process. I "lecture" for 1 hour max in a three hour seminar! For what it is worth my evaluations have gone North and not South!

Mind you, I teach third year students who want to learn - my subject has a direct competitor and my set a fairly strong work load.

Anyway my five cents worth ...

Regards 
Andrew Priest [a.priest@ECU.EDU.AU] 

Reply 2 from Bob Jensen

Hi Andrew,

I agree that the seating arrangements were probably of less importance than other critical factors such as how the grading transpired. However, this was the first time, to my knowledge, where a professor requested (and received) round tables that he considered an important factor in his new pedagogy.

Obviously, pulling off discovery learning is a complex and many-faceted pedagogy that can take on many variations. Some professors pull it off better than others, and a given professor pulls it off better in some courses than in other courses. The age and maturity level of the students also makes a huge difference.

I might add that this illustration took place prior to the Internet. Obviously, discovery learning has become much easier in days of the Web, especially in tax and law where access to cases and government source materials has become commonplace.

Interestingly, the BAM pedagogy in intermediate accounting generally entails, but does not require, that students meet live in class and work in small teams. During class, the instructor circles about listening to team activities without lecturing or providing anything other than an occasional clue. It would seem that round tables would facilitate "circling." See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm 

What is probably more important than round tables in modern times is a cubicle configuration in an electronic "classroom." The relatively new College of Business building at the University of Texas at San Antonio is one of the best-designed buildings that I have ever seen. It has a variety of electronic classrooms, including what might best be called a pod room. There are various cubicles where students can work in teams (with computers at hand) and a center court where students can meet in larger groups. The instructor can electronically monitor each pod and each student's computer. That, it seems to me, is the ultimate in "round tables."

Bob Jensen

Reply 2 from Andrew Priest

Hi Donald

I totally agree. I have, know for some 2 -3 years being reorganising my tutorial rooms so that the students sit in groups of four or five. We have the traditional rectangle desks, so I move the desks so that the students face each other in a block of four. When necessary a fifth desk is add at one end.

As I take seminars in third year, I use this room layout for the seminar with the desk grouping angled to allow the students to face the front of the room.

This allows for both interaction with me in "lecture" mode and with themselves when they are working on examples etc.

I also, where a lot of discussion is required or demonstrating by the students (or myself) often use a circle of chairs (with no desks). We (being myself and students) use rounds to manage the discussions. This allows for ALL students to participate, it removes the "hiding behind the desk" syndrome and it allows for the students to actually interact with each other as a whole group.

I feel that the feedback (we have a mid semester tell it all session - luckily our windows can't be opened :-) ) has been very positive with this approach, particularly the circle/rounds which encourages all to participate and share their experiences/findings/views etc.

BTW to "manage" the rounds/circles/discussions the students put in place their own rules of engagement/behaviour at the beginning of the semester which seems to work very well.

One criticism however, has been the need to reorganise the room each time I use it! I have learnt to "train" the students to be pro-active on this! It seems that at my university we still have a strong preference for the traditional system of long straight rows of desks which discourage discussion and interaction.

Anyway some brief thoughts/experiences. Hope it helps.

Regards 
Andrew Priest [a.priest@ECU.EDU.AU]

"Faculty vs. the University: An Intellectual Property Rights Debate for the Electronic Age" --- http://www.educause.edu/issues/faculty.html 

As more colleges and universities enter the realm of distance learning, providing an abundance of courses and even degrees online, the question of intellectual property ownership is once again at issue. Who owns the course material? Is it the faculty, who create the online resources and curriculum, or the university, whose server is being used to offer the course? Just as the fight over printed materials created by university faculty had to be addressed in previous years, the battle over copyrights and intellectual property for electronic material is now at the forefront of the academic sphere.

Resources on Faculty and their struggle for copyright ownership follow. If you have other resources that might be included on this page, please send URLs to contribute@educause.edu 

Campus Documents/Policies

Colorado State University

Georgia Institute of Technology

University of Arizona

University of Chicago - New Information Technologies and Intellectual Property at the University

University of Texas Systems

For more campus Intellectual Property Rights Policies - see http://www.inform.umd.edu/copyown/policies/./ip.html

EDUCAUSE RESOURCES

Courseware Development for Distance Education: Issues and Policy Models for Faculty Ownership - paper presented at the EDUCAUSE 2000 conference.
The issue of who owns courseware is of great concern to faculty and the university. Regardless of the type of institution, intellectual property (IP) policies that address ownership are essential to ensure incentives to create courseware, avoid litigation, and avoid competition between institutions. This paper provides an overview of current policies of higher education institutions concerning faculty ownership. You'll learn the issues that universities should consider when creating IP policies that address the emerging area of courseware development and review the current models available for adaptation. Examples currently in use for faculty ownership are also presented.

From InformationWeek Online on February 20, 2001

Time To Capitalize On DRM Is Yesterday

Talk about your accelerated markets. With legal issues surrounding the online distribution of content being the topic of the day, perhaps no technology is more under the microscope than digital-rights management. The need to protect and manage the sale of digital content is resulting in a flood of companies vying for a piece of the action.

Digital-rights management is essentially a set of rules that specify how digital files can be used and by whom. The ability to successfully wrap it around video, audio, and text is crucial to ensuring that the owners of content are compensated, an issue at the center of the ongoing legal battles over Napster's music-file-sharing service. Webnoize analyst Lee Black estimates the number of digital-rights-management companies has quadrupled in the past 16 months, fueled largely by the music industry's copyright debate. Assessing so many new companies has proven next to impossible. "Who knows which one is better than the other?" Black says.

But Black and other analysts say Microsoft, because of the compatibility between its pervasive Windows Media Player and its digital-rights-management technology, is in an enviable position. The same can also be said of InterTrust Technologies Corp., whose client-side digital-rights-management application is included in CD-ROMs containing America Online's latest software. Beyond that, analysts say, it's pretty much a free-for-all, but not for long. "There's going to be DRM consolidation in very short order," says Jupiter Research analyst Marci Glazer.

But InterTrust senior VP Talal Shamoon says any of dozens of young digital-rights-management companies could emerge as market leaders anytime, whether or not they have client-side deals in place. "Napster didn't need Microsoft's help to get 58 million copies of its software out there," Shamoon says. "I'd be smoking pot if I told you we didn't have challenges." Black says, however, that the window of opportunity for digital-rights-management companies will close once content owners abandon file downloads in favor of streaming, which he predicts will happen within 10 years. "DRM to us will be a stop-gap until streaming technologies flush out."
Tony Kontzer

The Other Side of the Sword
Stanford's Lawrence Lessig had little good to say Friday about lawyers who protect Big Entertainment at the expense of technological innovation --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102194/2687160/ 

ZDNet Downloads guru Preston Galla offers up a grab bag of great programs for listening to and handling digital music online. http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/prespick/0800/index.html 

New PDF Competition

See the below utility for a conversion utility that takes an MS Word file and converts it to MS Reader format.

 It's Microsoft's answer to Adobe Acrobat. You will see the green Reader icon added to your MS Word program. It is not a standalone program.

http://www.microsoft.com/reader/info/selfpublish.htm 

Richard J. Campbell

Reply from Kevin Nickels (Department of Engineering Science, Trinity University)

I doubt it'll make much headway until or unless MS reader is released for
some of the various non-Windows-OSs out there. I've been known to
overstate the importance of non-Windows-OSs before, but IIRC that was a big
part of the push for PDF.

-Kevin Nickels

AN-MSI
"Ending the Digital Divide:  The Nation's Tribal Colleges and Universities" by Thomas Davis and Mark Trebian, Educause Review, Jan/Feb 2001, pp. 38-46 --- http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm011w.html 

The Wall Street Journal's Education Program introduce a new service for professors  http://ProfessorJournal.com! 

Welcome to our new Web site, designed exclusively for college professors. Inside you'll find all the tools you need to incorporate The Journal into your classes. We hope it makes your job a little easier and a lot more rewarding! And at any time, please feel free to contact us with your comments and suggestions.

The Wall Street Journal Educator Reviews (I have subscribed to this service for over a year)

Our weekly lesson plans are designed to help you easily integrate Journal content into your curriculum. They highlight 3-5 Wall Street Journal articles and include an article summary, discussion questions and WSJ.com link for each article. The reviews are e-mailed to you every Friday and are available in the following disciplines:

Personal Finance
Learn about the new rules for IRA investing --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=37799&d=101 

The new rules represent a dramatic simplification of the required minimum distribution rules, but more importantly, offer taxpayers who have passed their Required Beginning Date hope for ameliorating the adverse tax consequences of having made improper distribution elections and/or beneficiary designations. Rather than seven different distribution schedules, under the new rules, almost all IRA owners will take minimum distributions from their IRAs under one uniform schedule. The only exception is a slower and more favorable distribution schedule for IRA owners who have spouses more than 10 years their junior.

Distributions must still begin by the same Required Beginning Date as under the old rules. But the need to make appropriate beneficiary designations by that date in order to maximize the distribution period during the lifetime of the IRA owner has been eliminated. Regardless of whether beneficiaries have been designated or not by the Required Beginning Date, for most all IRA owners, distributions will be made to account owners at the same rate. For most taxpayers, this uniform schedule will slow the rate of required distributions.

This is not to say, however, that beneficiary designations will become unimportant under the new rules. Beneficiary designations will continue to have significance under the new rules in determining what options are available to the account owner's heirs, for example, if the account owner dies before his Required Beginning Date. Under the worst case scenario, an IRA account could be forced to be liquidated in full by the end of the fifth calendar year after the IRA owner's death.

Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes, designed a new software program called Groove.  Groove could be an even bigger deal than Notes. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/38039/101 

Tips for Screen Capturing in the Web

This new Website surprises me!  The articles are online.
The New Yorker --- http://www.newyorker.com/ 

It is interesting how software at the website makes it difficult to copy the cartoons (unlike the text of the articles).  The menu choice (Edit, Copy) brings up a message that "You need permission to use these cartoons."  Of course anybody can capture the pictures with graphics software (such as Paint Shop Pro), but we won't do that will we as long as we're explicitly reminded that it is illegal?  All right, I'll do it just once to show you the warning message:

Reply 1 from Mike Everest  (Department of Chemistry, Trinity University)
(note that Bob Jensen normally right clicks to copy images from the Web using Internet Explorer, but the right click does not work for me at The New Yorker's Website).

I'm not sure what software you're using, but I had no problem copying the cartoons on the New Yorker's website using either Netscape or I.E. I just right-clicked on the image and chose either "Copy Image" or "Save Image" (or something to that effect).

For something like this to be made secure, the viewing software must cooperate with the folks whose material is being viewed. Even if Netscape and Microsoft decide to cooperate by refusing to save an image, a more "primitive" web browser like lynx (or just a good perl script) could always be used to grab the image from the net. Basically, if you can view it, you can save it---even without having to go through the hassle of a screen capture. After all, only the human eye and mind can detect a significant difference between rendering a bunch of ones and zeros as an image on the screen or in a file on the disk.

I'm no expert on this stuff, so you probably wouldn't want to include my comments in any public forum.

-Mike Visiting Asst. Prof., Chemistry

Bob Jensen tried again after receiving the above message from Mike, but he still gets the same "You need permission ..." message.  Then he received the following message (Reply 2) from Mike:

I'm using I.E. 5.0 which lets me "Copy" when right-clicking and Netscape 4.75 which lets me "Save Image As..." when right-clicking. The latter won't let me copy to the clipboard, however.

Quote me if you so wish to lower your journalistic standards to those depths.

-Mike

Now that's the secret.  It works for me (but in the case of The New Yorker and most other Websites, copying images is illegal without permission.

Reply from Curtis Brown (Department of Philosophy, Trinity University)

Hi Bob-

Another strategy we won't use is to simply copy the image directly from the cache. Windows 2000 makes the Internet Explorer cache difficult to find -- on my machine it's C:\Documents and Settings\cbrown\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files, but Local Settings is a "Hidden Folder," so it's invisible unless you set the "Show Hidden Files" option under Tools:Folder Options. If the contents of the folder are sorted by the "Last Accessed" field (which seems to be the default) then the last image loaded will be the first item in the cache.

Curtis

Creating Web Graphics
"Fireworks 4 Overview" --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/07/index1a.html 

First things first: Vector or bitmap? If you have any experience with Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, Flash or Corel Draw, then you've worked with vectors. Essentially, a vector is simply an object created on your screen using mathematical formulas, which means it can be stretched, resized or enhanced with text, yet the object retains its original visual integrity. The other end of the spectrum of Web graphics is the bitmap. Photoshop and ImageReady are raster-based bitmap applications that dictate color depth and transparency for every pixel in your image. When you resize a bitmap, such as a JPEG or GIF, the pixels get stretched, clean edges get distorted, and your aliased text gets blurry. After a few small tweaks, the result is a maligned and sloppy version of your original. Not exactly a pretty picture. Ahem.

There are times, however, when bitmaps are the way to go. For example, photographs and photo-realistic objects look much, much better as rastered images. But vector graphics are perfect for creative animations, logos and text. And because every pixel doesn't need to be accounted for (like they do in rasterized images), your file sizes stay small. Banners ads, anyone?

For banner ads and beyond, your best bet is Macromedia's jack-of-all-trades app, Fireworks 4, a full-featured, vector-based graphics program that can be used to build interactive banners, pop-up menus, image maps and animations. And it handles vectors and bitmaps equally well -- all for just US$299 retail.

In the pages that follow, you'll find an overview of what's new and exciting about the latest version of Fireworks. If you are new to Fireworks, you should check out Michael Kay's extensive tutorial, which tackles an earlier version of the software. And if this is your first exposure to vector graphics, or Web graphics in general, there is a great article written by Jonathan and Taylor that can help you decide if vectors or bitmaps are the best bet for your intended projects.

OK, ready to see what's new? Then download a trial version of the program and we'll get started by peeking at all the new tools Fireworks 4 has to offer. 

More at  http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/07/index1a.html 

Balthaser:Fx is an online development environment allowing both amateurs and professionals to create Flash animations using a browser-based drag-and-drop environment. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2501 

A new version of the Flash Player runs on Microsoft's Pocket PC platform, which will extend the Flash Player to Compaq's iPaq and Casio's Cassiopeia --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102204/2687559/ 

I received the following message from JASC on February 14, 2001

THE JASC WEB TOOL KIT Get The Jasc Web Tool Kit, which includes the award- winning book, Paint Shop Pro Web Graphics, completely updated for Paint Shop Pro 7, and SPG Web Tools 4 Pro, the plug-in that extends Paint Shop Pro's Web capabilities with a suite of professional tools.

Order today and get these powerful Web resources for the low price of only $60* (plus shipping and handling). That's a savings of $20 off the regular price of $80! To order, go to:

http://www.jasc.com/promo.asp?CID=33688 

You already know Paint Shop Pro 7 has powerful, built-in Web tools. Maximize them with Paint Shop Pro Web Graphics. This book steps you through building striking Web graphics for your personal and/or business Web site,through dozens of full-color examples. Written by Paint Shop Pro experts Andy Shafran and Lori Davis, this book takes users of all skill levels through colorful examples quickly and easily.

In Paint Shop Pro Web Graphics, learn how to: + Edit and optimize images for your Web site + Use vectors, layers, tubes, and effects + Build icons and other simple graphics from scratch + Slice images, create image maps, and create Web animations

When you add-on SPG Web Tools 4 Pro, you're extending Paint Shop Pro's Web capabilities. For the serious Paint Shop Pro user, SPG Web Tools 4 Pro has more tools for Web developers who demand professional results. For example:

+ Create patterned background tiles with the Web Background Renderer + Automatically find and download graphics files with the Web Graphics Spider + Plus 3D Web Tools, which include: 3D Text Renderer; 3D Text Animator; 3D Web Object Renderer

Use Paint Shop Pro 7 to the fullest! Add-on the JascWeb Power Bundle to create the ultimate Web Power Suite for the extremely low price of only $60* (plus shipping and handling)! That's a $20 savings off the regular price of $80. Hurry, this offer won't last long! To order:

http://www.jasc.com/promo.asp?CID=33688 

2) THE JASC GUARANTEE If you are dissatisfied with your purchase from Jasc Software, you will receive a refund if you request it within 30 days of the original ship date. http://www.jasc.com/returns.asp 

CD Burning Tutorial
"CD Burning Basics"  --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/38/index4a.html 

CDs are the cheapest form of data, audio, and video storage and can be played on most any computer having a CD-ROM drive.

I use Easy CD Creater that came bundled with my Turtle Beach audio hardware.  I can burn CD-Rs or CD-RWs, but I almost always burn CD-Rs so I can play them on any PC or laptop with a CD-ROM player. CD-RWs require CD-RW drives for playback, and CD-RW drives are not nearly as common as CD-ROM drives. [This is not quite true --- see the replies from Rohan Chambers and Larry Gindler below.  Others also pointed out my error here.]

Old and slow computers can give you trouble when burning CDs. You also need quite of free space (at least 650 Mb) on a hard drive to temporarily store the data you intend to burn (encode) onto a CD.

Media Jukebox <http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox>  is free program that burns audio CDs and encodes to MP3 (as noted below).  I discuss MP3 encoding at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/newfaculty.htm#Resources 

The quotation below is only a small part of what you will find at  http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/38/index4a.html 

If you buy a CD recorder in the United States, Adaptec's Easy CD Creator will most likely be bundled with the unit. There are several other software options, however (see below), and programs like Ahead Software's Nero may be more appealing in some respects. For Mac users, Adaptec's Toast is the most popular choice, but again, other programs are available.

To give you an idea of what CD burner software can do, let's have a quick look at Nero and CD Creator, and compare feature sets.

Both programs offer wizards for the newbie, which take you step by step through the CD creation process. Both packages also offer single and multiple session burning formats, MP3 ripping, jewel case creators, hard disc backup, video disc creation (VCD), and CDDB support, which allows you to download song titles from the Internet when you insert a disc.

Creator comes with several job-specific applications: DirectCD is a packet-writing program that allows you to use a CD as a giant floppy. By dragging and dropping files using Windows Explorer, you can burn them onto a CD. The Spin Doctor application helps clean up data from older tapes and records so you can remove noise from that favorite old Frank Sinatra album. It will also encode standard music CDs to MP3, but it tops out at 56 Kbps, which results in pretty lousy sound quality (but super small files). For more information on encoding, converting audio to wav files, and all things MP3, check out the Webmonkey MP3 Overview.

You can also use Creator to convert home movies to a Video CD (VCD), which can be played on a computer and some DVD players. This is one format used to save video to CD. MPEG is a video standard like VCD, and both programs will record MPEG files as a data CD. To do this, you need a video capture card and software that can deliver video in specified formats to use this feature. Another feature allows you to create a CD that plays photo slideshows of your digital pictures.

For Mac users, Adaptec's Toast software offers virtually the same feature set as CD Creator.

Note: Unfortunately, DirectCD must be uninstalled before you can install Nero and other CD-R programs.

Nero requires a bit more user savvy, but has some excellent CD burning and MP3 encoding features. For starters, it encodes MP3 files up to 320 Kbps (although you must pay extra for this after a 30-song trial), which yields true CD-quality sound. Nero also boasts variable bit rate encoding, which is a method for creating MP3 files that find the perfect balance between sound quality and file size.

Nero also includes some funky features such as a Karaoke filter, which cancels the voice track of music so you can insert your own lyrics when playing Eminem tracks for the toddlers. The program has another filter for blending songs into each other for those freaky-fresh party mixes.

Nero also supports Super Video CD, which offers higher resolution than standard VCD format.

If you are a Windows user, both of these programs are good for beginners. Review the feature sets to decide which are important to you. If price is the most important consideration, you may want to check out Media Jukebox, a free program that burns audio CDs and encodes to MP3. It offers MP3 encoding at 320 Kbps and organizes and plays a wide variety of audio files.

If you plan on using your recorder to backup discs, you may want to look at CDRWin or WinOnCD.

For a PC, there are many other good programs, including CD-Maker, GearPro for Windows, and yet more choices at CD Recording Software.com.

Mac users should check out the audio section of Versiontracker to find an extensive list of audio software.

More at --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/38/index4a.html  

Reply from Rohan Chambers

I share the same experience as Bob.

However on a related issue...I burnt some music on a CDRW using Easy CD Creator and was able to play it in CD-ROM drives, but could not play it on my Radio's CD player.

Rohan Chambers [rchambers@CYBERVALE.COM] 

Reply from Kumar N. Sivakumar 

The following two sites provide a lot of useful information about CD recording:

For CD recording information: http://www.mrichter.com/ 

For CD-recordable FAQ: http://www.fadden.com/cdrfaq/ 


Kumar N. Sivakumar [ksivakumar@GSU.EDU] 
Georgia State University

Introductory definitions to aid you when reading a message on CD-RW recording from Larry Gindler

IDE = Intelligent Drive Electronics interface hard drive disc controller standard for PCs that enables the controller to reside on the motherboard and, thereby, not require the use of an expansion slot. This enhances ease of installation and allows for the elimination of SCSI controllers for accessing auxiliary hard drives --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm 

SCSI = Small Computer System Interface, is a set of interfaces that allow personal computers to communicate with peripheral hardware such as disk drives, tape drives, CD-ROM drives, CD-RW drives, printers, and scanners faster and more flexibly than previous interfaces. SCSI interfaces often cost a bit more than IDE controllers, but there are some advantages to SCSI interfaces --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm 

Message from Larry Gindler (former Director of the Trinity University Computing Center)

Some interesting experiences:

I purchased an HP CD-RW last weekend. I installed it and it worked fine as a regular CD for 24 hours (once I got a new IDE cable -- my old one was bad -- another story.)

Then I installed the OEM versions of EasyCD and DirectCD that came on the HP supplied software disk. The nightmare began. My computer (Windows 2000 Pro SP1) would reboot as soon as any user logged in. Since no one could log in, the machine was unusable. I rebooted in "safe mode" and uninstalled everything. At this point, the CD would not work at all. I called HP technical support.

HP technical support was great. The lady was very polite and very patient. I learned some very interesting things.

Microsoft Media Player 7 installs a stripped down extension of Adaptec DirectCD. If this is installed and active when the HP OEM version of DirectCD is installed, the CD will not work properly at all. The fix is to disable the Adaptec extension from the Media Player options dialog, then reinstall the drivers for the CD. This problem is not supposed to occur if DirectCD is already installed when you upgrade to Media Player 7.

A bigger problem. Early versions of DirectCD are incompatible with later versions of McAfee Virus scan. Some newer versions of DirectCD are supposed to work with some CD-RW devices, but I cannot confirm this. Both McAfee and Adaptec are supposedly looking at solutions (this information is from HP -- I have not confirmed it with Adaptec or McAfee.)

The CD-RW is now working properly with EasyCD, installed manually. The HP wizard wants to install everything at once.

The other story -- This all started because my existing CD quit. It is four years old and slow, so I wasn't particularly hesitant to replace it. Since I was replacing it anyway, I bought the CD-RW. When I first installed the CD-RW, it exhibited the same symptoms as the old CD. So like any good auto mechanic, I started replacing things one at a time. Replacing the IDE cable fixed the problem. The old CD now works as well, but I'm going to keep the new one anyway. I hate computers ;-)

larry

How does streaming media work --- http://service.real.com/help/player/plus_manual.8/rppmanual.htm 

Full Manual --- http://service.real.com/help/player/plus_manual.8/rppmanual.htm 

How MP3 files work --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm 

"Digital-Music Tidal Wave Invades the Family Room," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2001, p. B1 --- http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB981581696954192246.djm&template=pasted-2001-02-08.tmpl 

This spring, a number of big-name companies, including Compaq and RCA, are planning to introduce audio jukeboxes that hook up to your main stereo system. These boxes can create and play MP3 files and store them on large internal hard disks, all without the use of personal computers.

The idea is to marry the freedom and personalization of digital music with the power and quality of the best circuitry and speakers in the house.

For a couple of years now, it has been possible to create digital collections of your favorite songs in the MP3 format, either by converting your existing CDs or by downloading music from the Internet. The trouble is, you either have to play back this music on crummy PC speakers or via hand-held music players meant mainly for use with headphones.

. . . 

The AudioReQuest-20 model I tested in my family room contains a 20 gigabyte hard disk that can hold about 350 hours of music. That's more than 7,000 typical songs, recorded in the MP3 format at CD quality. A higher-capacity model with 50% more storage costs $1,199. An even newer model with the ability to record, or burn, CDs will cost $1,600 when it appears later this year.

. . .

How does one get music into the AudioReQuest? Well, if you have MP3 tunes already on your PC, you can either hook the unit up to a PC via a cable to transfer the songs, or burn the songs from the PC onto data CDs and use the CD drive on the AudioReQuest to copy them from these CDs onto the unit's hard disk.

If you don't have songs on a PC, you can just feed your regular music CDs into the AudioReQuest, one at a time, select the songs you want to record to the hard disk, and press a button.

The current models can't directly download songs from the Internet. You can network the AudioReQuest to a PC and play songs stored on the computer, but this feature isn't very appealing in a device that has its own large storage capacity. You can also transfer music from the AudioReQuest to a Rio portable MP3 player.

If you have a question you want answered, or any other comment or suggestion about Walter S. Mossberg's column, please send e-mail to mossberg@wsj.com 

"If You Love Your Palm, Try the Slim New RIM With E-Mail Functions," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2001, p. B1

Research In Motion (RIM) --- http://www.rim.net/products/handhelds/specifications/index.shtml 

RIM Wireless Handhelds™ allow you to send and receive wireless email from the palm of your hand. And now you can choose the size of handheld that suits you best. The RIM 850 Wireless Handheld™ and RIM 950 Wireless Handheld™ are pager-sized and the RIM 957 Wireless Handheld™ is palm-sized. Creating and retrieving information is amazingly simple using the optimized keyboard, thumb-operated trackwheel, easy-to-read backlit screen and intuitive menu-driven interface.

Always On, Always Connected™ With RIM Wireless Handhelds you don't need to retrieve your email. Your email finds you. No dialing-in. No initiating connections. No antennas to raise. No effort required. The handhelds are designed to remain on and continuously connected to the wireless network, allowing you to be discreetly notified as new email arrives. Now you can easily stay in touch with your colleagues and clients while you're on the go.

It is somewhat ironic that the most confusing part of creating and executing a SQL statement from ASP is determining where to put the quotes. When is a single quote used? When is a double quote used? When are they used together? Which takes precedence? http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2495 

Peter Coffee has a message to New Economy entrepreneurs: Watch IBM, and learn from its example --- http://www.eweek.com/b/pcwt0101306/2677484/ 

A portion of a message from Professor XXXXX with a question concerning the economic neutrality of FAS 133

Hi Professor Jensen,

I am interested to some of your thoughts during our correspondence.

In your earlier e-mail on FAS 138 you said that : "It could go into an analysis of why FAS 133 went too far (in the eyes of dissenting FASB members Foster and Leisenring) or did not go far enough (in the eyes of the electric power companies.)" Are you implying that FAS 133 will induce different risk management strategies among different industries? What is your expectation? John expected no major change of risk management activities in the energy industry because the industry practice is to maintain a balanced portfolio.

That is, energy firms enter into derivatives to mitigate the risk of price changes that impact the purchase price of gas, and concurrently enter into derivatives to offset risks associated with the sale price of gas. In such a case, the entity has locked-in margins or "spread" that will be generated from the purchase/sales transaction cycle. At the same time, the fair value of the derivative used to hedge a purchase would offset the change in the value of the derivatives used to hedge sales transaction result in minimal earnings volatility.

The result of marking-to-market both of these derivatives would be to recognize the expected margins that will eventually result when the derivatives are settled and the purchase/sales cycle is complete. In some cases, this alternative would be preferable to accounting for the derivatives as either a fair value or cash flow hedge since the associated accounting complexities and system requirements are reduced.

In addition, you commented that "The major impact of FAS 133 is on the balance sheet rather than the income statement." Why is your concern so different from that of others (on earnings volatility). I can appreciate your thoughts because come financial ratios use assets, or liabilities. For instance, debt/equity ratio for loan covenants, return on assets for measuring profitability.

Professor XXXXX

Reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Professor XXX,

Take a look at the following document: http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000overview/mp3/133intro.htm#Consequences  
Especially note the audio of Mike Koegler (Chase Bank) where he reveals that banks are revising all sorts of strategies and hedging instruments because of FAS 133.

At the bottom of the above document, note the message from Sanford Menashe Project Manager, FAS 133 Bonneville Power Administration Mr. Meashe keeps writing me messages complaining how FAS 138 did not go far enough to provide relief for the power industry. He claims that unless the DIG gives the power industry relief, it will have to change how business is conducted in that industry. (Actually, the DIG has placed this issue on the agenda.)

The whole point regarding earnings volatility is that the complexity of FAS 133 was caused by the FASB's attempt to relieve earnings volatility. The FASB really wanted to have no special hedge accounting treatment for derivatives, i.e., the FASB originally proposed having all changes in derivative instrument fair value be charged to current earnings. Industry officials screamed loudly (and rightly) that this would create extreme interim earnings volatility even when the hedges were perfectly effective when they ultimately matured. Since most firms have strict policies forbidding speculation with derivative instruments, most derivative instruments are hedges that qualify for hedge accounting.

Screams about earnings volatility come mainly from industries that have a difficult time meeting hedge accounting requirements in FAS 133 (such as the power industry's troubles with NPNS). In fact, one of the main reasons for FAS 138 was to provide banks relief with the new concept of benchmarking in interest rate hedging. Banks almost never fully hedge interest rate risk (which is virtually impossible) or even full sector spreads (since there are no hedging instruments for this purpose). Instead banks hedge only a portion of interest rate risk (the most popular being a treasury lock hedge of the risk-free rate portion of total risk or a LIBOR portion hedge). Under FAS 133, benchmark hedging was not feasible, and banks were subject to huge volatility of earnings because their hedges would not qualify for hedge accounting. FAS 138 gave the banking industry a huge amount of relief.

You can read more about FAS 138 at 
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000overview/mp3/138intro.htm 

Bob Jensen

A new bill working its way through Congress could change the way you track your customers as they surf the Web. The legislation would, among other things, mandate that Web sites obtain consumer consent before using third-party services to track visitors' online journeys with cookies --- http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2494 

Sacred Rocks and Buddhist Caves in Thailand --- http://home.worldnet.fr/~eimioku/ 

Based on the open source Gecko engine, the initial (non-beta) release of Netscape's
long awaited new browser is available as a free download from the Netscape
site. --- http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2499

No more fighting over who has the clicker --- now its a fight over the end of the couch
"Singing clothes:  New smart fabrics turn touch into tunes" --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/528278.asp 

Imagine a couch that automatically turns on your TV when you sit on it — and then, when you trace the number seven on the cloth arm with your finger, the channel switches. That’s only the beginning of what may be possible thanks to a new “smart fabric” interwoven with fiber optic threads that can sense and react to even the most delicate human touch.

Real-estate-related Web sites rapidly come and go in today's volatile e-marketplace. But one site--and perhaps similar sites to come--might permanently change the way property sale transactions are closed --- http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2500 

From InformationWeek Online on February 20, 2001

A Peek Into Sabre's Cloaked Research Group

Anyone who's paid $800 for an airline seat at the last minute only to discover that the guy in the next seat paid $200 has just had the first lesson in airline yield management. It's an arcane science of global importance as airlines fight for profitability. At Sabre Inc.'s airline-reservation network, it looks like things are getting a bit more scientific and a bit less arcane.

As Sabre's new chief scientist, Barry Smith takes one part artificial intelligence and one part operations research and conjures up a formula that fills every seat for the highest possible fare. Smith's formula eventually will let airlines compete with buses for low fares. It'll also be smart enough to hold a sufficient number of seats to meet the demand of travelers willing to pay top dollar at the last minute.

Smith heads Sabre's Research Group, which carries out proof-of-concept projects in optimization, forecasting, and algorithms. The group is working on three initiatives for 20 Sabre customers: improving forecast accuracy, coordinating multiple distribution channels, and improving integration of yield-management with flight scheduling and operations. On the cutting edge is research that combines artificial intelligence and operations research. The goal is to produce systems that search thousands of combinations to find the lowest fares for a number of travel Web sites.

Smith says the Research Group's efforts will include improvements in forecasting, where as a general rule a 10% improvement advances an airline's profitability between 0.5% and 1%.

Another hot topic is "robust planning," which optimizes airline schedules and efficiency. For the past 20 years, airlines have used models that show the optimum deployment under normal conditions to make flight schedules, Smith says. But travelers know that when it comes to putting people in planes, plans often go awry. "We're trying to figure out how to put some flexibility back in airline schedules," he says, "and how to deal with air-traffic-control problems, weather problems, and crews getting sick without giving away a significant amount of revenue." Weary travelers hope Smith will have some answers soon.
Cheryl Rosen

At the recent APLG meetings in Ft. Lauderdale, I made a presentation on the innovative new way we are teaching our introductory accounting class at Brigham Young University through the use of a CD/online/limited class format. This approach has been extremely successful with great reviews from our students while at the same time significantly reducing our costs of teaching and administering the course. Following the session many of you inquired as to the availability and pricing of the CDs and other online features of the course. Unfortunately, I did not get a list of those inquiries at the time. If you are interested in that pricing, please reply and I will send that information to you. If you did not attend that session but are interested in viewing the course materials made available at that time, I would be happy to make a packet available to you. Please provide me with your mailing address in that case.

Norm Nemrow 
School of Accountancy and Information Systems 
Brigham Young University
Norm Nemrow [nrn2@ucs-exch.byu.edu] 

From InformationWeek Online on February 21, 2001
Bob Jensen's threads on SAP and ERP can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245glosap.htm 

SAP has been reinventing itself during the last year from a staid, monolithic ERP company to a dynamic E-business company. It looks like the transformation is finally paying off for the world's third-largest software maker.

SAP's R/3 program was launched nine years ago to let companies control and monitor various finance and human-resource functions. One drawback was a lengthy installation process; another was its proprietary nature, which made R/3 ill-suited for a Web-based environment.

SAP, like many other ERP companies, suffered badly in late 1999 from a slowdown in spending on enterprise apps because of Y2K. Meanwhile, the Internet was taking the world by storm, and it became clear that SAP had little to offer in this new world order. Instead, the spotlight was on companies such as Siebel Systems Inc., with its customer-relationship management software, and i2 Technologies Inc., with its supply-chain management software. In response, SAP launched mySAP.com, but the effort lacked focus, leaving potential customers to conclude it didn't apply to them.

SAP could have retreated to its original market and slowly become another corporate dinosaur. Instead, it decided to leverage its customer base of 13,500 businesses and restructured its 6,000 software developers to focus on mySAP. The company concentrated on opening itself to other applications; changing the R/3 interface to be more Web-friendly; and developing applications such as CRM, supply-chain management, business intelligence, and knowledge management. SAP also has had to stop developing every application in-house. As a result, SAP invested $250 million for a 2% stake in Commerce One Inc., which develops E-marketplaces in competition with Ariba Inc. and BroadVision Inc. SAP now sells Commerce One's software to customers wanting to develop public and private exchanges.

While the old R/3 was monolithic, mySAP is truly modular. It lets companies purchase only one application and not the entire suite of products. A key benefit for customers is the ease of integration among the various mySAP products. Typically, the difficulty in integrating back-end and front-end systems is underestimated, and poor integration might keep a company from realizing the full potential of software. SAP and Oracle have an edge over foes such as Siebel and i2 on this front.

The competition is extremely intense in the E-business space. Competitors such as Siebel and i2 continue to produce best-of-breed products, and many companies are still willing to buy and integrate them.

Siebel and i2 report outstanding results this quarter and continue to sign new customers. I2 scored big when it signed Siemens to use its customer-management software, even though Siemens has already implemented SAP R/3.

While SAP's new products are heading in the right direction, many of its customers are already SAP clients. SAP must sign new customers to remain on the ERP throne.

Despite this, it appears that SAP's restructuring efforts are finally paying off. For the fourth quarter last year, SAP reported a year-over-year revenue gain of 31%.

Software sales, which account for 49% of total revenue, increased 30% from the fourth quarter of 1999. Perhaps more interesting, mySAP makes up 63% of all software sales, an indication that SAP's E-business products are gaining acceptance in the marketplace.

Sales of non-R/3 applications increased 286% in the fourth quarter of 2000 vs. the same quarter in 1999 to make up 32% of total software revenue. SAP also reported that earnings per share increased 15%.

Management expects revenue to grow more than 25% in the first half of this year. Earnings per share will likely grow slightly faster because of an expansion of operating margins.

However, with SAP trading at 64 times 2001 earnings-per-share estimates, much of the good news appears already to be factored into the stock price.

After reading the message below, it struck me that it would be rather inexpensive for an auto repair shop to install a webcam so that customers or potential customers could watch cars being serviced and repaired.  The following module from Information Week Online on February 16 shows how to take it further:

Having a car serviced is one of the most stressful experiences for the mechanically challenged. Ford Motor Co. sympathizes. It is teaming with venture firm CCG Venture Partners LLC to raise $13.5 million in Series A funding for JoeAuto Inc.

The startup lets people go online to price repairs, select loaner cars, and monitor repairs via cameras placed in participating auto shops. Offline services include free pickup and delivery of autos and overnight repairs. Ford "was intrigued by our concept," says Lynn Graham, JoeAuto president and CEO.

JoeAuto also is working with the Six Sigma Qualtec Institute, a statistical measuring company, to re-design 35 car-service processes to improve information flow, reduce defects, and improve productivity. The prototype center in Houston has been open for 180 days and has already made the top-10 list of revenue-generating repair shops in the nation. Within five years, the company expects to have 140 major service centers nationwide.

From Carnegie-Mellon University
Swiss Poster Collection --- http://swissposters.library.cmu.edu/Swiss/ 

Group insurance options. 
Learn more about this complicated field and how to partner with existing insurance providers to pick the best plan. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/37023/101 

The Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum --- http://www.patentmodel.org/ 

Send and receive fax images and voice mail via email --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=38448&d=101 

If you travel, or just can't seem to get your faxes out on time or want to track your voicemail more closely, you can try one of the services offered by eFax.com. Free and fee based software downloads are available from eFax.com. Below are a few of the downloads available along with information on each product highlighted.

eFax Free is an easy-to-use service that lets you receive faxes by email.

Simply sign up for a personal eFax number. Then, when people send faxes to your eFax number, you receive them as email attachments that you can view, edit with annotations, and forward easily.

On the same eFax number you can also receive voicemail. Customers, clients, and friends can leave you voice messages that you can access by telephone or by email.

What to whisper to your baby --- http://www.babywhisperer.com/ 

Since carriers can't devise a way to put ads on their wireless networks without angering customers, they should stop trying --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102155/2683063/ 

For low budget travelers --- go to where the rich and famous live without leaving your own humble abode --- http://www.residensea.com/ 

Yahoo UK to block access to U.S. chat rooms
But U.S. version of software remains unchanged 
http://www.msnbc.com/news/529989.asp#BODY 

THE U.S. VERSION of the software, which anyone can access, will remain unchanged and users will still be able to get onto adult chat rooms based in the U.K. A Yahoo UK spokesman said the firm has made the changes to its service in order to comply with U.K. law. He says that the decision was taken after consultation with children’s charities and Internet watchdogs including ChildNet and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). ZDNet News has campaigned against the way in which Yahoo’s IM chat facility operates since October.

The use of the Internet by pedophiles is a growing problem. Members of the world’s largest organized Internet child porn ring, dubbed the Wonderland Club, were convicted in the U.K. last month and are due to be sentenced this week. One of the convicted men, interviewed on the television show “Panorama” this Sunday, praised the Internet for creating a community for people interested in child pornography. The club traded thousands of images of babies and children being subjected to sexual abuse in Internet newsgroups.

Learn how to be annoying in a variety of languages --- http://www.budweiser.com/whassup/languages/ 

EuropeanLeftistIntellectual.com by Doug Henwood on the fate of Europe's lefty intellectuals in the cyber-crazy Old World 

American intellectuals, particularly those of a leftish persuasion, are often Europhiles (though not Eurocentrists, please!). Less poverty, less vulgarity, fewer guns, more cafés -- a nicer way to do capitalism, if capitalism is all we have to choose from these days. And a special charm for intellectuals, particularly those of the leftish persuasion, is that intellectuals seem more integrated in the broader culture than in the United States. A recent trip to Germany for a conference on Lenin put me in the mood for a partial rethink of this formula --- http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1616 

American history from the Smithsonian (where the buffalo roam) --- http://americanhistory.si.edu/hohr/buffalo/index.html 

Peer-to-Peering Into the Future (P2P, Napster, etc.) --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41813,00.html 

Indeed, despite the gloomy future of the phenomenally popular music-trading application, the assembled pioneers of P2P appeared to be in an immutable state of awe over their emerging technology.

. . . 

For example, here's Ian Clarke, the brash, young, P2P-evangelizing founder of Freenet, a still-in-development P2P network: "The music industry did not win this. They may have won the battle, but the collateral damage -- in terms of fan loyalty, etc. -- was substantial, so much that I doubt they'd ever do something like this again."

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

Barnesandnoble.com wins the latest round in its legal dispute with Amazon, its chief rival in online book retail. Amazon is suing Barnes & Noble for infringing its patent for one-click shopping --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41824,00.html 

The Justice Department is looking into Microsoft's relationship with Corel. Does it hinder competition in the word processing and spreadsheet markets? --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41811,00.html 

A Bladerunner-style eye scan reveals if you are too drunk, stoned or tired to work --- http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999426 

A new 90 second eye test could soon be used by companies to see if employees are too drunk, drugged or tired to do their job properly.

Much like the eye test in the movie Blade Runner, used to determine whether subjects are androids, subjects of the new test are asked to perform certain tasks during the examination.

Critical Perspectives on Accounting - Volume 12, Number 1, February 2001

A special issue of The European Accounting Review aims to combine the two streams of management accounting and control systems research to further our knowledge of performance evaluation in organizations. See http://accountingeducation.com/library/library219.html  for full details.

Recently in Gold Star Sites
November '00 - Setting Up Shop Online
October '00 - Health Sites
September '00 - Expert Advice
June '00 - Planning a trip
May '00 - Job Hunting
Apr '00 - Personal Finance
Feb '00 - Home Buying
Sept '99 - Web Auctions
Sept '99 - Car buying
July '99 - Sports
June '99 - Travel

Finding a Home Online

Home Buying Sites --- http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/mag/0002/goldstar.html 

Finding a Car Online

Buying a Car Online  --- http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/mag/0102/goldstar.html 

Finding a Date Online

Cyberdating links found in  Newsweek, February 19, 2001, p. 50

A GUIDE TO CYBERDATING
WEB SITE USERS MONTHLY
FEE		 TARGET
AUDIENCE		 SIGN-UP
TIME		 SAMPLE QUESTION
OR
ESSAY TOPIC		 RATIO,
MEN TO
WOMEN
AmericanSingles.com 1.3 million Free Singles of all age groups 15-20 min. This is what I've learned from my past relationship 70/30
AsianFriendFinder.com 3.6 million Free Those seeking Asians 10 min. What language do you speak? 68/32
Catholicsingles.com 18,000 $8.95 Catholics 5-10 min. Can you marry in church or not? 46/54
JDate.com 200,000 $19.95 Jews 15-20 min. How often do you attend synagogue? 50/50
Kiss.com 2.1 million $19.95 25-49 years 10 min. Criteria for ideal companion 60/40
Match.com 1.5 million $24.95 25-45 years 15 min. What I'm looking for... 58/42
Matchmaker.com 5 million $19.95 25-45 years More than 20 min. Do you have a private place to take a partner? 55/45
PlanteOut.com 250,000 Free Gays/lesbians/bisexuals 10-20 min. How out are you? 60/40
TheSpark.com 275,000 Free Weird sense of humor Less than 10 min. Would any ex cry at your funeral? 40/60
ThirdAge.com 1.4 million Free Adults 45+ 2-3 min. Are you looking for romance, an activities partner or an online pal? 49/51

Yahoo Internet Life, March 2001, p. 74 recommends http://webcenter.love.aol.com/LoveMain/?partner=AOW 

 

The Underpants Archive --- http://acovington.home.mindspring.com/underpants.html 

Embarrassing FAQs --- http://www.prematuree.com/ 
Warning:  Although the questions and answers seem to be seriously intended, many of them are sexual in nature.

There are tulips in the garden,
There are tulips in the park,
But the tulips I like best,
Are the tulips in the dark
http://www.twentysix.net/~cami/journal/010111.html 

For the urban avant-garde --- Detour Magazine at http://www.detourmag.com/ 

Sampling from the Catty Corner by John Waters --- things that irritate him (I occasionally get a black tie invitation, but never have I had a creative black tie invitation.  Also I rarely fly first class to Europe.  Am I missing out on two of life's questionable  pleasures?)

1. Charities that junk mail you those cheesy personal home-address labels that criminals love to find in your garbage can to use in mail-fraud scams.

2. Magazines that try to trick you into “early renewal” by mailing out misleading subscription bills that aren’t really due for six to eight months.

3. CD packaging that is designed to infuriate the buyer. Can you open a new CD without ripping the labeling tape unevenly, breaking the box, or using one of those plastic utensils that should never be needed in the first place?

4. The term “creative black tie,” which usually encourages people who know better to dress stupidly.

5. East Coast white people who over celebrate the first day of spring-like weather by leaving the house practically naked. That night, when the sun has gone down and the temperature has plunged, I secretly chuckle as they stand shivering at the bus stop trying to get home.

6. Guests who respond to your dinner invitations with “I’d love to attend, but you know I have dietary restrictions.” No, I didn’t. “You might want to eat before you come,” I snarl. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that if you don’t like the food, mess up your plate a little, and the host will think you ate what was served?

7. Friends who R.S.V.P. to my Christmas party invitation for two who ask “Can I bring a third person? We’re having company from out of town, blah, blah, blah.” “No, you can’t, and now you’re not invited” is my policy, and believe me, it works.

8. Overly fashion-enthused salespeople in fancy clothing stores who won’t leave you alone to shop for yourself even after you’ve politely said “just looking” five times. “Here’s something I really like,” they continue to gush. A stern, “I wasn’t thinking of buying you a present” usually does the trick.

9. Telephone solicitors. “What do you have on?” I pant lewdly to them, and they never call back.

10. I hate myself for this one, but I can’t help resenting airlines that open up the first-class lavatories to coach passengers who wait in line next to my over-priced seat, farting their way to Europe.

Forwarded by Dr. D

My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.   

Never trust a stockbroker who's married to a travel agent.    The only time the world beats a path to your door is if you're in the bathroom.   

A husband is someone who takes out the trash and gives the impression he just cleaned the whole house.   

My next house will have no kitchen --- just vending machines.   

My blond girlfriend told me, "I was worried that my mechanic might try to rip me off, but I was so relieved when he told me all I needed was blinker fluid.  

 I'm so depressed... I went to the Dr. today and he refused to write me a prescription for Viagra. Said it would be like putting a new flagpole on a condemned building.

Forwarded by Debbie Bowling (who wants to see and smell life's roses everywhere on earth)

I had a very special teacher in high school many years ago whose husband unexpectedly and suddenly died of a heart attack. About a week after his death, she shared some of her insight with a classroom of students. As the late afternoon sunlight came streaming in through the classroom windows and the class was nearly over, she moved a few things aside on the edge of her desk and sat down there. With a gentle look of reflection on her face, she paused and said, "Before class is over, I would like to share with all of you a thought that is unrelated to class, but which I feel is very important. Each of us is put here on earth to learn, share, love, appreciate and give of ourselves. None of us knows when this fantastic experience will end. It can be taken away at any moment. Perhaps this is the powers that be way of telling us that we must make the most out of every single day." 

Her eyes beginning to water, she went on, "So I would like you all to make me a promise. From now on, on your way to school, or on your way home, find something beautiful to notice. It doesn't have to be something you see it could be a scent - perhaps of freshly baked bread wafting out of someone's house, or it could be the sound of the breeze slightly rustling the leaves in the trees, or the way the morning light catches the autumn leaf as it falls gently to the ground." "Please look for these things, and cherish them. For, although it may sound trite to some, these things are the "stuff" of life. The little things we are put here on earth to enjoy. The things we often take for granted. We must make it important to notice them, for at any time...it can all be taken away." The class was completely quiet. 

We all picked up our books and filed out of the room silently. That afternoon, I noticed more things on my way home from school than I had that whole semester. Every once in a while, I think of that teacher and remember what an impression she made on all of us, and I try to appreciate all of those things that sometimes we all overlook.

Take notice of something special you see on your lunch hour today. Go barefoot. Or walk on the beach at sunset. Stop off on the way home tonight to get a double-dip ice cream cone.

For as we get older, it is not the things we did that we often regret, but the things we didn't do.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Author Unknown

Added note from Bob Jensen:  This reminds me of the most memorable lines of Thornton Wilder's Our Town  (didn't every high school drama group perform Our Town in the 1950s?).  The unforgettable part of the drama for me was when Emily (who has died and is looking back at her town, at her family, and at her friends).  She exclaims:  "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? every, every minute?"

I did find the following excerpts from Our Town online at --- http://www.thorntonwilder.com/plays/ot_text.html . 

Our Town is as close to a universal literary experience as can be found. In addition to its international audience, nearly every English class in the United States reads this play at some point. Nearly every American high school performs it, and casual references to it crop up on television and in the movies. Our Town has been a staple on community and school stages since it premiered in 1938. On average, over fifteen hundred separate groups perform it each year. It is difficult to think of another play that is playing in theaters in five different states across the United States on any given night!

Who knows how many young students have chosen a life of acting, writing or directing based on their personal experience playing George Gibbs or Emily Webb in Our Town? In this excerpt from the play, the pivotal end of Act III, Emily returns from the dead to witness the passage of her fourteenth birthday. This haunting scene still reverberates through memory and experience as much as any of the other truly great passages in American literature.

EMILY: Softly, more in wonder than in grief. I can't bear it. They're so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I'm here. I'm grown up. I love you all, everything. -- I can't look at everything hard enough. There's the butternut tree.

She wanders up Main Street.

There's Mr. Morgan's drugstore. And there's the High School, forever and ever, and ever. And there's the Congregational Church where I got married. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Oh, dear!

The STAGE MANAGER beckons partially to her. He points to the house. She says a breathless "yes" and goes to the house. Good morning, Mama.

MRS. WEBB: At the foot of the stairs, kissing her in a matter-of-fact way.

Well, now, dear, a very happy birthday to my girl and many happy returns. There are some surprises waiting for you on the kitchen table.

EMILY: Oh, Mama, you shouldn't have.

She throws an anguished glance at the STAGE MANAGER.

I can't -- I can't.

MRS. WEBB: Facing the audience, over her stove.

But birthday or no birthday, I want you to eat your breakfast good and slow. I want you to grow up and be a good strong girl. She goes to the stairs and calls.

Wally! Wally, wash yourself good. Everything's getting cold down here.

She returns to the stove with her back to EMILY. EMILY opens her parcels.

That in the blue paper is from your Aunt Carrie and I reckon you can guess who brought the post card album. I found it on the doorstep when I brought in the milk George Gibbs . . . must have come over in the cold pretty early . . . right nice of him.

To herself. Oh, George I'd forgotten that....

MRS. WEBB: Chew that bacon slow. It'll help keep you warm on a cold day.

EMILY Beginning softly but urgently.

Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally's dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it -- don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's look at one another.

MRS. WEBB: That in the yellow paper is something I found in the attic among your grandmother's things. You're old enough to wear it now, and I thought you'd like it.

EMILY: And this is from you. Why, Mama, it's just lovely and it's just what I wanted. It's beautiful!

She flings her arms around her mother's neck. Her mother goes on with her cooking, but is pleased.

MRS. WEBB: Well, I hoped you'd like it. Hunted all over. Your Aunt Norah couldn't find one in Concord, so I had to send all the way to Boston.

Laughing.

Wally has something for you, too. He made it at Manual Training class and he's very proud of it. Be sure you make a big fuss about it. -- Your father has a surprise for you, too; don't know what it is myself. Sh -- here he comes.

MR. WEBB: Off stage. Where's my girl? Where's my birthday girl?

EMILY: In aloud voice to the STAGE MANAGER.

I can't. I can't go on. Oh! Oh. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another.

She breaks down sobbing. At a gesture from the STAGE MANAGER, MRS. WEBB disappears.

I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking.. . and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. She looks toward the STAGE MANAGER and asks abruptly, through her tears.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No. Pause. The saints and poets, maybe -- they do some.

EMILY: I'm ready to go back

She returns to her chair beside MRS. GIBBS.

Mother Gibbs, I should have listened to you. Now I want to be quiet for a while. -- Oh,, Mother Gibbs, I saw it all. I saw your garden.

MRS. GIBBS: Did you, dear?

EMILY: That's all human beings are! -- Just blind people.

MRS. GIBBS: Look, it's clearing up. The stars are coming out.

EMILY: Oh, Mr. Stimson, I should have listened to them.

SIMON STIMSON: With mounting violence; bitingly.

Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those. . . of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know -- that's the happy existence you wanted to go back and see. Did you shout to 'em? Did you call to 'em?

EMILY: Yes, I did.

SIMON STIMSON: Now you know them as they are: in ignorance and blindness.

MRS. GIBBS: Spiritedly. Simon Stimson, that ain't the whole truth and you know it

The dead have began to stir.

THE DEAD: Lemuel, wind's coming up, seems like. -- Oh,, dear, I keep remembering things tonight. -- It's right cold for June, ain't it?

MRS. GIBBS: Look what you've done, you and your rebellious spirit stirring us up here. -- Emily, look at that star. I forget its name.

The DEAD: I'm getting to know them all, but I don't know their names. -- My boy Joel was a sailor, knew 'em all. He'd set on the porch evenings and tell 'em all by name Yes sir, it was wonderful. -- A star's mighty good company. -- Yes,,yes. -- Yes,, 'tis.

And that's the way it was on February 23, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

February 16, 2001

Quotes of the Week

God made me your teacher.  Prozac made me your friend.  
Bob Jensen's adaptation of a bumper sticker.

Science isn't one success after another, it's mostly one success in a desert of failure.
Dr. Justin Folkman whose theories on fighting cancer moved from the status of disgrace to high optimism (See Newsweek, February 19, pp. 44-45.  Eventually the article will be posted to http://www.newsweek.com 

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy

Murphy's Law: Some come to the fountain of knowledge to drink;  others just gargle.

Murphy's Law:  An optimist is a person who looks forward to marriage.  A pessimist is a married optimist.

Murphy's Law:  If things were left to chance, they'd be better.

Murphy's Law:  A president of a democracy is a man who is always ready, willing and able to lay down your life for his country.  
(If not your life, your money.)

Murphy's Law:  Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.

Murphy's Law:   No matter what happens, there's always somebody who knew it would happen.

Murphy's Law: In order to get a loan, you must first prove you don't need one.

Murphy's Law: When all else fails, read the instructions.

Murphy's Law: Close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and thermonuclear devices.

Murphy's Law: No matter where you start, its always against the wind coming back.

Murphy's Law: T hose whose approval you seek the most, give the least.

Wizeup Will Soon Impact Upon Virtually Every College Faculty Member and Student

I added the following to my threads on electronic books at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

"Textbooks Go Online," T.H.E. Journal, February 2001, p. 14 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3294.cfm 
McGraw-Hill Education and WizeUp Digital Textbooks have formed a joint initiative to electronically publish, sell and distribute digital textbooks for the higher education market. Students will be able to view the education titles online with password-protected access, or download the book directly to a computer. The titles integrate seamlessly into course management technology systems such as Web CT and Blackboard, and allow the professor to link the textbook content to classroom presentation materials. Interactive technology allows students to search texts, take and manage notes, create hyperlinks and bookmarks, and electronically highlight text. WizeUP, New York, NY, www.wizeup.com.

Email message from Jonathan Kowit 

Allyn & Bacon and WizeUp Launch Digital Textbook Initiative for the Higher Education Market

New York - February 7, 2001 - Allyn & Bacon, a division of Pearson Education, and WizeUp Digital Textbooks announced today the first major initiative to electronically publish, sell and distribute digital textbooks in education and social sciences for the higher education market.

For the first time, titles such as Allyn & Bacon's Psychology by Philip Zimbardo; Educational Psychology by Robert Slavin; Social Psychology by Robert Baron and Donn Byrne; Living Sociology by Claire Renzetti and Daniel Curran; and other titles in the social sciences will be available in digital format. There have been a number of initiatives to develop digital content for business, technology, and other “hard” sciences. This initiative marks the first major effort in the “soft” sciences where Allyn & Bacon is the market leader.

Initial trials of the program conducted this past fall with key professors, such as Richard Jackson at Boston College, who uses Allyn & Bacon’s Exceptional Learners: Introduction to Special Education, by Daniel P. Hallahan and James M. Kauffman, proved to be extremely successful.

“I’m predicting in five years that all curriculum resources will be available digitally,” said Professor Jackson.

WizeUp has developed the most advanced technology in the e-Publishing marketplace with highly sophisticated features and functions. WizeUp Digital Textbooks are unique in ensuring the pedagogical integrity of the books as developed by the publishers. The Digital Textbooks follow the printed version page-by-page, graphic-by-graphic while bringing the power of interactive technology and the Internet to the students. WizeUp Digital Textbooks, which are available via Internet download or on the web, include features such as: powerful search capabilities, in-context note-taking and notes-management tools, custom hyperlinking, bookmarking and electronic highlighting capabilities.

“Our alliance with WizeUp demonstrates our commitment to developing e-learning solutions for the higher education marketplace-in particular for the soft sciences,” said Sandi Kirshner, President of Allyn & Bacon. “These products will make an immediate impact in technology-based learning environments, where digital textbooks will expand the classroom and offer students a powerful and efficient learning solution.”

The combination of the widely utilized and respected content from Allyn & Bacon and the e-learning tools supplied by WizeUp benefits all of today’s learning environments-traditional, online, distance learning, continuing education and corporate education. The evolution of the textbook into a complete e-learning solution gives students and professors unprecedented educational power, making both studying and teaching more effective, more efficient and more dynamic.

Allyn & Bacon and WizeUp have developed innovative pricing packages designed to capture market share in technology-based academic environments, including: distance learning, laptop universities and other educational technology based student populations.

"Students will enrich their learning experience with the powerful combination of Allyn & Bacon’s highly recognized content and WizeUp's e-learning tools. This will allow students to meet their academic goals and gain an edge in our increasingly competitive society,” said Stephen Jordan, Vice President of Publishing for WizeUp.

About WizeUp:

Based in New York City, WizeUp Digital Textbooks is the leading developer of digital educational content-including digital textbooks, training materials, and other related educational content-for both the higher education and corporate marketplaces. The company is dedicated to serving the educational community with innovative new E-learning solutions. Additional information is available by visiting www.wizeup.com .

About Pearson Education:

Pearson Education is the world's leading integrated education business. Pearson Education offers a full range of rich content across electronic and print media for all students everywhere, from early childhood to professional education and training. Pearson Education's leading brands include: Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, Longman, Allyn & Bacon, Scott Foresman, Pearson Learning, NCS Learn, and NCS Pearson. Pearson Education is the global education publishing business of Pearson plc, the international media group. For more information, visit www.pearsoned.com .

Contact: Wendy Spiegel Pearson Education 212.782.3482 wendy.spiegel@pearsoned.com 

Jonathan Kowit WizeUp Digital Textbooks 212.324.1300 jkowit@wizeup.com 

Bob Jensen's threads on Wizeup and electronic books in general are available at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Wow Accounting Professor of the Week

It is rare to find a world-leader accounting researcher who shares research documents on the Web.  A noteworthy exception is Professor Baruch Lev from NYU.  Every accounting researcher, educator, and practitioner should visit Dr. Lev's website at least once per month at http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~blev/ 

Thank you for sharing Baruch.

The word "metacognition" arises once again.

"Assessing the Impact of Instructional Technology on Student Achievement," by Lorraine Sherry, Shelley Billig, Daniel Jesse, and Deborah Watson-Acosta, T.H.E. Journal, February 2001, pp. 40-43 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3297.cfm 

Four separate simplified path analysis models were tested. The first pair addressed process and product outcomes for class motivation, and the second pair addressed school motivation. The statistically significant (p < .05) results were as follows:

Clearly, correlation does not imply causality. However, when each of these elements was considered as an independent variable, there was a corresponding change in associated dependent variables. For example, there was a significant correlation between motivation and metacognition, indicating that students' enthusiasm for learning with technology may stimulate students' metacognitive (strategic) thinking processes. The significant correlations between motivation, metacognition, inquiry learning, and the student learning process score indicate that motivation may drive increases in the four elements connected by the first path. Similarly, the significant correlations between motivation, metacognition, application of skills, and the student product score indicate that motivation may drive increases in the four elements connected by the second path.

Based on the significant correlations of the two teacher measurements of student achievement with the student survey data, these data validated the evaluation team's extension of the Developing Expertise model to explain increases in student performance as a result of engaging in technology-supported learning activities. Moreover, nearly all students across the project met the standards for both the teacher-created student product assessment and the learning process assessment. This indicates that, in general, the project had a positive impact on student achievement.

Conclusions

These preliminary findings suggest that teachers should emphasize the use of metacognitive skills, application of skills, and inquiry learning as they infuse technology into their respective academic content areas. Moreover, these activities are directly in line with the Vermont Reasoning and Problem Solving Standards, and with similar standards in other states. The ISTE/NETS standards for assessment and evaluation also suggest that teachers:

Rockman (1998) suggests that "A clear assessment strategy that goes beyond standardized tests enables school leaders, policymakers, and the community to understand the impact of technology on teaching and learning." RMC Research Corporation's extension of the Sternberg model can be used to organize and interpret a variety of student self-perceptions, teacher observations of student learning processes, and teacher-scored student products. It captures the overlapping kinds of expertise that students developed throughout their technology-related activities.

One of the greatest challenges facing the Technology Innovation Challenge Grants and the Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers To Use Technology (PT3) grants is to make a link between educational technology innovations, promising practices for teaching and learning with technology, and increases in student achievement. We believe that this model may be replicable in other educational institutions, including schools, districts, institutions of higher learning, and grant-funded initiatives. However, to use this model, participating teachers must be able to clearly identify the standards they are addressing in their instruction, articulate the specific knowledge and skills that are to be fostered by using technology, carefully observe student behavior in creating and refining their work, and create and benchmark rubrics that they intend to use to evaluate student work.

The word "metacognition" also appears at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm 

Bob Jensen's Threads on Assessment of Education Technologies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 

A Fun Site
Welch-born author's literature (note the audio describing how Dahl writes)
The Official Roald Dahl Web Site --- http://www.roalddahl.com/ 

Don't miss his Tips for Teachers --- http://www.roalddahl.com/index2.htm 

Academic Site of the Week --- Carnegie Foundation for Advancement in Teaching --- http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/ 

Andrew Carnegie founded The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1905, "to do all things necessary to encourage, uphold and dignify the profession of teaching." The Foundation is the only advanced study center for teachers in the world and the third oldest foundation in the nation. A small group of distinguished scholars conducts the Foundation's research activities.

New Publication --- http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/WhatsNew/docs/new.htm#opening 

Essays by eight Carnegie Scholars that:

Includes a CD-ROM with valuable resources and supplemental information.

Send an email request and you will be billed.  The title of the book is:  

Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Bob Jensen ordered a copy!

 Carnegie Publications
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
555 Middlefield Rd.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Phone: 650/ 566-5128
Fax: 650/326-0278
publications@carnegiefoundation.org

Single copies are $15, with a 20 percent discount on orders of 20 or more

Read the Introduction and Conclusion at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/eLibrary/approaching.htm 

The cases that constitute this volume represent work in progress by faculty selected as Carnegie Scholars with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). Each of the eight authors tells the story of her or his efforts at "opening lines" of inquiry into significant issues in the teaching and learning of the field. In particular, their accounts focus on the doing of this kind of investigative work—that is, on methods and approaches for undertaking the scholarship of teaching and learning.

A key principle of this volume is that there is no single best method or approach for conducting the scholarship of teaching and learning. Indeed, the cases illustrate a need for approaches that are useful and doable in the varied contexts represented by their authors. Mills Kelly, for instance, explores questions about teaching and learning at a large public research university; Donna Duffy undertakes her investigation in the quite different setting of a community college. Both public and private institutions are represented; several are urban, one is Catholic, and another, Spelman, is an historically black college for women. The authors' fields are diverse as well, including humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, business, and an interdisciplinary program. Several of the eight are senior faculty, well along in their academic careers; one is not yet tenured. All of these differences play into the way the authors think about and undertake their scholarship of teaching and learning. The desire to illustrate a variety of approaches, and to preserve the contexts and particulars of their use, underlies our decision to build this volume around cases. Cases capture details and differences.

But readers will find common themes as well. The cases were developed through a process designed to reveal aspects of the scholarship of teaching and learning that crosscut contexts and fields. This process began with two-hour phone interviews, conducted by me with each of the authors. The interview was turned into a rough transcript, which the author then reworked around a set of common topics or questions that emerged as the interviews were undertaken, and which appear as more or less standard headings in the finished cases collected here. For instance, all of the authors describe the process of formulating their question or questions. Each also describes the investigative strategies he or she considered using, how choices were made among these, how the various approaches worked or didn't, and what was learned from doing the work. In a final section of each case, the author offers advice to faculty newly undertaking the scholarship of teaching and learning. Our hope is that by organizing the cases around a set of standard elements we have made it easier for readers to extract transferable lessons and themes they can apply in their own work.

As a further aid to this task, an accompanying CD-ROM provides additional information and resources. For instance, Dennis Jacobs talks, in his case, about a focus group protocol he adapted and used as part of his study of at-risk students in chemistry; that protocol appears in the "analytical tools" section of the CD-ROM, where it can be accessed, adapted, and used by readers. Additionally, the CD offers samples of student work, artifacts such as syllabi and exams, and links to electronic course portfolios as well as leads to further resources relevant to "how to" questions.

More at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/eLibrary/approaching.htm  

If you want to join the new electronic mailing list, contact babb@carnegiefoundation.org 

CASTL Center for Advancing the Study of Teaching and Learning --- http://castl.duq.edu/ 

CASTL was established in 1998 in the Department of Foundations and Leadership at Duquesne University School of Education. CASTL is committed to developing and promoting a culture of learning, knowledge, and skill that makes possible a deeper understanding of the teaching-learning process and engages learners as active, problem-solving participants.

We believe that professional learning begins with concerns and questions: a teacher wanting to understand a student who is excelling in one subject but struggling in another; a superintendent wondering how to ensure meaningful communication between the district and the community; a college professor examining assumptions about the relationship between theory and practice; a principal searching for better ways to meet the needs of students with disabilities. The best of CASTL’s learning programs have helped educators raise and explore concerns of importance in their learning and practice.

Today, fundamental questions of equity, diversity, and social justice take on special significance in our schools. As our society becomes more pluralistic and the world more interconnected, we need to find new ways to learn from and with each other and to contribute our diverse perspectives to improve the quality of the teaching-learning process for all. Therefore, CASTL learning programs are designed to enhance learning opportunities for learners of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities across learning environments. Our view of learning environments is not bound by the walls of a school or university or focused only on children and young adults. Instead, our learning programs are designed to reach around the world and across the lifespan. To share what is learned about the teaching-learning process CASTL promotes and supports publications, presentations, and other networking activities in a variety of contexts to facilitate the use of relevant theory operating in effective practice.

TIL (Teaching as Intentional Learning ) --- http://castl.duq.edu/til/TIL_overvw.htm 

TIL is not a packaged program, it is not a course on line, it is not teacher training. At the heart of TIL is the TIL professional learning process. Guided by this process, educators grapple with the real concerns that emerge from their daily practice and use their concerns to set unique professional learning agendas. These personal and professional learning agendas can be as varied as the educators themselves. The TIL process honors educators as professionals who can research and develop a course of actions that honors their complex set of circumstances. Using their new learning and their educational experience they have the latitude to invent local solutions to the problems that underlie their concerns rather than adopt pre-packaged solutions and practices thought to be effective for all purposes, conditions, or situations.

ADEC --- http://www.adec.edu / 

ADEC is:
an international consortium of state universities and land grant institutions providing high quality and economic distance education programs and services via the latest and most appropriate information technologies. Primary emphasis is on programs relating to: ADEC will:
be the foremost leader in providing and creating access to customer driven distance education in its mission areas.
ADEC is also known as the American Distance Education Consortium and as AgSat.

ADEC Online Resources --- http://www.adec.edu/online-resources.html 

Excellence in Online Teaching --- http://www.adec.edu/user/excellence.html 

"Accounting in 2015,"  by Michael Alles, Alexander Kogan, and Miklos A. Vasarhelyi, CPA Journal, November 2000 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2000/1100/features/f111400a.htm 

What Will the Next 15 Years Bring?

The single greatest change agent facing accounting in the next 15 years is technology. Emerging trends in technology will fundamentally alter the way in which both business and accounting will be conducted. The measurement and reporting of business transactions, long considered a core competency of accountants, will be challenged by the information economy, forcing accountants to justify their role in business. The foundations of the profession will be eroded by the opposing demands of emerging services and established values.

Nevertheless, technology alone cannot give information meaning and relevance. Network software could allow auditing to evolve into a more comprehensive process of continuous assurance, where software constantly monitors the operating and reporting structure and auditors step in when difficulties warrant a strategic correction. The globalization of the financial markets and increasingly specialized demand for business information will certainly challenge traditional accounting and reporting models but will also likely increase the demand and value of the right information presented to the right consumer at the right time. In the convergence of business and technology, the market will have to choose whom it trusts--and accountants can make sure that they remain the trusted professionals.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States--and in less developed countries today--one of the essential needs of business was the guarantee of physical security of assets from theft and sabotage. The problem was not just to hire guards, but to obtain guards whose integrity was assured. Even today, a retailer like Wal-Mart cannot conduct business without armored car companies. Yet few investors or analysts care about the steps taken to safeguard physical assets, confirming that such an assurance is a necessity of doing business rather than a source of competitive advantage.

While security companies were emerging to physically safeguard assets, the accounting profession was protecting shareholders from financial theft and loss caused by misinformation and fraud. Ultimately, after rampant abuses became obvious during the Depression, that role was codified by legislation mandating audited financial statements of public companies. Accounting firms, taking advantage of their privileged access to businesses, expanded far beyond auditing to provide broader financial and systems services.

Lately there has been a reversal of that trend, with the consulting arms being spun off or sold. If accounting firms once again concentrate solely on audits, that service must provide enough value to escape the fate of the old security firms. If accounting firms cannot use the audit as a means of "up-selling," will the audit itself be seen as nothing more than a necessity to overcome the friction of information asymmetry? Will accountants become just another service provider?

More at http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2000/1100/features/f111400a.htm 

The Problem of Attrition in Online MBA Programs

We expect higher attrition rates from both learners in taking degrees in commuting programs and most online programs.  The major reason is that prior to enrolling for a course or program, people tend to me more optimistic about how they can manage their time between a full-time job and family obligations.  After enrolling, unforseen disasters do arise such as family illnesses, job assignments out of town, car breakdowns, computer breakdowns, job loss or change, etc.

The problem of online MBA attrition at West Texas A&M University is discussed in "Assessing Enrollment and Attrition Rates for the Online MBA," by Neil Terry, T.H.E. Journal, Febrary 2001, pp. 65-69 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3299.cfm 

Enrollment and Attrition Rates for Online Courses

Bringing education to students via the Internet has the potential to benefit students and significantly increase the enrollment of an institution. Student benefits associated with Internet instruction include increased access to higher education, flexible location, individualized attention from the instructor, less travel, and increased time to respond to questions posed by the instructor (Matthews 1999). The increase in educational access and convenience to the student should benefit the enrollment of an institution by tapping the time- and geographically-constrained learner. The results presented in Table 1 indicate that online courses are doing just that. Specifically, Internet courses averaged higher enrollments than the campus equivalents in 12 of the 15 business courses. The online delivery had an overall average of 34 students per course, compared to only 25 students in the traditional campus mode.

Although enrollment is relatively high, it is also important to note that the attrition rate was higher in 13 of the 15 online courses. Potential explanations for the higher attrition rates include students not being able to adjust to the self-paced approach in the virtual format, the rigor of study being more difficult than students anticipated, and a lack of student and faculty experience with the instruction mode. A simple sign test reveals that enrollment and attrition rates are both statistically greater in the online format (Conover 1980).

Table 1, Average Enrollment and Attrition Rates for Campus and Online Courses
Course Name Campus Course
Enrollment (Attrition)		 Online Course
Enrollment (Attrition)
Financial Accounting 31 (22%) 40 (16%)
Accounting for Decision Making 43 (13%) 45 (16%)
Contemporary Economic Theory 11 (19%) 13 (23%)
Advanced Macroeconomic Theory 24 (15%) 26 (19%)
International Economics 13 (2%) 48 (3%)
Money and Capital Markets 14 (7%) 44 (14%)
Corporate Finance 36 (23%) 47 (36%)
Statistical Methods in Business 10 (13%) 14 (43%)
Quantitative Analysis in Business 33 (17%) 22 (33%)
Computer Information Technology 40 (7%) 38 (5%)
Managerial Marketing 11 (9%) 19 (24%)
Seminar in Marketing 23 (11%) 50 (14%)
Organizational Behavior 47 (13%) 31 (29%)
International Management 17 (26%) 44 (27%)
Strategic Management 24 (8%) 28 (7%)
Overall Average 25 (89%) 34 (21%)

The results shown in Table 1 indicate that some business disciplines are more conducive to attracting and retaining students than others are. Discipline-specific implications include the following:

Accounting
The basic accounting course (Financial Accounting) and the advanced accounting course (Accounting for Decision Making) both have higher online enrollment and attrition rates. Of primary interest is the observation that attrition rates in the two instruction modes are comparable, contradicting the notion that the detail-specific nature of accounting makes courses unconvertible to the online format.

Economics
The online versions of the basic economic course (Contemporary Economic Theory) and the advanced economic course (Advanced Macroeconomic Theory) both have higher enrollment and attrition rates than their classroom counterparts. The two field courses in economics (International Economics and Money and Capital Markets) both have online enrollments over three times greater than the campus equivalent, indicating an extreme interest in global economic courses delivered via the Internet.

Finance
The corporate finance course in the study had a substantially higher online enrollment and attrition rate than its classroom counterpart. The most glaring observation is the lack of retention in the online format. The attrition rate in the online finance course is an alarming 36 percent, indicating that one in three students who start the course do not complete it.

Business Statistics
Enrollment in the basic statistics course (Statistical Methods in Business) is slightly higher in the online mode, but enrollment in the advanced course (Quantitative Analysis in Business) is substantially higher in the campus mode. Attrition rates for the online statistics course are extremely high. The 43 percent attrition rate of the basic online statistics course is higher than that of any other course in the study and may have a lot to do with campus enrollment in the advanced statistics course being higher than the online counterpart.

Computer Information Systems
Enrollment and attrition rates for the Computer Information Technology business course are not significantly different across instruction modes. The online attrition rate of five percent is well below the overall average of 21 percent.

Marketing
The basic marketing course (Managerial Marketing) and the advanced marketing course (Seminar in Marketing) both have higher enrollment and attrition rates online than in the classroom. The advanced marketing course was offered four times during the study period and averaged 50 students per course, making it the most popular online course.

Management
The three management courses have atypical results. The online course in Organizational Behavior has a relatively high attrition rate with lower than average enrollment. Much like the global economic courses, enrollment in the field course in International Management is substantially higher in the online format. Enrollment and attrition rates for the MBA capstone course in Strategic Management are not significantly different across instruction modes.

Conclusions

If a university offers courses over the Internet, will anyone enroll in them? If students enroll in a Web-based course, will they complete it or be attrition casualties? The results of this study imply that online courses enroll more students, but suffer from higher attrition rates than traditional campus courses. It appears that the enrollment-augmenting advantages of Internet-based instruction, like making it easier to manage work and school and allowing more time with family and friends, are attractive to a significant number of graduate business students. The sustained higher enrollment across several business courses is a positive sign for the future of Internet-based instruction. On the other hand, attrition appears to be a problem with some of the online courses. Courses in the disciplines of accounting, economics, computer information systems, marketing, and management appear to be very conducive to the Internet format, as attrition rates are comparable to the campus equivalents. Courses in business statistics and finance, with attrition rates in excess of 30 percent, do not appear to be very well suited to the Internet instruction format. An obvious conclusion is that courses requiring extensive mathematics are difficult to convert to an Internet instruction format. It is important to note that results of this study are preliminary and represent a first step in an attempt to assess the effectiveness of Internet-based instruction. Much more research is needed before any definitive conclusions can be reached.

The following modules appeared in the December 1 edition of my New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q4.htm#120100 

I like the honesty and integrity in a recent paper appearing in the Journal of Business Education, Volume 1, Fall 2000, 33-38.  It is entitled "Student and Faculty Assessment of the Virtual MBA:  A Case Study,"  by Neil Terry, James Owens, and Anne Macy.  JABE editions are not available online.  However, you can read more about JABE and the Academy of Business Education at http://www.abe.villanova.edu/ 

The article points out how badly many students want online MBA programs and how difficult it is to deliver a program that receives high evaluations.  

The online degree program is from Texas A&M University (WT) in the Texas Panhandle.  Student evaluations of the program were quite low (1.92 on a five-point scale where 5.00 is the highest possible rating) but the perceived need of the program is quite high (3.30 mean outcome).  Over 92% of the students urged continuation of the program in spite of unhappiness over its quality to date.  In another survey, eight out of twelve faculty delivering the courses online "feel the quality of his/her virtual course is inferior to the quality of the equivalent campus course."  However, ten of these faculty stress that they "will significantly improve the quality of the virtual course the next time it is taught via the Internet format."

A major complaint of the faculty is "the time required to organize, design, and implement a virtual course."  

This study is consistent with the many other startup online education and training programs.  The major problem is that online teaching is more difficult and stressful than onsite teaching.  A great deal of money and time must be spent in developing learning materials and course delivery has a steep learning curve for instructors as well as students.

A portion of the conclusion of the study is quoted below:

The results of this MBA case study present conflicted views about online instruction. Both the critics who worry about quality and the advocates who contend students want online courses appear to be correct based upon this case study.  While a majority of students acknowledge the benefits of Internet instruction, they believe that the online instruction is inferior to the traditional classroom.  A significant number of students are not satisfied with the Internet program and none of the students want an entirely virtual program.  However, most students want online instruction to continue and plan on enrolling in one or more future courses.  Faculty members recognize the flexibility advantage of Internet-based instruction but express concerns over the time-intensive nature of the instruction mode and the impact of student course evaluations on promotion and tenure.

The conclusions of this article are in line with my Advice to New Faculty at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm 

You can read more about assessment of virtual courses in the "assessment" category at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm 

Reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU] 

The New York Times had an article (I believe it was the Sunday, November 19, edition, that addressed the perception among recruiters of online MBA programs. The jist of it was that there are many mediocre programs, but a few very good ones. The students are enthusiastic about the benefits they provide, but the business community (i.e. the ones who the students hope will hire them) are still skeptical.

pat

Reply from Eckman, Mark S, CFCTR [meckman@att.com] 

Reading the comments on motivation reminded me of a quote from Bernard Baruch that tells me a lot about motivation.

"During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think."

While character development and critical thinking may not be the most important items considered in development of curriculum or materials for the classroom, they can be brought into many accounting discussions in terms of ethical questions, creativity in application or simple 'what if' scenarios. People have many motivations. Sometimes you can motivate people, sometimes you can't. Sometimes motivations rise by themselves.

Thinking back to undergraduate times, I still remember the extreme grading scale for Accounting 101 from 1974. It started with 97-100 as an A and allowed 89 as the lowest passing grade. The explanation was that this was the standard the profession expected in practice. I also remember 60% of the class leaving when that scale was placed on the board! They had a different set of motivations.
Bernard Baruch

Bob Jensen's reply to a message from Craig Shoemaker 

Hi Craig,

You have a lot in common with John Parnell. John Parnell (Head of the Department of Marketing & Management at Texas A&M) opened my eyes to the significant thrust his institution is making in distance education in Mexico as well as parts of Texas. After two semesters, this program looks like a rising star.

Dr. Parnell was my "Wow Professor of the Week" on September 26, 2000 at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q3.htm#092600 
You can read more about his program at the above website.

Congratulations on making this thing work. 

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. 
Email: rjensen@trinity.edu  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

-----Original Message----- 
From: docshoe1 [mailto:docshoe1@home.com] 
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2000 11:25 AM 
To: rjensen@trinity.edu Subject: Education -- Online

HI Bob,

I read with interest your note regarding online education. I just concluded teaching my first one. It was a MBA capstone course -- Buisness Planning Seminar. I had 16 students spread throughout the USA and Mexio. The course requirement was to write and present, online, a business plan consisting of a extensive marketing plan, operations plan and financial plan. Without knowing each other, the students formed teams of 4. The student commitment required 15-20 hours per week.

I held weekly conference calls with each team, extensively used chat rooms for online discussion and e-mailed some team nearly every day. The requirement of my time was at least twice that if I would have had one 3 1/2 hour class each week.

The written plans and the online presentations were quite thorough and excellent. The outcome was, in many ways, better due to the extensive and varied communications media used. My student evaluations were as high as when I have done the course "live" in class. The "upfront" work to prepare the course was extensive.

Craig

Craig Shoemaker, Ph.D. 
Associate Professor 
St. Ambrose University 
Davenport, Iowa

From Syllabus News on February 13, 2001

Steelcase, a designer and manufacturer of products used to create high performance work environments, recently announced its collaboration with the MIT Media Lab on a design project that is featured as part of the Museum of Modern Art's "Workspheres'' exhibition. The interactive 'Atmosphere' exhibit addresses the complexity of information management in the modern workplace. The exhibit consists of six projects that examine the changing nature of the workplace and the role of design in creating effective solutions to accommodate those changes. In the exhibit, users can navigate a large wide screen that represents an ``organic'' cloud of information. Up to three people can navigate through the infor- mation simultaneously by using one of three handheld devices, each representing a different level of detail--macro, medium, and micro. As information is seamlessly integrated, users can intuitively navigate financial, management, operational and administrative processes to better manage complex projects and multiple ideas.

The ``Workspheres'' exhibit will be open to the public at MoMA through April 22, 2001. For more information, visit www.moma.org/workspheres 

I realize that I am repeating myself, but with the surge of viruses in email attachments, I once again remind you of a very good way to open many types of attachments (e.g., Word's doc files and Excels xls files) without risk of triggering a macro virus. The answer is a relatively inexpensive ($49 or possibly less in stores) piece of software called Quick View Plus from the great software company (JASC) that also produced Paint Shop Pro.

The link is at http://www.jasc.com/product.asp?pf%5Fid=006 

Now you CAN open virtually any file and email attachment with Quick View Plus – the easy way to view virtually any file.

After the disposable camera, what's next?

A $10 Disposable Cell Phone? An inventor in New York has unveiled a working model of her phone-card-phone. At $10 a pop, this may be the world's first "disposable" mobile phone. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2472 

For details, go to http://www.dtcproducts.com/products.html 

In November of 1999 Randi Altschul was issued a series of patents for the World's First Disposable Cell Phone. This was followed by an incredible Media Blitz that included the New York Times, The CBS Early Show, Reuters, CNN, The London Times, and numerous other programs, newspapers and magazines around the World. Within 6 months of this blitz, she had her first round funding in place and was able to continue the development of the products. Within four months of funding she not only had the WORKING MODELS of the phone, which she now calls the PHONE-CARD-PHONETM. She also has expanded their IP to include more than 20 Patents on products ranging from the PAPER LAP TOP, to the ANTI-VIRUS CHAMBER and numerous Internet related products too.

Randi's background is Toys and Games, but in 1999 she spun off her technology products into a new company to focus on their development. DTC has proven that we can create better than, and move faster than, all the big guys. We are changing the paradigm from every angle. From our Super Thin Technology (STTTM), to our unique products. We are a company that makes things happen!!! Product is KING and unlike all these .com companies, which go public with no substance behind them, our IPO will bring about changes that put products that people want, in the palm of their hands!!!

How can you record multiple channels on your TV simultaneously? --- http://www.recordtv.com/ 

RecordTV.com was founded in November of 1999 and is currently a small startup company looking for venture capital. Currently, we are getting more than 100,000 hits a DAY and have more than 100,000 active users. We are looking for capital to support the massive amount of people that coming to our website on a daily basis.

We have been written up in all types of media from the Wall Street Journal and L.A. Times to CNET and ZDNET. We have been interviewed by most of the major TV networks (NBC, CNBC, CNN, FOX, UPN). If you would like to obtain more information about the company or obtain a copy of our business plan, send us an email at: recordtv@hotmail.com 

All you have to do is click on the RECORD button and pick your show from the TV guide. Any time after the show has aired, come back to our website and view your TV Show. It will play on your computer monitor using Real Player. It is as simple as that!

This is a whole new way to tape TV shows. You will no longer need your old VCR. This website does most everything your current VCR can do and then some. You can record any show you want with simple "One-Click Recording"(tm). You can even record multiple channels at the same time. You will also be able to rewind, replay, pause and fast forward just like your current VCR.

RecordTV.com was featured as the "Pick-of-the Week" product on Computer Chronicles (PBS) on February 4, 2001.

From Syllabus News on January 30, 2001

GOU Lite, an Israeli company specializing in optical technology, has developed apen-like product that enables writing messages into digital devices--anywhere and at any time. Instead of having to hit the buttons on a cellular phone, users will be able to write text --SMS, e-mail or signature--on any surface available. The Virtual Pen is based on patented optical technology: Called the Vpen, it measures its motion relative to any writing surface and transmits the information via Bluetooth link to cell phones, PDAs, set-top boxes, or PCs. The Vpen is expected to hit the market within a year.

For more information, visit www.goulite.com. 

Nearly 300,000 taxpayers received correspondence from the IRS that contained erroneous advice. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/37490/101 

Don't miss AccountingWEB's digest of tax tips offered on our site throughout this tax season. Visit our tips area and make sure that you cover all your bases with your clients. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/35497/101 

Hundreds of web sites are offering accounting-related programs for free. Are you helping your clients and colleagues take advantage of these resources? http://www.accountingweb.com/item/37041/101 

Less than 10 percent of Fortune 2000 companies have deployed an end-to-end online billing and payment system, according to research firm Killen & Associates, which projects that it will be 2004 before even half of those companies put such a system in place.  Why the holdup? --- http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCLx0Bdl6n0V30DBHw 

New IASB to Push for Global Accounting Standards --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x29074.xml 

The effort toward global accounting standards moved forward with the appointment of members of the new International Accounting Standards Board, a 14-member group charged with the daunting task of developing globally accepted standards. 

These guys have their work cut out for them. Industry leaders favoring the development of global standards say a single set of rules is crucial to enabling companies' financial results to be reliably compared internationally, and that the implementation of one set of standards would produce potentially huge cost savings. But the already complicated process has been made even thornier by squabbling over whose standards are best.

Note from Bob Jensen:  "These guys," as quoted from above, include two women.  See http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen4_6_2.htm 

A message for Trinity University students:

Counseling & Career Services (C&CS) and your academic department are pleased to forward the following link to career information for business administration majors. For more information about career options for business majors, visit the Career Resource Library at C&CS, 215 Coates University Center (above the bookstore), Monday-Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

There is a huge demand for business grads. Job seekers with a bachelor's degree in business administration have a distinct edge in the business world and they're landing management positions with big salaries! 
Read more from CNN Financial Network http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2000/10/20/career/q_degreebusiness/index.htm 

Political Satire (With Great Flash Video)
Cross Circuit --- http://www.crosscircuit.com/ 

Web Sites Still Fail to Protect Customer Data http://www.internetnews.com/intl-news/article/0,,6_572581,00.html 

People remain far too preoccupied with online data-sharing practices that ultimately affect them very little. Your privacy is impinged offline every day. Stores collect data on your every purchase. Magazines pass on your name, your address and other details to other companies targeting similar demographics. Your financial profile is almost a matter of public record for credit card and mortgage companies. Yes, the Web makes that collection and dissemination (and junk mail machine) more efficient, but companies have been passing around your personal info for decades.

But industry hard-liners must acknowledge that companies lose out on $12 billion a year because consumers don't feel safe online. Countless more B2B transactions and information-sharing don't happen because partners don't quite trust the Internet. In this case, perception is reality.

Find out more ---  http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCLx0Bdl6n0V30DBKz 

New concerns about how to best protect e-businesses and Web sites from crackers are now at the forefront, after recent Denial of Service attacks on Microsoft's Web sites and recent news reports on the discovery of a computer flaw affecting BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain). ECommerce Guide, NewMedia's sister Web publication, has put together a series of current articles that discuss measures you can take to prevent hackers from wreaking havoc on your e-commerce site. http://ecommerce.internet.com/solutions/ec101/article/0,1467,6321_575461,00.html 

Get your California history before the State plunges into darkness
California History Online --- http://www.californiahistory.net/ 

"Making Web Sites Work for People With Disabilities," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2000 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i21/21a03001.htm 

In January 1998, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights cited the A.D.A. in ordering California's community colleges to take specific steps to make print and electronic information available to visually impaired students.

Meanwhile, the new federal regulation clarifies Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. State-controlled colleges must make their Web sites accessible, and make sure that when they purchase new computer hardware and software, the machines and programs can be adapted for use by disabled people.

Although the rule was written primarily to aid federal employees and those who use federal Web sites, state institutions, too, are required to comply with Section 508, because all states receive money under the Assistive Technology Act. "Section 508 is the A.D.A. of cyberspace," says Cynthia Waddell, an expert on disability law and information technology.

Many state universities are only now beginning to learn that the new rule will apply to them. And while private institutions are not covered, advocates for the disabled say the rule is likely to spur the creation of products to promote Web use by disabled people, and that those products will also benefit students at private colleges.

The regulation is scheduled to go into effect June 21. But the new Bush administration says published regulations that have not yet taken effect will have their enforcement date delayed for 60 days, while they are reviewed.

There's no cemetery like this cemetery!  (English Literature, Poetry, History)
100 Lives Past: An Oxfordshire Who's Who --- http://www.thisisoxfordshire.co.uk/oxfordshire/visit/pastintro.html 

The National Archives of Scotland --- http://www.nas.gov.uk/ 

Turn your cursor into on onboard reference library with these tools for instant thesaurus, dictionary, encyclopedia, and search engine gratification at the click of your mouse. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/37344/101 

The three smart cursors available for free download are highlighted below:

Comet Systems Inc. --- http://www.cometsystems.com 

NBC Internet Inc. --- http://www.quickclick.com/ 

Atomica.--- http://www.atomica.com/solutions_products_pc.html 

Bob Jensen's general references to dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc. can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm 

While mobile phones are very popular, they are lagging behind PDAs and laptops in the m-commerce market. http://cyberatlas.internet.com/markets/wireless/article/0,,10094_573131,00.html 

Internet users should be, at least passively, familiar with digital wallets, especially with big players like Yahoo and AOL touting branded versions within their own e-commerce spaces. But a survey by BizRate.com found use of digital wallets is lagging. http://cyberatlas.internet.com/markets/retailing/article/0,,6061_570911,00.html 

As part of a merchant network with over 12 million customers ready to buy, Magna Cash is definitely a micro-payment solution worth checking out. http://ecommerce.internet.com/reviews/article/0,1467,3691_570251,00.html 

How to write better term papers --- http://www.questia.com/Questia.jsp 

The Questiasm service offers an extensive scholarly collection with the full text of thousands of books and, coming soon, journal articles. A broad range of tools allow hyperlinking from source to source, powerful searching, automatic creation of footnotes and bibliographies, plus highlighter markup and margin note capabilities.

Do you know how much it is going to cost you to retire? Do your clients know the answer? Surprisingly, the closer people get to retirement age, the less likely it is that they understand how much money they are going to need to sustain their current lifestyle. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/37340/101 

Submarine to the Arctic - take a plunge beneath the polar ice cap --- http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/icerun/ 

From Syllabus News on January 30, 2001

Report to Congress: Financial-Aid Rules Hurt Distance Education

The U.S. Department of Education said in a report to Congress last week that the inflexibility of financial-aid regulations hurts the advancement of distance-education programs. Regulations determining which institutions can provide federal financial aid are complex and inhibiting, the report says, and should be updated to reflect the growth of alternative education.

One rule prevents institutions offering more than 50 percent of their courses as distance education from providing federal student aid. Another rule requires that students enroll in at least 12 hours of course work per week to qualify for full-time status and maximum student aid.

For more information about the report, visit www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/PPI/DistEd/ 

Forwarded by Don Van Eynde

This is a very cool montage of pictures taken from a NASA satellite that purports to show all the lights in the world.

It also provides a vivid display of population distribution in the U.S.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg 

The race in Congress to determine how e-commerce will -- and will not -- be taxed began in earnest today with the introduction of bipartisan legislation --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102092/2683771/ 

Online music beyond Napster ZDNet Downloads guru Preston Galla offers up a grab bag of great programs for listening to and handling digital music online ---  http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/prespick/0800/index.html 

Try these sites for XBRL software and tools.

http://www.reportingtools.com  

http://www.navision.com  

http://www.xbrlsolutions.com  

http://web.bryant.edu/xbrl 

Saeed Roohani [sroohani@BRYANT.EDU] 

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

GMAT POWERPREP CD-ROM from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) --- http://www.gmac.com/ 

Perform your best on the Graduate Management Admission Test® (GMAT®) by becoming familiar with the mechanics of the test and the kinds of questions that are asked before you take the test. You can visit Sample GMAT Questions or use the GMAT Mini-Test to practice answering questions. Or for more extensive review, download GMAT: POWERPREP® 3.0 Software or visit the GMAC Store for The Official Guide for GMAT® Review. Make sure you also review the Test-Taking Strategies provided.

There are other companies whose publications, software, or preparation courses can assist in becoming familiar with format of the GMAT. However, there is sufficient free information about previous actual GMAT questions on this web site and in publications in libraries to fully prepare you for taking the GMAT. Expensive training courses or preparation materials are not necessary to perform your best on the test.

Pay attention to where you are in the test, the number of questions that remain in a section, and the amount of time you have left. On average, you have about 1 3/4 minutes for each verbal question and 2 minutes for each quantitative question. You will have 75 minutes for 37 quantitative questions and 75 minutes for 41 verbal questions. If you do not know the answer to a question, or it's too time-consuming to figure out, guess. You cannot skip a question and go back to it, or change your answer once you have moved on to the next question.

To prepare for the Analytical Writing Assessment, practice on the writing topics included in Sample GMAT Questions. You will have 30 minutes to compose each of two essays.

CorelDraw has powerful tools, but sometimes they can be confusing. Take a step-by-step journey through every basic tool. http://webreference.com/graphics/corel101/4/ 

From FEI Express February 14, 2001

Today, the FASB issued an important exposure draft accounting standard related to business combinations. Specifically, this draft covers accounting for goodwill under the proposed model, by which companies will no longer amortize goodwill. Rather, they will test for impairment upon the occurrence of certain triggering events. This is obviously an important standard for almost all companies that have acquired businesses or evaluating acquisitions. There is a short comment period closing March 16. You can download the full document from our website.

Just to give you a little flavor for the significance of the provisions, here is part of the summary of the ED.

"Entities would be required to initially apply the provisions of this proposed Statement as of the beginning of the first fiscal quarter following issuance of the final Statement." (Phil comment - expected to be June 30t) "Those provisions would apply not only to goodwill arising from acquisitions completed after the issuance date of the final Statement but also to the unamortized balance of goodwill at the date of adoption." (Phil comment - your net income for 2001 will be impacted if you have goodwill on the balance sheet.) "Income before extraordinary items and net income computed on a pro forma basis (as if goodwill had not been amortized in prior periods) would be required to be displayed for all periods presented either on the face of the income statement or in the notes to the financial statements until all periods presented reflect goodwill accounted for in accordance with the final Statement." (Phil comment - you're going to have to pro forma prior periods to allow fair comparisons)

"This proposed Statement would not require that goodwill be tested for impairment upon adoption of the final Statement unless an indicator of impairment exists at that date. However, it would require that a benchmark assessment be performed for all existing reporting units with goodwill within six months of the date of adoption. If an impairment loss were recognized as a result of that "transitional" benchmark assessment, it would be presented in the operating section of the income statement in the same manner as other impairment losses. It would not be treated as a change in accounting principle." (Phil comment - I'm glad I am sitting where I am for now!)

From Bob Jensen:  You can download the Amended Exposure Draft free (in PDF format) from http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/draft/edwebintro.html 

This proposed Statement would establish a new accounting standard for goodwill acquired in a business combination. It would continue to require recognition of goodwill as an asset but would not permit amortization of goodwill as currently required by APB Opinion No. 17, Intangible Assets. 

This proposed Statement would establish a new method of testing goodwill for impairment. It would require that goodwill be separately tested for impairment using a fair-value-based approach. Goodwill would be tested for impairment at a level referred to as a reporting unit, generally a level lower than that of the total entity. This proposed Statement would require that a benchmark assessment be performed in certain circumstances. That assessment would establish the methods and assumptions that would be used to test goodwill for impairment. Goodwill of a reporting unit would be tested for impairment when events and circumstances occur indicating that it might be impaired. Goodwill related to long-lived assets to be held and used would no longer be allocated to those assets when they are tested for impairment as currently required by FASB Statement No. 121, Accounting for the Impairment of Long-Lived Assets and for Long-Lived Assets to Be Disposed Of. 

If the implied fair value of a reporting unit’s goodwill is less than its carrying amount, goodwill would be considered impaired. The implied fair value of goodwill would be determined by subtracting the fair value (with certain exceptions) of the recognized net assets of the reporting unit (excluding goodwill) from the fair value of the reporting unit. The impairment loss would be equal to the amount by which the carrying amount of goodwill exceeds its implied fair value. Goodwill impairment losses would be aggregated and presented as a separate line item in the operating section of the income statement. This proposed Statement provides guidance for determining the amount of goodwill, if any, that would be included in the determination of the gain or loss on sale or disposal when all or a portion of a reporting unit is to be sold or otherwise disposed of. 

Entities would be required to initially apply the provisions of this proposed Statement as of the beginning of the first fiscal quarter following issuance of the final Statement. Those provisions would apply not only to goodwill arising from acquisitions completed after the issuance date of the final Statement but also to the unamortized balance of goodwill at the date of adoption. Income before extraordinary items and net income computed on a pro forma basis (as if goodwill had not been amortized in prior periods) would be required to be displayed for all periods presented either on the face of the income statement or in the notes to the financial statements until all periods presented reflect goodwill accounted for in accordance with the final Statement. 

This proposed Statement would not require that goodwill be tested for impairment upon adoption of the final Statement unless an indicator of impairment exists at that date. However, it would require that a benchmark assessment be performed for all existing reporting units with goodwill within six months of the date of adoption. If an impairment loss was recognized as a result of that “transitional” benchmark assessment, it would be presented in the operating section of the income statement in the same manner as other impairment losses. It would not be treated as a change in accounting principle. 

This proposed Statement would not apply to goodwill acquired in a combination between two or more not-for-profit organizations or to goodwill acquired in an acquisition of a for-profit enterprise by a not-for-profit organization.

Is there a "circle of life" when it comes to multimedia marketing? Will the rules of the Web apply to marketing via wireless devices? Two speakers at a recent Washington, D.C. conference attacked those subjects in separate keynote speeches. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2458 

IBM usability guru, Vanessa Donnelly, takes a structured approach to usability using methods borrowed from the software development world, in her new book, "Designing Easy-to-Use Web Sites." http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2465  

NewMedia also provides an interview with Donnelly, who further discusses the state of usability on the Web. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2471 

Are you ready for the "experience"? Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates thinks you are, and on Tuesday he introduced what the company calls the biggest Windows launch since Windows 95 --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102141/2685407/ 

netFuturi is a subscription-based service you can plug into your site helping you to both solicit and manage your customers' input. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2469 

Accounting Profession's "2000: THE YEAR IN REVIEW" --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=34717&d=101 

And now, AccountingWEB's List of the Top Ten Biggest Stories in Accounting - 2000:

1. SEC Redefines Auditor Independence
2. Consulting Arms Break Free of Attest Functions
3. Cognitor Could be New Designation for Accountants
4. Consolidators Continue to Shape the Profession
5. ASP Services Compete With and Complement Traditional Accounting
6. The Internet Continues to Change the Practice of Accounting
7. XBRL and the Future of Financial Reporting
8. Staff Shortage Continues to Plague Profession
9. Multi-Disciplinary Practices Continue To Inch Forward
10.Republicans Take Back the White House

Bob Jensen would have included FAS 133 and IAS 39 along with the exposure drafts on fair value accounting for all financial instruments.

Do you know the rules regarding what to Debit and what to Credit?  If your computer can play Flash videos, then go to Richard's http://www.virtualpublishing.net/debit04/index.html 

Or contact Richard J. Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU] 

What I don't understand is why Napster addicts just do not shift to Gneutella.  Gneutella may be virtually impossible to stop with a court edict --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

But there may be a big risk for Gnutella addicts.  See "Cookie monster: Gnutella may expose users to data theft" --- http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2683950,00.html 

Web surfers trading free music and other digital goods over one of the Web's most popular file-swapping networks are sharing much more: sensitive data files that could expose them to identity theft. One of several file-swapping networks coat-tailing on Napster's success, Gnutella allows people to open the contents of their computers to create a virtual swap meet for MP3s, software, video and text files. A recent casual search of the system revealed scores of files that could compromise the service's users.

Putting these would-be file swappers at risk are electronic markers, known as cookies, left automatically on their computers through Netscape or Internet Explorer Web browsers. Web sites place cookies as a way to identify surfers, using them to create personalized Web sites or accounts at shopping sites such as Amazon.com.

"This not a good thing," said Richard Smith, chief technical officer for the Privacy Foundation, an online privacy watchdog group. "All someone would have to do is take these stolen cookies...and they would be able to masquerade as someone else."

Ordinarily these files are private. But under certain settings in Gnutella, people can open their hard drives indiscriminately to the network, giving anyone who cares to look access to their recent Net history. At best, this can provide a potentially embarrassing look into a person's private Web surfing habits. But unscrupulous individuals could also use these files to log into other people's Web accounts, possibly even gleaning passwords and usernames that could give access to bank accounts or other financial data.

Like Napster and other peer-to-peer programs, Gnutella allows people to open bits or all of their hard drives to other people on the Net, sharing or swapping files with the simple click of a mouse.

But where Napster limits its sharing solely to music, Gnutella supports any type of file. People downloading one of several software programs that tap into the Gnutella network can specify which folders, directories or drives they want to leave open to the public.

For careless or unsophisticated computer users, this can be dangerous. Accidentally opening a full drive, instead of just a single folder, could expose private documents or system files to anyone who takes the time to look. One Gnutella user interviewed said he had recently downloaded somebody's private diary, for example.

"There is a need for users to be very careful about these things," said Kelly Truelove, chief executive of Clip2, a company that does research and consulting on peer-to-peer technologies. "Otherwise they could get a nasty surprise."

In scores of cases, this is taking the form of making private Web cookie files available. Because of the way Gnutella searches work, it's impossible to tell exactly how many people are affected, however.

The actual risk of any given file depends on what sites a person has visited and what level of security those sites maintain.

Many companies, such as Yahoo, leave cookies on visitors' computers that allow personalized sites to be recreated at the next visit.

Most e-mail and financial sites ask for a separate password before allowing access. Most sophisticated Web sites also encrypt this type of information inside the cookie files, so that any genuinely sensitive data appears as an incomprehensible string of numbers or letters.

Not every site takes all of these precautions, however. Some cookie files show up with unencrypted login names and passwords. These could potentially then be plugged into such things as finance sites to see if a person has used the same password for both accounts.

This aspect is potentially more dangerous for Netscape users, because that program stores all cookies in a single file. IE cookies are also being shared on Gnutella, but the information is stored in multiple files, making it slightly more difficult to cross-reference passwords or other information between different sites.

Because dozens or hundreds of these "cookies" can be in each file, combing through them by hand would be difficult to do. But privacy experts say it would be reasonably easy for someone to write a small, automated script to download cookie files as they were made available or to search individual files for specific information.

To guard against this, Gnutella users should make sure they know exactly what folders, directories or drives they are making public, Truelove said.

EDUNET from T.H.E. Journal, February 2001, pp. 28-33 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/M2629.cfm 

Microsoft's hard-charging CEO talks to eWEEK about the company's progress in the embedded arena, the lessons of Linux and the upcoming Windows XP --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0102072/2683068/ 

Four years ago, U.S. government agencies were ordered to donate thousands of excess computers to needy schools. Now the government is trying to figure out why most of them ended up getting sold instead --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41636,00.html 

On the heels of a new book detailing IBM's cooperation with the Third Reich, five Holocaust victims file suit against Big Blue --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41753,00.html 

Northwestern University exhibits art from Holocaust prisoners in an online gallery. Also: A millionaire CEO sells stock to build a virtual school.... A smelly dinosaur debuts in London.... The ADL offers an online course for parents.... and more --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,41689,00.html 

The exhibit includes paintings, sculpture, drawings, illustrated diaries and painted letters, the vast majority of which have never been shown before now. Portraits comprise a large part of the exhibition, some having been smuggled out of the camp to show that a family member was still alive.

"The Holocaust victims who produced art amid the death and destruction of the Nazi camps did so under a variety of conditions and for an array of reasons," David Mickenberg, co-curator of the exhibit, said in a statement.

Artists used scraps of paper and contraband materials from the camp to create many of the works.

"The greatest challenge was to find the most respectful, effective balance of contemporary digital media capabilities to treat so somber and painful a subject," Bob Taylor, director of academic technologies, said in a statement.

---

Teaching tolerance: This month, the Anti-Defamation League's A World of Difference Institute will offer a free online course for parents on how to teach children about stereotypes and prejudice.

The course is based on Hate Hurts: How Children Learn and Unlearn Prejudice, the ADL's antibias handbook. It is offered in four installments, including a segment on how to help children navigate the Internet safely.

"In a multicultural society, parents and caregivers must address complicated issues, including prejudice, with children at an early age," instructor Yvonne Brady said in a statement.

The course will be offered through the Child Trauma Academy, and parents can sign up for the course on the academy website. The registration deadline is Feb. 19. (or should that be was?)

Celebrate Black History Month - the History Channel --- http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/blackhist/ 

I apologize for not yet having had time to read any of the replies to the document below.

Laurence Thomas states: "And no computer on the face of this earth can replace the affirmation that your child receives no computer can generate the sparkle in your child's eyes when I affirm the intellectual power of their remarks."

My gut questions for Laurence Thomas are as follows:

What is a computer? Are my email messages responding to sometimes very personal questions of students "a computer?" Are the 59% (on average) increase in communications between students and instructors in the asynchronous network learning (SCALE) courses at the University of Illinois messages from "computers?" Studies repeatedly point out that communications often improve if individuals or teams of people do not communicate face-to-face?

Do your students sometimes divert their "sparkling eyes" when they are uncomfortable or embarrassed while face-to-face discussing issues that they cannot grasp immediately but can grasp with greater confidence at their own pace in repeated email exchanges with you?

Why is E&Y's ERNIE (online consulting) such a success? Don't clients actually prefer to find answers to frequently asked questions quickly and efficiently without having to take added time and pay added costs to have live consulting? This frees up the live consultants for the more difficult questions or the rarely-asked questions that are not in the FAQ database. It also frees up client cash to spend on questions that cannot be answered from a consulting database.

Since you say your primary mission is "education," why would you deny yourself the most powerful technology tools ever discovered for training and education? Isn't that a bit like saying you refuse to ever fly in an airplane because you cannot see the terrain closely? Airplanes and automobiles and horses and ships serve different purposes in different contexts. Why should a traveler choose only one or two such as a horse for land and a ship for water? Why must an educator choose only one or two technologies such as chalk and overhead transparencies? Why must all your teaching be face-to-face? If you also use a textbook, why can't the concept of a "textbook" be expanded to electronic materials, including materials accessed by computers?

I beg to differ with you Laurence Thomas. "Altruistic footprints" can also be digitally "planted in the sands of time." My eyes sparkle when some stranger from some far away land answers my questions without ever seeing my sparkling eyes and is content and energized with my simple written "Thank you."

I apologize if some of earlier replies to this message on the AECM covered the same points.

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

-----Original Message----- 
From: Andrew Priest [mailto:a.priest@ECU.EDU.AU]  
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 1:08 AM 
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU 
Subject: Humanity is the essence

Hi All,
 The attached item which appear in one of our national newspapers, was brought to my attention by a colleague. I think worth sharing with your, in light of the ongoing debate(s) on the validity of online education.

Andrew

No computer can replace the affirmation that a student receives from their professor and vice versa, writes Laurence Thomas.

I WRITE not as someone's parent, nor as someone's husband. Rather, I write as a professor of someone's child.

Sometimes with just words of encouragement, sometimes with searching questions, I am the person who helped steady the course of someone's child embarking upon the rocky road of independence away from home.

I heard the first riveting angst of someone's child as the fairy tale ideal of the college experience gave way to the biting reality of life. Upon occasion, my only task has been to help a child believe in their own moral goodness or intellectual powers. Though perhaps singular in aim, this task is formidable In its execution. For as rust eats away at metal, self-doubt eats away at the will to live a life of excellence.

I taught someone's child how to turn self-doubt into an instructive moment regarding the range of choices at their disposal. Or perhaps I helped another to see that failure is truly that only if it resigns us to not getting up and trying again. Perhaps I am your child's professor.

I heard the pain that your child would dare not speak at home, the wound of betrayal that time alone was supposed to heal, such as parental abuse or parents being too busy making money to be there. Or perhaps it was the divorce that netted a new partner for each parent, but left the scar of a broken home and divided loyalties in your child's life. I heard the sigh of relief as I helped your child to understand that they could dearly love their parents even as they had reason to be angry with them.

Upon occasion, there is the white student worried about the extent to which they are racist, or the minority student whose ethnic identity blinds them to the pain that they cause others. I do not pounce upon the former, nor do I express my delight in the attitude of the latter. And this alone, since I am black, often suffices to give both of them pause and reason to reflect upon their concerns.

Sometimes individually, sometimes collectively in lecture, I remind them both that it is not our ethnic histories that make us either righteous or evil, but the lives that we choose to live - that our legacy is forged by our actions and not those of another.

Perhaps I am your child's professor.

Of course, my primary role is to educate your child. And I delight in bringing my intellectual expertise to bear upon your child's life. Engaging your child intellectually is as electrifying as any experience could be. If I am stopped in my tracks by an insight or question from your child, and my student., then your child and I have both benefited from teaching at its best.

And no computer on the face of this earth can replace the affirmation that your child receives no computer can generate the sparkle in your child's eyes when I affirm the intellectual power of their remarks. Although it is perhaps true that human beings can learn under any condition, the fact remains that learning at its very best is quintessentially an interpersonal experience. As perhaps your child's professor, I strive to embody this reality.

Since I have no children of my own, some would insist that ultimately I am a selfish person But I beg to differ. Having children is not the only way to leave altruistic footprints in the sands of time. And history reveals that the morally admirable life is defined not so much by how many souls we bring into the world, but by the manner in which we touch the souls that we encounter along the way.

And if perhaps I was your child's professor, then I may very well have them to thank for so poignantly making this insight so very real in my life. It is thus with much gratitude that I say to your child: thank you.

Laurence Thomas teaches philosophy at Syracuse University, New York.

Source: The Australian Newspaper, Wednesday January 31, 2001. Page 34

ThE AUSTRALIAN Wednesday January 31 2001

Reply from George Lan:

Bob, 

First of all , let me say that I am not against the use of computers and indeed use them quite effectively for research and other purposes. I also teach several distance education courses and communicate with my students by e-mail and by telephone. However, I think that certain types of students (the older, more mature ones for example) do benefit better than others from the extensive use of computers for learning purposes.

This being said, I do have a few experiences as a student, teacher and professor which help me understand what Laurence Thomas meant when he said that no computer on earth can replace the affirmation your child receives...I am sure other subscribers on the list have similar experiences and would appreciate if they could share some of them, as I will do below.

Last December, I went back to Mauritius, where I grew up, to visit my family. My wife came with me but could stay only one week. However, we did not know that we had to reconfirm her return flight (after a break in the journey of more than 3 days) and hence at the airport we were told that her name was not on the list of passengers and that she would be on standby.I was furious and called for the supervisor. The supervisor tried to calm me down and then after a few moments he said: " Don't you recognise me, you were my high school teacher. Don't worry; your wife will have a seat on the plane." ( I taught maths and sciences in a high school over 20 years ago, when I was just 19 and 20 years old ). I wonder whether a computer would have recognized me after such a long time. (Sure, the computer has infinite memory, if the file is not deleted!)

On another occasion, when I went back to Mauritius, a former student insisted that he brought his daughter to see me and said that he wished I was there to teach his daughter. I wonder whether he would have said that to a computer.

Having been a student in the U.S. and Canada for a long time, I have had several professors. Those that I do remember the most and try to "imitate" as a professor of accounting myself now, were those who had sparkles in their eyes when they teach and a sense of humanity about them, which indicates to me that they care not only about imparting rigourous intellectual knowledge but also in the well-being of their students.

I think affirmation is reciprocal, while we affirm the students- they also affirm us. I think this was the implied message of Prof. Laurence Thomas, rather than computers do not have any use at all in teaching and communicating knowledge and should not be used. I have not followed all the replies to this theme and may be repeating what was already mentioned. 

Regards, 
George Lan, University of Windsor [glan@SERVER.UWINDSOR.CA] 

Reply from Bob Jensen

Hi George,

I like your response and hope you will grant me permission to reproduce it in my next edition of New Bookmarks.

I fully recognize the value of face-to-face learning and socialization. In fact, I list the residential and athletic participation infrastructures as the most important comparative advantages of most universities with residential traditions (Trinity University requires that all students live on campus). I discuss trends in these and other comparative advantages at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#ComparativeAdvantages 

Face-to-face relationships and learning have long-lasting impacts and are highly important to people of all ages. In fact, they are crucial to most of us. They are not, however, without comparative disadvantages relative to our new technologies for learning and other forms of communication. First there is the comparative disadvantage of cost. My daughter had face-to-face classes at the University of Texas, but most of those courses were about as distant as courses in a virtual university. Her first chemistry class had 300 students. Her chemistry professor, by his own admission, would never recognize her in an airport. He never noticed her sparkling eyes among the 299x2 other sparkling eyes. Now that she is a former science teacher and current professional medical technician engaged in biochemistry testing, however, she carries on an occasional email dialog with her former professor even though she lives in Old Town, Maine and he resides in Austin, Texas. They know each other much better by email than they ever did "face-to-face" or "eye-to-eye."

I carry on frequent email conversations with some former students and some people that I have never met face-to-face. It helps to dimly recall what those former students looked like, but in our email conversations I feel just as close, or closer with, some people whose sparkling eyes can only be imagined.

It is interesting, in history, how learned men and women prided themselves in their carefully-crafted letters, letters that are now regarded as literary pieces more valuable, in some cases, than the books they wrote or the their other professional accomplishments. I am afraid that our email messages in present times are not so carefully crafted, but they are sometimes intensely informative about what is going on in the minds of our correspondents.

Thanks for your thoughtful and interesting reply. I now know a great deal about you without a face-to-face encounter.

Bob Jensen

Forwarded by Debbie Bowling (I know this fatigue!)

email fatigue (noun)

Mental exhaustion caused by receiving a large number of email messages each day.

"Robert Cavalier, philosophy professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is experiencing 'e-mail fatigue.' Originally Cavalier responded to his e-mail the moment he got to his office. Due to an explosion in the number of e-messages, he has redesigned his schedule to answer e-mail at noon." --"DL Changes Learning," Education Technology News, November 11, 1998

See Also: diversity fatigue, information fatigue syndrome

Backgrounder ---------- Direct marketers also refer to a form of fatigue related to receiving a steady flow of ad pieces each day. The terms they use are "mail fatigue," "direct mail fatigue," and "junk mail fatigue":

"Everyone has heard of compassion fatigue. Now it seems there is also appeal fatigue, junk mail fatigue, and a mounting sense of annoyance on the part of donors at the insensitive behaviour of some charities. Indeed, most charities are now reporting a strong negative reaction to junk mail, particularly from their own supporters." --Judy Hirst, "Relationship Fundraising," Investors Chronicle, October 30, 1992

For more Word Spy words, see the Word Spy Archives: http://www.logophilia.com/WordSpy/ 

To search for a previous word, try the Word Spy Index: http://www.logophilia.com/WordSpy/WordSpy-index.html 

A message on FAS 133

Dear XXXXX,

You wrote the following: "Using OCI under cash flow hedge is more appropriate as the firm commitment progressed (especially partial shipments) to be honored by the engaging parties."

A firm commitment cannot be a hedged item for a cash flow hedge, because there is no cash flow risk --- even with partial shipments with contracted prices.

Two rules to always keep in mind.

1. Hedging fair value always creates cash flow risk. 

2. Hedging cash flow risk always creates fair value risk.

You can only use OCI for a cash flow hedge of cash flow risk. In the case of a fair value hedge, the offset to a change in value of a derivative must be either to the booked item (if it was previously accounted for at historical cost or LCM prior to the hedge) or to an account called "Firm Commitment" if the hedged item was not previously booked.

Purchase commitments were not booked prior to FAS 133 and are still not booked after FAS 133. Under ARB 43, an anticipated "loss" in a firm (irrevocable) purchase commitment is booked (but only to the extent of the loss rather than the full commitment). Under FAS 133, firm commitment gains and losses are booked if a firm commitment is hedged for fair value, but only to the extent of the gain or loss rather than the full contracted obligation. I suspect this is very misleading for investors who are likely to think that the booked "Firm Commitment" amount is for the full contractual commitment rather than its incremental gain or loss.

I have attached some homework problems that I give to my students. Note in particular Problems 01 and 02.  We might be able to extend these problems into some effectiveness testing cases. However, I do not have the time at the moment to plunge into an empirical study of hedging ineffectiveness. I have to teach in Mexico for a week in March and will be lecturing in Europe for five weeks next summer. It's a busy time for me!

Bob Jensen

February 11th edition of the ENews Internet Essentials newsletter for the financial professional --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. How Does Technology (like XBRL) Become Accepted? Part II 
2. 10 Useful E-Commerce Web Sites 
3. XML.gov Portal Open 
4. "Worst Boss" Stories --- http://www.cio.com/archive/111500_confidential.html 
5. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

Forwarded by Lanny Solomon [SolomonL@umkc.edu]
As presented by him at the American Accounting Association APLG meetings in Ft. Lauderdale on February 5, 2001

TOP 10 REASONS WHY PROFESSORS BECOME CHAIRS

10. Because you don't want someone else to do it even if you don't.

09. Because you are burned out teaching the same thing over and over again for 20 years and writing articles that two people in the entire country read.

08. For the money.

07. For the petty power, having, in middle age, experienced a precipitous decline…and needing an alternative thrill.

06. Because you lack imagination and can't think of anything better and more original to do.

05. Because you have imagination and fantasize about all the things you will do back to your peers that they did to you while they were chair.

04. Because some dean has made you an offer you can't refuse.

03. Because your peers elect you to slow down your rate-busting activity by loading you up with administrative trivia.

02. Because your peers elect you, thinking you are useless at research and teaching, and this way you can at least fill out the related administrative reports.

01. Because you temporarily became insane, forgetting why you came into academics in the first place, momentarily in a state of confusion, mistaking your department for the next Microsoft or Dell Computer, thinking you will climb the ladder for your successes.

Forwarded by Bob Overn

At a nursing home in Miami, Florida, a group of Senior Citizens were sitting around talking about their ailments: "My arms are so weak I can hardly lift this cup of coffee," said one.

"Yes, I know. My cataracts are so bad I can't even see my coffee," replied another.

"I can't turn my head because of the arthritis in my neck," said a third, to which several nodded weakly in agreement.

"My blood pressure pills make me dizzy,".... another went on.

"I guess that's the price we pay for getting old," winced an old man as he slowly shook his head. Then there was a short moment of silence.

"Well, it's not that bad," said one woman cheerfully. "Thank God we can all still drive."

Also forwarded by Bob Overn

Instead of Astrological Signs, how about these .. What's Your Business Sign?

1) MARKETING You are ambitious yet stupid. You chose a marketing degree to avoid having to study in college, concentrating instead on drinking and socializing which is pretty much what your job responsibilities are now. Least compatible with Sales.

2) SALES Laziest of all signs, often referred to as "marketing without a degree." You are also self-centered and paranoid. Unless someone calls you and begs you to take their money, you like to avoid contact with customers so you can "concentrate on the big picture." You seek admiration for your golf game throughout your life.

3) TECHNOLOGY Unable to control anything in your personal life, you are instead content to completely control everything that happens at your workplace. Often even YOU don't understand what you are saying but who the hell can tell. It is written that Geeks shall inherit the Earth.

4) ENGINEERING One of only two signs that actually studied in school. It is said that engineers place ninety percent of all Personal Ads. You can be happy with yourself; your office is full of all the latest "ergodynamic" gadgets. However, we all know what is really causing your "carpal tunnel syndrome."

5) ACCOUNTING The only other sign that studied in school. You are mostly immune from office politics. You are the most feared person in the organization; combined with your extreme organizational traits, the majority of rumors concerning you say that you are completely insane.

6) HUMAN RESOURCES Ironically, given your access to confidential information, you tend to be the biggest gossip within the organization. Possibly the only other person that does less work than marketing, you are unable to return any calls today because you have to get a haircut, have lunch AND then mail a letter.

7) MANAGEMENT/MIDDLE MANAGEMENT Catty, cutthroat, yet completely spineless, you are destined to remain at your current job for the rest of your life. Unable to make a single decision you tend to measure your worth by the number of meetings you can schedule for yourself. Best suited to marry other "Middle Managers" as everyone in your social circle is a "Middle Manager."

8) SENIOR MANAGEMENT (See above - Same sign, different title)

9) CUSTOMER SERVICE Bright, cheery, positive, you are a fifty-cent cab ride from taking your own life. As children very few of you asked your parents for a little cubicle for your room and a headset so you could pretend to play "Customer Service." Continually passed over for promotions, your best bet is to sleep with your manager.

10) CONSULTANT Lacking any specific knowledge, you use acronyms to avoid revealing your utter lack of experience. You have convinced yourself that your "skills" are in demand and that you could get a higher paying job with any other organization in a heartbeat. You will spend an eternity contemplating these career opportunities without ever taking direct action.

11) RECRUITER, "HEADHUNTER" As a "person" that profits from the success of others, most people who actually work for a living disdain you. Paid on commission and susceptible to alcoholism, your ulcers and frequent heart attacks correspond directly with fluctuations in the stock market.

12) PARTNER, PRESIDENT, CEO You are brilliant or lucky. Your inability to figure out complex systems such as the fax machine suggest the latter.

13) GOVERNMENT WORKER Paid to take days off. Government workers are genius inventors, like the invention of new Holidays. They usually suffer from deep depression or anxiety and usually commit serious crimes while on the job...Thus the term "GO POSTAL"

A poem forwarded by Bob Overn (Sounds like lyrics for a new country song)

Many many years ago when I was twenty three,
I got married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter, who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her, and soon the two were wed.
This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life.
My daughter was my mother, for she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matters worse, although it brought me joy.
I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.
My little baby then became a brother-in-law to dad.
And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad.
For if he was my uncle, then that also made him brother
To the widow's grown-up daughter who, of course, was my step-mother.
 Father's wife then had a son, who kept them on the run.
And he became my grandson, for he was my daughter's son.
My wife is now my mother's mother, and it makes me blue.
Because, although she is my wife, she is my grandma too.
 If my wife is my grandmother, then I am her grandchild.
And every time I think of it, it simply drives me wild.
For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw.
As the husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa!

A Lesson in Statistics 
Forwarded by Richard Newmark

More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.

Fully 50% of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.

In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.

Every piece of bread you eat brings you nearer to death.

Bread is associated with all the major diseases of the body. For example, nearly all sick people have eaten bread. The effects are obviously cumulative: a. 99.9% of all people who die from cancer have eaten bread. b. 100% of all soldiers have eaten bread. c. 96.9% of all Communist sympathizers have eaten bread. d. 99.7% of the people involved in air and auto accidents ate bread within 6 months preceding the accident. e. 93.1% of juvenile delinquents came from homes where bread is served frequently.

Evidence points to the long-term effects of bread eating: Of all the people born in 1839 who later dined on bread, there has been a 100% mortality rate.

Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!

Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis.

Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.

Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.

Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.

Newborn babies can choke on bread.

Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute. Increased temperatures cause global warming.

Most bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between serious significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical political babbling.

Celebrity Quotations forwarded by Dr. D

And God said: "Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on  me.  And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan.
George Burns

My girlfriend always laughs during sex--- no matter what she's reading."
Steve Jobs (Founder: Apple Computers)

My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
Jack  Nicholson

There's a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men are  having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause severe  swelling. So what's the problem?
Dustin Hoffman

When the sun comes up, I have morals again. 
Elizabeth Taylor

See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only  enough blood to operate one at a time.
Robin Williams.

Bumper Stickers

Princess, having sufficient experience with princes, seeks a frog.
Bumper stickers --- http://www.send4fun.com/bumperp.htm 

Since he arrives in his office so early every morning and stays so late in the evening, this could happen to Bob Jensen! 

Birmingham (Ala.) Sunday Mercury, December 17, 2000

A REAL DEATH

 Bosses of a publishing firm are trying to work out why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for five days before anyone asked if he was feeling OK.

George Turklebaum, 51, who had been employed as a proofreader at a New York firm for 30 years, had a heart attack in the open-plan office he shared with 23 other workers.

He quietly passed away on Monday but nobody noticed until Saturday morning when an office cleaner asked why he was still working during the weekend.

His boss, Elliot Wachiaski, said: "George was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night--so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything.  He was always absorbed in his work and kept much to himself."

A post-mortem examination revealed that he had been dead for five days after suffering a coronary.  Ironically, George was proofreading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died.

And that's the way it was on February 16, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

February 9, 2001

Quotes of the Week

What are the real differences between virtual university and college faculty and faculty at traditional institutions?  I have found one big difference at the University of Phoenix ---  instead of awarding tenure, this institution offers its long-time faculty stock options.
Sally M. Johnstone, "Perception Versus Reality:  Differences in Faculty at Virtual and Traditional Institutions," Syllabus, February 2001, Page 16. 
(Note from Bob Jensen:   The first sentence appears to have a typo, but I quoted it as it was originally published.)

The world is changing like a kaleidoscope --- right before our eyes.
Marian Wright Edelman

Murphy's Law:  Avoid reality at all costs.

Murphy's Law:  Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.

Murphy's Law:  In a hierarchical organization, the higher the level, the greater the confusion.

Murphy's Law:  A man of quality does not fear a woman seeking equality.

Murphy's Law:  The first rule of intelligent thinking is to save all the parts.

Murphy's Law:  If you try to please everybody, nobody will like it.

Murphy's Law:  Do not believe in miracles --- rely on them.

Murphy's Law:  You can't expect to win the jackpot if you don't put the nickels in the machine.

Murphy's Law:  The man who smiles after something goes wrong has found somebody to blame it on.

Murphy's Law:  Sanity and insanity overlap a fine gray line.

Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul.
Malcolm Lowry

Epitaph of Malcolm Lowry (Shortly after publication of Under the Volcano, 1962)

Malcolm Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery
He lived, nightly, and drank, daily
And died playing the ukulele

Wow Site of the Week 

Orchestra, Drama, Opera, Dance
Online Classics (streaming videos) http://www.onlineclassics.com/ 

I had trouble getting the videos to run, because I am running on the NT system rather than Windows 2000.  Microsoft's Media Player 7.0 does not and will never upgrade to NT or Windows 95.  There is a fix of sorts that is noted at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q272/3/86.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0 

It's not the Wow Site of the Week, but it is a helpful site for U.S. taxpayers (download forms, instructions, FAQs, tax tables, IRS publication guides, etc.)

WorldWideWeb Tax [.pdf] http://www.wwwebtax.com/ 

Other helpers can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

Helper PowerPoint Slides of the Week

Time Value of Money  --- from the University of Tennessee's Suzan Murphy
 http://www.bus.utk.edu/finance/S.%20Murphy/MBA%20prep%20summer%20tech.ppt 

Contains story problems and solutions to those problems.

Reply from Leon Hanouille:

From: Leon Hanouille [mailto:ljhanoui@SOM.SYR.EDU]  
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 9:26 AM 
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU 
Subject: Re: Helper PowerPoint Slides of the Week

Thank you, Bob, for posting these slides. By the fact of your posting them, may we assume permission to adapt and/or use them for our students' benefit?

Since you introduced this issue of TVM, may I open a discussion thread on approaches to teaching it? Briefly, I do not teach, nor require my students to learn, the standard formulas. Rather, I distribute a set of tables and teach only one formula: TVM = $amount x table factor.

Rationale: 1) Most business students that I have had do not retain formulas, but they do remember concepts. 2) Each table will be used exactly the same way to find the factor: what row do I need (that is, how many interest periods are there) and what column do I need (that is, what is the applicable interest rate per period). 3) The logic implemented for a 'table approach' is virtually identical to that used with a financial calculator. Thus, students are learning just one approach, not two. 4) The logic (parameter specification) for the financial functions on most spreadsheets is very similar to that for financial calculators. Again, the basic learning approach is more consistent with and applicable to a new environment.

Over the years my students have been very comfortable with this approach. This is parole evidence only, but typically those who first learned (or, rather, were taught) the formula approach professed a greater understanding and better ability after the table approach. (Oh, I should mention that distribute only the four basic tables: PV and FV of a lump sum, and PV and FV of an ORDINARY annuity. The students learn to interpolate annuity-due factors from the ordinary annuity tables. That further imbeds the concepts involved.)

I'm not much of a PowerPoint user for lectures, but Suzan's slides would make excellent supplementary study material for my students. 
Thank you.

Leon
Leon Hanouille [ljhanoui@SOM.SYR.EDU] 

Reply from Bob Jensen

I think that permission is implied, but it is best to clear it with Suzan Murphy at the University of Tennessee.

I think your approach is great for openers. However, I think that it is essential that students eventually learn virtually all the Excel financial functions (without memorizing the formulas.

Academic Sites of the Week --- LEAD and SCALE for Evaluation and Assessment of Asynchronous Learning

The feature of the week is evaluation and assessment of asynchronous learning network (ALN) courses and technology-aided course materials.  The featured sites are the following:

For more threads on assessment and evaluation, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Accreditation Article of the Week 

"Regional Accrediting Commissions:  The Watchdogs of Quality Assurance in Distance Education," by Charles Cook, Syllabus, February 2001, beginning on p. 20 and p. 56.  I think the article will one day be posted at http://www.syllabus.com/ 

"So, what's new?"  It's a question we are often asked as a kind of verbal handshake.  As the executive officer of a regional accrediting commission, these days I respond, "What isn't new?"

My rejoinder is suggestive of how technology-driven change has affected American higher education.  We now have e-learning, largely asynchronous instruction provided anytime/anywhere, expanding its reach.  Faculty roles have become unbundled and instructional programs disaggregated.  The campus portal is no longer made of stone or wrought iron, and through it students have access to virtual textbooks, laboratories, classrooms, and libraries, as well as an array of services, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week; indeed we now have wholly virtual universities.  Technology has made our institutions of higher learning, once like islands, increasingly dependent on external entities if they are to be effective.  Once pridefully autonomous, they now seek affiliations with organizations both within and without the academy to jointly offer programming online.

These new phenomena, unheard of five years ago, challenge the capacity of regional accreditation commissions to provide meaningful quality assurance of instructional programs offered by colleges and universities.  Simply put, many of the structures and conditions that led to accreditation's established assumptions about quality do not hold up in the virtual education environment.  The core challenge, of course, is to deal with new forms of delivery for instruction, resources, and services.  But beyond that, as with so many things,  the Net has provided unprecedented opportunities for colleges and students alike to package parts of or all an educational experience in new ways previously beyond contemplation.  Given circumstances, it's reasonable to ask, "How is accreditation responding?"

Balancing Accountability and Innovation
The eight regional commissions that provide quality assurance for the majority of degree-granting institutions in the United States are effectively taking action collectively and individually to address the new forms of education delivery.  Working within their existing criteria and processes, they are seeking at once to maintain and apply high standards while also recognizing that education can be provided effectively in a variety of ways.  However, regardless of the form of education delivery in use in higher education, the commissions are resolved to sustain certain values in accrediting colleges and universities:

Amy Dunbar forwarded this one.

"Who Owns Online Courses and Course Materials? Intellectual Property Policies for a New Learning Environment," by Carol A. Twigg --- http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewSym/mono2.html 

"WebCT LAUNCHES NEW E-LEARNING HUB: FIRST DESTINATION SITE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION NOW HUB FOR 70 ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES" --- http://www.webct.com/service/ViewContent?contentID=2550741&communityID=-1&categoryID=-1&sIndex=0 

Lynnfield, MA, September 26, 2000 – WebCT announced today the launch of the e-Learning Hub, the first academic destination hub site for higher education. WebCT.com (http://www.webct.com/change), which encompasses 70 different discipline-based learning communities, is a place where students, scholars, teachers, and those in pursuit of knowledge come together to share and collaborate across academic and institutional boundaries. 

The launch of the e-Learning Hub represents the third wave in the evolution of online education. The first wave was the development of WebCT course tools, enabling faculty to create online learning classes, allowing increased communication and collaboration between students and teacher. The second wave expanded the online class to the online campus, through the key alliance of WebCT, SCT and Campus Pipeline, that allows universities to offer faculty and students a single streamlined system with one-stop, secure access to all of its online services. Now, the e-Learning Hub expands the learning environment to the entire global community of learners -- transcending class, campus and institutional boundaries. More information about the e-Learning hub can be found at http://www.webct.com/change.

The e-Learning Hub also fills the need among higher education faculty and students for robust online academic resources. Among faculty delivering online courses, 21% currently refer students to resources on the Web. These professors now go through the time-consuming process of finding, and vetting those resources themselves. In addition, Student Monitor found that 85% of students used the Internet for academic pursuits. The e-Learning Hub provides both groups with a single location for the start of their academic online research.

“Our customers are the best research and development resource we could hope to have,” said Carol Vallone, CEO of WebCT. “They made it clear to us that content – using the widest definition of content – needed to be readily accessible to them as they developed their online classes. The e-Learning Hub absolutely provides that and provides WebCT with an opportunity to maintain our relationship with the millions of students that take WebCT classes each year, throughout their careers and lives,” said Vallone.

“We were really excited to see the e-Learning Hub become available,” said Diane Oerly, of the University of Missouri/Columbia. Our faculty were seeking an environment in which faculty can communicate with other faculty and share resources within and across academic disciplines. So we were really pleased to see WebCT respond to that need to have learning communities that are focused at the discipline level but could span the world.”
While the e-Learning Hub provides specialized content within the 70 disciplines, there are common features to all the communities:

Pedagogical Underpinnings
The learning community concept is an important topic among education thought leaders. In Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace, authors Paloff and Pratt focus on community as the key to effective online learning: 

“Key to the learning process are the interactions among students themselves, the interactions between faculty and students, and the collaboration in learning that results from these interactions. In other words, the formation of a learning community through which knowledge is imparted and meaning is co-created sets the stage for successful learning outcomes.” -- Paloff and Pratt

Learning communities can exist within an online course, or among a larger group of teachers and learners. WebCT’s e-Learning community breaks down the barriers of the classroom, department and campus to enable the creation of unique resources through the collective efforts of the community. These collective resources will provide value to new teachers and learners, long after one specific course has ended. The Educational Laboratory at Brown also points to a learning community as one that through collaboration, transforms a central resource repository for educators into a learning community (“The Knowledge Loom: A Vision of a Distributed Repository Revisited”).

The enduring quality of the collective work done within the WebCT.com framework has already proven useful to WebCT customers. “The advantage that web-based learning has over computer-based learning is the sense of community and interactivity that the web can provide. The e-Learning Hub’s ready-made communities and discussions provide this sense of closeness. Of course, every instructor can and will also use their own chats and bulletin boards within their own course, but the Hub’s Discussions stay around when the courses are finished and they can be contributed to by people all over the globe. Using the Hub discussion forums with your students can give you connection to something that endures," said Laura Summers from Alva Learning Systems.

The development of the e-Learning hub is a natural outgrowth of the research conducted by WebCT founder, Murray Goldberg, when he first developed the WebCT course tools. His research indicated that the opportunity for collaboration and online communication increased student achievement when online class elements became available to students taking on-campus classes.

How it Works
WebCT, provider of leading online course management system has developed the e-Learning Hub so that when the two are used together, it creates a full e-learning environment. 

For example, an astronomy professor using WebCT for her course can introduce class materials in WebCT-ready format, that correspond to the textbook being used in the class. Students can then go to the e-Learning Hub to purchase access to that material – just as they would a textbook at the campus bookstore. 

The astronomy professor uses the e-Learning Hub to find out about an online briefing with NASA scientists and e-mails her class to attend the chat and she hosts a discussion following the chat where her students discuss the findings. She adds the discussion to the e-Learning Hub where other scientists and researchers respond to questions and add their perspective on the NASA announcements.

Students visit the e-Learning Hub throughout the term to Ask Dr. Astronomy questions about their theories and try to answer the “question of the day” and share their research and thinking with other students, researchers and professional scientists interested in the same topics.

Success of Math Forum – Model for e-Learning Hub Communities
WebCT launched the pilot for the e-Learning Hub at the beginning of this year, giving its customers and the academic community an opportunity to provide input on the content, usability and focus of the site. In the Spring, WebCT acquired the Math Forum as a model academic site for students, faculty and professionals. The award-winning Math Forum became the math community on the e-Learning Hub and also served as a model for the development of the other communities. 

The Math Forum, with its flagship “Ask Dr. Math” and “Problem of the Week” services, has developed a knowledge-building environment that integrates and capitalizes on activity in three areas: mentoring, community building, and establishing a resource center that provides easy access to mathematics, learning activities, and powerful tools. The Math Forum pioneered and fast became the leading academic community site as a result of its ability to foster communities and discussions between students, educators, and mathematicians. 

The e-Learning Hub now combines the input from the academic community, the thinking and experience of the Math Forum and the scale of a true destination site, with the offering of 70 discipline-based academic communities. 

About WebCT
WebCT provides the leading e-learning environment to the higher education marketplace. This robust e-learning environment integrates WebCT, the most popular course management system in the world and WebCT.com, The e-Learning Hub. WebCT.com is the first higher education destination site to offer both faculty and students online teaching and learning resources to a community of peers across discipline and institutional boundaries. Today, more than 48,500 faculty use WebCT to teach at 1,500 colleges and universities in 57 countries. Currently, WebCT is used to deliver or enhance courses totaling more than 6.9 million student accounts – a key metric for the industry, indicating the product’s widespread deployment at higher education institutions. These statistics don’t include more than 800 K-12 schools and almost 100 corporate customers who are also using WebCT, or about 7,500 others who are currently conducting free trials. More than 42,400 faculty provide links from their online courses to WebCT.com, The e-Learning Hub, and more than 1,368,000 college students had visited the hub this spring (Q2 Brand Intelligence). The Company has offices in Lynnfield, MA, and Swarthmore, PA, in the U.S., as well as Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. More information about the company and its integrated e-learning environment can be found at http://www.webct.com/change.

You can read about WebCT's main competition in this regard at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/blackboard.htm 

Online Interactive Calculations --- http://www.engineering.com/l 

Waterloo Maple, supplier of advanced software products and components for mathematical computation, announced recently its partnership with Engineering.com, an online resource for engineers. The partnership will allow engineers as well as students, architects, robotics designers, and others to perform complex calculations interactively using only a browser. No additional software or plug-ins are needed to access the results.
From SyllabusNews on February 6, 2001

Computer-Aided Engineering at the University of Wisconsin --- http://www.cae.wisc.edu/ 

From Syllabus News February 6, 2001

Handspring to Bring Visor to Higher Education

Handspring recently announced a distribution agreement with D&H Distributing's education division to bring the Visor family of products to campus bookstores nationwide. With a variety of plug-and-play Springboard expansion modules, students and educators can easily tailor their handhelds to suit their specific needs, such as taking notes and enabling field research and mobile communications. Modules currently include a range of modems, MP3 players, a graphing calculator, and content-based modules such as the 2000 Physicians' Desk Reference and the New Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Gartner Dataquest reports that worldwide handheld computer shipments, which totaled 5.1 million in 1999, will total 33.7 million units in 2004. North America will command dominant market share and a key component to this growth is the expansion of the market into vertical areas including education.

For more information, visit www.handspring.com. 

Consumer Sentinel - the FTC's fraud information --- http://www.consumer.gov/sentinel/ 

See how law enforcement all over the world work together to fight fraud, using Consumer Sentinel, an innovative, international law enforcement fraud-fighting program.

get the facts on consumer frauds from Internet cons, prize promotions, work-at-home schemes, 
and telemarketing scams to identity theft.
report your fraud complaints so they can be shared with law enforcement officials across 
the U.S. and around the world.
learn how U.S., Canadian, and Australian law enforcers work together with private sector 
companies and consumer organizations to combat fraud.
see trends and the types of complaints consumers file.

Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries http://www.humanities-interactive.org/splendors/ 

"The history of Mexico is no less intricate than its geography. Two civilizations have lived and fought not only across its territory but in the soul of every Mexican. One is native to these lands; the other originated outside but is now so deeply rooted that it is a part of the Mexican people's very being." Thus wrote Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in 1990 as an introduction to the great exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. With these words, he reiterated a sentiment that he had voiced four decades earlier in The Labyrinth of Solitude: "Any contact with the Mexican people, however brief, reveals that the ancient beliefs and customs are still in existence beneath Western forms."

There is no easy continuity between these two civilizations. Paz emphasizes the sense of antithesis—of opposition and struggle—that exists between the ancient heritage and the new customs and values introduced by the conquering Spaniards. This difference is most keenly felt when one stands in the presence of ancient works that seem to typify the native society. "The sculptures and monuments of the ancient Mexicans are works that are at once marvelous and horrible," writes Paz. They are strange, baffling, even terrifying, making reference to sacred rites and systems of belief that shock modern viewers much as they did the first Spaniards who gazed upon them wonderstruck. And yet, Paz maintains, these frightful images express an essential part of the Mexican's being. They did not cease to have meaning just because another civilization was overlaid on the old.

These two civilizations have been made splendidly manifest in the exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, with its selection of stunning artifacts organized to convey the essence of successive cultures that have occupied seats of power in the land.

Object-oriented database systems are quite different from relational database systems (e.g., MS Access, FoxPro, DBase, etc) that are extremely popular today.  I will begin this module with a quote from my favorite online textbook in accounting information systems (that I adopt each year for my ACCT 5342 course):

Emerging database systems concepts 
We conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of an emerging concepts relating to database systems. Object-oriented (OO) approaches to modeling and implementing database systems are becoming increasingly popular. This approach employs object-oriented modeling (OOM) techniques to model the domain of interest and then implements the resulting model using an object-oriented database management system (OODBMS). The object-oriented approach focuses on the objects of interest in the domain. Customers, vendors, employees, sales orders, and receipts are all viewed as objects that have certain attributes. OOM involves identifying the objects of interest, their attributes, and relationships between objects.

A critical feature unique to the OO approach is that an "object" package includes both the attributes of the object and the methods or procedures that pertain to that object. The methods might dictate how the object's attributes are modified in response to different events, or how the object causes changes in the attributes of other objects. Thus, a key difference between the database models described earlier and the OO approach is that OO models combine data (attributes) and procedures (methods) in one package, i.e., the "object." This feature of OO models is referred to as encapsulation - attributes and methods are represented together in one capsule. Another powerful feature of OO models is inheritance. OO models depict the real world as a hierarchy of object classes, with lower level classes inheriting attributes and methods from higher level classes. Thus, lower level object classes do not need to redefine attributes and methods that are common to the higher level object classes in the class hierarchy.

An OO model contains all details needed for implementation and object-oriented DBMS are powerful enough to represent all the information contained in the model. However, most organizations that have made heavy investments in RDBMS see little need to migrate to OO environments. While OO modeling methods are available, there is no consensus regarding the "best" method to use. Finally, although OODBMS are beginning to become commercially available, they have not gained much acceptance in the marketplace probably due to their relatively high cost and poor performance in comparison to RDBMS. Gemstone, ObjectStore, VBase, and O2 are some examples of OODBMS.

Accounting Information Systems: A Database Approach
by Uday S. Murthy and S. Michael Groomer
For more information go to http://www.cybertext.com/ 

Next I will repeat a great illustration pointed out in the message below from Alexander Lashenko:

Hello Bob, 

Take a look at http://www.sanbase.com/cx.html 

It's an original object-oriented DBMS with web interface. Looks very nice.

By the way, try to click at "Live connection" -> "connect as guest".

Regards, 

Alex.
Alexander Lashenko [alashenko@cryptologic.com] 

Reply from Ghazi Alkhatib

OODBMS are not suited for developing business systems. let us differentiate between OO analysis and design and OO programming languages. at the front-end OOAD maybe used to document the behavior of a systems and it gives some insights that structured methodologies don't. Some of the principles of OOAD are incorporated into what is call extended ERP, such as generalization specialization and others. However, when you try to migrated your analysis and design into programming, the transition is by no means smooth and seamless. OO programming languages are not developed for transaction processing. In fact the first major application used OO programming was the development of the user interface for one of the OS, as I remember the OS/2 presentation manager. No we come to UML. It is best used to document real-time systems with some physical components. Based on some research, UML as a whole is a lot more complex than other OOAD methods. On the other hand, relational DBMS do not support OOAD principles and you have to de-Objectize your EERP before implementation. This leave us in a big mess. If you try to teach all of that to accounting students, they need a good course in analysis and design and another in DBMS as pre-requisite. otherwise, the exposure to OODBMS is simply an academic exercise without actually any practical benefits. You may see the article in Computer, August issue page 16 entitled "Whatever Happened to OO Databases."

Of course this subject could be debated further with a lot more detailed discussions. 

Best luck.
Ghazi Alkhatib, 
Assistant Professor Department of Accounting and MIS College of Industrial Management 
King Fahd U of Petroleum and Minerals Saudi Arabia
ALKHATIB GHAZI ISHAQ [alkhatib@KFUPM.EDU.SA] 

On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, ALKHATIB GHAZI ISHAQ wrote: > OODBMS are not suited for developing business systems.

This is not true. Most businesses have not migrated to OODBMS for a variety of reasons having little to do with their suitability:

1. Many large corporations migrated to RDBMS just a bit over a decade ago, and so have enormous investments in it that probably have not yet been recovered. Migration is painful, expensive, and at times risky.

2. Support for full-fledged OODBMS from major vendors (IBM, ORACLE, SQL Server, SYBASE, INFORMIX,...) has not been quite forthcoming. The reasons should be obvious: they too have enormous investments in RDBMS, and they have chosen the strategy of providing OO features in RDBMS. In some sense, all major RDBMSes now are really Object-Relational, and support object features.

3. Lethargy.

4. Those with relatively little investment sunk in RDBMS ARE using OODBMSes. For example, I know that ObjectStore is quite popular with Telcos (not in accounting or business systems).

However, when you try to migrated your analysis and design into programming, the transition is by no means smooth and seamless.

This too is not true. Relational databases suffer from the classic impedence mismatch problem too. In fact the problem is not severe for OO systems, since data representation and manipulations are subsumed in the same language (java for instance). With the adoption of OQL, things should change for the users in that one does not have to be a hotshot C++ or java programmer to query a database.

In any case, even in the design of RDBs, good practice would be to specify them first in an object oriented fashion (for example in OMG's ODL) and then translate it into a relational design. That way, ALL important data design decisions are taken EXPLICITLY.

Sound strategy demands that we do not shoehorn our data to fit RDB model (the currently dominant technology). It demands that we explicitly consider the database in an idealised (object) world, and then with full knowledge take less than optimal design decisions to shoehorn the data into the currently available/dominant RDB world.

Many OO CASE tools nowadays offer RDB schema support.

OO programming languages are not developed for transaction processing.

This comes as news to me, considering the fact that most TPSes ARE written nowadays in C/C++ (or sometimes in Java, a "pure" OO language).

No we come to UML.  It is best used to document real-time systems with some physical  components. Based on some research, UML as a whole is a lot more complex  than other OOAD methods.

I do not like the complexity of UML very much either (I am suffering through it right now, having to inflict upon my students UML's complexity in all its glory). But it is pretty much an international standard of sorts. What we can not change in this world, we must endure.

UML is complex because it is an amalgamation of three OO approaches (Booch, OMT, and CRC). In a sense, UML is the Swiss army knife of oo systems design.

On the other hand, relational DBMS do not support  OOAD principles and you have to de-Objectize your EERP before  implementation. This leaves us in a big mess.

Commercial RDBMSes do support some object features (for example, user defined data types, class/object definitions, class methods, etc.).

My opinion is that it is ALWAYS better to start with object specifications and then translate to relational specs. Deobjectifying is a valuable reflective process in the design of databases.

Relational model is very elegant and has sound mathematical foundations (set theory and logic). However, it lacks complex data structures that we demand (in relational databases you can not have attribute values coming from domains that are sets, bags, arrays, vectors, lists,...). Object models, on the other hand provide for such complex data structures, but the underlying theory developments are more recent.

If you try to teach all of  that to accounting students, they need a good course in analysis and  design and another in DBMS as pre-requisite. otherwise, the exposure to  OODBMS is simply an academic exercise without actually any practical  benefits.

I agree. In our database course (offered concurrently with SASD) we start with the object model, introduce the relational model, and then study the translation both ways (OO -> RD, and RD -> OO). With the popularity of document databases, we also study translation to (and from) relational to hierarchical (document object) models, but the starting point is again object modeling of documents.

Jagdish S. Gangolly, 
Associate Professor (j.gangolly@albany.edu ) 
State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222. 
Phone: (518) 442-4949 Fax: (707) 897-0601 URL: http://www.albany.edu/acc/gangolly 

University of Washington's English Server: Race and Ethnicity http://eserver.org/race/ 

Memorial to the Bell System --- http://www.navyrelics.com/tribute/bellsys/index.htm 

Related Note:  I read in USA Today that Bell South is dropping its pay telephone business.  If some business does not buy a pay phone and continue the service, Bell South will rip the phone out and discontinue the service.  Pay phones still provide a useful and essential service, and I hate to see this service cease because cell phones have taken all of the profits out of the service.  

The Hidden Forest (Botany) --- http://www.hiddenforest.co.nz/ 

Six leading e-libraries:  

For more information, visit www.eduventures.com .

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books and libraries can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Super Bowl Commercials ---- http://www.adcritic.com/superbowl/ 

From InformationWeek Online, February 9, 2001

Windows 2001? Migration At Least Half Year Away

Enterprises planning to adopt Windows 2000 will do so gradually, typically taking six to 12 months to conduct top-down planning and to ensure a smooth migration to Active Directory and other new features.

In many cases, IT departments are setting up a central Windows 2000 infrastructure and leaving implementation timing and other details to individual units.

About half of the 100 IT managers surveyed by InternetWeek say their company will take longer than six months to complete the transition to Windows 2000. While 59 percent plan to transition in less than a year, only 8 percent plan it for less than a month. --Mitch Wagner

Read on: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCSr0Bdl6n0V30DKol 

PBS on race relations --- http://www.pbs.org/fromswastikatojimcrow/ 

From the Harvard Business School
American Women in the Emerging Industrial and Business Age http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/unheard_voices/ 

Traditional views about the role of women in society have colored the way that historians have typically approached topics concerning the role of women in the economy. Scholars have recently begun, however, to look more closely at the phenomenon of women in the marketplace. It is clear that women have long been an important factor in the economy, whether driven by necessity to take economic responsibility for themselves and their families, or motivated by the desire to take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities.

The manuscript collections at Baker Library contain a broad range of materials documenting the history of female small-business owners, investors, professionals, executives, consumers, executors of estates, household managers, and wage laborers. These resources, however, were often overlooked because they were not identified as such either in the printed guides to the collection or in the online records. In May 1999 the Historical Collections Department began a comprehensive survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American manuscript holdings in the Business Manuscripts Collection for material related to the history of women.

Based on a review of each of the finding aids in the Business Manuscripts Collection, more than 300 manuscript collections were identified as possibly containing records related to women's history. These collections were then closely examined to verify whether they contained relevant materials and, if so, to identify the names, occupations, and histories of each woman mentioned. Of the 300 collections examined, 219 proved to contain materials relevant to women's business and financial history in the United States. Detailed notes about the manuscripts and the women were made as the collections were examined.

The final steps of the project, which are currently underway, will ensure that the resources discovered during this project will be readily accessible to scholars. The data gathered from the manuscript collections forms the foundation of a database that will allow researchers to search the information about women found in the collections by a variety of criteria, including name, date, occupation, marital status, and location. In addition, the online catalog records for the manuscript collections that contain resources on the history of women will be edited to provide enhanced subject access, as well as access to records on individual women in the collections.

The online guide that follows is the first of these research tools to be available to scholars, providing both information on the materials that were identified within the manuscript collections, as well as a bibliography of secondary resources.

Hi Professor Jensen!

I have just visited your site http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acrobat.htm  and liked it very much, especially your list of international search engines.

Here is another search engine for your page:

Multimeta: ( http://www.multimeta.com/ )

This is a fast meta search engine (simultaneous searches in the major search engines, free URL submission service).

There is even an e-mail feature that allows to receive the search results by e-mail.

Best regards,

Mehul Trivedi
mehul_trivedi@yahoo.com  

Bob Jensen's search engine helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

World Environment (ecology) --- http://www.worldenvironment.com/ 

Hi Dr. Jensen,

I was visiting your web page today ( http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245progs.htm ) and noticed that you had a link to www.monster.com .

I was wondering if you would be kind enough to add a link to my website,

http://www.net-temps.com  "Net-Temps, A world of Jobs neatly Packaged"

Please let me know if this is ok with you, the people that visit your site can visit ours and create a Free Desktop for their Job Hunt.

Thanks, Becky Price Net-Temps
becky@net-temps.com 

-----Original Message-----   
From: Hockey, Robert   
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 8:01 AM   
To: Jensen, Robert   
Subject: Blackboard problem 

 I am sending you this e-mail to see if you can help me solve a problem   with Blackboard. These are about 10 of my students who cannot printout my   lecture notes. When they open up a lecture it opens directly into   Powerpoint and is a full screen. Normally in Powerpoint if you hit Esc it takes you to Powerpoint with the various toolbars and you can printout  slides or handouts. However when you hit Esc in Powerpoint through   Blackboard it takes you back to your lecture menu. For the majority of the  students this is not a problem because the slides open in the Blackboard   browser, not in Powerpoint and you can right-click and print them out.  I have worked with Steve Perez and he cannot come up with a solution.  I  was wondering if you can. I know that you know quite a lot about   Blackboard     

Bob Hockey  

Reply from David Fordham

-----Original Message----- 
From: David R. Fordham [mailto:fordhadr@JMU.EDU]  
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 1:05 PM 
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU Subject: 
Re: FW: Blackboard problem

This might related to a problem I had in Netscape and MS Internet Explorer.

I would post an Excel spreadsheet on the website, and when students would download it, the browser would open the spreadsheet ** in a browser window ** rather than in native Excel. The *browser's* toolbars and controls would appear instead of the Excel toolbars and controls. This confused the heck of students at first, and frustrated them because they couldn't get to the Excel tools.

We simply implemented a workaround: rather than click on the URL to download the file from the web site, we would RIGHT-click on the URL, and select SAVE TARGET AS... thus saving the file directly to the disk rather than "opening" it.

We would then start Excel and open the *disk file* from within the Excel program.

I don't know if (a) Blackboard lets you right click and save, or (b) whether the Blackboard problem has anything to do with this, but I thought I'd throw this in just in case it does.

My tech people were unable to explain why sometimes the browser opened the file in a browser window and sometimes opened it in native Excel. If anyone has an answer, please let me know.

David Fordham 
James Madison University

Reply from 

I have experienced the same thing, and think it is related to the version of PowerPoint that you use to view (not post) the slides. I have Office 2000 at school and Office 97 at home. At home I am able to open, from the Blackboard course site, the slides in the normal way. I see the slide view, the notes view, etc. and can print all of the same. At school I get the same effect as noted below - I only can view the slide show. This doesn't seem related to the browser because I use Netscape at both home and school. The only solution I have come us with (which is less than perfect) is to post 2 versions of the slides to Blackboard. One is the .ppt version and one is a Word version created by saving the file from within PowerPoint in an outline form. So students who have Office 2000 can at least download the outline version of the slides.

Regards,

Janet Mobus [jmobus@U.WASHINGTON.EDU] 

Reply from Kathy Hansen

There also is an option in PowerPoint to save the slides as a Word file with space for notes next to the slides. Click on File, Send to, Word. Save the file as a Word file and then upload that to Blackboard. It takes a lot less time that trying to upload the PowerPoint files and less time for the students to download. The problem is that you can't access your PowerPoint presentation from the web, you need to have your presentation on disk. So depending on what you want from Blackboard, this really saves time.

Kathy Hansen 
Associate Professor CSU-LA Los Angeles, CA
KATHRYN HANSEN [kathryn.hansen@PRODIGY.NET] 

The XBRL mailing list with more than 200 users runs very successfully on eGroups ( www.egroups.com  and now part of Yahoo!). Provides mailing list, Web-based archive and file storage. I have also used eGroups for small mailing lists including teaching teams.

Roger Debreceny [rogerd@NETBOX.COM] 

Bob Jensen's threads on "XML, XHTML, XFRML XBRL, XForm, and RDF Watch" --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/xmlrdf.htm 

"Abuse in America:  The War on Addiction,"  Newsweek, February 12, 2001, beginning on Page 36.--- http://www.msnbc.com/news/526153.asp 

I don't think I really ever understood drug addiction and alcoholism until I read this article.
"How It All Starts Inside Your Brain," Newsweek, February 12, 2001, beginning on Page 40 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/526132.asp 

Three new releases from the National Center for Education Statistics:

Advanced Telecommunications in U.S. Private Schools: 1998-99---  http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001037.pdf 

Digest of Education Statistics, 2000 --- http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001034

A Primer for Making Cost Adjustments in Education--- http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001323 

The software we use for AECM is called "Listserv" and comes from L-Soft <http://www.lsoft.com/> . I believe it is the best available. It has been around for about 20 years and is, by far, the most popular.

Barry Rice www.barryrice.com 

Business Strategy --- military theory
From the Scout Report on December 8, 2001

War, Chaos, and Business: Modern Business Strategy http://www.belisarius.com/ 

This unique Website, hosted by Kettle Creek Corporation, offers articles and presentations on the theories of Colonel John R. Boyd, a US strategist. Boyd wrote extensively on the ideas of agility and time-based competition. The former refers to the ability "to generate ambiguity, isolation, and panic in the opposing side." Boyd advocated combining agility with time-based competition, "to operate in rapid decision cycle time," in order to win wars. On this Website, these two theories are applied to business strategy. The articles in the database may be browsed by author or title, navigating via the left side of the screen. The site also contains a large collection of case studies, business applications, and biographies of Boyd. This site seems to be a little slow to load, but for those interested in applying military theory to business strategy, it will be well-worth the wait.

Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR) http://www.cesnur.org/ 

February 4th edition of the ENews Internet Essentials newsletter for the financial professional. The ENews newsletter, received a facelift this week. I hope you enjoy the new look. Check out  --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. How Does Technology (like XBRL) Become Accepted? 
2. XBRL Educational Resource Center Symposium at Bryant College Feedback 
3. Security Is the Wrong Place to Cut Costs 
4. Financial Consolidation Web Cast 
5. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

The document originally quoted here uses a false reference.  See http://www.viahealth.org/via_news/news1999/99_august_news/heartattack.htm 

From The Best, Worst, & Most Unusual (Noteworthy Achievements, Events, Feats, & Blunders of Every Conceivable Kind), by Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler (Galahad Books, New York, 1976).  

PSYCHOLOGY

Best Idiot Savant
Tom Wiggins was a feebleminded fellow from Georgia with the uncanny ability to imitate any piano performance after hearing it only a single time.  His keyboard work was identical to that of the master he copied, down to the subtleties of interpretation.  Following the Civil War, Wiggins toured Europe, performing before enthusiastic crowds.  Gradually, however, his talent began to fade.

A similar phenomenon was Kyoshi Yamashita, a very popular Japanese artist, who was totally unable to care for himself and depended on his government-appointed guardians.  More than once, Yamashita was found half-naked in the streets, unaware of his own home or name.  But his art shows no signs of his mental deficiency.

Best Madman:
Not all lunatics are dribbling, unproductive wastrels who do nothing but talk to themselves on the subway and frighten people.  Colin Martindale of the University of Maine studied the lives of fifty-two French and English poets recently and found that nearly half of them were psychotic and 15 percent were psychopaths.  Percy Shelley, for example, hallucinated frequently and was haunted by visions of a man attacking him with a revolver.  (The man in his fantasies could have been the equally unbalanced Lord Byron, who was textbook paranoid and always carried a pistol with him.)  John Keats often alarmed his friends with alternating fits of weeping and hysterical laughter, and the nineteenth-century French poet Edouard Joachim Corbiere spent much of his time constructing scale-model ships and the destroying them.

Most Unusual Anal Compulsive:
According to the catty Miss Gertrude Stein, the tidy French poet Guillaume Appolinaire always made love on an overstuffed chair because he did not want to mess up his ever-so-neatly-made bed.

Most Unusual Cure for Kleptomania:
If you're a storeowner beleaguered by shoplifters, the people at Rent-a-Thief Canada, Ltd., a Toronto-based firm, may have the remedy you've been looking for.  For $100 a day, they'll send over one of their carefully screened and trained free-lance thieves (who are mostly students and out-of-work actors) who will go through the motions of filching merchandise and getting caught and berated publicly while he's unceremoniously hauled off to the store office and the police are called. Says Les Cohen, general manager of Rent-a-Thief, "The whole thing is a put-up to show everyone present what's in store for shoplifters."  The company is a subsidiary of College Marketing and Research, Ltd.

Most Unusual Delusion of Grandeur:
In his prime Wilhelm Steinitz was one of the world's most brilliant chess players, but as he grew older he slowly went insane and was enslaved by the delusion that he could make telephone calls without a telephone and move chess pieces from one square to another without touching them.  He possessed, he claimed, a unique ability to emit electric signals from his fingertips that could move objects.

Steintz also claimed to be on speaking terms with God, and in one Icarian burst of chutzpah, he challenged God publicly to a game of chess.  Worse yet, he offered Him a one-pawn handicap!

Most Unusual Fantasy:
Apparently even those who are constantly called upon to make speeches must deal with butterflies in their stomachs.  Winston Churchill found that a simple fantasy helped him to conquer his stage fright.  Whenever he stood before a crowd, he tried to imagine that every man and woman he was addressing had a hole in his sock.

President Eisenhower is said to have taken his fantasies one step further and formed a mental picture of his audience sitting before him as naked as worms.

Most Unusual Foot Fetish:
Probably the most unusual was the Chinese practice of binding girls' feet in early childhood.  Bound feet became a symbol of sexual oppression.

According to a Life magazine article, the ancient Greeks had a gentler fetish.  They considered a longer second toe aristocratic--a longer first toe, base and plebian.

Most Unusual Phobias:
Mercifully, psychiatrists have not given names to every fear troubling mankind.  Perhaps the most unusual phobia with a name of its own is amaxophobia, the fear of riding in vehicles.  Other unlikely aversions include skokophobia (fear of spies) and triakaideaphobia (dread of the number 13).

Thomas Hobbes was afraid of the dark and always slept with a lighted lamp.

Degas suffered from nausea whenever he was in the presence of flowers or perfume.

Napoleon suffered from aelurophobia (the fear of cats).  Once in the Palace of Schonbrunn his aide-de-camp heard a  great ruckus in the general's chamber.  He entered to find "mon commandant" half-dressed, lunging with his saber at a terrified kitten cowering behind a wall hanging.  King Henry III of France was another swashbuckling political leader who felt faint at the very sight of a cat.

Erasmus, the Dutch scholar and humanist, came down with a fever anytime he smelled fish.

Most Unusual Psychological Test:
Link, a weekly newspaper published in New Delhi, India, quoted color specialist Max Luscher as saying that a person may offer clues about his real personality and innermost feelings by the way he adjusts his color television set.  If he makes the picture too red, says Luscher, he is probably too lustful; if he makes it too blue, he overeats; too yellow, he is too hopeful.  A picture too dominated by magenta may indicate homosexuality.

Forwarded by Dr. Wolff

History Test

These are Reported to be actual answers made by eleven year olds on History tests:

1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere. 

2. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada. 

3. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name. 

4. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline. 
(Note from Bob Jensen:  Socrates really did have an overdose of wedlock with his fierce-tempered wife.  Once she dumped a pail of human-waste slops over Socrates' head.)

5. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: "Tee hee, Brutus." 

6. Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head. 

7. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper. 

8. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroicouplet. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet. 

9. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead. 

10. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practised on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German half Italian and half English. He was very large. 

11. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this. 

12. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened and catapulted into Napoleon. Napoleon wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't have any children.

Also forwarded by Dr. Wolff

DARWIN AWARDS - 2000

The 2000 nominees are:

NOMINEE No. 1: [San Jose Mercury News]: An unidentified man, using shotgun like a club to break a former girlfriend's windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his gut. 

NOMINEE No. 2: [Kalamazoo Gazette] James Burns, 34, (a mechanic) of Alamo, Mich., was killed in March as he was trying to repair what police describe as a "farm type truck." Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise. Burns' clothes caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns "wrapped in the drive shaft."

NOMINEE No. 3: [Hickory Daily Record] Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, N.C. Awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith Wesson .38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear. 

NOMINEE No. 4: [UPI, Toronto] Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the building's windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously has conducted demonstration of window strength according to police reports. Peter Lawyers, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was "one of the best and brightest" members of the 200-man association. 

NOMINEE No. 5: [Bloomsburg News Service] A terrible diet and room with no ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man who was killed by his own gas. There was no mark on his body but an autopsy showed large amounts of methane gas in his system. His diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage (and a couple of other things). It was just the right combination of foods. It appears that the man died in his sleep from breathing the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed. Had he been outside or had his windows been opened, it wouldn't have been fatal. But the man was shut up in his near airtight bedroom. According to the article, "He was a big man with a huge capacity for creating "this deadly gas." Three of the rescuers got sick and one was hospitalized. 

NOMINEE No. 6: [The News of the Weird.] Michael Anderson Godwin made news of the Weird posthumously. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina's electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. Whilst sitting on a metal toilet in his cell and attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted. 

NOMINEE NO. 7: ["The Indianapolis Star"]. A cigarette lighter may have triggered fatal explosion in Dunkirk, Indiana. A Jay County man using cigarette lighter to check the barrel of a muzzle loader was killed Monday night when the weapon discharged in his face, sheriff's investigators said. Gregory David Pryor, 19, died in his parents' rural Dunkirk home about 11:30 pm. Investigators said Pryor was cleaning a 54-caliber muzzle loader that had not been firing properly. He was using the lighter to look into the barrel when the gunpowder ignited. 

NOMINEE No. 8: [Reuters, Mississauga, Ontario] A man cleaning a bird Feeder on the balcony of his condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories to his death. Stefan Macko, 55, was standing on a wheeled chair when the accident occurred, said Inspector D'Arcy Honer of the Peel regional police. "It appears the chair moved and he went over the balcony," Honer said. 

NOMINEE No.9: [Arkansas Democrat Gazette] Two local men were seriously injured when their pick-up truck left the road and struck a tree near Cotton Patch on State Highway 38 early Monday morning. Woodruff County deputy Dovey Snyder reported the accident shortly after midnight Monday. Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc and Billy Ray Wallis, 38, of Little Rock are listed in serious condition at Baptist Medical Center. The accident occurred as the two men were returning to Des Arc after a frog gigging trip. On an overcast Sunday night, Poole's pick-up truck headlights malfunctioned. The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older model truck had burned out. As a replacement fuse was not available, Wallis noticed that the .22 caliber bullet from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering wheel column. Upon inserting the bullet, the headlights again began to operate properly and the two men proceeded on east-bound toward the White River bridge. After traveling approximately 20 miles and just before crossing the river, the bullet apparently overheated, discharged and struck Poole in the right testicle. The vehicle swerved sharply to the right exiting the pavement and striking a tree. Poole suffered only minor cuts and abrasions from the accident, but will require surgery to repair the other wound. Wallis sustained a broken clavicle and was treated and released. "Thank God we weren't on that bridge when Thurston shot his balls off or we might both be dead" stated Wallis. "I've been a trooper for ten years in this part of the world, but this is a first for me. I can't believe that those two would admit how this accident happened," said Snyder. Upon being notified of the wreck, Lavinia, Poole's wife, asked how many frogs the boys had caught and did anyone get them from the truck. (Way to go, Lavinia!)

Note from Bob Jensen:  The Official Darwin Awards Website is at http://www.darwinawards.com/ 

And that's the way it was on February 9, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

February 1, 2001

I will be participating in the American Accounting Association's APLG  meeting in Ft. Lauderdale.  Please try to avoid sending me email February 1-7.  
Thanks, 
Bob Jensen

Quotes of the Week 

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
Author Unknown

Some people weave burlap into the fabric of our lives, and some weave gold thread. Both contribute to make the whole picture beautiful and unique
Author Unknown

Murphy's Law:  Each problem solved introduces new unsolved problems.

Murphy's Law:  For every credibility gap, there's a gullibility fill.

Murphy's Law:  There are three ways to get things done:

  • Do it yourself
  • Hire someone to do it
  • Forbid the kids to do it

Murphy's Law:  Definition of an elephant:  A mouse built to government specifications.

Murphy's Law:  I no longer get lost in the shuffle ... I shuffle along with the lost.

Murphy's Law:  Keep emotionally active, cater to your favorite neurosis.

My Secret is Out!

Advertainment: The Good and Bad 
The phrase "beyond the banner" is used more and more nowadays, as both click-through rates and CPMs fall through the floor. A very sticky way of advertising is called "advertainment," and one company already has out a survey on the best advertainments in 2000 --- http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2456 

Now I can let the cat out of the bag:  The jokes, human interest stories, poetry, and quotations that are embedded in my New Bookmarks might be termed Accountingtainment.  As a subject matter, accounting is pretty dull to billions of people --- even to a two or three  accountants in the world.  But if you add a little "tainment," chances are that you get your messages across to a wider audience.  This does not always work.  I'm reminded of the first draft of a mystery novel that I once wrote (and never tried to publish) for purposes of teaching accounting and finance in a novel.  My wife read the first draft.  Her comment was the following:  "Great story, but the accounting made it boring and messed up the reading flow.  It will never sell unless you cut out the accounting junk." (Sigh!)

I wrote a tribute to some authors (Bill Breit and Ken Elzinga) who did manage to teach economics in mystery novels that were successfully published.  See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/muppets.htm 

Chris Nolan forwarded the following link to turnitin.com --- http://www.turnitin.com/services.html 
I did link to this previously in my New Bookmarks to www.plagiarism.org, but you should also know about turnitin's expanded portfolio of services:.

Turnitin.com is the educational branch of the Internet company iParadigms, Inc., which was founded in 1997 by a group of UC Berkeley computer scientists and researchers concerned with the growing problem of intellectual property theft in the Internet. They developed a series of new, algorithm-based pattern matching techniques able to turn any text document into a virtual 'digital fingerprint', which, with the help of a series of automated web robots, could then be used to track sensitive information online. iParadigms is presently using these technologies to help a variety of organizations protect their intellectual property, ranging from patents and other proprietary information to every form of digital media. More information on iParadigms can be found at our corporate website, www.iparadigms.com .

Since the researchers who developed the technologies at the heart of iParadigms were teachers as well, it seemed the next logical step to apply those technologies to help ensure that their own students were not abusing Internet resources and submitting work taken from sites in the Web. Initial tests in large classes at UC Berkeley produced disturbing results: in one large class it was found that 45 out of 320 students-- approximately 15%-- had turned in papers either partially or completely lifted from one or more sites online. Subsequent tests at other institutions produced similar results, and a very recent test conducted at UC Berkeley has confirmed that the problem, unfortunately, is only getting worse. We at Turnitin.com  are alarmed at the downward trend in academic honesty that has accompanied the growth of the Internet, and feel our service provides invaluable assistance to educators and students seeking to reverse this trend and ensure a level playing field for all students. Additional information on these tests, in addition to detailed analyses of the various techniques employed by digital plagiarists, can be found at our informational site, www.plagiarism.org .

Our aspiration at Turnitin.com is, ultimately, to provide a whole portfolio of services designed to tap the Internet's potential as a unique educational resource. We do not see ourselves as a 'policing force' intent on punishing students, nor as a barrier to students wishing to make full use of the educational possibilities the Internet provides. Conversely, we also understand-- if the Internet is ever to reach its full potential as an educational tool-- that certain controls need to be implemented to ensure that this foreseeably limitless resource remains an asset rather than a detriment to learning. The first step is already being taken by the numerous subscribers to Turnitin.com around the world. We intend to further this process by expanding our services in the coming months to include a digital archiving system for the efficient storage and retrieval of academic documents, and in the near future plan to launch a sophisticated, online classroom management system available to all Turnitin.com subscribers. A final goal will be to open our vast and growing database of papers to members of the entire academic community, where it will serve as a forum for both teachers and students to exchange their ideas freely and without risk of theft. This final goal, however, is only realizable in an Internet environment insured against intellectual property theft in any of its many forms; as such we encourage any educator concerned with the deterioration of academic integrity in our institutions to help us realize this goal and become a member of the Turnitin.com educational community.

Bob Jensen's Threads on Plagiarism Detection --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarsm.htm 

Tips of the Week are from http://www.bitbetter.com/powerfaq.htm 

Can I save my presentation to HTML?  The answer is a qualified "yes".  If you want to do this, upgrade to PowerPoint 2000.  In the File menu of PowerPoint 2000, you'll see the "Save to Web" option.  This dialog does a lot of things, none of which are obvious.  

Clicking SAVE:  This saves your presentation as HTML in such a way that PowerPoint can reopen the file, edit it, and save back to HTML.  (Useful if you saw a typo, for example, and you wanted to go back and fix it.)  The file created by this function will be large and will look and work really nicely in IE5.  HOWEVER, it won't work at all in any version of Netscape.  So, this is the classic "Microsoft only" solution.  Files are big.  All links, action buttons, transitions, builds, animations, and even Flash files display properly.

Clicking PUBLISH: gives you three alternatives, all of which are one-way only (you can't open these html files back up in PowerPoint).

Option 1: Publish for IE4 and higher: does the same quality job as above (good, but only for IE); no difference in file size from SAVE.

Option 2: Publish for Netscape Navigator 3.0 and higher: creates a file that doesn't look as good as the IE versions, but does work for Netscape.  You'll find that navigation buttons and links will still work, but all other effects will display but not work.  Files are very small.

Option 3: Publish for both options 1 & 2: essentially, this does both 1 & 2, and people get the best one for their browser.  Files are same size as adding options 1 & 2.  While this creates a lot of space on the server, it probably is your best option if you don't live in an all Microsoft world.

Important Note: If you want transition effects, builds, and animation effects to work in your web pages, you'll need to change a setting.  From the File menu, click on Save to Web. Then click the Publish button, and then click the button marked "Web Options..."  In this dialog, make sure that the box that says "show slide animations while browsing" is clicked.  Otherwise, your animations will not play, regardless of how you save the file. 

How can I transfer my presentation to video?  Upgrade to PowerPoint 2000, and then try using the "Presentation Broadcasting" feature.

Is it possible to save a presentation as read-only?  Not really. You can save a presentation as a template (POT) file, which will open an unnamed copy of the template, but these files contain only masters, and no slides.

Is there a list of keyboard shortcuts somewhere?  Yes, on this very web site. Click here to see it.

How do I get rid of Custom dictionary entries? These are stored in a file known as custom.dic. If you use the FIND command (from the Windows Start menu) you will probably find this file in: c:\\office97\office 

To edit the file, launch Notepad, and open custom.dic. There you will find the list of words that you've entered into your custom dictionary. Delete any words you don't want, save the file, close the file, and then restart PowerPoint.

Other tips (including audio and video tips for PowerPoint)

Drawing

How do I change the default colors? What happened to Recolor Picture in PowerPoint 97? Is there a limit to the number of guides you can have? How do I make my own PowerPoint backgrounds? (templates) How do I create additional pre-set color fills?

Pictures & Other Imported Files

My pictures turned to Big Red X's--what happened? How can I put Flash or Shockwave files into my presentation? How do I make bitmaps and captures screens display well in slide show? Can the WMF format be converted to GIF? Is there some way to prepare photos so they display well in PowerPoint? I'm trying to open *.wmf files, and just get garbage. What do I do? How can I make the background of my logo transparent? Why are my Excel Spreadsheets getting cropped when I paste them into PowerPoint? What resolution should I scan an image at in order for it to present well in PowerPoint? How can I import DXF files into PowerPoint?

Animation & Slide Show

How do I get Animated GIF files to play in Slide Show? Any way to have smooth (aliased) fonts in Slide Show? Are there any Animation Plug-ins for PowerPoint? Why won't my branched presentations work when presented with the Viewer? Is there a way to go backwards in an electronic slide show? Any way to run two different slide shows at once on two different monitors? Any way to seamlessly run slide shows sequentially? Any way to "zoom in" on a picture in slide show? Why is my slide show playing in a window? How can I make objects flash infinitely in slide show? Any way to have OLE objects update automatically in slide show? How can I go "back" in a slide show like I do in my browser? Any way to make Right Mouse go backwards in slide show? How can I change the speed of the transitions? Can I create links that go to web pages while in slide show? Why does the speed of animation effects change on different computers? Can you prevent PowerPoint from advancing slides when anything other than buttons are clicked? How can I make font animation (like in Microsoft Word) work in PowerPoint? Is there a way to make my own animations and play them in PowerPoint?

Sound & Video

Is it possible to use an Audio-CD soundtrack in my presentations? Can I play QuickTime movies in PowerPoint? Why don't sounds play when I move my file to another computer? What movie format plays on both Mac and Windows? How do I make my sound files invisible in Slide Show? How do I get rid of the Virus Alert when playing mpeg Videos in Slide Show? Why do my movies start and end with black boxes? How can I make PowerPoint load embedded sound files more quickly? Any way to play a Sound and Animation simultaneously?

Printing

Is there a way to control how slide print in black and white? Any way to keep some slides from printing? How do I print giant posters from PowerPoint? Any way to print a catalog of slides with titles and file names? Why is my bulleted text printing differently from how it looks on screen?

Formatting

Is there a way to adjust "kerning" or "tracking" in PowerPoint? How can I get Word tables to look good in PowerPoint? How do I get graphs to look right when the file is transferred to the Mac? Any way to have more than two masters, like Persuasion? Why do my Org Charts keep falling apart? How do I change PowerPoint's ruler from Metric to US? Why are all my slides black and white? What happened to the colors? Any way to change the presentation design of individual slides? Is there anyone who makes an Indexing Tool for PowerPoint presentations? How do I make a new Title Master? How do I make a slide use the Title Master and not the Slide Master?

Saving, Using, Editing & Opening Presentation Files

Which versions of PowerPoint can open/save which other versions? Any tools for recovering corrupt .PPT files? Can I save my presentation to HTML? How can I transfer my presentation to video? Is it possible to save a presentation as Read-Only? Is there a list of keyboard shortcuts somewhere? How do I get rid of Custom dictionary entries? What is the maximum file size for PowerPoint? How do I completely remove PowerPoint? How do I make a PowerPoint file into a self-running executable file? How do I merge two presentations into one? Can Power Point slides be made into PDF files? Why do I get errors trying to edit OrgCharts in PowerPoint? Is there a way to copy slides into a specific location in my presentation? Why is my file still big, even after deleting things?

Unsolved Mysteries This section of the site is devoted to those questions that should have answers, but unfortunately don't. If you have some information about any of these questions, please mail us and let us know!

What happened to PowerPoint 5.0 and 6.0? Any utilities that will replace bitmaps in bulk in PPT? Any way to play Screencam exe files in PowerPoint slide shows? Know where to get a copy of PowerPoint to run on Windows 3.1? How do you populate List Boxes using VB in PowerPoint?

Initial Contributions From Phil Padgett & Michelle Olsen

In the January 26 edition of New Bookmarks, I introduced you to Phil Padgett.  During my first meeting with Phil in my office, we delved into the perplexing question how to choose authoring software for learning modules and courses on the Web.  See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetoolsa.htm.

The two messages that follow are Phil Padgett's first contributions to New Bookmarks.  

Hello Bob, 
Regarding forwarding the message/link to the AECM: Michelle and I have no objection to sharing the link to our HTML course if you think that it will understood by all that the Intro to HTML was a limited test due to restrictions posed by the "lecturetech.com" web site plus the absence of the interactivity, exploration, and assessment features required for quality web based learning. The only course developed by us on that "lecturetech" page was HTML. Several of the other examples posted for review on that web page provide some examples of the kind of issues we are trying to address.

I sincerely apologize for not getting back to you with heartfelt thanks as soon as I returned to Pocatello, so I want to do that now. Thanks! It was great to find leads to so many fine people who have similar interests.

It was also encouraging to discover that the research and work that my partners and I have done may help others. As the intermountain region does not offer many project opportunities, we hope that we may find contacts who can use our services.

Our ISP has provided sufficient server space to support us posting our research database and some examples of our work and experiments with higher order learning objectives, assessment, and simulation as well as on going research toward integrating learning styles, personality types, and emotional intelligence into the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning domains. Work on our web site commenced as soon as I returned, and we hope to be able to post good examples of our web courses and research within the next 10-14 days. Then we won't need a pallet of CD's. Meanwhile, the HTML course posted on "lecturetech" may help to demonstrate the power of coordinating narration with graphics.

More to follow....

Sincerely, Phil Padgett & Michelle Olsen
Phil Padgett [padgettp@qwest.net] 
Idaho State University

I am providing a non-passworded link to one of the two sample courses that my partner Michelle and I created to explore the possibilities of an on-line delivery method that addresses several issues that seem to be obstacles for many faculty.

Background.

Faculty tend to teach the way they were taught, and for most this means spending much class time in a lecture environment with presentation aids such as overhead transparencies, Powerpoint slides, or electronic projection systems. Many faculty are still intimidated by computer technology, and many of those who take the first steps toward creating an online course (at least in Idaho) simply input their powerpoint slide graphics and provide printable notes pages of the same material.

Our approach is to use ISD methods to develop criterion referenced goals & objectives, higher order assessment instruments, and story board designs before beginning production. Production means crafting a graphic with a script for professional narration that plays while the slide is displayed. Each slide may have hyperlinks to text references, exercises, enrichment sources, glossary, etc. This method simulates a classroom presentation while providing all the capabilities of hyperlinked resources.

http://www.lecturetech.com/ku/ 

When I met with Bob Jensen, I showed him a pass worded course entitled "Introduction to Photoshop" that has the above features plus simulation of tools for image repair and enhancement -- that is the one I will provide on CD-ROM to you. In the meantime, the link I am sending to you will give you access to the first course entitled "Introduction to HTML" -- it was done within a few days to test the conversion of fireworks graphics and the narration tools. The link opens a page with several courses -- only one is ours, the Introduction to HTML.

The "full text version" link provides the student with a downloadable copy of the narration, text of the slide, notes that enrich the content, as well as links to class projects, assignments, assessment, and other resources. More of these features are implemented in the Photoshop course we will be showing you shortly.

Please remember that these two efforts are just demonstration vehicles -- we are working on some courses that will push these capabilities to reach and measure achievement of higher level learning objectives -- Bloom level 5 and 6.

My partner Michelle and I looked at your web site a little while ago, and it looks like your graphics emphasis is very similar to ours. Please let us know how you feel about the combination of graphics, voice narration, etc.

We will be looking forward to talking with you next week.

Sincerely,

Phil Padgett & Michelle Olsen
Phil Padgett [padgettp@qwest.net] 
Idaho State University

The following message may have implications for education and well as business practice.  In this era of being overwhelmed with information, we may well revert to human instructors and other experts for reasons mentioned below by David Drucker:

From Internet Week on January 29, 2001

Knowledge Mgm't Revised: Theory Doesn't Equal Practice

Only a handful of companies are experimenting with "knowledge management," and already the definition is changing drastically.

Pundits and vendors paint a world in which information in document management systems, databases and other applications is invisibly captured for reference at a later time. IT organizations, on the other hand, say their users aren't interested in reusing old data. Rather, the early KM adopters are building systems that connect workers to resident experts on various subjects--but the knowledge exchange occurs offline.

Energy company Texaco is a prime example. Nearly every department in the 18,000-employee company has at least some users actively participating in KM-aided projects. But there is little perceived need to reuse information from past projects.

"The kind of prospects, explorations and drilling projects we deal in tend to be one of a kind," says John Old, an IT manager who oversees KM efforts at Texaco.

Because of this, capturing and retrieving documentation is superseded by the need to connect with those who possess knowledge so that teams can decide the best way to solve problems. --David Drucker

Keep reading: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCGL0Bdl6n0V30C1cI 

Academic Site of the Week

Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/ 

Fallacies of Distraction

Appeals to Motives in Place of Support Changing the Subject Inductive Fallacies Fallacies Involving Statistical Syllogisms Causal Fallacies Missing the Point Fallacies of Ambiguity Category Errors Non Sequitur Syllogistic Errors Fallacies of Explanation Fallacies of Definition References

The Scout Report stated the following on January 23, 2001:

Stephen Downes, an information architect with a background in philosophy, created this site with the aim of identifying, indexing, and describing "all known logical fallacies." A logical fallacy can be defined as an error in reasoning in which a conclusion appears to follow from a set of premises but in reality does not. Downes groups the fallacies into thirteen categories, such as Fallacies of Distraction, Inductive Fallacies, and Syllogistic Errors. Each fallacy (over 50 in all) is described with its name, definition, examples of how it might be used in an argument, and how the argument can be proven fallacious. The How to Use this Guide section of the site provides a helpful introduction, and a robust bibliography offers possibilities for further study of logic. In addition, users may register at the site (no fee) to gain access to discussion boards on the topic. The author notes that his Guide "is intended to help you in your own thinking, not to help you demolish someone else's argument." Regardless of how a reader uses the information, however, the site remains an interesting and fun investigation of how logical arguments are constructed.

An audio interview with Phil Livingston --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28819.xml 

(Jan. 15, 2001) — Philip Livingston is president and CEO of Financial Executives International, a professional association for senior financial executives. In this interview, Livingston discusses the issues and concerns accounting and finance professionals are faced with today, and FEI's involvement in the community of corporate financial professionals.

Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
Show Number 407 of the Digital Duo has a nice summary of online encyclopedias and dictionaries.  Go to http://www.digitalduo.com/407_dig.html 

The references are as follows:

Whether you're a student searching for just the right word in the wee hours of the morning or an epidemiologist needing a map of Equatorial Guinea late at night – you can always use good reference materials at your fingertips, 24-7. For years we've all depended on those thick, clunky reference books in the library (or if you're lucky – at home too). But now many of our tried-and-true reference sources can be found on the Web.

Web-based reference sources offer several advantages over their leather-bound counterparts. For one, you don't have to go to the library to find the latest, detail-laden Encyclopedia Britannica or the complete, 20 volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. You can access these extraordinary reference materials from the privacy of your home at any hour of the day. Plus, the online editions are often more up to date than their library counterparts. And they're often, but not always, free.

Let's start with encyclopedias. The wizened old grandfather-of-them-all would have to be the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can find this resource online at Britannica.com. The online version not only keeps pace with the real-world edition, but also allows you to search 70 major magazines and some 125,000 Web sites. This larger net can be quite useful if you're trying to find something a little more obscure than say, a map of Venezuela.

So let's give it a try! Steve grabbed the old dead tree copy of the encyclopedia and Susie went online to Britannica.com. What's the secret search term? Kenneth Tynan, the playwright. Analog Steve came up a bit short, finding almost no references to Tynan. Digital Susie found plenty of info: articles on theater, critical analyses and the like, not only from Britannica, but from outside sources as well.

So is the online way the only way to research today? Not exactly. Britannica.com leaves out maps, photos, and graphics. For that kind of useful visual support you'll have to try other online encyclopedias like Encarta.com.

Encarta.com is very well-organized and well-presented. The visuals are great, but the information is rather shallow. To get more and deeper content, you'll need to buy the CD-ROM edition. The online edition mainly serves as a supplement to the larger CD.

There are, of course, several useful online encyclopedias. Bartleby.com is a compendium of several encyclopedias. It had plenty to show for our search on Kenneth Tynan. Encyclopedia.com is good only for quick and dirty, simple searches.

What if you just need a single word – le mot juste? If you're looking for a single word, or definition – you'll need a good dictionary. If you happen to be at your computer when the need strikes – there are several great online dictionaries you can use for reference.

One of the best is Dictionary.com which has a sister site Thesaurus.com. Dictionary.com is based on the American Heritage Dictionary Third Edition and is very fast. Encarta.com also has it's own dictionary which will pronounce words for you. It's way better to hear a word than to try using an arcane pronunciation key. And like a pulp dictionary, Encarta.com lets you see the words that come before and after the one you're looking for in the alphabetical lineup so you can browse for the sake of curiosity. That was always a fun feature of the paper dictionaries.

If you're one of those hyper-educated types who shuns two and three dollar words for the ten dollar word with full historical background – the only source for you is the Oxford English Dictionary. The venerable OED. Yes, it's on the Web too, as OED.com. But this behemoth is far from free, costing $550 per year. That's actually a lot of money considering the fact that the full-fledged, twenty volume edition costs about $2000. And it's also expensive compared to the $300 real-world "Compact Edition". The typeface is so small in the CE that it comes with a magnifying glass!

So enough bavardage, let's have another face-off. The secret word this time is "solinomial". Steve's analog search took slightly longer than Susie's online query about 15 seconds in total. The results? Solinomial means "Consisting of a single term." Fascinating.

The online edition does offer benefits over its analog cousin. You can perform backwards searches – so if you needed a cool word for "hat" you could look "hat" up in the definitions and find yourself with a "trilby."

In many cases the true scholar will opt for the old leather-bound edition of OED. There are some books that should just be analog, if only for sentimental reasons.

Bob Jensen's Search Helpers contain links not mentioned by the Digital Duo.  See  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

Search for Websites
Search for People and Missing Persons
Searching for Companies
Librarian's Index to the Internet
Library Spot
Electronic Books Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, and Glossaries

Bob Jensen's bookmarks to encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other such things can be found at 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm 
Encyclopedias not mentioned by the Digital Duo include the following:

Eyewitness Encyclopedia (over 40,000 pictures and 2 million terms) --- http://eyewitness.dk.com/ 
eBLAST : Encyclopædia Britannica's Internet Guide
Encyclopedia of the New Economy
The Funk & Wagnalls Knowledge Center

The Canadian Encyclopedia (History) http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ 
Alternative Cultures http://www.altculture.com/
NatureServe - an encyclopedia of North American plants, animals, and ecology. --- http://www.natureserve.org
SYMBOLS.com -- encyclopedia of Western signs and ideograms

Dictionaries not mentioned by the Digital Duo include the following:

The DICT Development Group --- http://www.dict.org/ 

A great online source for references, dictionaries, quotes, great books, poetry, and much more --- http://www.bartleby.com/ 

On PBS television, the Wall Street Journal's technology editor, Walt Mossberg, clued me in on one of the neatest free software downloads that I have ever seen.  Guru software is from Israel, and the web site is at http://acronymfinder.com/ 
(Warning:  Photoshop users should probably not use Guru, because Guru takes over the (Alt, Click) keystroke combination that is also used for the clone tool in Photoshop.)

American Heritage Book of English Usage (Dictionaries) --- http://www.bartleby.com/64/ 
 
OneLook Dictionaries (Dictionary), The Faster Finder

Cambridge International Dictionaries Online 

Duhaime's Law Dictionary --- http://www.duhaime.org/diction.htm 
Sociology Dictionary http://www.iversonsoftware.com/sociology/index.htm
Guide to Pronunciation
Dictionaries, Glossaries, & Acronyms
LSP-Glossaries and Dictionaries I
Starting Point
WWWebster Dictionary - Search screen
Directories: Thesaurus of Geographic Names
DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms
Grammar Lady - Login - In the Crease
The Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD)
Philosophy Pages (includes Dictionary of Philosophical Terms)
Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus
Vocabularies: Thesaurus of Geographic Names

Pseudo Dictionary (This one is naughty and not nice) http://www.pseudodictionary.com/ 

Do you ever search for the spelling of an English word that you just cannot find in an English language dictionary?  Try http://www.mathcs.carleton.edu/faculty/jondich/CSTI/words.txt 

Once again, Bob Jensen's bookmarks to encyclopedias, dictionaries, glossaries, and other such things can be found at 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm 

The Power of the Internet for Learning: Final Report of Web-Based Education Commission ---  http://www.ed.gov/offices/AC/WBEC/FinalReport/ 

THE POWER OF THE INTERNET FOR LEARNING:

MOVING FROM PROMISE TO PRACTICE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .

The Power of the Internet for Learning . . . . .

Age-Old Dreams, Down-to-Earth Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .

Blazing Trails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . .

A Call to Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .

What Are We Waiting For? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .

No Turning Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Illustrative Stories:

Arming Soldiers with Laptops . . . . . . . . . .

West Virginia: Turning the Campus into a Computer Lab . . .

Seizing the Opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .. .

Access to Broadband Technologies: Bridges Across the Digital Divide . .. .

Technology Trends: Delivering on the Promise . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .

Digital Inclusion: Are We Doing Enough? . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .

Household Internet Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .

Wiring Schools and Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .

K-12 Educational Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .

Postsecondary Institutions . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Internet Ramps for the Disabled . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Illustrative Stories:

Digitizing Dakota! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Breaching Canyon Walls: Bringing the World to Isolated Reservations . .. .

Professional Development: How Technology Can Enhance Teaching .. .

Getting Beyond the Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Professional Development and Technology: Too Little, Too Basic, Too Generic

Comparisons With the Private Sector . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .

Bringing Teachers Out of Isolation . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .

The Internet as a Tool for Teacher Learning . . .. . . . . . . . .

Wanted: Two Million New Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .

Making Professional Development in Technology a High Priority . . . . .. . . .

Illustrative Stories:

Helping Isolated Teachers Make New Connections . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .

Co-Authors in Cyberspace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .

Correcting a Paucity of Research and Development . . . .. . . . . . . . .

Not Enough is Spent on Educational Research . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .

Educational Research Should Lead to Enhanced Learning Performance. . . . . .

Building the Foundation for 21st Century Learning Goals . .. . . . . . . . .

Educational Research That Teachers Value . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Illustrative Stories:

Making the Web Accessible for Students with Disabilities . . .. .. . . . .

e-Learning: The Medical Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . .

Compelling Online Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .

State of the Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .. . .

PreK-12: Moving From Online Materials, to Courses, to Full Programs. .

Online Content and Courses at the Postsecondary Level . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .

Assuring High Quality at the Postsecondary Level . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .

The Bottom Line Test: Does it Work? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .

Illustrative Stories:

Telecom Workers: Overcoming Educational "Busy Signals" . . . . . . . . . . . .

Turning Students into Virtual Explorers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Removing Regulatory Restrictions to E-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Regulation in a Nation of States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .

The PreK-12 Education Regulatory Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Postsecondary Education Regulatory Environment . . . . . . .

Federal Statutory and Regulatory Barriers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .

The 12-hour Rule . . . . . . . . . . .

The 50 Percent Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Ban on Incentive Compensation Plans. .

Copyright Protection: Horse and Buggies on the Information Superhighway .

Rethinking Regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Illustrative Story:

Learning at 'Virtual U' .. . .

Privacy, Protection, and "Safe Streets" . . .

Online Advertising and Marketing in Schools .. . . .

Online Profiling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Young People and the "Dark Streets" . . . . . . . . . .. . .

Potential Solutions . . .

Illustrative Story:

"Yo, It's Time for Braces" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Funding for e-Learning: A Continuing Challenge . . . . . . . .

Total Cost of Ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .

Local Budgets Vary, but Patterns are Consistent . . . . . . . . . . . . .. ..

Patterns of Education Funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .

Federal Funding for Technology—Targeted and General . . . .. . .

Telecommunications Funding: Intersecting State and Federal Responsibility .

Technology Investments Can Lead to Economies of Scale and Real Productivity Gains

Good Education is Good Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .

Aggregating the e-Learning Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .

Meeting the Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Illustrative Story:

A Classroom that Keeps Up With Migrant Kids . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Moving From Promise to Practice: A Call to Action . . . . . . .. . .

A National Call to Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .

 

Appendices

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Although web-based education is in its earliest phase, it holds extraordinary promise.

 

The bipartisan, congressional Web-based Education Commission set out to discover how the Internet is being used to enhance learning opportunity for all learners from pre-kindergarten through high school, at postsecondary colleges and universities, and in corporate training.

 

In the course of our work, we heard from hundreds of educators, policymakers, Internet pioneers,

education researchers, and ordinary citizens who shared their powerful visions and showed us the promise of the Internet—

 

·        To center learning around the student instead of the classroom

·        To focus on the strengths and needs of individual learners

·        To make lifelong learning a practical reality

 

We heard that the Internet enables education to occur in places where there is none, extends resources where there are few, expands the learning day, and opens the learning place. We experienced how it connects people, communities, and resources to support learning. We witnessed how it adds graphics, sound, video, and interaction to give teachers and students multiple paths for understanding.  We learned that the Web is a medium today's kids expect to use for expression and communication—

the world into which they were born.

 

And we were told first-hand that the Internet could result in greater divisions between those with access to the opportunities of web-based learning, and those without access.

 

We also understood that the Internet is not a panacea for every problem in education.

 

By the end of our work, we were able to identify the key barriers that are preventing the Internet from realizing its full potential for enhancing learning. The Commission was urged to help the nation better understand these barriers and offer its recommendations for addressing them.

 

Based on the findings of our work, the Commission believes a national mobilization is necessary, one that evokes a response similar in scope to other great American opportunities—or crises: Sputnik and the race to the moon; bringing electricity and phone service to all corners of the nation; finding a cure for polio.

 

Therefore, the Commission is issuing a call to action to:

 

••Make powerful new Internet resources, especially broadband access, widely and equitably available and affordable for all learners. The promise of high quality web-based education is made possible by technological and communications trends that could lead to important educational applications over the next two to three years. These include greater bandwidth, expansion of broadband and wireless computing, opportunities provided by digital convergence, and lowering costs of connectivity. In addition, the emergence of agreement on technical standards for content development and sharing will also advance the development of web-based

learning environments.

 

••Provide continuous and relevant training and support for educators and administrators at all levels. We heard that professional development—for preK-12 teachers, higher education faculty, and school administrators—is the critical ingredient for effective use of technology in the classroom. However, not enough is being done to assure that today's educators have the skills and knowledge needed for effective web-based teaching. And if teacher education programs do not address this issue at once, we will soon have lost the opportunity to enhance the performance of a whole generation of new teachers, and the students they teach.

 

••Build a new research framework of how people learn in the Internet age. A vastly expanded, revitalized, and reconfigured educational research, development, and innovation program is imperative. This program should be built on a deeper understanding of how people learn, how new tools support and assess learning gains, what kinds of organizational structures support these gains, and what is needed to keep the field of learning moving forward.

 

••Develop high quality online educational content that meets the highest standards of educational excellence. Content available for learning on the Web is variable: some of it is excellent, much is mediocre. Both content developers and educators will have to address gaps in this market, find ways to build fragmented lesson plans into full courses and assure the quality of learning in this new environment. Dazzling technology has no value unless it supports content that meets the needs of learners.

 

••Revise outdated regulations that impede innovation and replace them with approaches that embrace anytime, anywhere, any pace learning. The regulations that govern much of education today were written for an earlier model in which the teacher is the center of all instruction and all learners are expected to advance at the same rate, despite varying needs or abilities. Granting of credits, degrees, availability of funding, staffing, and educational services are governed

by time-fixed and place-based models of yesteryear. The Internet allows for a learner-centered environment, but our legal and regulatory framework has not adjusted to these changes.

 

••Protect online learners and ensure their privacy. The Internet carries with it danger as well as promise. Advertising can interfere with the learning process and take advantage of a captive audience of students. Privacy can be endangered when data is collected from users of online materials. Students, especially young children, need protections from harmful or inappropriate

intrusions in their learning environments.

 

••Sustain funding—via traditional and new sources—that is adequate to the challenge at hand. Technology is expensive, and web-based learning is no exception. Technology expenditures do not end with the wiring of a school or campus, the purchase of computers, or the establishment of a local area network. These costs represent just the beginning.

 

The issue before us now is how to make good on the Internet's power for learning and how to move from promise to practice.

 

The Web-based Education Commission calls upon the new Congress and Administration to embrace an "e-learning" agenda as a centerpiece of our nation's federal education policy.

 

This e-learning agenda should be aimed at assisting local communities, state education agencies, institutions of higher education, and the private sector in their efforts.

 

The moment is at hand.

 

We urge the new President and the 107th Congress to seize this opportunity and to focus on ways in which public law can be modified and changed to support, rather than undermine, the technology that is so dramatically changing education.

 

••We call on federal and state governments to make the extension of broadband access for all learners a central goal of telecommunications policy.

 

We urge federal and state officials to adopt a policy framework that will help accelerate broadband deployment in education quickly and effectively. The E-rate program, which has brought 21st Century telecommunications into the nation's schools and libraries, has provided a dramatic boost. Individual state efforts have shown promise and success. Local and state policymakers should consider complementary efforts focused on educational applications of broadband access.

 

••We call upon policymakers at all levels to work with educational institutions and the private sector to support the continuous growth of educators through the use of

technology.

 

We encourage continuing federal and state support for initiatives and models that make just-in-time, just-what's-needed training and support available to educators. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and subsequent Higher Education Act reauthorization offer the opportunity to make this happen and to incorporate the best thinking and practices identified by this Commission. Partnerships that bring together the federal government, state and local agencies, the private sector, and educational institutions offer the best promise of assuring continuing teacher empowerment and growth with technology.

 

••We call upon the federal government to create a comprehensive research, development, and innovation framework for learning technology.

 

We recommend establishing a benchmark goal for federal research and development investment in web-based learning, consistent with similar benchmarks in other industry segments. This framework would focus on high payback targets of educational opportunity and support the creation of learning communities and tools for collaborative knowledge building and dissemination among researchers, teachers, and developers.

 

••We call upon the public and private sectors to join forces in developing high quality content and applications for online learning.

 

At the federal level, the Commission recommends that Congress articulate content development priorities, provide seed funding for high need areas, and encourage collaboration and partnerships between the public and private sectors in the development and distribution of high quality online materials. The federal government should work with all agencies and programs to adopt technical standards for the design of online courses, meta tagging of digital content, and universal design standards for access for those with disabilities.

 

The Commission recommends that the education community develop standards for high quality online courses. The current voluntary system of accrediting higher education institutions and programs should continue but with better clarity for the consumer regarding online options.

 

The Commission recommends the convening of state and regional education accreditors and organizations to build common standards and requirements for online learning programs, courses, and certifications comparable to the standards required for onsite programs.

 

We call upon Congress, the U.S. Department of Education, and state and regional education authorities to remove barriers that block full access to online learning resources, courses, and programs while ensuring accountability of taxpayer dollars.

 

The Commission encourages the federal government to review and, if necessary, revise the "12-hour rule," the "50 percent rule," and incentive compensation requirements that are creating barriers to students enrolling in online and distance education courses.

 

The Commission encourages national, state, and regional education policymakers to increase cross-state regulatory and administrative cooperation in web-based education. We also call upon states to develop common and appropriate policies regarding credits, faculty compensation, accreditation, licensing, articulation, student services, and programs to reach underrepresented student populations.

 

The Commission endorses the U.S. Copyright Office proposal to convene education representatives and publishers to build greater consensus and understanding of the "fair use" doctrine in its application to online learning.

 

••We call upon parents, the education community, and the private sector to develop and adopt privacy and protection safeguards to assure that learners of all ages are not exploited while participating in online learning activities.

 

The Commission believes that filtering and blocking software alone is of limited value. Instead, we recommend encouraging developers and educators to collaborate in creating noncommercial, high quality educational "safe zones" on the Web. We also recommend that schools, districts, and states develop and promote programs for the safe, wise, and ethical use of the Internet.

 

The Commission also believes some adjustments to the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act may be necessary to allow educational exemptions for the collection of identifiable student data online with appropriate parental consent.

 

••Finally, we call upon the federal government, states, localities, and the private sector to expand funding initiatives and to develop new models to bring these policies to reality.

 

The Commission believes these initiatives could include tax incentives, additional public-private partnerships, increased state and federal appropriations, and the creation of a learning technology trust fund. The Commission encourages states and localities to aggregate their market strength as a way of bringing advanced technologies to education at a considerably lower cost.

 

The question is no longer if the Internet can be used to transform learning in new and powerful ways. The Commission has found that it can. Nor is the question should we invest the time, the energy, and the money necessary to fulfill its promise in defining and shaping new learning opportunity.

 

TheCommission believes that we should. We all have a role to play.

 

It is time we collectively move the power of the Internet for learning from promise to practice.

 

"Business Schools Revamping Programs --- http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/10/15/intelligent/IIMBA15.htm 
Some courses are getting an interdisciplinary focus as part of a move to cover the global economy.
Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 2000 

The interdisciplinary approach translates into a focus on risk management and problem solving at Villanova University. "We're moving away from memorization, and focusing more on how to make decisions in an imperfect world," Villanova's business school dean, Thomas F. Monahan, said. "We've tried to drive home the concept of systemic thinking. It's taking the case-study model, and exploding it throughout the curriculum."

The interdisciplinary approach mirrors what many "old-economy" businesses and new Internet-based companies are learning in the real world: They must mesh old and new skills to succeed. "Through the technology of the Internet, older businesses are becoming more agile and in touch with their customers," Judy Olian, the business school dean at Pennsylvania State University, said. "At the same time, online companies must deal with more traditional infrastructure issues. The economy is emerging into hybrid forms. GM is not going to go away; it will transform itself into e-GM."

Educators said the global, technology-driven economy creates other dilemmas. Olian said: "Because of the boundary-less marketplace, the important factor won't necessarily be where a company is located, but if it has an efficient distribution network." So business schools offer more courses on logistics and product distribution.

Along these same lines, I want to mention a conference in Berlin (where I will play a small part on the program).  It is called "Cross-Border Business Combinations," June 22-25, Hosted by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin organized by:

Details are given at http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/meetings/global3/toc.htm 

"Intelligent Machines Threaten Humankind," by Will Knight at http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/3/ns-20309.html 

Science fiction writer Isacc Asimov anticipated a potential menace. He speculated that humans would have to give intelligent machines fundamental rules in order to protect themselves.

Later Asimov added a further rule to combat a more sinister prospect: "A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."

Will machines ever develop intelligence on a level that could challenge humans? While this remains a contentious question, one thing is certain: computing power is set to increase dramatically in coming decades. Moore's Law, which states that processing power will double every 18 months, is set to continue for at least the next ten years, and quantum computers, though poorly understood at present, promise to add new tools to AI that may bypass some of the restrictions in conventional computing.

What was once the realm of science fiction has mutated into serious debate. While the focus is currently on cloning and genetic engineering, few people have seriously considered being annihilated by a robot race.

That is until an article published in Wired magazine early last year titled Why the future doesn't need us by cofounder of Sun Microsystems and esteemed technologist Bill Joy introduced a wider audience to the possibility that recent technological advances could be a threat to the existence of man. Joy discussed the potential catastrophes that could result from tinkering with genetics, nanotechnology and artificially-intelligent machines.

Most disturbingly, Joy cites not technophobes or paranoid theorists, but some of the leading lights of AI research and academia who have voiced concern that machines might confront humans.

Steve Grand, artificial intelligence researcher and author of Creation: Life and how to make it says it would be impossible for humans to be totally sure that autonomous, intelligent machines would not threaten humans. Perhaps more worryingly, he claims it would be futile to try to build Asimov's laws into a robot.

This was mentioned in an earlier edition of New Bookmarks.  Now you can read more about it in the New York Times on the Web ---  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/technology/24EDUCATION.html 

Former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett is chairman of the new endeavor, which is backed with an initial $10 million from Knowledge Universe Learning Group. It's academic approach is based on University of Virginia Professor E.D. Hirsch's very traditional "Core Knowledge" curriculum, developed in collaboration with John Holdren, now K12's senior VP of content and curriculum.

Promotional materials from the company assert that they will offer "world-class education to any elementary and secondary student who is interested -- regardless of...how much money their family makes." The fact is, however, that while the company reports it is exploring methods of establishing scholarships and providing financial aid, K12 will only be serving paying customers for the foreseeable future. Still, K12's creators remain hopeful that an assortment of tax credits, educational savings accounts and charter school mechanisms will eventually allow parents of any income level to afford their programs.

"Goodwill Gunked," By: J. Edward Ketz --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28897.xml 

Jan. 22, 2001 (Pro2Net) — For a couple of years the Financial Accounting Standards Board has held the line with its proposal to scuttle the pooling of interests method for accounting for business combinations, a method so devious that I have frequently referred to it as legalized fraud. While I have had some disagreements with FASB's proposal, overall it looked pretty good. Until recently, FASB blocked the bruising linemen sent by the so-called New Economy firms and picked up the blitzing linebackers hurled by the investment bankers. FASB has built up a small but steady lead in the game by advancing the causes of truth and representational.

From the  Scout Report on January 25, 2001

Business Combinations Project Summary http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/project/buscomsumm.html 

The staff of the Financial Accounting Standards Board presents its project summary for the Business Combinations Project. The project was founded in August 1996 in order to offer solutions to improve the "transparency of the accounting for business combinations." The Business Combination's main objective was to consider goodwill and purchased intangible assets as they related to accounting in business combinations. Although the summary itself is quite short, it links to a rich collection of supporting projects and documents including working papers, related projects, and Websites.

This reconfirms the elimination of pooling of interests accounting as part of the project on accounting for business combinations.

"Honey, please bring home some old, rottenish fruit from the market."

Scientists found that fruit flies possess a protein that mirrors the effect of cocaine in human beings. It could lead to a better understanding of the addictive nature of the drug --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41462,00.html 

Cognitors = CPAs Plus Visionaries

Editorial on January 26, 2001

Life is anything but dull over at the AICPA these days. The latest news has the national accounting organization teaming up with Bill Gates, who seems to be throwing money around the accounting profession faster than the SEC can say, "Auditor Independence."

Two weeks ago we saw Microsoft acquiring accounting software company, Great Plains, and now it seems the father of Windows has an extra $50 million to give to the AICPA for its new for-profit Internet venture, cpa2biz. Excuse me, but does anyone remember what happened the last time Microsoft tried its hand at accounting? The TaxSaver software program barely made it through one season.

Meanwhile the word on the street is that "Cognitor" is still the front-runner for the AICPA's new designation for CPAs and other professionals. There has been some dissent regarding this fancy title, but it would appear that the Great Oz has spoken.

Gail Perry 
Managing Editor mailto:gperry@accountingweb.com 

Reply from Professor Mattson on January 26, 2001

 Before we criticize the "Cognitor" too much, ask if we are involved in  the development of it? Are we working with the Vision Statement and  making our students aware of the opportunities out there in the business  world? Do we understand the implications of the vast changes in our  profession in the past 10 years? What will our students be expected to  do in their careers, given the political, economic, social,  technological, human resources and regulatory forces pushing the global  economy now? Have we examined the CPA brand elasticity research the  AICPA has had done? Are we willing to take some risks for the sake of  our profession?   

If we are looking at a global branding within the economic platforms of  the Vision Report, we must realize it will take 50 years or so to assess  the impact. This is not a short term effort. Maybe two generations of  CPAs from now will thank those with the foresight to take a chance.  Maybe not. That's the risk we as a profession have to decide to take or  not. Why not get involved with the evaluation of the advantages and  disadvantages to help determine if the risk is worth it, rather than  take potshots at the concept we don't understand.

Lucretia Mattson, University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire [mattsols@UWEC.EDU] 

Reply from Bob Jensen on January 26, 2001

I did not start this thread until late, and I have to agree with most of what Lucretia states. However, it is one thing to have a vision and another thing to have a dysfunctional name for that vision or the professionals in that vision. Sometimes the name of a profession can detract from the prestige of the profession. For example, when a king proclaims himself omnipotent, almighty, or nonpareil, he degrades what otherwise is a great accomplishment and a tremendous responsibility. The reason is that he's, thereby, claiming to be something he cannot possibly be in reality. It begins to sound like Saddam claiming he is omnipotent as proven in his great "victory" in the Gulf War.

The first point is that the naming of a profession should not glorify it beyond what it is in reality. For example, changing the designation from CPA to CIS (Certified Information Scientist) would be misleading, because most members of the AICPA Vision's profession are not educated to be scientists.

The second point is that the naming of a profession should set it apart from other professions. For example, the designation CIS (Certified Information Specialist) is too vague, because all knowledge of all other professions can be deemed "information."

The third point is that the naming of a profession should not use a term that associates it with some other profession. Replacing the designation CPA with "Cognitor" uses a prefix that is too closely aligned with the professions of psychology, education, and cognitive science.

Perhaps the professionals encompassed in the AICPA's Vision Project are too varied and disjointed to be embraced by any single designation. A traditional auditor is not an ERP consultant or an actuary. If we must have an all-embracing designation, choose a meaningless beginning and lend meaning to it through advertising and service. For example, the designation Aspirer would put this profession at the front of the Yellow Pages of the phone book. Or the term Globalspire has some connotation of global without being associated with other disciplines. But it probably has too many letters and, like Cognitor, does not lend itself to an acronym. Of course a CGP could be a Certified Globalspire Professional. (This is not a misguided attempt to be funny or cynical.)

I think that when the (former) Andersen Consulting firm changed its name to Accenture, the firm did indeed choose a meaningless name that it intends to lend meaning to with advertising and service. Plus the name Accenture places the firm near the front of the Business Pages in the telephone directory. Incidentally, when I go to the Accenture website using a T1 line, I once again discover how very smart professionals can make huge mistakes in Website design. It takes forever to open up the Acenture website at http://www.ac.com /. You should delete that big butterfly Accenture. I did, however, have better luck with http://www.accenture.com/  where there is no big Monarch butterfly.

Bob Jensen at Trinity University ( rjensen@trinity.edu )

Reply from Paul Williams on January 26, 2001

Professor Mattson: 
You make an interesting observation about not criticizing the "Cognitor" "Cognitor" designation until we understand what it is. But doesn't the term "Cognitor" imply knowing (perhaps even a Solomon-like All Knowing)? How could a knower not know what it is? Isn't "cognitor" dangerously pretentious? Most professions admit to a limit to their expertise, i.e., it is confined to a limited realm (medicine even acknowledges the limit to expertise through the first rule of medicine to do no harm). What is the limit of presumed understanding beyond which a "Cognitor" refuses to venture? Are "Cognitors" respectful of democratic controls? "Cognitor" -- laughably pretentious, but at the same time with an Orwellian creepiness. 

Paul Williams [mailto:williamsp@COMFS1.COM.NCSU.EDU] 
North Carolina State University

Reply from John Hayden

It is my opinion that the AICPA should spend its time defending, defining and clearly marketing the old name, CPA. It need not focus on Certified Public Accountant. It worked well for KFC when Fried was no longer what they wanted to accent Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC. They should be defending our brand against the likes of the CFP, CFE, CSA, CIA, CMA, CFM, CLU, ChFC.... They should be helping to retrain and retool those of us who have been out here awhile. Most informed international organizations already see the CPA as the same as the CA.

John Hayden, CPA 
The PJA School
Merrie & John Hayden [m.j.hayden@PRODIGY.NET] 

Intelligent Investing from the Philadelphia Inquirer  http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/10/15/intelligent/ 

Intelligent Stealing with the blessings of the U.S. Tax Court

CRIME, PUNISHMENT TAKE CENTER STAGE AS NEW CAST OF CHARACTERS CONFRONT THE IRS IN COURT, AccountingWeb --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=36650&d=101 

You’d think this tax scenario would be fairly straightforward: You surreptitiously skim a few hundred thousand dollars from your own company; the IRS finds out about it; they want, and get, their share. Fuhgeddabowdit, said the Tax Court.

The Court held that an officer in a corporation was not required to include in his income amounts that he skimmed from his companies in a false invoice scheme and subsequently paid out in kickbacks to secure business for those companies.

In this case, William D. Zack and his business partner arranged for suppliers to submit false invoices to their companies for work that was not performed. The companies paid the suppliers pursuant to the invoices, and then the suppliers returned the payments to Zack and his partner, less a "handling fee" of 25 percent.

Separately, Zack and his partner began looking into contracting opportunities for their companies with Ford Motor Company. A Ford employee who met with them said that in order for the Ford contracts to be awarded, he would have to be paid bribe money. An arrangement was agreed upon, and using a portion of the cash obtained from the false invoice scheme, Zack and his partner paid the bribes.

When the scheme unraveled, the IRS came looking for its due on Zack’s unreported income of over $300,000. While Zack did not dispute that he had received the money, he claimed that it was not includable in income because he received the money as a "mere conduit" for his business entities’ payment of bribes to the Ford employee.

Trends in shopping and delivery.

From Bizmodel.com on January 29, 2001

Companies could soon have a way to ship packages to secure, centralized locations near their customers, rather than sending them to recipients' homes, where frequently no one's around. Perhaps best of all, the whole process has all the spy-game overtones of a John Le Carre novel.

EShip-4U.com has developed an automatic delivery machine. A little bigger than a bank ATM, it's three- to four-feet deep and has rotating shelves that can hold up to 180 packages, everything from a jewelry box to a 22-inch TV. Package recipients are notified to make a pick-up at a nearby box and given an access PIN via phone, E-mail, or wireless page. They go to the box, key in the PIN, and retrieve their package.

"There's billions of dollars to be saved in transportation costs in the United States. The consumer has been paying these costs," through higher prices for goods, says Booz-Allen & Hamilton Inc. VP Tim Laseter. Home delivery is being subsidized by business traffic, Laseter says.

In coming months, EShip-4U will conduct beta tests of its devices in Israel.

One of the sections is shown below from The Wall Street Journal Accounting Educators' Review, January 24, 2001

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: 

1. Compare and contrast "tax evasion," "tax avoidance," and "tax planning." What is a "tax haven"? How do tax havens enable tax evasion and/or tax avoidance? Is the U.S. a tax haven?

2. What specifically do the OECD countries want tax havens to do? What counter-arguments do the tax havens offer? How do tax havens' money-laundering laws compare to OECD countries' laws?

3. What penalties do OECD countries threaten to impose on tax havens? What might be the consequences of these penalties? Why do you think the OECD countries are so determined to have other countries harmonize with their own laws?

4. Why are so many technology firms moving to Dubai Internet City? How do low taxes compare against the other benefits?

5. Which cabinet official is responsible for implementing U.S. tax laws? What evidence does the related article cite that Treasury Secretary O'Neill might be avoiding taxes? Does such tax planning raise a conflict-of-interest in his enforcement of tax laws? Do you think wealthy people should be barred from holding this office?

ANSWER SOURCES

ARTICLE 2 The Americas: OECD Nations Want Caribbean Tax Havens to Tell All By Daniel J. Mitchell 01/19/01 Page A15

ARTICLE URL: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB979870965298437730.djm 

RELATED ARTICLE: Why Is the Tech Set Putting Down Roots in the Desert? Dubai, of Course-Du-What? With Low Taxes And High Transparency, Cyber-Sheikdom Beckons By Hugh Pope 01/23/01 Page A1 

ARTICLE URL: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB980206407491564574.djm 

RELATED ARTICLE: Treasury Nominee Has Assets Totaling $66 Million or More By John D. McKinnon 01/19/01 Page A4

ARTICLE URL: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB979869894353896069.djm 

TOPICS: Tax havens, Tax evasion, Tax avoidance (Taxation)

The OECD nations held a conference hoping to convince "tax havens" to rewrite their tax and privacy laws that attract foreign investment under a "Collective Memorandum of Understanding."

GERMANY JOINS THE FRAY - JWG FINANCIAL INSTRUMENTS NOW AVAILABLE FROM DRSC Along with other major accounting regulators, the German Accounting Standards Committee (DRSC) is now serving copies of the Draft paper of an Accounting Standard for "Financial Instruments and similar items" published by the Joint Working Group of Standard Setters (JWG). Click through to http://accountingeducation.com/news/news1510.html  for download links

A review that I provided in the January 26 edition of New Bookmarks is repeated below:

I summarize some of the most important documents that might greatly impact upon financial reporting, especially financial instruments reporting:  (if I missed one of great importance, please let me know):

FASB December 14, 1999 Exposure Draft 204-B
Reporting Financial Instruments and Certain Related Assets and Liabilities at Fair Value 
This document can be downloaded from http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/draft/draftpg.html   
Trinity University students can find the document at J:\courses\acct5341\fasb\pvfvalu1.doc 

The primary purpose of this Preliminary View is to solicit comments on the Board's views about issues involved in reporting financial instruments at fair value. The Board has reached preliminary decisions about the definition of a financial instrument, the definition of fair value, and general guidance for determining fair value, but it has not yet decided when, if ever, it will be feasible to report fair values of all financial instruments in the basic financial statements. Before making that decision, the Board needs more information about potential problems and solutions. The Board invites comments on all matters addressed in this Preliminary Views; however, respondents need not comment on all issues and are encouraged to comment on additional issues they believe the Board should consider.

JWG (FASB and IASC) Draft Standard 215-A, December 22, 2000 
Financial Instruments and Similar Items 
For the time being at least, the Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the Exposure Draft can be downloaded from http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/public/index.html  
The IASC website for the same PDF report can be downloaded from http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen3_112.htm#Draft_Standard 
Trinity University students may access the report from J:\courses\acct5341\fasb\jwg01 

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has issued this Special Report prepared by the Financial Instruments Joint Working Group of standard setters (JWG) to solicit views on financial reporting for financial instruments. The Special Report has not been edited using the FASB’s guidelines for publication. It has been published in exactly the form in which it was received from the JWG and is identical to similar reports published in other countries with representatives on the JWG. Although it is not a formal part of the due process in an FASB project, this Special Report is related to the Board’s current project on reporting financial instruments at fair value. The JWG was formed in 1997 for the sole purpose of developing a coherent framework for reporting financial instruments at fair value. That framework was to be based on the principles discussed in the March 1997 Discussion Paper, Accounting for Financial Assets and Financial Liabilities, issued by the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, as further developed or amended as a result of the deliberations of the JWG.

This Draft Standard proposes far-reaching changes to accounting for financial instruments and similar items. These include: 

FASB January 29, 2001
Improving Business Reporting: Insights into Enhancing Voluntary Disclosures  http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/brrp/brrp2.html  
Trinity University students may access the report from 
J:\courses\acct5341\fasb\VoluntaryDisclosures.pdf  

The overall Business Reporting Research Project includes three separate studies. In addition to this study of voluntary disclosures of business information, separate studies address the electronic distribution of business information and redundancies between generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure requirements. This Executive Summary presents the Steering Committee’s observations and recommendations about each of those studies. 

Report on Voluntary Disclosures 
The objective of this Report is to help companies (the preparer community) improve their business reporting by providing evidence that many leading companies are making extensive voluntary disclosures and by listing examples of those disclosures. The examples serve to provide companies with helpful ideas of how to describe and explain their investment potential to investors. The basic premise underlying this Business Re-porting Research Project is that improving disclosures makes the capital allocation process more efficient and reduces the average cost of capital. The examples are not a list of recommended disclosures. They do illustrate, however, how companies are communicating with investors. 

The term voluntary disclosure, as used in this Report, describes disclosures, primarily outside the financial statements, that are not explicitly required by GAAP or an SEC rule. However, the Steering Committee recognizes that many of these “voluntary disclosures” are made to comply with the SEC’s requirements concerning description of a business and management’s discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations (MD&A). 

The Steering Committee thanks the companies who participated in the study for making their communications to the public easily available to the Working Groups. Findings and Recommendations 

• Many leading companies are voluntarily disclosing an extensive amount of business information that appears to be useful in communicating information to investors. 

• The importance of voluntary disclosures is expected to increase in the future because of the fast pace of change in the business environment. 

• Voluntary disclosures related to matters that are important to the success of individual companies are very useful, particularly disclosures of management’s view of the company’s “critical success factors” and trends surrounding those factors.

Here in San Antonio, we sure are glad SBC moved its headquarters into town.
From InformationWeek Online --- January 26, 2000

** Data And Wireless Services Give SBC Boost In 4Q

SBC Communications Inc., the nation's No. 2 local-phone company, said a surge in demand for wireless and data services helped it meet Wall Street expectations.

SBC reported fourth-quarter income of $1.95 billion, or 57 cents a share, up 5.6% from last year, when the company posted income of $1.85 billion, or 54 cents. Revenue increased 9.1%, to $14.07 billion, for the quarter, ended Dec. 31, up from $12.91 billion in 1999. For fiscal 2000, revenue reached $53.3 billion, up 8.8% from $49 billion in fiscal 1999. Earnings for the year were $7.7 billion, up 4.1% from $7.4 billion. Diluted earnings per share for the year were $2.26, up 5.1%, from $2.15. None of these figures include one-time costs, such as the acquisition of Midwest telco Ameritech Corp.

SBC highlighted a 44.3% growth in fourth-quarter data revenue, to $2.2 billion; 251,000 new digital-subscriber-line customers; and a net gain of 814,000 customers by Cingular Wireless, which SBC co-owns with BellSouth.

TeleChoice analyst Adam Guglielmo says the results are a little better than he expected. "It's pretty solid growth, especially in the DSL space," he says. Guglielmo expects the company to grow solidly in the coming quarter and continue to expand aggressively, particularly in DSL.

The SEC thinks KPMG's audit of Porta Systems got a bit out of control. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/36562/101 

Scandinavia is the center of the world for the mobile phone business, and in that corner, Finland beats out Sweden: Ericsson says it will stop making mobile phones and will slash thousands of jobs -- 

Scandinavia is the center of the world for the mobile phone business, and in that corner, Finland beats out Sweden: Ericsson says it will stop making mobile phones and will slash thousands of jobs. --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41445,00.html 

From Yahoo on January 29, 2000

The 1000 Journals Project http://www.1000journals.com/ 

This Pynchonesque social experiment follows the circuitous routes of 1,000 blank journals across the globe. Each journal comes with a simple set of instructions: add your own artistic statement, then pass it on. Or better yet, leave it in a public space (preferably one that artistic types are known to frequent). The site receives occasional updates on individual books (which are all stamped with the source URL): where it was found, who it was passed on to, what it looks like now, etc. The project's creator is "watching and waiting to see what develops... Somewhere, someone is reading a journal right now."

From FEI Express, the newsletter of Financial Executives International at --- http://www.fei.org/newsletters/indexnws.htm 

A quarterly newsletter for senior finance professionals. Read the latest issue of the quarterly newsletter that delivers the latest on issues impacting the commercial lending industry, success stories from your peers on how they solved their financing needs, and more --- http://www.gecommercialfinance.com/newsletter/ 

Chairman Levitt recently sent a letter to the audit committee chairmen of the largest 5,000 public companies. In it, Chairman Levitt summarizes the some of the key proposals of the recent O'Malley panel on audit effectiveness. The letter is quite controversial, because these proposals have not been put through the SEC's or AIPCA's due process procedures. Most IMPORTANTLY, they do not yet represent actual rulemaking. However, the weight and unprecedented nature of a letter from the SEC Chairman might imply otherwise. Some describe his letter as aspirational, not regulatory. That's an important distinction for FEI members to recognize upon receipt of the letter. Here is a link to the letter for your measured consideration: http://www.sec.gov/news/digests/01-05.txt. 

The current tax shelter initiatives can be traced to hearings in April 1999 and a massive Treasury Report on Tax Shelters in July 1999. Former Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy John Talisman testified in November 1999 that "a comprehensive approach" was needed to address a growing disparity between tax and book measures of incomes, and growth in the number and diversity of tax avoidance devices that lacked economic substance. Former Secretary Lawrence Summers announced that abusive tax shelters posed a "threat" to the tax system and would be aggressively pursued by the IRS.

Then, in October 2000, Robert McIntyre of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy issued a controversial report alleging that many of America's largest 250 companies paid little or no corporate taxes, and that corporate tax breaks resulted in an aggregate 38% loss in tax revenues during the period 1996-1998. The ITEP report argued that the AMT was a "shell of its former self" and needed to be reinvigorated. Accelerated depreciation, the R&D and oil drilling credits and stock-option deductions were all cited as "culprits" in declining corporate tax revenues.

To address the perceptions that corporate tax avoidance and corporate tax shelters were a "growing problem," Senators Roth and Moynihan circulated two legislative proposals to define abusive corporate tax shelters, establish new reporting requirements and significantly increase penalties (some mandatory) for understatement of income due to use of an improper tax shelter. FEI and other tax policy organizations (see, e.g., http://www.tei.org ) went on record in opposition of the legislative proposals because:

Abusive tax shelters are not defined and, as written, had the potential to capture many legitimate business enterprises; The new 40% penalties were unduly harsh, given Treasury's lack of discretion to waive penalties in meritorious cases; and Taxpayers had less ability to rely upon professional tax opinions/tax advisors in cases of substantial understatement of income. Since neither Senators and Moynihan or Roth were reelected, the future of these Committee's initiatives is uncertain.

Even though corporate tax shelters are no longer on the "front-burner," this problem will not go away. Continued close IRS scrutiny of so-called BOSS shelters, debt straddles, liquidating REITs, and Lease-in, Lease-out transactions can be expected. It is also possible that political opponents of a business tax relief package would re-ignite calls for more hearings on the issues of corporate tax avoidance, prompt aggressive IRS enforcement action or calls for more legislation along the lines proposed by the Senate Finance Committee a few months ago.

Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy --- http://www.ctj.org/itep/ 

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) is one of the leading research and education organizations in the country working on government taxation and spending policy issues. Since its founding in 1979, ITEP's work has played a key role in educating the public and informing federal and state tax reform debates.

For the first 15 years of its existence, ITEP worked extensively with Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), providing much of the research for important studies released by that organization. CTJ's studies of federal corporate income taxation in the early 1980s are widely credited with fomenting an intense public debate over the wisdom of tax-based corporate subsidies. This debate eventually helped lead to a bipartisan consensus that many of these tax provisions were unwise public policy.

ITEP and CTJ reports, such as Inequality & the Federal Budget Deficit (1991), helped inspire new thinking about tax policy that later lead to the federal tax reforms adopted in 1993.

The development of the ITEP Microsimulation Tax Model, completed in 1996, marked the beginning of a new era for ITEP. This model is capable of calculating the impact of current tax law and tax change proposals on taxpayers by income level. The model can also project potential revenue yields of tax law changes. The ITEP model is unique in its ability to produce analysis at the federal and state levels and to analyze income, consumption and property based taxes.

Genetically modified food appears to pose no severe health risks, an American Medical Association report concludes. But there are some environmental concerns that shouldn't be overlooked, either --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41448,00.html 

I get so tired of taking the kids to the Little League Junk Yard.

It is time to start building machines which can learn and be raised in the same way as humans, the authors of an article in the journal Science say --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1136000/1136870.stm 

Hey those are cool threads you're wearing --- http://www.beyond2000.com/news/Jan_01/story_990.html 

Soldiers, emergency teams and miners will soon be strapping on the coolest of fashion accessories. Australian scientists have produced a new vest to help keep these workers alive, comfortable and efficient in the searing temperatures of deserts, tunnels and raging bushfires. The undershirt uses a personal cooling system (PCS) jointly developed by Australia's CSIRO and Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO).

The cool garment is designed to fit under heavy protective clothing like the body armour and NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) suits worn by soldiers, the fire retardant uniforms of emergency workers and the overalls of miners working underground.

Last week, the SEC clarified some of the new rules on auditor independence. The full Q&A can be accessed at the following link: http://www.sec.gov/offices/account/audinfaq.htm. 

Flower of India (printmaking by hand) --- http://www.mfa.org/poppy/ 

What's behind Jesse Jackson's drive-by penance?  --- http://opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=85000484 

From InformationWeek Online, January 29, 2001

Sneakernet, Ethernet, Space-Dustnet?

Wireless technologies have made it possible to surf the Internet from your back yard and beam infrared signals from palm to palm. But how about using space dust as your next networking medium?

Each day, Earth is bombarded by more than 50 tons of rock and dust that burn up in the atmosphere, leaving long trails of gas. In the 1930s, ham-radio operators discovered they could bounce signals off these trails, and in the 1950s, the U.S. military caught on to the technique. Now, StarCom LLC is using it to offer a reliable and less-expensive wireless network.

The system works like a racquetball player aiming for where he wants the ball to land after its bounce. The spot is picked, and the signal is sent until it hits and rebounds to the recipient. A meteor trail will usually appear within a few seconds, but certainly within two minutes.

Since the messages are sent as compressed packets of data, the entire process usually can be completed within a gas trail's half-second average lifetime. This requires that the messages be kept short, usually 50 to 100 characters. StarCom president Steven J. Becker says the technology is best used for tracking vehicles, monitoring remote instruments, and the like.

StarCom is pushing the scheme as an alternative to radio or wire-based systems at half the cost. Becker says StarCom will have complete geographic coverage of the United States within 18 months.

From InformationWeek Online, January 25, 2001

Despite accelerating layoffs at dotcoms, competition for information technologists has never been greater, and businesses are raising salaries while searching for other ways to find and recruit IT talent.

The number of dotcom job cuts reached 10,459 in December, jumping 19 percent from November, according to a survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. That marked the most layoffs among dotcoms since December 1999, when the outplacement firm began its survey.

Big business appears to be the chief beneficiary of these layoffs. A Challenger, Gray survey released last week indicated that the economic slowdown is more often hurting the hiring efforts of small, rather than large, businesses.

The shakeout that has hit B2C companies hardest may be spreading. B2B companies also will start to shed staff, according to John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray. B2B is "beginning to face real pressure as the shakeout unfolds," Challenger said. "Businesses are not embracing [B2B] with the speed many companies expected."

Yet recruiting executives and other employment experts agree that the layoffs have scarcely made a dent in nationwide shortages of IT workers. Barring a deep recession, there is little chance high demand for IT talent will fade soon. --David Lewis

Read more: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCEP0Bdl6n0V30Cxjc 

Tax Accounting for Website Development Costs --- http://www.ecommercetax.com/WebSiteCosts.htm 

New society or new individualism? --- ESRC http://ns1.b4.co.uk/mbmdesign/newsociety/societyhome.html 

Nutrition.gov --- http://www.nutrition.gov/ 
(I could not find Cubalibras anywhere!)

New health website of the New York Times --- http://www.nytimes.com/pages/health/index.html?0124 

The Smithsonian offers gems of American art --- http://nmaa-ryder.si.edu/t2go/ 

Broadband is increasingly drawing the interest of companies looking to incorporate video and other high-bandwidth features on their Web sites --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0101251/2674592/ 

Amid heightened security, the software giant has alerted testers that it's making substantial changes to the successor to Windows 2000 --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0101255/2678102/ 

It's no joke.
Clinton Presidential Materials Project --- http://www.clinton.nara.gov/ 

World Bank Experts Guide http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/wbexperts/ 

Royal Philharmonic Society --- http://www.royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/ 

 SmallBusiness.com knowledge sharing at http://www.smallbusiness.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/sbsite.woa 

Smallbusiness.com connects you with the relevant advice and experiences of other small businesses to help you make better decisions every day.

For more links, go to the Small Business section of http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

metacritic ---- http://www.metacritic.com/ 

(Movies, Music, Games)

Metacritic.com was founded in 1999 by three movie fans who liked to read movie reviews. In fact, we liked to read multiple reviews for each movie, to get a better idea of the critical consensus for each release. Although at the time the web offered a wealth of reviews and other movie information, there was no easy way to track down all of the various pages without spending a lot of time searching. Thus, Metacritic was born.

We envisioned Metacritic.com as a place where movie fans like us could easily find multiple reviews for each new movie. Thus, in addition to quotes from reviews from major critics on each movie page on our site, you will find links to each of the full reviews. We also wanted to come up with a system for comparing reviews between critics and between movies. To accomplish this goal, we developed our Metascore formula. Each movie is assigned a Metascore, which is a weighted average of each of the individual reviews for that film. This number, on a 0-100 scale, lets you know at a glance how each movie is reviewed.

Now that our full film site is up and covering every new release every week, we are expanding our coverage into music and videogames. As a preview of these two new sections, you can now get Metascores for many of the music and games releases for 2000 and 2001. In Spring 2001, these sites will be fully operational, with a full page of critic quotes, scores, and links for every new game and music release. We will also continue to add new features throughout the site, to continue to make Metacritic.com useful and enjoyable.

This website is owned and operated by Metacritic Incorporated, a privately-held Nevada corporation. If you would like more information about the company or this website, please email us through one of the addresses listed in our email directory. If you have questions about how our Metascores are computed (and, frankly, who doesn't?), a detailed (but fun) description of the process can be found on our scoring explained page. If you have questions about other random topics, you came to the wrong place.

The food industry's On the Rail http://www.ontherail.com/ 

International Mountain Guides (Travel) --- http://www.mountainguides.com/ 

The personal information of about 45,000 Travelocity customers was available on the company website for all to see. No blaming hackers for this one -- the problem was pure and simple human error --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41390,00.html 

Sounds like Travelocity should check out the AICPA website on WebTrustSM/TM at https://cert.webtrust.org/jhcohn.html 

Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences http://datadump.icaap.org/cgi-bin/glossary/SocialDict/SocialDict 

You can find other dictionaries at 

Visa and MasterCard have very recently (and finally)  updated their terms and conditions. It now recognizes  internet businesses as merchants. Our online terms and  conditions reflect the changes. Go to:  http://www.submityourapp.com and click on "terms and  conditions" listed at the bottom of the page.  

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me.  

Jason E. Morrow 

Heartland Payment Systems 
jmorrow@heartlandcard.com   888-702-3321 x305  440-824-6610 fax  http://www.visa-mc.com 
Ecommerce Services  http://www.hpsaffiliate.com  -
Affiliate Program http://www.submityourapp.com/sr2 

In the process of refereeing a paper for a UK journal, I ran across the following websites.

"How to Select the Right Accounting Software," by by J. Carlton Colling, Journal of Accountancy, October 1999 --- http://www.occpa.com/joasw3.htm 

"Sizing Up NPO Software, Roberta Ann Jones, Journal of Accountancy, November 2000 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/nov2000/jones.htm 
NPO = Not-for-Profict Organization (including governmental agencies).

Accounting Software Directory http://www.bizforms.com/hlpchrt1.htm 

Each listing includes the manufacturer's name, software titles, platforms supported, price range, web site links and telephone numbers. A brief description of the company's software products is also included. Please note that Software Manufacturers almost always offer technical support for their own products on their respective web sites. Their sites frequently provide excellent business help or have excellent links to other sources for business help. We will mention when a software site includes help or access to resources that are of general interest to businesses of all kinds.

Accounting Software Review --- http://www.cpasoftwarenews.com/editorial/articles/1999/9-7.htm 

Accounting Software News --- http://www.accountingsoftwarenews.com/

"Software for Beyond the SOHO and Single-Office Environment"
By David B. Moody, CPA

[ACCPAC] [AccTrak21] [Champion Business Systems] [Cougar Mountain Software] [CYMA] [Database Creations] [DataModes] [eTEK International] [International Accounting Software] [Peachtree Software] [Red Wing Business Systems] [Sage] [SBT] [Sirius Software]

"High-End Accounting: Big Business Features with a Small Business Feel"
By David B. Moody, CPA

[ACCPAC International] [Appgen] [eTEK International] [Macola] [Open Systems] [Sage] [SBT] [Solomon Software] [SouthWare Innovations] [The Versatile Group] [Due-Diligence Table]

Other links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

Great American Public Libraries: HAPLR Ratings 2000 ---  http://www.ala.org/alonline/archive/hennen2000.pdf 

DSL Rhymes With Hell 
The biggest U.S. DSL providers are in a quandary. Customers are clamoring to get the high-speed service in their neighborhood. But once it's available, they say it's too hard to set up --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41433,00.html 

For a look on the brighter side of DSL, go to http://www.internetweek.com/indepth01/indepth013101.htm 

By the way, ASL differs from DSL in that there is an asymmetry in transmission speeds into (download) and out of (upload) your computer.  In ASL, the upload speeds are much slower than the download speeds.  However, ASL connections are being pushed heavily into the huge home market, whereas DLS is being touted for the business firm market.

You can read the following in Bob Jensen's Technology Glossary --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm 

Digital Subscriber Line technology for transmitting data up to 50 times faster than present analog modem and ISDN alternatives. Telephone companies are hoping that DSL service will keep telephone lines competitive with cable modems and other competitive alternatives to present telephone transmission services. Telephone companies are considering two dominant DSL technologies: Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL, ASL) and High Rate Digital Subscriber Line (HDSL). ADSL technology will deliver higher downstream speeds (6 Mbps) than upstream speeds (640 kbps).

The head of Bertelsmann says the company will begin offering Napster's service on a subscription basis sometime early this summer. The announcement catches Napster people somewhat by surprise --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41469,00.html 

Anonymous Forward

 I just finished taking the most amazing self-defense class, sponsored by  Shandwick, and I wanted to share some really valuable info with you before  it goes out of my head. The guy who taught the class has a female friend  who was attacked last year in the parking garage at Westport Plaza in St.  Louis one night after work and taken to an abandoned house and raped. He  started a women’s group and began teaching these classes soon after. This  guy is a black belt in karate and trains twice a year with Steven Segall.  He and the others in this group interviewed a bunch of rapists and date  rapists in prison on what they look for and here’s some interesting facts:           

The #1 thing men look for in a potential victim is hairstyle. They are most likely to go after a woman with a ponytail, bun, braid or other  hairstyle that can easily be grabbed. They are also likely to go after a  woman with long hair. Women with short hair are not common targets.      

The second thing men look for is clothing. They will look for women who’s  clothing is easy to remove quickly. The #1 outfit they look for is  overalls because many of them carry scissors around to cut clothing and on  overalls the straps can be easily cut. They also look for women on their  cell phone, searching through their purse or doing other activities while  walking because they are off guard and can be easily overpowered.      

The time of day men are most likely to attack and rape a woman is in the  early morning, between 5 and 8:30 a.m. The number one place women are  abducted from/attacked at is grocery store parking lots. Number two is  office parking lots/garages. Number three is public restrooms. The thing  about these men is that they are looking to grab a woman and quickly move  her to a second location where they don’t have to worry about getting  caught.      

Only 2% said they carried weapons because rape carries a 3-5 year sentence  but rape with a weapon is 15-20 years. If you put up any kind of a fight  at all, they get discouraged because it only takes a minute or two for  them to realize that going after you isn’t worth it because it will be  time-consuming. These men said they will not pick on women who have  umbrellas, or other similar objects that can be used from a distance, in  their hands. Keys are not a deterrent because you have to get really close  to the attacker to use them as a weapon. So, the idea is to convince these  guys you’re not worth it.      

Several defense mechanisms he taught us are:       

If someone is following behind you on a street or in a garage or with  you in an elevator or stairwell, look them in the face and ask them a  question, like what time is it, or make general small talk, I can’t  believe it is so cold out! here, we’re in for a bad winter. Now  you’ve seen their face and could identify them in a lineup, you lose  appeal as a target.   

If someone is coming toward you, hold out your hands in front of you  and yell Stop or Stay back! Most of the rapists this man talked to said  they’d leave a woman alone if she yelled or showed that she would not be  afraid to fight back. Again, they are looking for an EASY target. If you  carry pepper spray (this instructor was a huge advocate of it and carries  it with him wherever he goes,) yelling I HAVE PEPPER SPRAY and holding it  out will be a deterrent.   

If someone grabs you, you can’t beat them with strength but you can by  outsmarting them. If they grab your wrist, pull your wrist back so your  hand is in waving position (palm facing forward) and twist it toward  yourself and pull your arm away. It is hard to hold onto wrist ones that  are moving in that way. They stumble toward you and you stumble back, so  you can use that momentum to bring the same out and backhand them with  your knuckles in the forehead, nose or teeth.   

If you are grabbed around the waist from behind, pinch the attacker  either under the arm between the elbow and armpit or in the upper inner  thigh - HARD. One woman in a class this guy taught told him she used the  underarm pinch on a guy who was trying to date rape her and was so upset  she broke through the skin and tore out muscle strands - the guy needed  stitches. Try pinching yourself in those places as hard as you can stand  it; it hurts.   

After the initial hit, always go for the groin. I know from a  particularly unfortunate experience that if you slap a guy’s balls (sorry  to be graphic) it is extremely painful. You might think that you’ll tick  the guy off and make him want to hurt you more, but the thing these  rapists told our instructor is that they want a woman who will not cause a  lot of trouble. Start causing trouble, and he’s out of there.    When the guy puts his hands up to you, grab his first two fingers and  bend them back as far as possible with as much pressure pushing down on  them as possible. The instructor did it to me without using much pressure,  and ended up on my knees and both knuckles cracked audibly.       

Of course the things we always hear still apply. Always be aware of your  surroundings, take someone with you if you can and if you see and odd  behavior don’t dismiss it, go with your instincts. You may feel a little  bit silly at the time, but you’d feel much worse if the guy really was  trouble.       

Please forward this to any woman you know, it’s simple stuff that could  save her life.

Added notes from Bob Jensen:

Wear a digital wrist camera and decide during the confrontation whether it is best to take secret pictures or to lie to the guy and assert that his photos along with his fingerprints, voiceprints, and everything he has said has been transmitted live via satellite to all police stations and newspapers around the world.  Under Advanced Search enter the phrase "Wrist Camera" without quotation marks and you can find various inexpensive wrist cameras.  Remember, most rapists are not rocket scientists when it comes to computing technology.  The Google search site for wrist cameras is at http://www.google.com/advanced_search 

Alternately, you can wear a wrist email receiver or PDA that has an antenna.  You can claim the device is also a transmitting video camera.

Turn your cell phone on whenever you feel in danger.  My wife and I both carry SOS phones that dial 911 with one button.  Then leave the phone on until your are in a safer place.  

In Texas and some other states where it is legal to carry a gun, stick out your finger or your can of pepper spray from inside a jacket pocket and make it look like you might be a Texas Toter.  Better yet, be a toter and either aim low or between the eyes.  Actually between the eyes is better target if you want to reduce the odds of a subsequent lawsuit.

If you are an accountant, wear your green eyeshade in public.  Geeks are less likely targets.

Attend a rape prevention course given by real professionals rather than an old accounting educator.  

Poetics --- http://www.elsevier.nl/cdweb/journals/0304422X/viewer.htt 

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco --- http://www.thinker.org/ 

Note especially the Education Department at --- http://www.thinker.org/fam/education/index.html 

The Education Department provides a wide array of programs, services, facilities, and resources. We've tried to make it easy to find what you're looking for by breaking them down into the user categories below:
Families with Kids
There's lots to do and see with children at the museums-from the Big Kids/Little Kids art making program to Gallery One, our special gallery for children.
K-12 Students
There are many programs for school age children at the museums which do not require school group or class enrollment.
College Students
Whether you're working on a paper or looking for a summer internship, everything we have to offer college age students is here.
Educators
These are specific programs and services available exclusively to educators looking for continuing education and for art-related curriculum material and resources.
General Public
Everything the Education Department does to augment the museum experience for the general visitor as well as other resources and services.

"Companies Focus on Derivatives Compliance," Journal of Accountancy, February 2000, p. 26.  The online version is at http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/index.htm (FAS 133).  Interest rate swaps lead the way in terms of hedging popularity.

A friend named Neil Hannon at Bryant College wrote the following at http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

My wife Clare flagged an article in this Sunday's Providence Journal by Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times. Bob talked about a new travel site called www.Sidestep.com.  He claimed that Sidestep.com saved him hundreds of dollars over www.expedia.com  for a trip from New York to Seattle. His cost for leaving the Friday after booking a flight on Tuesday was $377, flying with Sun Country Airlines on a Boeing 727. I tried Sidestep.com for an upcoming flight to New Orleans and got a $169.50 rate out of Providence. (Are you listening, IMA national meeting goers?) With Sidestep.com, I got the same rates and same flights. I will keep checking around and suggest you do the same. Even though most online airline systems use the same computer base (run by SABRE), some online ticketing services will occasionally have lower prices. Personally, my favorite airline is Southwest Airlines (SWA) <http://www.iflyswa.com> . Southwest does not feed data to any online Internet travel service except their own Web site. I always check SWA first. Call me crazy, but I like an airline who take on time departures and arrivals seriously. I also appreciate the fact that you can de-plane a SWA jet quickly at the gate.

January 28st edition of the Internet Essentials 2001 Newsletter --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. XBRL Educational Resource Center At Bryant College Announces XBRL Course for March 16th 
2. Another Low Airline Fare Web Site 
3. Cnet's Free Accounting Downloads on the Net 
4. Washington Post Article On Dot Com Failures 
5. DoubleEntries, The Weekly World View of Accounting 
6. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

Forwarded by a very  close neighbor.

Published Errors in Church Bulletins

1. The Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles, and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

2. Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B. S. is done.

3. The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday morning.

4. Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.

5. The pastor will preach his farewell message, after which the choir will sing, "Break Forth Into Joy."

6. A songfest was hell at the Methodist church Wednesday.

7. Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community.

8. The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The Congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

9. Thursday night Potluck Supper. Prayer and medication to follow.

10. The rosebud on the altar this morning is to announce the birth of David, the sin of Rev. and Mrs. Adams.

11. Tuesday at 4 PM there will be an ice cream social. All ladies giving milk will please come early.

12. A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

13. At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What Is Hell?" Come early and listen to our choir practice.

14. Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

15. Mrs. Johnson will be entering the hospital this week for testes.

16. Please join us as we show our support for Amy and Alan who are preparing for the girth of their first child.

17. The Lutheran Men's group will meet at 6 PM. Steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, bread and dessert will be served for a nominal feel.

18. The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: "I Upped My Pledge - Up Yours."

19. Our next song is "Angels We Have Heard Get High."

20. Don't let worry kill you, let the church help.

21. For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

22. This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.

23. The service will close with Little Drops of Water. One of the ladies will start quietly and the rest of the congregation will join in.

24. Eight new choir robes are currently needed, due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

25. The senior choir invites any member of the congregation who enjoys sinning to join the choir.

26. During the absence of our pastor, we enjoyed the rare privilege of hearing a good sermon when A. B. Doe supplied our pulpit. The Rev. Adams spoke briefly, much to the delight of his audience

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Memories --- More 1950s source materials for the Statler Brothers --- http://members.tripod.com/~Calskp/1-Remember.html 

Forwarded by Dick Haar

A businessman was in a great deal of trouble. His business was failing, he had put everything he had into the business, he owed everybody-- it was so bad he was even contemplating suicide. As a last resort he went to a priest and poured out his story of tears and woe.

When he had finished, the priest said, "Here's what I want you to do: Put a beach chair and your Bible in your car and drive down to the beach. Take the beach chair and the Bible to the water's edge, sit down in the beach chair, and put the Bible in your lap. Open the Bible; the wind will rifle the pages, but finally the open Bible will come to rest on a page. Look down at the page and read the first thing you see. That will be your answer, that will tell you what to do."

A year later the businessman went back to the priest and brought his wife and children with him. The man was in a new custom-tailored suit, his wife in a mink coat, the children shining. The businessman pulled an envelope stuffed with money out of his pocket, gave it to the priest as a donation in thanks for his advice.

The priest recognized the benefactor, and was curious. "You did as I suggested?" he asked.

"Absolutely," replied the businessman.

"You went to the beach?"

"Absolutely."

"You sat in a beach chair with the Bible in your lap?"

"Absolutely."

"You let the pages rifle until they stopped?"

"Absolutely."

"And what were the first words you saw?"

"Chapter 11."  

(It's possible that only accountants and lawyers get the above joke.)

Young Judy, the editor of a trivia publication, was having trouble with her computer. So she called Prem, the computer guy, over to her desk. Prem clicked a couple buttons and solved the problem. As he was walking away, Judy called to him, "So, what was wrong?"

And he replied, "It was an ID ten T error."

A puzzled expression ran riot over Judy's face. "An ID ten T error? What's that ... in case I need to fix it again??"

He gave her a grin... ;-) ... "Haven't you ever heard of an ID ten T error before?"

"No," replied Judy.

"Write it down," he said, "and I think you'll figure it out."

(She wrote...) I D 1 0 T

The International Collection of Tongue Twisters --- http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/index.htm 

There those thousand thinkers were thinking how did the other three thieves go through.
(Sounds like one for the Texas Prison Board.)

Received from an elderly gentleman.

God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones that I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference. Now that I'm 'older' (but refuse to grow up), Here's what I've discovered:

1- I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it. 

2- My wild oats have turned into prunes and All Bran. 

3- I finally got my head together; now my body is falling apart. 

4- Funny, I don't remember being absent minded... 

5- All reports are in; life is now officially unfair. 

6- If all is not lost, where is it? 

7- It is easier to get older than it is to get wiser. 

8- Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.

9- I wish the buck stopped here; I sure could use a few... 

10- Kids in the back seat cause accidents. 

11- Accidents in the back seat cause kids 

12- It's hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere. 

13- The only time the world beats a path to your door is when you're in the bathroom. 

14- If God wanted me to touch my toes, he would have put them on my knees. 

15- When I'm finally holding all the cards, why does everyone decide to play chess? 

16- It's not hard to meet expenses ... they're everywhere. 

17- The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth. 18- These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about the hereafter; I go somewhere to get something and then wonder what I'm here after. 

19- UNABLE TO REMEMBER IF I HAVE MAILED THIS TO YOU OR NOT AND DOUBT IF YOU CAN EITHER

And that's the way it was on February 1, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

January 26, 2001

I will be in Ft. Lauderdale February 1-7.  It's a tough assignment, but somebody's got to do it --- right?  Please try to avoid email to me during this time that I will be slaving at the APLG meetings of the American Accounting Association.

Quotes of the Week 

Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.
Liz Smith, Tribune Media Services

Murphy's Law:  Those with the best advice offer no advice.
( Guess that puts Bob Jensen in his place.)

Smith's Fourth Law:  A body at rest tends to watch television.
(The author is apparently named Smith.)

When you stop spending time with real friends, 
You lose your balance.
(I don't know who the author is, but she or he must be an accountant.)

It's better to be 0-for-20 than 0-for 0.
(But don't tell anybody!
I don't know who the author is, but he or she has to be dueling with journal editors.)

A saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.
(Presumably trying to do something good.)

Real love stories never have endings.
(As is the case for New Bookmarks.)

To make an ending is to make a beginning,
The ending is the start of the beginning
Inspector Morse (in his last episode)

Congratulations to Dr. Katherine Schipper as the new academe member of the  Financial Accounting Standards Board (to replace Dr. Gary Mueller when his term ends this June). Dr. Schipper had the honor of being the only recommendation forwarded by the American Accounting Association.  

Also appointed to the FASB as an industry member was John Wulff of Union Carbide to replace Gaylen Larsen.  See http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/.

Also congratulations to Dr. Mary Barth for being named a part-time member of the new International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).  The rest of the new IASB are listed at http://www.iasc.org.uk/news/cen8_511.htm

What are the Web tutorial authoring software choices of the pros?  Let me introduce Phil Padgett.

On Friday, January 13, I received a phone call from a stranger named Phil Padgett.  Phil is an adjunct asynchronous learning  course developer at Idaho State University.  He said he was going to be in San Antonio visiting his mother and requested an appointment to visit with me.  He did indeed show up an my door early on Monday, and we spent a delightful morning together.  This leads into my short story about Phil Padgett.  I hope he will become a regular contributor to future editions of New Bookmarks.

Phil's life is the ore out of which Readers Digest stories are mined.  He was kicked out of a San Antonio high school in the early 1960s and was considered to be somewhat retarded by the high school system.  He joined the Navy, and while a seaman on a submarine, the Navy (to its credit) discovered genius in this young seaman and sent him to the U.S. Naval Academy (as a President John F. Kennedy appointment to the Academy).  Phil's specialty became boiler engineering and design, although he performed other complex engineering duties in the Navy.  In turbulent seas, he suffered a spinal injury that almost completely severed his brain from his body.  He was paralyzed and had absolutely no memory.  Thanks to a brilliant surgeon who totally defied all odds, Phil's health eventually returned to what to me appears to be 100%.  The recovery was slow.  Phil received the first PC ever issued to a U.S. naval officer.  This was in part due to his temporary, memory-impaired inability to remember codes needed to perform his duties assigned by the Navy during his lengthy recovery.

Now when and if you ever read Phil Padgett's postings to my future editions of  New Bookmarks, you will have a bit of an idea of where he is coming from out of those turbulent seas.  His life proves the repeated rule that "success is often trouble turned inside out."  It makes those of us on a cushy paved road to academe take a deep breath and say Bravo to Phil Padgett.

Like all of us who are developing asynchronous learning materials, Phil struggles with alternative choices of module design and software.  In Phil's case he and a partner have a company that both designs and develops online courses for clients who supply the content.  In my case, I struggle with both the content and the development.  But we share several views in common about design.  These include the following:

Sadly, neither Phil nor I can place our best authoring work online for the world to sample.  In my case, my best work is authored on Multimedia ToolBook CD-ROMs that I use some in my teaching (less now that these ToolBooks are getting out of date) and in my multimedia road shows ( http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations ).  The reason that I cannot show my best stuff on the Web is that hypermedia ToolBooks just do not transmit well over the Internet.  Asymetrix ToolBook and Macromedia Authorware were the creme de la creme high-end authoring software alternatives in the fleeting glory years of hypermedia CD-ROM course development.  Unfortunately, both alternatives had and still have steep learning curves for authors and demand too much bandwidth for distribution on the Web unless the multimedia features are extremely curtailed.  ToolBook is now a losing (moneywise) product of Click2Learn ( http://www.click2learn.com/ ) and Authorware never has been a bread winner for Macromedia ( http://www.macromedia.com/ ).  This is sad, because these two alternatives are arguably the best authoring systems ever developed.  Like the Marine Corps new Osprey aircraft, they are the intricately designed products for their intended missions, but they are just too complex and unreliable for the changing world within which they must operate.  With the slowdowns or stoppages of further development and refinement of ToolBook's OpenScript coding and Authorware's Lingo coding, these authoring systems probably (in my opinion) will not survive long enough to use when bandwidth problems are solved.

My course materials on the Web do not have the good designs that I authored into my CD-ROMs, because my Web materials are  mainly limited to HTML text with limited graphics and limited audio combined with downloadable Excel workbooks (for example see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm ).  My Web materials do not have those transcribed commentaries of experts at each point along the way.  (There are a few exceptions such as the transcription of one of Paul Pacter's workshops at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/pacter.htm.  

In Phil Padgett's case, it is presently not possible to demo his best work on the Web, because his clients own the copyrights.  He is presently attempting to get permission from his clients to demo parts of his work on the Web.  Unfortunately, his clients presently charge fees to see the work.  One example of a set of tutorials that Phil helped design and develop can be found at http://www.lecturetech.com/tlogin1.cfm.  Phil has the password to this work and showed me one of the tutorials (Introduction to Photoshop).  I was impressed with the audio commentaries, transcriptions, and links to downloads.

This, at last, leads us to the question at hand.  What software did Phil choose when authoring these Web tutorials?  His choice was Macromedia's Fireworks and Dreamweaver coupled with RealNetwork's RealProducer.  

Create, edit, and animate Web graphics using a complete set of bitmap and vector tools. Use export controls to optimize your images, give them advanced interactivity, and export them into Macromedia Dreamweaver and other HTML editors. Launch and edit Fireworks graphics from inside Dreamweaver or Macromedia Flash.

Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4, with all the powerful new features of Dreamweaver 4, is the most efficient way to develop ASP, JSP, or ColdFusion applications. View code and design simultaneously. Easily create libraries of server-side scripts or use the built-in server behaviors and shortcuts.

For a review, see http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/01/index1a.html 

The best streaming media-creation tool just got better.

Now support for RealAudio 8 and RealVideo 8 lets you create CD-quality audio and true Internet video for your Web pages. Easy-to-use RealProducer Plus provides the help beginners need, and comes loaded with features powerful enough to satisfy any pro.

RealProducer Plus creates impressive-sounding streaming Web audio and video from live sources or media files.

Outstanding RealProducer Plus Features

News and Updates

See it in action

Other authoring software choices are summarized at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm.  Publishers are leaning toward electronic books summarized at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm.

In my case, I still cling to Microsoft FrontPage ( http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/ ) combined with MP3 audio file compression.  ( http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/newfaculty.htm#Resources ).  Microsoft is beta testing the new FrontPage 10.  See http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2658474,00.html 

One innovation is the inclusion of Microsoft SharePoint, which allows users to quickly set up a team Web site for intranet or Internet users to store, find and share information.

Users can also add and edit content to SharePoint sites straight from their browsers.

Beta 2 integrates Microsoft's SharePoint, allowing users to set up a team Web site for sharing files of all kinds.

You don't have to possess any particular Web-authoring skills to add and edit content to a SharePoint-based site, which means that everyone within a workgroup or a broad organization -- even family members in different places around the world -- can collaborate on projects, share documents and communicate more effectively.

FrontPage 10 also enables users to create a custom photo gallery to display personal or business photos and images. In addition, users can add automatic Web content to a Web site by inserting MSNBC headlines and weather forecasts, MSN searches, Expedia maps and bCentral small-business service tools. This automatic Web content allows users to update their site daily without having to edit it every day.

XML, Advanced HTML features Site-management features have also been enhanced, with usage analysis reports that track how visitors use the Web site and how they were referred to it. And FrontPage 10 provides faster and more targeted Web site publishing.

"XML (Extensible Markup Language) is very important to our users, and FrontPage 10 recognizes it as a structured language," he said. "Users can apply formatting rules to XML while in an HTML view, with many of the features then stored as XML yet retrieved as HTML."

Advanced HTML editing features also give users the ability to control exactly how their HTML code looks and works with improved XML Formatting Rules, HTML and ASP Source Code Preservation, and Optional HTML Source Reformatting.

New pasting features are also included that will make working with Office applications simpler by allowing users to decide whether they want text being pasted from another application to keep the formatting in the existing Web page, keep the formatting from the source page or even paste as text.

Apart from the XML features mentioned above, one reason I stick with Microsoft products is the anticipation that Visual Studio will really take off commercially. Sometime in the future, it may one day also find its way into academe.  See http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2001/jan01/01-16vsa.asp 

Visual Studio For Applications: The Power of Customization Moves to the Web

REDMOND, Wash., Jan. 16, 2001-- Imagine that you've been the regional sales manager for a large manufacturing company since the late 1980s. Chances are that when you took over, your businesses processes were managed almost entirely through the exchange of paper forms. Communication centered on telephone calls and face-to-face meetings. Business intelligence arrived as typewritten reports summarizing events in your industry over the previous quarter, or even the previous year. Today, by contrast, comprehensive up-to-the-minute information about your company, your customers, and your competitors is only a mouse-click away. Much of the job of keeping in touch is handled with a quick email. Business process automation software has nearly eliminated the blizzard of typed forms and handwritten notes on which you once relied. Now, everything from order processing, to contact management, to scheduling and bookkeeping occurs automatically, powered by database-driven applications. In recent years, the ability to quickly and cheaply customize those applications to meet the specific business needs of your organization has helped streamline operations to a degree that was once unimaginable.

The rise of the Internet offers a host of new possibilities for the way people do business. Chief among them is the chance to move business process automation onto the Web, giving sales staff access to the power of back-office computing any time, any place and on any device.

But while there are plenty of choices for prepackaged Sales Force Automation applications for the Web right now, there is also a problem. Customizing them to conform to an organization's unique procedures is prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.

With today's announcement of a new Web application customization technology, called Visual Studio for Applications (VSA), Microsoft is delivering the ability for companies to easily customize their Web-based applications.

"Corporations are sharply limited in their ability to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Web because there is no easy way to extend their internal business logic in distributed applications," explains Robert Green, Microsoft's lead product manager for Visual Studio. "There are ways to do it today, but they are all hugely unattractive. Either your software vendor has to be willing to expose its source code, which they typically don't want to do, or you have to hire a consultant to do the work, which is expensive and doesn't scale. Least attractive of all is having to build your own application from scratch, which just is not a viable option for any but the largest organizations."

What are optimal knowledge portal designs and are they disasters for education?

Threads of my comments on this subject are given at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

I have some threads on knowledge portals and vortals at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm#HigherEducation.

My discussions with Phil Padgett inspired me to briefly summarize what I think should be contained in an optimal (probably not attainable) knowledge portal design on a given topic (e.g., FAS 133 on Accounting for Derivative Financial Instruments and Hedging Activities):

Although "optimal" knowledge portals and vortals will never be achieved, if they come close to optimization in terms of the above criteria and other criteria not mentioned above, this may prove to be a disaster for educators and students.  The problem is that knowledge will become too easy to find and too easy to learn.  In another document I state the following at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateel.htm 

Bob Jensen's Working Paper 265 Concerns Giving Students the Full Benefits of Newer Technologies May Be Hazardous to Their Long Run Memory and Accomplishments.

Source:  Metacognitive Concerns in Designs and Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training: 
Are We Misleading Ourselves About Measures of Success? by Bob Jensen at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm 
  • Multimedia and Other Technologies Can Give Students What They Want by Making Learning More of the Following:
  1. Easy (e.g., interactive graphics, interactive databases, ease of search, ease of access, ease of finding help, ease of navigation, etc.)
  2. Fun (animations, videos, audio, etc.)
  3. Inspirational (cream-of-the-crop instructors, access to experts and motivators)
  4. Realistic (networked simulations and virtual reality)
  5. Collaborative (ease of communication and collaborative software)
  6. Efficient (learn from any location at any time at less cost with personalized knowledge bases and portals)
  • What Students Want is Not Necessarily What They Need
  1. Humans retain more when something is hard to learn.
  2. Humans retain more when something is painful to learn and that part of the retention of what is learned is the struggle in finding the answers.
  3. Students retain more when they reason and discover something on their own.
  4. Leaning from mistakes may be the best teacher.
  5. Humans are prone to information overload.
  6. The pace of life and learning may indeed be a killer.

 

Optimal knowledge portals may destroy the Socratic pedagogy and discovery learning.  Optimal knowledge portals may make learning too easy and too forgettable.  Students learn best from their mistakes.  

So this begs the question of whether knowledge portals should be banned from students.  This is analogous to only making textbook and case solution manuals only available to faculty (who possibly cannot derive correct answers without such manuals).  Of course banning knowledge portals from students is absurd.  We are all students.  We are all teachers.  

The good (?) news is that in the 21st Century knowledge is too complex and our technologies are too crude for purposes of creating and maintaining "optimal" knowledge portals.

What is more serious are such questions as the following:

Elaboration of such issues is beyond the scope of this edition of New Bookmarks.

David Carson at Adobe discusses "The End of Print" at http://www.adobe.com/web/features/carson/main.html 

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

Bob Jensen's threads on Adobe PDF files are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acrobat.htm 

Audio-Mining
Forwarded by Debbie Bowling:

I thought you would be interested in this word of the day...audio mining.

Debbie

-----Original Message----- 
From: Paul McFedries [mailto:wordspy@mcfedries.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 8:18 AM 
To: wordspy@mcfedries.com  
Subject: The Word Spy for 01/23/2001 -- audio mining

audio mining (noun)

The process of extracting and indexing the words in an audio file and then using that index to search the file for specific words or phrases. (Also called "audio indexing.")

"Come to think of it, the experience of reading Ambrose's book itself points to a needed technology. I listened to it on my MP3 player and have no printed copy. Suppose I wanted to double-check the kind of wood the railroad men replaced those cottonwood ties with. How can I search an audio stream to find the exact word I need?

The technology to do that -- it's called audio mining -- is going to make recorded speech as index-able as printed text." --Paul Gilster, "Tech money is drying up, but not ideas," The News and Observer, January 1, 2001

See Also: v-commerce, voice portal

Backgrounder ---------- It appears that today's phrase was coined by Dragon Systems, one of the companies involved in creating audio mining technology:

"It's easy to think of other business applications in which audio indexing (Dragon calls it audio mining) could be useful, as in reviewing call center tapes for insurance companies, stock brokerages, banks, order desks and other places where verifying financial transactions is important and access is otherwise difficult." --Bill Machrone, "Audio mining: New way to dig for data," PC Week, March 1, 1999

Top Academic Site of the Week

Lingua Franca's Breakthrough Books --- http://www.linguafranca.com/bookworm/breakthrough/index.html 

In every issue of LF we ask the experts to recommend the breakthrough books in their field, those books that have defined a particular area of thought. Currently, we are in the process of making our entire archive of Breakthrough Books available on line. Not only can you read about the best books in all the subjects we've covered over the years, but you can also order them directly through our links to www.barnesandnoble.com .

Commentary from Yahoo

Lingua Franca, the rag of choice for academic types, presents this collection of seminal books that have "defined a particular area of thought." The creme de la creme, the top guns, the grande fromages -- these are the books that rule the schools. From Suburbia to Cognitive Science, the Welfare State to Neglected Fiction, these are the books that the brainiacs worship. And to shamelessly jump on the PBS bandwagon, you'll also find some great books on Jazz.

Topics

Wow Site of the Week

Digitize old documents and books with 1MAGE® Software --- http://www.1mage.com/ 

Over the past several years, document imaging has moved from a paper storage alternative to the foremost solution in managing multiple information sources. Today’s corporate information originates from a myriad of places, such as e-mail, fax, web pages, multimedia, spreadsheets, letters, contracts and more. The need to store and access this information quickly and efficiently are key to every business application.

At 1mage, we design solutions that make information management transparent and easily accessible. Whether reviewing a shipping order over the Internet, retrieving a billing record from the archives, or storing e-mail at your desktop, 1mage allows you to treat every task—and every information source—the same. If it gets to your desktop, we can conveniently store and manage it with the 1MAGE® document management system. Our mission is to make information management a natural extension of your entire business environment.

1mage has licensed hundreds of systems in a variety of applications across a diverse mix of industries. At 1mage, we respect the fact that you know your business. It’s our job to make imaging a part of it.

From Syllabus News on January 16, 2001

1mage Software Captures Historical Library Collections

The Grandview Heights Public Library, Grandview, Ohio, has selected the document imaging and management system from 1mage Software to bring online Internet access to several important and rare collections at central Ohio public libraries. Grandview Heights Public Library, GHPL, will initially utilize 1MAGE, 1SERVER and 1SUITE software for scanning, indexing, cross- referencing, and bringing online over 10,000 historic photographs taken by the Citizen Journal newspaper from between 1930 and 1985, when the publication closed its doors. The digitized images, maintained on a server using the Linux operating system, will be made available via the Internet worldwide and through the library's online catalog.

For more information, visit www.1mage.com. 

Important Article of the Week

P2P is much more than a saying first invented by the mothers helping toddlers in and out of snow suits ten times a day.

Now that Napster  is virtually dancing to the tune of  Bertelsman Music Group (see "Henhouse acquires fox:  Now what?" Yahoo Internet Life, February 2001, p. 56) , we wonder what is happening with Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing.  According to the very important article below, there is a very big future for P2P that will affect education and industry.  I maintain threads entitled "P2P, PDE, Collaboration, and the Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/Pointera/FreeNet Paradigm Shift in Web" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

The very important Article of the Week is "Peer-to-Peer Computing:  The New Old Thing," by John K. Waters, Application Development Trends, January 2001, pp. 20-27 --- http://www.adtmag.com/Pub/article.asp?ArticleID=2217 

Buzzwords fly in and out of the IT lexicon like bees at a fast-food pollen franchise. But if the number of companies, projects and initiatives currently swarming into the peer-to-peer space is any indication, this particular buzz is more than just the usual noise. Technology heavyweights are getting involved. Venture capitalists are sniffing the air. And industry watchers are looking beyond the "next big thing" hype, finding technologies with the potential to influence the way software is written and hardware is utilized. IT managers ignore this trend at their peril.

But what exactly is it they should not be ignoring? If ever there was an ill-defined computing concept, it is P2P. Solution offerings from self-described P2P companies range from instant messaging applications to workgroup products, and from file-sharing services to distributed computing architectures. And new ones are fairly lining up to jump on the P2P bandwagon.

"It appears right now that developers are going in all different directions," said Cheryl Currid, president of Houston-based Currid & Company. "The good news is, everyone is working on it; the bad news is, they're all marching to their own drummers. We're going to see a lot of different applications coming out under this peer-to-peer banner that don't look alike. But it's a big tent, and it's full of innovative ideas."

Two of the important paragraphs on Page 24 of the article are quoted below:

One of the few pure P2P offerings is Gnutella, a system through which individuals exchange files directly via the Internet without going through a Web site. Once users install and launch the Gnutella software, their machines function both as servers and clients. They have access to the files of other Gnutella users, and they can download virtually any file type. Like Napster, Gnutella is often used as a way to share music files.

A hybrid P2P system, sometimes called a "brokered" system, involves some level of intermediation. Napster, that controversial and enormously popular MP3 file-sharing system (and the subject of most of the mainstream discussion about P2P), is, in fact, a brokered system. Napster users download music directly to and from their desktop machines, as in a pure system, but Napster utilizes central servers to store key data elements. These servers manage member particulars and shared-file lists and perform music searches to smooth out the process. Napster supports more than 20 million users on a network in which the servers have been relegated to the role of traffic cop.

P2P is a renewed leading edge concept that will become part of all our lives on the networks.

Tips of the Week

Question 1:
Suppose you are setting up on the road to do a presentation and your laptop fails.  For this very important presentation in front of hundreds of people who will be filing through the doors in less than an hour, your #X&X##! computer fails you when you need it ever so desperately.  In a panic, your mind goes blank and you can't remember much of anything you were going to say to these throngs of people.  And those tables and graphs you so carefully prepared locked inside a broken computer.  What do you do?

Answer 1.1 (the obvious and the least-effective solution)
Always carry a folder of overhead transparencies (that heavy hardcopy in your briefcase) of key part of your presentation.  These are minimal for your show's effectiveness, but they do serve something like cue cards to remind you of something to say in front of the audience.  

Answer 1.2 (a solution if you can borrow a computer with a floppy drive)
If some of your key files are less than 1.44 Mb, carry spare floppy disks in your brief case.  Then if you can borrow a computer with a floppy drive, you can read them into that computer.  You can also take along backup Zip disks for larger files, but the chances that the computer you borrow will have a Zip drive are low.  For example, somebody else on the speakers' platform may have a laptop you can borrow, but that computer probably will not have a Zip drive.  The sad thing is that it may also not have a floppy drive.

Answer 1.3 (the better solution if you can borrow a computer with a CD-ROM drive)
Almost all computers have a CD-ROM drive, although, if the drives are external to the laptop, some people do not bring along the external CD drive.  However, your chances of borrowing or renting a computer with a CD-ROM drive are pretty high.  For that reason, having CD-ROM backup disks of your presentation files is a very good idea.  The drawback is that this alternative is troublesome if you do not have your own CD-ROM burner.   Everybody should have a CD-ROM burner since they are so cheap.  If your computer has a CD-RW burner, you can also create CD-ROM disks.  It is better to carry CD-ROM backup disks on the road since most borrowed computers will not have CD-RW drives but will have CD-ROM drives.  If you are an educator, chances are high that your institution will burn your backup CD-ROMs if you do not have a burner (encoder).  CD-ROMs are better than floppy drives since they will hold the equivalent of about 451 floppy disks.

Problem for Windows Users: Another of the many frustrations of Windows is that files transferred from a CD-ROM disk to a computer hard drive is that all transferred files are "Read Only." You can change the properties one file at a time, but what a pain in the tail Microsoft dumped on us for this unwanted feature of CD-ROM file transfers in Windows.

Answer 1.4 (an alternative solution if you need to tap a lot of file storage and can get to the Web)
Put your key files into network backup storage that you can access from any borrowed computer on the Web.  In previous editions of New Bookmarks, I provided links to alternative sites that provide free online backup storage for most any types of files.  However, until now I did not bother to take advantage of those free services.  Now I am going to take advantage of those generous folks on the Web.  I was reminded to do this by yesterday's Show Number 402 of the Digital Duo on PBS.  The transcript for that show is at http://www.digitalduo.com/402_dig.html.

Storage Saviors
Nightmare work scenario: You're on a business trip and have a major presentation to give tomorrow. You get into your hotel room and discover your handout isn't on your laptop! And you forgot to bring a copy! Aaahhh!

Yes we all have a story like that one. And of course, to the rescue – a new service on the Web. It can't solve the crises you've already had (sorry, we're still looking for that panacea) but it can help stave off future ones. Internet Hard Drives. They work by giving you a lump of virtual memory – usually between 10 and 100 megabytes – where you can stash your commonly used files. You can then access your space on any computer, any where, any time, provided you have a Web connection and compatible software.

Internet Hard Drive sites all work in a similar way: you upload copies of your files to a password-protected website and specify whether you want the files to be public or private. A company called iDrive does this well. At iDrive, the copying process isn't quite as easy as it is to, say, copy 10 files to a Zip disk. As with most of these sites you have to select one file at a time for uploading and then do the deed, which can become quite a monotonous chore. Better plan a dinner date with your PC!

One company called Xdrive has a nifty solution to the upload/download problem. You download their plugin and it allows you to view the Net drive as a local drive on your computer. It’s assigned a home on your computer, kind of like your C: drive (hard drive), D: drive (CD-ROM) and E: drive (Zip Disk or other storage). And next to all those is the X: drive, behaving just like the others. It's an elegant workaround to the problem, and we’re impressed with its speed.

Fortunately Mac users also have an option. If you use MacOS 9, you use Apple's iDisk. It will put your 20 MB Net drive right on your desktop. And it's very simple to use.

Steve has qualms about security. All these sites are password protected, but generally, the data is not encrypted, so there's a chance that someone could peek at your data. Another thing to watch out for: These sites don't back-up your data. For that, Steve recommends Connected Online Backup, which is not free.

The virtual hard drive is a great idea. But, as Susie points out, you can't get any of your data if you don't have a reliable net connection. If only there were a back-up alternative for that!  
(But Susie, you can simply rely upon Bob Jensen's Answers 1.1-1.3 above!)

Once again the key websites for free storage are as follows

Second Tip of the Week

Question 2
Why should you take advantage of Answer 1.4 (External Storage) even if you never make presentations on the road or can rely fully on any of Answers 1.1-1.3 above when you are on the road?

Answer 2
Your main computer may crash.  It is best to back up your crucial files to some other computer at home or on a LAN drive at your job.  However, if you do not have such backup capabilities, the backup solution for you is Answer 1.4 discussed above.

Third Tip of the Week

Question
What is the huge failing of most of us computer buffs?

Answer
We forget to backup or work on a regular basis.  That is like driving across the desert on a low tank of gas and no spare water.  If fact it's worse, because in the desert someone might give you a lift.  All the Good Samaritans of the world cannot help you recover the lost creative masterpieces on your computer.

Reply from Neil Hannon

Bob, 
Thanks for the tips. Here's another quick solution to road computer failures. When I'm giving a presentation on the road, I always post the Power Point files to a server on the Internet. The server could be www.bryant.edu  or my ISP at home, http://members.home.com  . That way, I can have a backup and I can give out the URL to the audience. This method also helps cut the demand for paper copies of slides.

By the way, the Internet posting method also works when I occasionally forget to bring in the correct CD Rom for an in-class presentation. Several times a month, I email files to my yahoo.com and hotmail.com account for later retrieval in the classroom. 

Neal Hannon [nhannon@TIAC.NET] 

Reply from John Roberts regarding the "Read Only" problem with CD-ROMs and CD-Rs.

Hi Bob,

I believe this problem stems from the CDRs being a read only medium. I haven't tried it but I believe a file copied from a CD-RW would copy to a hard drive with the current Read Only attribute of the file. If it wasn't Read Only on the CD-RW, it wouldn't be Read Only on the hard drive. Of course this offers no help when you are going from machine to machine and can't use CD-RWs.

You can reset the "Read Only" attribute on more than one file at a time by: running Windows Explorer; selecting the folder containing the files in the left window; selecting all the desired files in the folder in the right window; right-clicking on one of them; selecting properties; clicking "off" the Read Only box and clicking "OK."

This will work as long as all the files are in the same folder. I have not discovered a method in Windows to do several folders at the same time by selecting a parent folder to reset all child folders and files.

However, this is possible in DOS using the old ATTRIB command. go to DOS; use the CD command to change to the directory containing the folders and files desired (you may have to do a DIR to see what the DOS filename is for the folder since DOS only allows 8 characters for a name); use the ATTRIB -R *.* /S command to reset all of the Read Only attributes; EXIT.

Using the +R switch with ATTRIB will set the Read Only attribute so that files are read only. The /S switch tells it do traverse all sub-directories as well as the current directory.

If you are running Windows ME, I have heard that a DOS prompt is not available in the Start Programs Menu. In that case you could start Windows Explorer or My Computer and go to the Windows\Command folder and double-click on COMMAND.COM to start DOS.

John C. Roberts, Jr. 
St. Johns River Community College 
283 College Drive 
Orange Park, FL 32065 (904) 276-6816

Reply from Bob Woodword on backups and recovery!

While losing your office desktop is bad, especially if the keyboard gremlins sense the smell of anxiety in the sweat of your fingertips, there are some final (expensive) alternatives. For something in the $x,000, Ontrack ( http://www.ontrack.com )  will take your failed disk apart and send you a set of CDs with all the files and file fragments they can find. ... Been there, done that... I'll learn real soon now...

Bob Woodward, rsw@wubios.wustl.edu 

Triumph of Life (Nature on PBS) --- http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/triumphoflife/ 

Bob Jensen's search engine helper document is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm.  I added the following to my helper document:

Best place to start a search --- Google at http://www.google.com/ 
Note the Advanced Search option at http://www.google.com/advanced_search 

Best place to start if you want to designate starting and/or ending dates of documents searched --- Altavista at 
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&stype=stext 

Best place to start if you want language translation --- Altavista at
 http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&stype=stext 

What is the difference between the Google's SiteSearch and Google's WebSearch service?

Go to the FAQ page at http://services.google.com/univ_faq.html  

Google Offers Free Search Services to Educational Institutions 

You can read the following at http://services.google.com/googleuniv/login 

Google offers free SiteSearch (enables users to search your university website) and optional WebSearch (enables users to search the Internet) to universities and educational organizations worldwide.

Note: This services is intended for educational organizations only. Google reserves the right to terminate accounts used for other purposes.

The features of the service are listed below: 

EveryBook is the high end (Mercedes) of the specialty device electronic book readers (two screens in color).  Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books is available at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 
I also maintain PDF threads at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acrobat.htm 

I received this the following message from Kirby McKinney on January 18, 2001:

Hi Bob

Everybook is pleased to announce that we have released a remarkable and robust PDF document management application tool called DocAble(tm) 1.0. Fifteen (15) day evaluation copies of DocAble(tm) are available on our website ( www.everybook.net  ). Orders can be placed by contacting me directly. For orders over ten (10) in quantity, please contact me for information on Everybook's aggressive volume discount schedule, as well as government and educational pricing.

DocAble(tm) can help organize, search, read from and write with PDF documents. It is the first PDF document manager to visually organize, auto-index and excerpt PDF documents. DocAble's cross document search tool, multi-screen reader, integrated notebook and PDF workflow capabilities greatly add to the utility and distribution of your documents. Please feel free to contact me via phone or e-mail for more information. Thank you for your consideration.

Regards,
Kirby

Kirby L. McKinney 
Director New Business Development 
Everybook, Inc. 
2300 Vartan Way 
Harrisburg, PA 17110 717.703.1010 ext. 129 kmckinney@everybook.net 

ECCH European Case Clearing House features a new COLIS case format that has been "a great success with users."  Go to http://www.ecch.cranfield.ac.uk/ 

The ECCHO Newsletter links (in PDF formats) are under "Hot News."

The momentous day arrived on Tuesday 12 September, after more than twelve months intensive development work. So successful has it been that in the space of about five weeks since the launch, we have registered over 3,600 users worldwide. Further insights into the creation of an exciting series of contemporary cases. 

Free course on Macromedia Flash from Barnes & Noble University --- 
http://www.barnesandnobleuniversity.com/Classroom/OfferingMenu/1,2666,25015_25169_,00.html 

A listing of all other B&N University's free courses can be found at 
http://www.barnesandnobleuniversity.com/AllCourses/1,2668,25015__,00.html 

Advice to Computer Buyers

If you are purchasing a computer, I highly recommend "Be on Your Guard For These 10 Little Lies As You Shop for Your PC," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2001, p. B1.  Online subscribers can access  http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve@1.cgi?rjensen/text/wsjie/data/SB979773631494082068.djm/&d2hconverter=display-d2h&NVP=&template=atlas-srch-searchrecent-nf.tmpl&form=atlas-srch-searchrecent-nf.html&from-and=AND&to-and=AND&sort=Article-Doc-Date+desc&qand=&bool_query=Mossberg&dbname=wsjie%26named%3Ddbname%26period%3D%3A27&location=article&HI= 

  1. Memory: Many lower-priced machines don't actually deliver the full 64 or 128 megabytes of memory, or RAM, they claim. That's because they siphon off a lot of memory to power the video processor ...
  2. Internet Readiness: Lots of machines are described as "Internet-ready." But these days few of them are really any more Internet-capable than any others...
  3. Screen Size: Standard monitors never deliver the screen sizes they tout...
  4. Laptop Weight: Many laptop makers state the weight of their laptops in an unrealistic and misleading manner, assuming, for instance, that you'll be replacing an internal CD-ROM drive with a flimsy, cosmetic "travel panel." They also usually leave out the weight of the electrical adapter...
  5. Battery Life: Laptop makers use a variety of methods to figure out battery life, but one thing is clear: The claims are almost always overstated...
  6. CD-ROM Speed: CD-ROMs are often rated as running at speeds like 32X and 40X, where X is the speed of a standard audio CD player. But such figures are misleading for two reasons...
  7. Printer Speed: Printer makers always claim a certain speed, in pages per minute, for black and color printing. But they don't tell you -- except deep into their marketing materials, in tiny type -- that these speeds refer to printing at the machines' draft or economy settings, which produce the worst output and aren't commonly used...
  8. High-Speed Modems: Many computers are said to include "high-speed V.90 modems." But these are just dial-up phone modems, and they are actually quite slow, compared with today's broadband speeds...
  9. On-Site Warranties: If a computer maker or store tries to sell you an "on-site" warranty, beware. They will, indeed, come to your site to fix your machine, but only as a last resort. Usually, they will force you to go through an exhausting and frustrating process of trying to diagnose the problem yourself before they'll even consider dispatching a technician...
  10. Bundled Software: Some computer makers and stores try to dazzle you with lists of software programs included on the PC. But in many cases, these are special "light" versions of the retail software, minus some features and often lacking manuals... 

I will say I agree with everything Walt Mossberg says almost all the time.  I emphasize his distrust for on-site warranties or warranties where you must send the computer or peripheral equipment out of town.  When you can get service from a local dealer, this is often better because the dealer often carries the parts and you can talk to a real human being.  I also like the CompUSA'a extended warranty plan for peripheral hardware (provided you have a local CompUSA store).  Then when a peripheral blows (such as my having seven Iomega Jazz drives blow over the past three years), I simply take the bad item to the store and CompUSA hands me a new replacement from the shelf.  There is no boxing the bad item up, shipping it off, and praying daily that I will ever see a replacement.

Where to find financial statements in different countries:

Try these URLs for FS in some European countries

 http://www.cnmv.es  
 http://www.sib.co.uk  
 http://www.cob.fr 
 http://www.rmc.es 
 http://www.infogreffe.fr 
 http://www.companies-house.co.uk 
 http://www.infocamere.it 
 http://www.publi-com.dk 
 http://www.powernet.ch 

Enrique Bonson 
Universidad de Huelva, Spain

Stephanie Keifer of The Trout Gallery at Dickinson College has a neat history of art website.  A highlight is a gallery of interactive images --- http://www.writingonhands.org/catalog/entries.html 

From Syllabus News on January 16, 2001

Survey: Inner-City Residents and the Internet

Sponsored by the FleetBoston Financial Foundation and conducted by the University of Massachusetts Poll, a new study addressing the digital divide reports that 56 percent of low-to-moderate income inner-city adults from five Northeast cities said they knew not much or nothing at all about the Internet. The respondents said cost was the major obstacle to becoming computer literate and accessing the Internet. Among those who have little or no familiarity with the Internet, however, 80 percent said they would be eager to participate in training.

The survey found that fewer than half (42 percent) of respondents have computers in the home, and only 32 percent are connected to the Internet. In contrast, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of those with incomes over $40,000 use a computer in the home and 61 percent are very comfortable using the Internet. The gap in computer access and Internet usage is leaving members of disadvantaged communities behind in the new economy, says Fleet.

Three little piggies went to market
One little piggy stayed home
In Japan, $25,000 bought each piggy a Toyota car
Including shipping to Los Angeles so far.

Wilber who stayed at home
Kept his $25,000 under a mattress made of foam
Toyota prices in yen remained the same
But the Yen/Dollar exchange ratio grew very lame

A Los Angeles dealer lowered each Toyota price
From $25,000 to $18,500, now that was nice
Wilber rushed out with a squeal
And took advantage of such a deal

The Toyota factory made the same yen margin
On each car sold, including Wilbur's bargain
And that lovely $18,500 U.S. price
Increased L.A sales volume by nearly twice

But troubles began to pour
When Toyota shopped for additional U.S. iron ore
The old ore price was a wishful has been
In terms of what ore now required in inflated yen

Is Toyota better or worse?
The accountant's job becomes a curse
Figuring out what happens in the long run
Proves not to be so much accounting fun

That's why a lot of fuss is made
Over what we call balance of trade
To Tuskegee University students I bid adieux
I hope this has been of some help to you

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212
Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134
Email: rjensen@trinity.edu
<http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen>

-----Original Message-----
From: Roberta Brown Tuskegee University [mailto:RBrown1205@AOL.COM] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2001 11:39 PM
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
Subject: Does a weak dollar hurt Toyota?

Can someone help - I am taking International Finance, and half of the
textbook is on exchange rates. I think that this subject has been addressed
here before, but does anyone know an easier way (a mnemonic, an expression to
memorize) that makes it easier to keep in mind how changes in the exchange
rate due to inflation, interest rates, etc, affect the export and import
countries? (an example of what I mean is in the subject line of this thread).

It is clear to me that it involves adjustments in the current and capital
accounts of each country, and it is all very logical if one thinks through it
for a few minutes, but if any faculty member has an effective way to keep it
straight in the minds of their students, please post it on this mailing list.
Thanks

Roberta Brown
College Senior

Camping with the Sioux - a woman's  journey --- http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/fletcher/fletcher.htm 

TOTAL INSPIRATION SEMINAR

Sign up today for a FREE seminar showcasing Print & Web technologies from Adobe(R).

You'll get an in-depth look at how to turn your creative inspiration into print and Web designs with the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop(R), Illustrator(R), InDesign(TM), GoLive(TM), LiveMotion(TM) and Acrobat(R) software.

Register on-line at: http://www.adobe.com/inspiration 

Learn How To: 
- Make the most of Photoshop 6.0 with its new vector drawing support, streamlined user interface, flexible text options, and layer styles. 
- Turn Illustrator 9.0 print graphics into Web-ready assets in GIF, JPEG, SVG,or Flash(TM) (SWF) formats. 
- Design pages in InDesign using innovative typographical controls and other creativity features. 
- Produce Adobe PDF files from InDesign for high-end print production or for posting on the Web. 
- Easily convert Photoshop comps and other assets into working Web pages that jumpstart development in GoLive. 
- Use LiveMotion to create interactive, animated Flash (SWF) content from your assets. 
- Get up to speed quickly with the Adobe print and Web design tools because of their common look and feel.

Dates and Locations: --------------------------------- 
Time: 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Registration Starts: 12:30 PM

2/1 - Columbus 2/1 - New York City 2/1 - Phoenix 2/6 - Boston 2/6 - Minneapolis 2/6 - Orlando 2/8 - Atlanta 2/8 - Warren/Detroit 2/8 - Philadelphia 2/14 - Chicago 2/15 - Dallas 2/15 - Reston 2/15 - Rochester 2/20 - Miami 2/21 - Los Angeles 2/21 - Paramus 2/22 - San Francisco 2/27 - Nashville 3/1 - Austin 3/1 - Denver

Congratulations to Charles Bailey, Jim Hasselback, and Julia Karcher for having their paper accepted for future publication in Abucus, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2001.  The title is "Research Misconduct in Accounting Literature:  A survey of the Most Prolific Researchers' Actions and Beliefs"

Incidents of research misconduct, especially falsification, in the hard sciences and medicine have been widely reported. Motives for misconduct include professional advancement and personal recognition. Accounting academics are under the same tenure, promotion and recognition pressures as other academics; and, without the life-and-death issues of medical research, rationalizing misconduct in accounting research seems much easier. It is reasonable to assume that dishonesty has occurred, even if little evidence exists about its prevalence. Further, accounting research can influence tax policy and market conditions, affecting people's lives. This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to survey accounting researchers directly as to their ethical practices; it uses the randomized response technique of addressing sensitive questions. To maximize its relevance to the most respected accounting research, this questionnaire was sent only to the most prolific researchers at U.S. colleges and universities--those who have published in the "top thirty" accounting journals. The results indicate that serious misconduct has occurred among these established accounting researchers. The estimated percentage of seriously tainted articles in the top thirty accounting journals, based on self-reporting, is about 4 percent, while the respondents on average believe that about 21 percent of the literature is tainted. Faculty who were tenured more recently provide higher estimates of the falsification rate, and attribute more of the cause to external factors like tenure pressure. The article concludes by discussing implications and offering policy recommendations. 
Key words: Accounting; Ethics; Fraud; Research; Scientific Method.

The Abacus website is at http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/asp/journal.asp?ref=0001-3072 
Online journals information --- http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/Static/online.htm 

What with email, chat, and incessant Web-page building, the Net has us writing more than ever. The result is a whole new way of communicating --- flaws and all --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/32/index0a.html 

Tony Tinker will love this movie --- AntiTrust conspiracy theories --- http://www.antitrustthemovie.com/ 

Reader's Digest Health --- http://www.rdhealth.com/ 

From InformationWeek Online on January 19, 2001

With online revenue making up to 10% of its total sales, mammoth franchiser Cendant Corp. is placing a $100 million bet on the Internet. Owner of nine hotel chains--Howard Johnson and Days Inn among them--as well as Avis Rent A Car and Century 21 real estate, Cendant will use the money to build a travel portal to compete with Travelocity, Expedia, and Priceline.com.

Until last month, Cendant had worked with eight other hotel chains, including Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott, on a project called Honest Broker, designed to build an industrywide portal to sell everyone's products. But with little to show after nine months, Cendant wrote off its investment in the initiative and summarily quit.

Instead, Cendant's 2001 budget includes $100 million to build its own consumer portal. By mid-August it could be dealing airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals, time-share rooms, and vacation packages--all tied to a loyalty program that might even offer points for home purchases through Century 21. Company execs say they expect online sales to grow 10% a year before topping out at 50%.

Tax Agencies Around the World

While reading the recent article on ecommercetax.com about the new international ecommerce tax treaty (?) at http://ecommercetax.com/doc/012101.htm  I came across a links page that connects with tax agencies around the world.

http://www.oecd.org/daf/fa/links/links.htm 

Scott Bonacker, CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com

Bob Jensen's bookmarks on taxation and tax education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill --- http://www.wildparrots.com/ 

Good morning, Professor Jensen: 

More news from cyberspace. 

I am a firm believer in the entrepreneurial power of an idea whose time has come. Thought you'd be interested in surfing through www.k12.com < http://www.k12.com  > (Thanks to my daughter Cathy Jameson who mentioned this web site to me. She is an elementary school teacher with a passion for opening her students' eyes to the wonders of the universe.)

Welcome to K12 , a complete Internet-based elementary and secondary school being developed by William J. Bennett and an experienced team of learning and technology experts who share a passion for education and a belief that a challenging, enriching education should be readily available to all children. K12 was formed with the support of Knowledge Universe Learning Group, one of the nation's leading education companies.

Next fall, K12 will unveil the first version of its program, which will include a complete school for kindergarten through second grade, as well as a wide array of supplementary learning-and-assessment tools that will enable all parents to ensure that their children are receiving a good education. All services are being designed to meet the needs of students, parents, teachers, and other caring adults. Programs for later grades will be available in 2002. K12 is committed to offering a world-class, comprehensive education at any time and in any place.

Prices for K12 products and services will be available soon.

This is an exciting time to be part of K12. The opportunities to learn, grow, and make a difference are enormous.

Janet Flatley AVP-Controller 1st Fed S&L Assn Pt Angeles WA (360) 417-3104

Thanks to the Association of International Accountants (AIA) for this tip.

ACCOUNTANCY FIRMS PRODUCE REPORT ON GLOBAL RULES

Seven of the largest accountancy firms have published a survey highlighting the disparities in national and global accounting rules, and indicating areas where progress needs to be made.

The research, which spanned 53 countries, reveals that national accounting rules are significantly different from each other and the treatment of global accounting standards differs greatly from country to country.

http://www.aia.org.uk/news/news_index.cfm 

From Internet Week January 18, 2000

CASE STUDY: Allstate Stays True To Net Mission

A little more than a year after committing to sell insurance online as part of an ambitious multichannel strategy, Allstate Insurance Co. has had to swallow some tough medicine to stay on course.

Allstate Insurance, a subsidiary of Allstate Corp., slashed thousands of jobs and pushed employee agents into independent contractor roles to support the $600 million in annual cost reductions and $1 billion infrastructure investment it earmarked to revamp its business model.

Despite stiff agent backlash, the company is still not shrinking from challenging its formerly captive salespeople to prove their value by serving customers in their medium of choice. "It's not up to us whether an agent gets disintermediated or not. That's the customer's call," said Steve Groot, senior vice president of direct distribution and e-commerce.

Analysts said Allstate's strategy is a correct response to changes in the industry; however, resistance from agents, who still sell nearly all of Allstate's policies, remains a significant hurdle. Meantime, competition from nontraditional insurance providers, which don't have the same steep overhead, looms. 

Keep reading: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eB7F0Bdl6n0V30CoGT 

Advice for hiring external service for your computing devices (tech support)

In previous editions of New Bookmarks, I provided links to alternative sites that provide external tech support for most any types of computer device.  I was reminded to do this by yesterday's Show Number 402 of the Digital Duo on PBS.  The transcript for that show is at http://www.digitalduo.com/402_dig.html.

Everyone's an Expert
When you need an expert on digital technology, of course you turn to the Duo. But what happens when you've got a nagging question about gardening in New York? Or what if you want to find the best way to reshingle your roof? Your circle of friends only goes so far when it comes to expert advice. Luckily there's a whole network of people on the net – so-called experts – who are ready to give you a helping hand. Sometimes their advice is free, and sometimes it comes at a price.

Lots of expert sites are popping up. There's ExpertCentral.com, EXP.com, Keen.com, AskMe.com, KnowPost, Abuzz, deja.com and many more. Their homepages usually look like Web portals. They offer expertise on a variety of topics—featuring sections on "Auto and Motoring," "Science and Technology" and the like. The experts at these sites are normal folk who claim to have authority in fields in which they’ve worked or had real life experience. So of course this means that anyone's mother could call themselves a "parenting expert." On the other hand, this also means that a retired judge could also be out there offering free legal advice – quite nice.

But how much do these "experts" really know? Luckily there are bios available on every expert so you can check these folks out for yourself. Of course they wrote their own bios, so take that info for all it’s worth. You can also check out each expert's rating according to the people who’ve used them in the past. The ratings are on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, reflecting how people have felt about the quality of the expert’s advice. You can also see how many questions each expert has answered as well as their average response times.

Susie put one of these sites through its paces by psokng the following query: Let's say someone is passed out from drugs in the front seat of a drug dealer's car while a murder takes place. Could she be charged with felony murder? And if the judge did not consider her a real threat to society, could she serve time in house detention instead of prison? (Note: This was research for her screenplay, we're not losing her to a Colombian drug cartel.)

A swift response came from ExpertCentral.com's Jack212 – a retired police officer with 26 years of street beat experience. He said that a felony vs. a misdemeanor charge depended on her state of residence. The decision also hinged on whether she was just using drugs, not dealing them, in which case she could be sentenced to house arrest.

Steve likes ExpertCentral.com, but feels you should be able to pose the question to multiple experts at the same time, like you can on AskMe.com. KnowPost takes that idea to the extreme – they throw your question to all the so-called experts in an area simultaneously. This often leads to an online melee with experts arguing over each other’s answers.

Some of these sites do charge money, like EXP.com. Susie asked an EXP expert about how to get tracks from an old LP into MP3 format. The guy at EXP.com went back and forth with her for a few days and charged her $15 for the correct information. However, he withheld the really key information and then offered her a serial number for the key program he recommended for an additional fee. Clearly this was an offer of questionable legality. In contrast, Susie found the same answer for free – and in less than six hours – at ExpertCentral.com.

The Duo agree that these sites can be useful, but please don’t depend on them for such questions as "I just poked a nail through my foot. What should I do?"

From InformationWeek Online January 18, 2001

PricewaterhouseCoopers Cuts 400 Consultant Jobs
E-services firms aren't the only ones getting a head start on spring
cleaning. Big Five stalwart PricewaterhouseCoopers said Wednesday that
it has laid off 400 consultants from its U.S. staff, primarily on the
East Coast.
The layoffs are part of PricewaterhouseCoopers' efforts to realign its
staff with a market that's demanding more expertise in areas such as
customer-relationship management, strategy consulting, and
E-marketplaces, a spokeswoman says.
While the layoffs represent only about 3% of PricewaterhouseCoopers'
15,000 consultants in the United States, the move could signal that
the company is again close to finding a suitor for its management
consulting practice. The spokeswoman denies any correlation between
the firm's staffing realignment and its plans to separate its
management consulting and accounting practices. Hewlett-Packard was in
discussions briefly last year with PricewaterhouseCoopers to acquire
the management consulting practice for $15 billion to $18 billion.
Andrew Efstathiou, a program manager with the Yankee Group, says that
because PricewaterhouseCoopers, with more than 31,500 consultants
worldwide, is such a large company, and the number of layoffs is so
small, it's more likely the firm is signaling to the market that it's
striving for greater efficiency and dropping headcount that didn't
generate enough revenue.

Amazon.com's collaboration with the owner of literary journal Books In Canada has irked writers in Canada who claim the journal's owner doesn't have the right to publish or license those reviews electronically --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41311,00.html 

The message below from Evan Goldberg illustrates the problems of distributed computing on Webledgers and the advantages of dealing with a well-funded operation. NetLedger is a Webledger owned my Larry Ellison (who, as CEO of Oracle, has bet the farm on distributed computing for Oracle as well as NetLedger). I guess Ellison is something like the second richest man in the world. My threads on Webledgers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/webledger.htm 

Dear NetLedger Customers,

You may have heard about California's troubling power crisis. Business and individuals alike in the state have experienced numerous power outages which may continue for the foreseeable future. This issue is in the process of being resolved by government and industry authorities. However, in the meantime, I wanted to assure our customers that they can conduct uninterrupted business without worry using NetLedger. This is because from the launch of our service we have been based on an infrastructure that transparently handles just these types of circumstances.

Your data is housed at a bunker-like data center that has an extensive triple redundant system of surge-protected power which will be utilized throughout any blackout or any loss of utility services. This includes both uninterruptible power supply and back-up diesel generators which allow us to operate indefinitely despite power outages. In point of fact, NetLedger Corporate lost power for 90 minutes today but there was absolutely no loss of service to our customers who had power.

For our customers that are in California or other areas with power issues, this should drive home the benefit of securing your data offsite using an Internet-based business application. Not only is it possible to continue to utilize your business system from another location on the internet, but times of power outages are when data on desktop PCs are most vulnerable to corruption.

We hope this email will ease any concerns you may have.

Thanks,

Evan Goldberg CEO 
http://www.netledger.com/  

Reply from Todd Boyle

Robert Jensen said, "The message below from Evan Goldberg illustrates the problems of distributed computing on Webledgers and the advantages of dealing with a well-funded operation..."

Amen to that last comment. Whew.

Actually, none of the major websites (accounting or otherwise) went offline in California during the rolling blackouts. If they were so wimpy as to go offline during a 1-hour power failure, they would have been out of business long ago.

The industry has drawn on long experience with mainframe data centers in which service interruptions cost $millions. It isn't easy to keep all the network, storage, and application layers working and alternative power systems are one of the easy things that even 2nd rate hosting providers install!

Netledger uses Level 3 http://www.level3.com

---

Incidentally, where does Goldberg's message illustrate the problems of distributed computing on webledgers? It seems to illustrate (one of the few) real strengths of webledgers: reliability and robustness of the data storage, compared with local computers and LANs.

If you want to talk about the problems, let's talk about conducting business over the internet, i.e. buying and selling with real money, directly with our customers and suppliers! and how we're supposed to keep trojans and thieves out of our local computers, when they have the power to spend real money.

Conducting business over the internet is the only thing worth doing, for our generation. There is a *vast* amount of savings and process improvments awaiting us, when all of our transactions are accurately sent and received over the internet and automatically reconciled. Automatically reconciled and settled receivables, payables and cash. Automatically managed inventory. Almost automatic GAAP reporting based on the objective unambiguous attributes of transactions being agreed by both parties in arms length transactions.

These are only the beginning of the great things which await us, if only todays accountants would put shoulder to the wheel and contribute their energies to automating of business over the internet.

Take this pledge. Stop doing manual data entry, tax, and bookkeeping. Manual accounting is wrong and not serving humanity or yourself. http://www.gldialtone.com/MetadataPledge.htm I did it 12/31/99 and just passed my first anniversary. I made a living in 2000 without doing manual taxes or accounting. You can too.

Todd Boyle [tboyle@ROSEHILL.NET] 

From Syllabus News on January 23, 2001

The official Web site of the president of the United States
( www.whitehouse.gov  ) was passed to George W. Bush at noon on
Saturday. TheNational Archives and Records Administration will
maintain the site as it existed at 11:59 a.m. on Saturday. The site
will be available at www.clinton.nara.gov  as part of the Clinton
Presidential Materials Project. The project is a precursor to the
Clinton library, to be completed in late 2003 in Arkansas. The
Archives has managed all of the presidential libraries since Herbert
Hoover's, with the exception of Richard Nixon's.

HorizonLive recently announced the launch of OfficeHoursLive, the first virtual office designed specifically for faculty, teaching assistants, tutors, counselors, and other distance learning professionals. The product enables instructors and students to speak with each other live over the Web, and can be used to hold virtual office hours, "Q & A'' sessions and study groups, deliver live lectures, host exam review sessions, or present guest speakers.

The OfficeHoursLive environment allows educators to interact with students live and in real-time through standard Web browsers, without custom software and on virtually any PC, Mac, or Unix computer. Each virtual Office features a teaching and learning tool kit, and a set of templates provide instructors a way to create and deliver interactive slides and exercises, as well as real-time polls, surveys, and evaluations.

For more information, visit www.officehourslive.com .

Hi Denny,

Thank you for the timely updates. Things are happening so fast these days with respect to new documents from the FASB and IASC, perhaps it would be helpful for listserv folks if I summarize some of the most important documents that might greatly impact upon financial reporting, especially financial instruments reporting:  (if I missed one of great importance, please let me know):

FASB December 14, 1999 Exposure Draft 204-B
Reporting Financial Instruments and Certain Related Assets and Liabilities at Fair Value 
This document can be downloaded from http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/draft/draftpg.html   
Trinity University students can find the document at J:\courses\acct5341\fasb\pvfvalu1.doc 

The primary purpose of this Preliminary View is to solicit comments on the Board's views about issues involved in reporting financial instruments at fair value. The Board has reached preliminary decisions about the definition of a financial instrument, the definition of fair value, and general guidance for determining fair value, but it has not yet decided when, if ever, it will be feasible to report fair values of all financial instruments in the basic financial statements. Before making that decision, the Board needs more information about potential problems and solutions. The Board invites comments on all matters addressed in this Preliminary Views; however, respondents need not comment on all issues and are encouraged to comment on additional issues they believe the Board should consider.

JWG (FASB and IASC) Draft Standard 215-A, December 22, 2000 
Financial Instruments and Similar Items 
For the time being at least, the Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the Exposure Draft can be downloaded from http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/public/index.html  
The IASC website for the same PDF report can be downloaded from http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen3_112.htm#Draft_Standard 
Trinity University students may access the report from J:\courses\acct5341\fasb\jwg01 

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has issued this Special Report prepared by the Financial Instruments Joint Working Group of standard setters (JWG) to solicit views on financial reporting for financial instruments. The Special Report has not been edited using the FASB’s guidelines for publication. It has been published in exactly the form in which it was received from the JWG and is identical to similar reports published in other countries with representatives on the JWG. Although it is not a formal part of the due process in an FASB project, this Special Report is related to the Board’s current project on reporting financial instruments at fair value. The JWG was formed in 1997 for the sole purpose of developing a coherent framework for reporting financial instruments at fair value. That framework was to be based on the principles discussed in the March 1997 Discussion Paper, Accounting for Financial Assets and Financial Liabilities, issued by the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, as further developed or amended as a result of the deliberations of the JWG.

This Draft Standard proposes far-reaching changes to accounting for financial instruments and similar items. These include: 

FASB January 29, 2001
Improving Business Reporting: Insights into Enhancing Voluntary Disclosures  http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/brrp/brrp2.html  
Trinity University students may access the report from 
J:\courses\acct5341\fasb\VoluntaryDisclosures.pdf  

The overall Business Reporting Research Project includes three separate studies. In addition to this study of voluntary disclosures of business information, separate studies address the electronic distribution of business information and redundancies between generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure requirements. This Executive Summary presents the Steering Committee’s observations and recommendations about each of those studies. 

Report on Voluntary Disclosures 
The objective of this Report is to help companies (the preparer community) improve their business reporting by providing evidence that many leading companies are making extensive voluntary disclosures and by listing examples of those disclosures. The examples serve to provide companies with helpful ideas of how to describe and explain their investment potential to investors. The basic premise underlying this Business Re-porting Research Project is that improving disclosures makes the capital allocation process more efficient and reduces the average cost of capital. The examples are not a list of recommended disclosures. They do illustrate, however, how companies are communicating with investors. 

The term voluntary disclosure, as used in this Report, describes disclosures, primarily outside the financial statements, that are not explicitly required by GAAP or an SEC rule. However, the Steering Committee recognizes that many of these “voluntary disclosures” are made to comply with the SEC’s requirements concerning description of a business and management’s discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations (MD&A). 

The Steering Committee thanks the companies who participated in the study for making their communications to the public easily available to the Working Groups. Findings and Recommendations 

• Many leading companies are voluntarily disclosing an extensive amount of business information that appears to be useful in communicating information to investors. 

• The importance of voluntary disclosures is expected to increase in the future because of the fast pace of change in the business environment. 

• Voluntary disclosures related to matters that are important to the success of individual companies are very useful, particularly disclosures of management’s view of the company’s “critical success factors” and trends surrounding those factors.

Of course there are many (too many?) FASB and IASC documents pouring out of their computers. I highlighted documents that relate to my introductory lecture at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/theory.htm 

Thanks,

Bob

-----Original Message----- 
From: Dennis Beresford [mailto:dberesfo@terry.uga.edu]  
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001 7:15 AM 
To: Bob Jensen Subject: FASB report

Bob,

One more comment for your Bookmarks. The long-awaited FASB report on "Improving Business Reporting: Insights into Enhancing Voluntary Disclosures" is now available for downloading at the FASB web site:

http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/fasb/ 

This is the major component of the Board's follow up to the Jenkins Report of several years ago.

Denny

Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon --- http://www.lpi.usra.edu/research/lunar_orbiter/ 

In the digital age, God -- not Al Gore, nor Tim Berners-Lee -- created the Internet. So says a Texas church that is changing its name to fellowshipchurch.com in order to market its message to Christians around the world --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,41229,00.html 

Diary of a War Artist --- http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/ardizzone/ardizz.htm 

Yahoo Internet Life --- http://www.zdnet.com/yil/ 

Web design software maker Macromedia on Tuesday evening said it had struck a $360 million deal to merge with Internet application server and software provider Allaire Corp.--- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0101174/2675095/ 

eBusiness Delivery To and From Your Home --- Kozmo.com at http://www.kozmo.com/index.html 
The Kozmo service was reviews by the Digital Duo in Show Number 403 at http://www.digitalduo.com/403_dig.html 

Internet Speedy Delivery
As every self-respecting surf-spud knows, no TV-watching marathon is complete without food, preferably of the junk variety. Most important is to have your nachos, Cheetos, M&Ms – pick your poison – within reach, so you can move as little as possible to get your hands on it. So, what's a lazy slob to do if she's forgotten to pick up the sour cream and onion ranch-style chips at the supermarket?

Order it on the internet! Now there are a handful of companies offering to deliver all the couch-potato accouterments you could ever want – in under an hour. By far the most popular of these is Kozmo, easily recognized by their fleet of bright orange vans and couriers. (The couriers aren't orange but their hair is sometimes.)

Here's how the service works. Go to Kozmo.com. After entering your zip code at their site, Kozmo directs you to your fair city's home page where you can order pop tarts, popcorn, pop music CD's, DVDs, DVD players, Diet Coke, toilet paper and even beer. Think of it as a virtual mini-mall. And the prices aren't bad. Most items will cost you about the same price as they would at the real mall. Movie and game rentals tend to be cheaper, and sandwiches and meals tend to be more expensive. Kozmo delivers the goods within an hour to your doorstep. You return your rentals within three days to special Kozmo dropboxes located in a surprisingly large number of convenience stores, supermarkets, take-out joints etc. Sorry – you can't return the meals!

We asked a crew of teenagers to try out the service for us. After milling about for a while, getting disgruntled and bored, they gave Kozmo a try. In a flurry of arguments, decisions, and clicks, our crack testing team compiled a shopping list of junk food, movies, video games, sodas and the like. Within 50 minutes Kozmo was at the door with the goods. Boredom was diverted and a fine time was had by all. The team was impressed to see that Kozmo even had Steve's old 70's movie: Mother, Jugs & Speed. Good show Kozmo!

SmartPlanet has more than 350 self-study courses in Office, Java, NetWare, Windows, CGI, Notes, Windows NT, FrontPage, Explorer, and other technology subjects. http://smartplanet.zdnet.com/learn.asp 

Online Invitations: 

Accountant Compensation
"The Basics of Compensation," by Wayne Mello --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28873.xml 

Understandably, many accounting students are filled with both optimism and apprehension about entering the workforce for the first time. For those of you who are about to explore this uncharted territory, one of the best things you can do to prepare yourself is to become familiar with some basic elements of a typical compensation package.

The Latest in TV Show Recording
Walt Mossberg had this piece in Show Number 403 of the Digital Duo at http://www.digitalduo.com/403_dig.html 

When you think of a hard drive, you think of some invisible component inside your computer. But today the hard drive is going mainstream – it’s becoming part of your living room, bonding with your TV and your stereo.

These Living Room Hard Drives (LRHDs for short) look like home theater components – inscrutable black boxes like tuners and CD players. However the LRHD can be something far more exciting, for example: a digital jukebox machine. The digital jukebox holds thousands of songs in MP3 format, available at the mere touch of a remote. This device is not a PC. There's no nasty setup process. No configurations. And no Windows! You plug the jukebox in, copy songs to it from CDs, set up playlists, and enjoy the music. Everything is stored on the hard drive inside.

Just as the digital jukebox lets you collect your favorite songs in one place, another hard disk device lets you record your favorite TV shows – and without videotape. This device is called a Personal TV Receiver. It comes in two versions: TiVo and ReplayTV.

The Personal TV box looks like a VCR, but it contains a huge hard disk that records only the shows you like. With it you can assemble your own personal, virtual TV network, customized to your tastes. Then you can watch your favorite shows whenever you like, skipping through the commercials in lightning speed. Unlike a VCR, the personal TV box doesn't require you to learn any programming codes or menus. You just look over an on-screen TV schedule and click on whatever shows you want to record. You don't need to feed it a constant supply of videotapes, because all shows are recorded digitally on the hard disk. Any show you watch in real time is silently being recorded as you watch, so you can pause or replay live television. This can be a great feature if you have to get up and answer the phone or want to see a sports play over again.

Both of these new devices are expensive right now, each costing around $400. But Walt believes that as their prices go down, they will become mainstream devices. And it's all thanks to the hard disk.

Government Websites Get It Together --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41084,00.html 

Hate standing in line to register your car? Have trouble finding out how to file a complaint against a business? Things are changing, thanks to the public sector's willingness to follow the private sector's lead.

The Syllabus spring2001 conference will be held at the Albert B. Sabin Convention Center in Cincinnati, Ohio April 5-8. For registration information and detailed session descriptions, visit www.syllabus.com. Also, be sure to check out the conference brochure in the January issue of Syllabus magazine.

National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center --- http://www.safeyouth.org/ 

XML buffs may want to attend the Web conference sponsored jointly by Software AG, IBM, and IDC.  Call 1-800-249-3537 or go to http://www.softwareag.com/corporat/default.htm.

A Most Controversial PoliceGuide Website That the FBI Should Shut Down
Message from Dick Haar

I cannot believe the FBI is allowing this site to be out for public use and that they will let it be out much longer. I checked it out and couldn't believe the info they had on me!!

I suggest you check it out.  Recommend you don't use your social security number --- just put in the state you were born in and your name and check to see what the FBI may have on you too!!

See the site below:

http://www.policeguide.com/cgi-bin/criminal-search 

Reactions to the website are mixed.  Barry Rice wrote the following:

Bob,

I certainly agree with what Dick Harr says about the FBI Web site ("I cannot believe the FBI is allowing this site to be out for public use.") I was amazed at the information that was available about me and I've never even been arrested! The fact that they have my PICTURE there blows my mind. We really need to do something to shut this thing down.

http://www.policeguide.com/cgi-bin/criminal-search 

Barry Rice www.barryrice.com 

Christine Kloezeman [ckloezem@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US]

I don't think this was an FBI website. Both me and my brother looked like a monkey. Also the facts are not accurate. I hope they didn't have your correct picture. It sounds like a big joke to me.

Paul Krause wrote:

I respectfully disagree. I also found some of my personal information there. I was astounded to see they even had records on parking violations that I have ignored.

However, I feel that information the government has on its citizens should be made available on an individual basis as this site does.

Paul Krause

Ed Scribner wrote the following:

That link isn't perfect, however. I entered my data, and Bob's picture came up.

Ed Scribner 
New Mexico State

President Bush submits his education plan to Congress, part of which centers on technology. Among the themes is Bush's desire for performance-based grant programs that target rural and low-income schools --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41367,00.html 

Wireless e-mail access company NowSpeed next week will start offering a service that enables users to access their personal corporate data via any touch-tone phone --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0101234/2677163/ 

It seems as though President Bush could use some advice about how to fix the problems on his White House website. Washington correspondent Declan McCullagh asks author and design maestro Jakob Nielsen for suggestions and a critique --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41325,00.html 

The inaugural balls were lavish and fun. The inauguration itself was pomp at its best. Just about everything went right during George W. Bush's big weekend, except for that pesky official White House website. Declan McCullagh reports from Washington --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41319,00.html 

Must-have downloads for every Windows PC! http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/toolkits/essentials/ 

From Internet Week on January 23, 2001

Lotus is placing less emphasis on its core Notes/Domino messaging software and instead focusing on its broader portfolio of modular information sharing applications. To entice IT shops to use its new add-on software, the company is offering to host the apps itself.

At its annual Lotusphere conference last week, Lotus officials asserted that customers--even non-Notes shops--will get maximum benefit by combining multiple collaborative products such as Sametime instant messaging, QuickPlace Web teamware and the new Discovery Server, a search tool due to ship in early March. "Our value proposition now extends to a whole set of collaborative solutions," said Lotus CEO Al Zollar.

Yet Lotus left Lotusphere attendees wondering where the company, a division of IBM, is going with the Notes/Domino messaging platform.

Several customers said Lotus failed to give substantial details about the next version of Notes, dubbed R-Next. --David Drucker

For more detail:
http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eCCT0Bdl6n0V30CvBw 

January 21st edition of the Internet Essentials 2001 Newsletter for the financial professional. News about Cpa2Biz, new XBRL members and free databases --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. Microsoft, Thomson fund CPA2BIZ portal 
2. ASP: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? 
3. XBRL Welcomes Our First African Member 
4. QuickBase: A Free Alternative to Access 
5. Another Scary Reminder About Security 
6. E-Volve-or-Die.com, The Book
7. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

From The Best, Worst, & Most Unusual (Noteworthy Achievements, Events, Feats, & Blunders of Every Conceivable Kind), by Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler (Galahad Books, New York, 1976).  

BEST

Best Ballet Dancer:
Rudolf  Nureyev.  Critical acclaim for this Russian-born premier danseur is unanimous--from Clive Barnes to Hubert Humphrey (who once bubbled after a Nureyev performance, "Excellent, wonderful--and I don't usually cotton to that kind of dancing").  Hubert Saal, music editor of Newsweek, has called Nureyev "the reigning prince of dancers."

 

Best Ballet Score:
Swan Lake, by Petr Ilch Tchaikovsky.  It's the music we're concerned with here, not the choreography or the staging, and many critics agree that in Swan Lake in his violin concerto, Tchaikovsky reached the height of his creative powers.  (You may be interested to know that Swan Lake, as ballets go, is especially hard on a dancer's feet; the average ballet dancer, in a typical production, will completely wear out four pairs of ballet shoes.)

 

Best Chamber Work:
Beethoven's String Quartet no. 14 in C# Minor (opus 131).  The best Beethoven is late Beethoven, and his five last string quartets, opus nos. 127, 130, 131, 132, and 135 composed in the final years of his troubled life, are commonly regarded as the pinnacle of Beetoven's aspirations and the greatest works of chamber music ever composed (as well as among the most difficult to play and appreciate).

 Best Choral Work:
Bach's The Passion According to St. Matthew.  Not that there aren't others that might also fill this spot--two to be exact: Brahm's German Requiem, and Handel's oratorio, Saul.  The Brahms and the Handel are certainly more immediately accessible than the St. Matthew Passion, and more fun at first, too.  But in the final analysis, Bach's St. Matthew Passion may well be the most moving, human choral music ever heard.

 Best Composer:
Ludwig van Beethoven, who straddled the classical and romantic periods of music, may well be regarded as the Big One, the composer who single-handedly turned the symphony from a pleasant enough parlor diversion into a medium of artistic expression.

 Best Composer (American):
Charles Ives or George Gershwin.  Both are favorites, but Ives seems to have the edge.  Gershwin, of course, is better known.  The prevailing sentiment is that he might well have become the greatest American composer bar none, had he not been cut down at his peak: he was only thirty-nine when he died of a brain tumor.

 Best Composer of the Twentieth Century:
Igor Stravinsky.  While Bela Bartok may have composed the best single piece of orchestral music of the twentieth century--the Concerto for Orchestra--Stravinsky is unchallenged as the century's best composer.  Stravinsky's best-known work, the Rite of Spring, may also be his best, but when it premiered in Paris in 1913, praise was scant.  Fistfights broke out among the audience and some of the performers were hooted off the stage.  Fortunately for Stravinsky, and for us, the work and its composer's genius were ultimately vindicated.

 Best Opera:
Mozart's The Magic Flute.  Mozart may well have been the greatest of the operatic composers, and The Magic Flute, his last opera and the next-to-last work he composed before dying a pauper's death at the age of thirty-five, is the ultimate synthesis of music and poetry.  Alan Rich, of New York magazine, finds another Mozart opera--The Marriage of Figaro--the best opera ever composed.

 Best Opera Singer:
When Puccini heard Enrico Caruso perform Manon Lescaut with the New York Metropolitan Opera, the composer whispered, "He is singing like a god."  While it is, of course, nearly impossible to compare modern singers with those who performed before the invention of the Victrola, we can say with confidence that Caruso was the most popular, famous, and successful opera singer of all time.  Edouard de Reske, an outstanding bass with the Metropolitan, described Caruso's attraction simply: "I have never heard a more beautiful voice."

 Best Performance of the 1812 Overture Ever:
Performances of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture have traditionally been augmented by the sounds of cannon and gunfire.  In a recent working of the overture in Atlanta, conductor Robert Shaw added real explosives to the score.  When he pressed the button smoke filled the concert hall and a loud blast shook the audience.  The smoke set off a supersensitive fire alarm that alerted the local fire department who arrived, axes and hoses in hand.  The concert ended early.

 Best Pianist (Contemporary):
Vladimir Horowitz.  The lines began to form at the box office of New York's Carnegie Hall twelve hours before tickets went on sale in 1965 for his first piano recital in twelve years.  A specialist in the works of the early romantics, Horowitz's piece de resistance, surprisingly, is a piano transcription of John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, which he introduced at a 1953 recital marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of his American debut.  One reviewer described Horowitz's performance as "possibly the most phenomenal pyrotechnical exhibition in the entire annals of piano playing."

 Best Piano Concerto:
Beethoven's Fourth.  Beethoven wrote five concerti for piano in all, and the most famous, certainly, is his Fifth, the Emperor, although there are some who call it that more for its pomposity than for its grandeur.  Other possibilities are two concerti of Mozart's--his A Major (K. 414) and his C Minor (K. 491)--and Brahm's Piano Concerto no. 1 in D Minor.

 Best Piano Sonata:
Again, Beethoven.  This time, it's his Piano Sonata no. 32 in C Minor, opus 111.  Beethoven's earlier keyboard classics--the Moonlight Sonata, the Appasionata, the Pathetique--are all beautiful, but they've been done to death.  (You'll notice, once again, that we've excluded non-Beethovian candidates.  The piano sonatas of Brahms and Mozart are great music, but they lack the depth and inventiveness of Beethoven's.)

 Best Rock Group:
The Beatles did for rock music what Henry Ford did for the automobile and Babe Ruth did for baseball--infused it with new life and made it respectable.  Their first album--long departure from rock orthodoxy--Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1966--maintains an almost impossibly high level of quality in every song.  Some say the Rolling Stones did as much for rock as the Beatles did, but remember, the Beatles did it first.

 Best Rock Song:
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is still the best rock album ever released.  Appropriately, side two closes with the best song in rock history--"A Day in the Life."  It's a drug-induced vision of timelessness and despair, with a final chord that takes forever to disappear.

Best Symphony:
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  Of all the symphonies ever composed--and there've been thousands--the possible choices for "all-time best," it seems, boil down to just six: Beethoven's Third, his Fifth, and his Ninth; and Mozart's last three--nos. 39, 40, and 41.  T. S. Eliot wrote that Beethoven, in the last movement of the Ninth, was somehow aspiring to transcend music and reach for something almost divine.

 Best Symphony Orchestra:
The Chicago Symphony, with Georg Solti conducting.  If the Philadelphia is the Cadillac of orchestras, the Chicago is a Maserati at the very least.

Best Violin Concerto:
Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major.  As fashionable as it has become to deplore the emotional excesses of romanticism, Petr Ilch Tchaikovsky managed to get it all together in this violin concerto--a magnificent synthesis of sensuality and substance.  Tchaikovsky, who was to die of cholera in 1893, was long troubled by feelings of artistic and creative inadequacy and freely admitted that he was "no Beethoven."  But Rosa Newmarch has said that the "brightness and infectious gaiety" of the concerto's third movement "would probably have delighted Beethoven."

 

WORST

Worst Ballet Score:
Ballet Mecanique, by George Antheil.  The French composer George Antheil--who was born in Trenton, New Jersey--conceived his Ballet Mecanique as a musical evocation of America, Africa, and steel.  Critics on both sides of the Atlantic were outraged and called Antheil's effort a monument to cacophony.

Worst Baton Technique:
During a 1975 concert in Mexico City, Uruguayan conductor Jose Serebrier accidentally stabbed himself through the hand with his baton.  While musicians and chorus members gasped, blood gushed from the wound, staining his white tuxedo shirt and splattering his shoes.  "I never use a baton, but I decided to use one for this performance because I thought it would help achieve greater musical control.  That was a mistake."  Nonetheless, Serebrier continued conducting without missing a beat, deftly removing the wooden fragment from his hand and wrapping the wound tightly in a handkerchief during a lull in the music.  He was treated at a nearby hospital following the concert and was back on the podium--sans baton--the following evening.

Worst Beethoven Composition:
Wellington's Victory, or The Battle Symphony, opus 91.  American and European music critics are all but unanimous in their choice of Wellington's Victory as rock-bottom in the Beethoven repertoire.  Today it is occasionally performed by a live human orchestra, augmented with all manner of muskets, cannon, and small-gage howitzers.  Much of it is reminiscent of the soundtrack for a grade B western.

Worst Composer:
"I remember meeting Max Reger in those years," Igor Stravinsky reminisced.  "He and his music repulsed me in about equal measure."  On other occasions Stravinsky made the unflattering comparison, "...as dull as Reger."  In short, Max Reger is a prime candidate for honors as the worst composer.  His music has been largely ignored, although he did receive some posthumous recognition when Hitler singled him out as a personal favorite.  But Max Reger is remembered as a musical reactionary who did his best to put the phony back in symphony.

Worst Musical Instrument:
Louis XI of France commanded the Abbot of Baigne to invent a preposterous musical instrument to entertain His Majesty's friends.  The Abbot good-naturedly agreed to undertake the assignment, and after a few hours at the drawing board, he gathered together a herd of hogs--ranging from nursing piglets to full-fledged swine.  Under a velvet tent, he lined them up with the low-voiced porkers on the left, the middle-range sows in the middle, and the soprano piglets on the right.  Then the Abbot modified an organ keyboard, attaching the keys to a complex apparatus terminating in a series of small spikes, one poised over the rump of each pig.  The courtiers were gathered together and the Abbot played his keyboard, causing the spikes to prick the pigs, who naturally let out a piercing squeal, each in its own particular voice range.  The tunes were actually recognizable, and the concert was adjudged a success by all.

There is another, similar story in French musical history about a fellow in the mid-1800s who trained cats to howl on command.  He publicly performed a work called Concert Miaulant or Meowing Concert, which was also quite well received.

Worst Symphony:
Any one of the nine symphonies of Louis Spohr, a mid-nineteenth-century German composer, has a fair crack at the title, but our choice is his Symphony no. 2.  Bland, yet pretentious; unmemorable, yet grating to the ears; altogether, a colossal bore.  At the age of seventy-three he broke his left arm and was no longer able to play the violin.  He died heartbroken two years later.

Most Unusual Composer:
Harry Partch.  It wasn't enough, for Harry Partch that he toss the twelve-tone scale, good enough for the likes of Beethoven and Irving Berlin, into the dustbin and invent his own forty-three-note octave; he found it necessary to invent and build his own musical instruments as well.  They included the Whang Gun, a seventy-two-stringed surrogate cithara, glass bells which he called "cloud chamber bowls," a strange, marimba-like instrument called a "boo," and his most famous creation, the bloboys, consisting of three organ pipes, a bellows, and an automobile exhaust pipe.

My friend and neighbor, Dr. Degiovanni, forwarded this message.  After retiring as a physician, Tony's artistic talent bloomed.  He's very good.  I found hundreds of websites that present this story, but all of them claimed the author was unknown.

I picture this story as deriving from Southeast Asia folklore. I'm sure the author meant to expound some moral lesson which I recognize but on the other hand, being an artist I can vividly see the innate beauty in this simple tale as it stirs up sensitive vibes in me and invokes a deep appreciation of really all the beauty resplendent throughout nature which I feel all too frequently goes unappreciated. (Plug for the Sierra Club) Enough of this pontificating! 

Tony

THE CRACKED POT
Author Unknown 

A water bearer in India had two large pots, each hung on each end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, and while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water at the end of the long walk from the stream to the master's house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots full of water in his master's house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect to the end for which it was made. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do.

After two years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream. "I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you."

Why?" asked the bearer. "What are you ashamed of?"

"I have been able, for these past two years, to deliver only half my load because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your master's house. Because of my flaws, you have to do all of this work, and you don't get full value from your efforts," the pot said.

The water bearer felt sorry for the old cracked pot, and in his compassion he said, "As we return to the master's house, I want you to notice the beautiful flowers along the path."

Indeed, as they went up the hill, the old cracked pot took notice of the sun warming the beautiful wild flowers on the side of the path, and this cheered it some.  But at the end of the trail, it still felt bad because it had leaked out half its load, and so again it apologized to the bearer for its failure.

The bearer said to the pot, "Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of your path, but not on the other pot's side? That's because I have always known about your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the stream, you've watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate my master's table. Without you being just the way you are, he would not have this beauty to grace his house."

You can read the following at http://dreamweavers.hypermart.net/cgi-bin/publish/publish.cgi?folder=weavers&next=6 

The moral of this story: Each of us has our own unique flaws. We're all cracked pots. In this world, nothing goes to waste. You may think like the cracked pot that you are inefficient or useless in certain areas of your life, but somehow these flaws can turn out to be a blessing in disguise."

Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed that the new program began making unexpected changes to the accounting modules, limiting access to flower and jewelry applications that had operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.9 but installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0 and NBA 3.0. Conversation 8.0 no longer runs and House Cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I've tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.

--Desperate

Dear Desperate,

Keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an entertainment package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Try to enter the command: C:/ I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME and install Tears 6.2. Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications: Guilty 3.0 and Flowers 7.0. But remember, overuse can cause Husband 1.0 to default to GrumpySilence 2.5, Happyhour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will create "Snoring Loudly" wave files. DO NOT install MotherInLaw 1.0 or reinstall another Boyfriend program. These are not supported applications and will crash Husband1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. Consider buying additional software to improve performance. I personally recommend HotFood 3.and Lingerie 5.3.

--Tech Support

HIGH DEFINITIONS APPRECIATED BY FOLKS MY AGE

ADULT: A person who has stopped growing at both ends and is now growing in the middle.

BEAUTY PARLOR: A place where women curl up and dye.

CANNIBAL: Someone who is fed up with people.

CHICKENS: The only creatures you eat before they are born and after they are dead.

COMMITTEE: A body that keeps minutes and wastes hours.  (Isn't that the truth?)

DUST: Mud with the juice squeezed out.

EGOTIST: Someone who is usually me-deep in conversation.

GOSSIP: A person who will never tell a lie if the truth will do more damage.

HANDKERCHIEF: Cold Storage.

INFLATION: Cutting money in half without damaging the paper.

MOSQUITO: An insect that makes you like flies better.

RAISIN: Grape with a sunburn.

SECRET: Something you tell to one person at a time.

TOOTHACHE: The pain that drives you to extraction.

TOMORROW: One of the greatest labor saving devices of today.

YAWN: An honest opinion openly expressed. (Especially at committee meetings.)

WRINKLES: Something other people have. You have character lines.

Forwarded by Auntie Bev
From Jessies Fun Pages at http://www.geocities.com/jessiesfunpages/ 
(Note that there are a lot more goodies at the above website than appear in the quotes below.)

It's always darkest before dawn. So, if you're going to steal the neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it.*

*No one is listening until you make a mistake.*

*Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.*

*Never test the depth of the water with both feet.*

*It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.*

*It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.*

*If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.*

*If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.*

*If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.*

*Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.*

*If you drink, don't park. Accidents cause people.*

*Some days you are the bug. Some days you are the windshield.*

*If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.*

*Don't squat with your spurs on.*

*Good judgment comes from bad experience and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.*

*The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.*

*A closed mouth gathers no foot.*

*Duct tape is like the force, it has a light side and a dark side and it holds the universe together.*

*Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.*

*There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.*

*Never miss a good chance to shut up.*

*Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your mouth is moving.*

*Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.*

*Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.*

*Don't be irreplaceable; if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.*

*Never mess up an apology with an excuse.*

The Washington Post's Style Invitational asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one  letter, and supply a new definition. Here are some recent winners:

 Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. (Glenn says this is me!)

 Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (this one got extra credit)

 Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you  realize it was your money to start with.

Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

Glibido: All talk and no action.

Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.  (I have dopeler effects.)

For Scandinavians Only
Printed on the menu of the Lutefisk Supper at the St. Olaf Lutheran Church in Bode, Iowa (Fall 2000) 
This definitely challenges my spell checker:

Ven yew go tew shop for Lutefisk
And yew find da one yew seek,
Yust be shur dat it is big enough
For tew, tew last a veek.
But don't try tew make him last dat long.

Yew don't vant tew be a dunce.
Se yew cok da whole fish right away.
Den yew eat him all at vunce!
Yust remember ven yew cook him
Dat yew stand on da vindvard side,
So da smell he make blow away from yew
Den yew don't care ven he died!

And that's the way it was on January 26, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

January 19, 2001

Biography of America (including the transcript of each show and links to references) --- http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/ 

Quotes of the Week 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice every where. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. 
Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.
Francis Bacon

I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. 
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fear less, hope more; 
Whine less, breathe more; 
Talk less, say more; 
Hate less, love more; 
And all good things are yours. 
Swedish Proverb

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
Buddha

I've learned.... that everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.
Andy Rooney

One person saying to me, "You've made my day!" makes my day. 
Andy Rooney

The Internet employs more people than the insurance industry, accounts for 20 percent of the U.S. economy, and -- burst bubble notwithstanding -- will continue to grow and grow --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41170,00.html 

Layoffs at New York Times Digital and News Corp.'s announcement it will lay off hundreds in the near future send a clear signal: Content on the Web is going to be closely scrutinized by the bean counters --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41121,00.html 

And speaking of those bean counters:
Pro2Net Advantages of Careers in Public Accounting --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28630.xml 

Bob Jensen's (Invited) Letter to the Editor --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28583.xml 

Reply from Dave Richards

Great read!

I couldn't agree with you more on your closing statement regarding "non-typical job opportunities". New times are coming, and we'll be ready.
Best regards,
Dave
Costantino & Richards, LLP (voice) 781-938-4540 (fax) 781-938-4546 (email) d.richards@costantino-richards.com  (epage) 7817603691@page.nextel.com  www.costantino-richards.com 

Pro2Net Accounting and Finance Salary Study --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28630.xml 

With the turn of the year many accounting students and professionals will make a New Year's resolution to find their ideal job -- which usually includes a friendly paycheck. Salary guides and projections, many released this month, indicate what salaries accountants can expect. Find out if you have the right degree, the ideal experience, or the best approach for landing your dream job.

Apparently it's "none of our business."

Gaming has long been regarded as a pastime of adolescents. But one professor believes that gaming has matured, and it's time to start studying the cultural and technical intricacies of games at the university level --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,40967,00.html 

Like the renowned chef, Robert Nideffer, an assistant professor of studio art at the University of California at Irvine, is trying to bring a somewhat unconventional idea to a place where some feel it does not belong.

Nideffer has proposed that the school offer a minor in computer games and gaming, an initiative that has sparked heated debate.

"Computer games and gaming have been largely ignored by the academic community," the proposal reads. "A more comprehensive and theoretically informed approach to the artistic and technical production, dissemination and consumption of games and gaming needs to be taken if we wish to effectively engage the cultural institutions that inform our individual and collective identities, and engender new processes of communication and creativity."

The proposal was already voted down once. In December, a faculty committee rejected the proposal, with eight opposed, four in favor, and two abstaining, Nideffer said. It will be re-submitted this year.

"As you can imagine, there's still quite a bit of stigma associated with games and gaming," Nideffer said. "It gets into the whole 'high culture, low culture' debate. There is resistance."

In a copy of a letter obtained by Wired News, Dean of the School of Social Sciences William Schonfeld expressed the following concerns:

"An academic program of study officially listed as focusing on gaming studies runs, I think, the strong risk of attracting people on the basis of prurient interest. I do not think we should send forth messages of this type if we wish to be a research university of the highest level of distinction."

When Schonfeld was contacted directly, he vehemently refused to comment on the proposal.

"Any discussion outside the university is inappropriate," he said. "It's none of your business."

This should become our business.  Science publishers need to hire more assurance services bean counters.

I recently asked a physics professor what he thought of K12 science books.  His reply can be distilled down into one word --- Garbage.  The large publishing houses pay a fortune to make the K12 books politically correct and a pittance to make them scientifically correct.  The result, after a recent study, compiled over 500 pages of serious scientific errors in the science books of the 12 leading publishers who supply about 85% of the middle schools with science books in the U.S.  The study headed by Professor John Hubisz of North Carolina State University was funded by a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Professor Hubisz wrote to me as follows:

Hi Bob,

I have attached a Word document. For a PDF version try http://www.psrc-online.org  and select "Curriculum" and then Middle School Physical Sciences Report.

Best wishes,
John L. Hubisz [hubisz@mindspring.com] 

The worst offender was the Prentice-Hall Science Series that is riddled with errors.  One problem is that the publishers use middle school teachers to review the books rather than serious scientists.  There also are unfortunate selections of authors.  For example, the authors of a physical science textbook were biologists instead of physicists, chemists, and geologists.  

They get people to check for political correctness ... they try to get in as much cultural diversity as possible," reports Professor Hubisz.  "They just don't seem to understand what science is about."

According to the San Antonio Express News, January 15, 2001, p. 12A:

Hubisz said the researchers contacted publishers, who for the most part either dismissed the panel's findings or promised corrections to later editions.

Reviews of later editions turned up more errors than corrections.

Sounds like a job for assurance service providers to me --- those bean counters!

"History on Reserve:  Using Online Journal Collections," by R.J. Bazillion and C.L. Braun, "Syllabus, January 2001, pp. 44-47.  The Syllabus home page is at http://www.syllabus.com/ 

Electronic reserves (e-reserves) directly accessible from the course syllabus allow students to click on the articles' titles and link to the home page of the service that offers the full-text documents.  Students can then follow the site's search protocols to locate a specific item, thus learning the techniques of electronic research.  Several full-text providers may be represented on the syllabus, in order to deliver broad coverage of digitized publications.  A few compromises may have to be made, because some relevant articles are not available electronically; but experience confirms that an excellent selection of resources already exists.

Finding the Best Digital Collections

A brief survey located about a dozen outstanding digital collections of full-text scholarly articles.  Among them are:

JSTOR, supported by the Mellon Foundation and several research universities, contains back issues of significant scholarly journals.  Instructors who wish to create e-reserves will find a wide range of suitable articles from which to choose.

Successful implementation of e-reserves depends, above all, on the library's ability to subscribe to a comprehensive set of databases.  Winona State University, for example, enjoys state-supported access through the regional interlibrary-loan consortium MINITEX.  Also indispensable is a reliable connection to the campus information network from library, dorm room, or home.  Some colleges require all students to lease or own a network-compatible computer that serves as their primary research, project-creation, and communication tool.  Libraries typically provide access to full-text services by using an IP address, a proxy server, or a password for authentication purposes.  Items on e-reserve may be reached through an on-campus connection, the school's modem pool, or one's own ISP.  As long as network connectivity is ubiquitous, faculty may assume that all students have equal access to course readings.  When students can retrieve their reading assignments in a couple of mouse-clicks, there can be no excuse, aside from sloth or technological meltdown, for failure to make informed contributions to course discussion forums.  Another benefit is that no one can monopolize or, as sometimes happens to print materials, sequester vital readings.

Copyright law is something that all creators of e-reserves have to take into account.  Technology allows us to do interesting things, such as scan-and-post, streaming audio/video, or hyperlinking that may be of dubious legality.  Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, campuses must deal with claims of infringement allegedly committed by their employees.  Risk management entails reducing the liberties that instructors sometimes take with copyrighted materials.  One way to do this is to subscribe to licensed databases that allow every authenticated individual (that is, all faculty and students) to make free use of the service, provided that they follow conventional citation practices and make no commercial use of the texts themselves.  A convenient and legal system of e-reserves may prove, however, to be something of a mixed blessing in an economic sense.

"Does Accredited Really Mean Accredited?" by Sally Johnstone, "Syllabus, January 2001, p. 22.  The online versions of these short articles in Syllabus are usually not made available on the Web.  The Syllabus home page is at http://www.syllabus.com/ 

Except where a U.S. distance education course is from an accrediting body recognized by either the U.S. Secretary of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), Ms. Johnstone casts doubt on the value of the accreditation.  There are "about 100 accrediting bodies that are unrecognized."  Some are very dubious accrediting bodies.  Obviously some are more prestigious than others.  Ms. Johnstone states the following:

This is a good question for a potential student to ask.  For most of us, accreditation refers to the regional or professional accrediting associations that have historically validated our traditional colleges and universities.  They assure that institutions have the intellectual, organizational, and financial capabilities they claim to have.

One accrediting group that is becoming well-known among distance learning providers is the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC).  It has been around since 1926 and was originally developed to assess correspondence schools.  Lately, several non-traditional online providers have gone to the DETC for accreditation because the DETC process for evaluation can be completed in a much shorter time frame than the regional accreditation associations' processes.  However, students studying at an institution accredited solely by the DETC are unlikely to be eligible for federal student loans and grants.

From: JeanP@bpm.com
To: XYZVirtualUniversity.edu
Subject Re: Re: Application fee

The CHEA homepage is at http://www.chea.org/About/ 

The DETC homepage is at http://www.detc.org/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245prest.htm#Accreditation 

In my opinion, the impossibility or impracticability of getting appropriate accreditation is what is driving many distance education providers to partner either with established accredited colleges or with prestigious corporations.  For example, accreditation becomes less important if the transcript can be stamped with such logos as Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Ernst & Young, etc.  However, for college credit, having accreditation from an organization recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education still has special meanings in the U.S. even if there is a wide range of quality of schools having such accreditations.  These special meanings include transfer credit to other colleges, qualifications for admittance to graduate programs, and government funding of loans and grants.

Imagine the art patron as canvas. Artist Jody Elff's sound sculpture uses a computer to translate the ambient noise generated by movement and sound at an art gallery into musical responses. Reena Jana reports from New York on the latest in the art of sound --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,40960,00.html 

The Moving Image Gallery website is at http://www.movingimagegallery.com/ 
As with modern art, some of us are just too old fashioned and set in our ways to truly appreciate or understand the leading edges of art.

This is not to imply that I do not think there will be huge advances in using sound for the analysis of data in science.  Bob Jensen's Threads on the Networking of the Five Senses (Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, and Taste) are at   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/senses.htm 

Hi Jeff,

My Threads on Plagiarism Detection are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarsm.htm 

The first thing I recommend trying if you find a somewhat unique phrase in a document that you think was plagiarized in whole or in part is as follows:

If the above steps fail, then look into the options listed at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarsm.htm 

I hope this helps

Bob Jensen

Reply from Roger in Singapore

As is increasingly common, NTU has a subscription to the full text version of ABI-Inform. We have several other full text databases as well, but ABI-Inform is the database that our students seem to use. This database is a more productive source of information for students to prepare their essays or to plagiaries. If I suspect that a portion of an essay has been lifted directly from elsewhere, I search the ABI-Inform database in much the same way as Bob recommends searching Google.

BTW, last semester I used Eve 2.2 but found it a complete waste of time. It just seemed to sit there and think for hours on end, giving no feedback on its progress. Very frustrating. This time around, I'm going to convert all Word documents to text to see if that speeds things up, and then just let Eve work overnight.

Roger Debreceny [rogerd@NETBOX.COM] 

What has always impressed me with WizeUp is how that company persuaded the leading textbook publishers to allow WizeUp to distribute their top textbooks as downloads into PCs (with software that allows one print copy) at substantial savings to students.  I received the following message from WizeUp on January 15, 2001:

WIZEUP DIGITAL TEXTBOOKS AND COLLEGES.COM ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP TO PROVIDE E-LEARNING PRODUCTS TO THE MASSES

NEW YORK, NY, January 16, 2001 -- Today, WizeUp Digital Textbooks (WizeUp), and Colleges.com announced a joint marketing agreement to promote WizeUp's e-learning products to students across the country through the numerous on and off-line properties owned and operated by Colleges.com.

WizeUp's e-learning products will be offered to Colleges.com's users through the Colleges.com web site (www.colleges.com), "word of the day" e-newsletters, U-Magazine and the College Press Network. Concurrently, WizeUp will promote Colleges.com as the leading content provider for college students by showcasing Colleges.com's unique content on www.wizeup.com.

WizeUp is the leading provider of Digital Textbooks and Study Guides in the higher education market. WizeUp offers the top selling textbooks in association with the world's leading higher education publishers including McGraw-Hill; Thomson; Harcourt; Pearson; and Bedford, Freeman & Worth. WizeUp products allow students to search, sort and manage the educational content much faster than with print-based materials. The e-learning products are in great demand as professionals and students who are under pressure to acquire new skills need new computer-based, interactive tools for gaining those skills-faster, better and cheaper. As a result, distance learning and on-line training is expected to experience exponential growth over the next three years. According to International Data Corporation, the number of students enrolled in distance-learning courses is growing 30% annually. Over 80% of all higher education institutions will offer distance learning by 2002.

Colleges.com is an extensive network of on-line and off-line properties that provides unparalleled promotional opportunities for its partners and advertisers. The web property, www.colleges.com, will offer the entire WizeUp catalog of products, which is the largest catalog of digital textbooks in the world.

"Colleges.com and its associated properties allow WizeUp to step up our promotional efforts from our target 250 schools to thousands of schools across the country," said David Gray, CEO of WizeUp. "The age of Digital Textbooks is here and Colleges.com will help us bring these advanced learning tools to the masses."

"This deal gives Colleges.com another avenue to actively support and participate in the new world of e-learning," said John Carrieri, CEO of Colleges.com. "WizeUp is the first mover in the digital textbook space and we look forward to expanding the exposure and benefits of digital textbooks to students."

About WizeUp: Based in New York City, WizeUp Digital Textbooks (www.wizeup.com) is the leading developer of digital educational content-including digital textbooks, training materials, and other related educational content-for both the higher education and corporate marketplaces. The company is dedicated to serving the educational community with innovative new E-learning solutions. Additional information is available by visiting www.wizeup.com.

About Colleges.com Colleges.com, the parent company of U. Magazine and the College Press Network is an interactive web site focused on providing college and university specific information, financial aid and e-commerce. Other services include a college search engine listing over 4,600 colleges and universities, a scholarship search engine offering 2 billion in awards and a price-comparison engine that compares on-line retailer textbook prices. Colleges.com also owns and publishes U. Magazine, the most widely read lifestyle and entertainment magazine among sixteen to twenty-four year-olds, with a circulation of over 1.5 million. U. Magazine is the only national college magazine written for college students by college students. It is currently distributed at more than 250 four-year colleges and universities nationwide. The College Press Network is a leading provider of advertising and on-line content for over sixty on-line college newspapers. Colleges.com is privately held and is headquartered in San Diego, CA.

The WizeUp website is at http://www.wizeup.com/ 

Bob Jensen's threads entitled "Electronic Book, e-Book, eBook, eJournals, and Electronic Journal Watch" can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Oracle's portal strategy is a lot deeper than it looks, says John Taschek.--- http://www.eweek.com/b/pcwt0101115/2666961/ 

Best Shopping Software --- Lands' End according to InformationWeek Online on January 15, 2001

Just what makes Lands' End's software unique? Typically, personalization tools offer choices based on a customer's buying history. The Lands' End-QuickDog software mimics the methodology of human personal shoppers. Lands' End asks customers a few questions about what they're seeking, their sizes, color and fabric preferences, and body types. The site then shows them several outfits based on the answers. It uses historical purchasing data to provide customers with appropriate ideas each time they return to the site. Lands' End senior VP Bill Bass got the idea for the system by observing personal shoppers at Nordstrom's help customers find the right items, says Scott Metcalf, QuickDog's president and CEO. Bass, in turn, hired McKinsey & Co. to help develop the concept, added back-end artificial intelligence from QuickDog, and outsourced the coding to Sapient Corp.

Although no software can duplicate a human personal shopper, Lands' End's has gone a long way toward "cloning the human personal shopper into a digital experience," says Arthur Andersen partner Joe O'Leary. So intriguing is the technology that O'Leary questions whether Lands' End made the right decision in reselling it. "If I were them, I wouldn't sell it to my competitors," he says.

The Lands' End homepage is at http://www.landsend.com/cd/frontdoor/ 

Only two percent of Mexicans are online, which puts them far behind the United States and other developed nations. The ones who are connected, though, are shopping, shopping, shopping. Only Brazilians do more online shopping in Latin America --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41148,00.html 

I might note that Mexican students really like distance education.  For example, one of the main reason's students in Mexico City love courses delivered by Texas A&M is that they don't have to spend three hours getting to an onsite class and three hours driving home in Mexico City gridlock.  

If any of you want a copy of Professor Parnell's paper, his email address is john_parnell@tamu-commerce.edu  
An excerpt is quoted below:

The course considered in the present study was structured to utilize three weekend professorial visits (i.e., Friday evening and Saturday) to campus in one term and four in another (see exhibits one and two). Weekend visits were typically spaced two or three weeks apart. In total, approximately fifteen hours was utilized in each term for delivery of strategic management concepts; the remainder of the time was devoted to preparation and ultimate presentation of group case projects. Students were enrolled in the graduate program at the Ciudad de Mexico campus of Instituto Tecnologico Y De Estudios Superiores De Monterrey (ITESM). Facilities at the institution, including internet access, were excellent.

Students were allowed to form their own groups of three to four students. Each group selected a company from a list of instructor-approved publicly traded American companies to strategically analyze as its group project. The case analysis was the major assignment in the course, accounting for 35 percent of the overall grade. Because of the wealth of information available on the internet and the potential research difficulties for ITESM students, links to an extensive array of on-line sources (e.g., Hoover's for financial data, Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition (WSJIE), Lexis-Nexis, etc.) were provided so that students could complete all of the case research via the internet.

Students were also required to participate in on-line class discussions with graduate students taking a strategic management course at an American institution. In these discussions, students were free to post views on a variety of topics and current issues related to strategy formulation, implementation, and the international environment. Specifically, students were encouraged to comment on articles from the WSJIE and other sources, and to participate in discussions begun by others students or the professor.

RESULTS

The two classes considered in the present study had fifteen and twelve students respectively. Each student chose to pursue the course under the weekend format in English instead of taking it with a local professor on a one-night-per-week basis. There is no indication that students in the course differed from those in other sections, except that marginal English speakers would not have chosen to take the course in English.

At the end of each course, students completed a brief, anonymous survey containing three questions: · If you had the opportunity to take the course again, would you choose the same section? (yes/no/maybe) · How would you evaluate the internet component of the course? (strong/moderate/weak) · How would you evaluate the weekend structure of the course? (strong/moderate/weak) In addition, students were allowed to provide specific written comments.

None of the students stated that they would not take the same section. Twenty-three students (85 percent) stated that they would, while the remaining four (15 percent) chose the "maybe" response.

The internet component of the course was evaluated as "strong" by 25 of the 27 students (93 percent), while the other two (7 percent) evaluated it as "moderate." Twenty of the students (74 percent) evaluated the weekend structure as "strong," whereas the remaining seven (26 percent) evaluated it as "moderate." Written comments by those in the latter group suggested that some would have selected different combinations of dates for the visits to campus.

Student participation on the bulletin board was commendable, in many cases providing a rich, international perspective to the topics and issues presented by their American counterparts. One of the unintended and positive outcomes of the experience was that the Mexican graduate students were able to learn from those at the American institution-which included Americans as well as students from several other countries-and vice versa. These two groups would never have connected outside of the bulletin board experience.

Project quality was excellent in most cases. Students were able to secure from the internet more than enough objective and subjective information to complete their projects. From a research perspective, the quality of the internet research was vastly superior to traditional forms of case research, and would be appropriate to traditional classes as well.

FUTURE RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

Internet delivery in the international arena appears to be growing exponentially, but remains in its nascent stage of development. The use of the internet to address the tremendous international market opportunity is both logical and promising for universities and faculty equipped to do so. Several fundamental questions must be addressed, however.

First, does the host institution and faculty member possess the technical expertise-including appropriate support-to utilize the internet for delivery of instruction? Faculty members must understand the basics of web page creation and/or possess the university support necessary to post materials, change them as needed, and address any technical support issues raised by the learners. Delivery of courses via the web also necessitates that faculty members "buy in" to a nontraditional model of education, whereby the faculty member becomes the facilitator instead of the teacher.

Second, to what extent, if any, should the internet delivery be accompanied by face-to-face interaction? Is it desirable to require that learners travel to the host campus or the professor travel to the students? Face-to-face interaction provides a personal touch not easily secured in an on-line environment. Practitioners developing programs should consider that at least some personal contact may be warranted.

Third, should internet based discussions be synchronous or asynchronous? In other words, should students be required to "meet" on the internet at certain times so that class may convene electronically, or should the course be structured so that students can work when they choose? Under the former case, the internet can be used to simulate the classroom environment, and students can exchange ideas or "chat" in real time. Under the latter case, exchange of ideas is limited to e-mails and the bulletin board. Evidence from the present study suggests that the bulletin board is an effective as real time chat, and on-line meetings may not be necessary.

Fourth, how should students be evaluated? If there are no face-to-face meetings, verifiable "closed book" examinations may not be possible. Many internet classes have adopted a "portfolio" approach, where learners submit projects instead of exams. Others require that each student complete a proctored final exam.

Finally, how can outcomes in the internet-based environment be compared to those in the traditional classroom environment? Critics and accrediting agencies will desire evidence the former approach is essentially equivalent to the latter. Proponents may charge that quality in the internet-based environment is superior. At any rate, educators need to be prepared to assess the outcomes and address quality comparisons.

More details are provided at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm 

A grass roots campaign for a Jargon-Free Web --- http://www.jargonfreeweb.com/ 

Interested in XML? Sign up for a free weekly email full of XML news, features, downloads and reviews. http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/lists/xml/subscribe.html

Make your own Rorschach Ink Blots (of sorts)
eblots --- http://www.eblots.com/ 

Psychology of the Brain --- http://www.assd.winnipeg.mb.ca/schools/sh/library/psych.htm 
Includes an ink blot museum)

The Brain.

The Brain: A Work in Progress
Brain Research, Emotions, Human Consciousness, Mental Health.

Brain and Intelligence

Brain Facts and Figures (I can't get this link to work)

Brain Imaging Centre

The Brain Lab
Masses of links to info on Brain Research and Neuroscience websites.

The Charles A. Dana Foundation
Brain diseases and disorders and innovative reforms.

Neuroscience for Kids (This is excellent even for adults.)
Contents include Neuroscience in the News, Explore the Nervous System, Experiments and Activities, Internet Neuroscience Resources and links to online

There's a lot more on Dreams and Links to Associations

Free course on the brain from Barnes & Noble University --- http://www.barnesandnobleuniversity.com/Classroom/OfferingMenu/1,2666,25015_25169_,00.html 

Please add a link to my web site in your Accounting, Finance and Business section under Miscellaneous Taxation Web Sites --- www.funwithtaxes.com 

Thank you!
Gail Perry, CPA
Tax columnist for the Indianapolis Star

Gail Perry and the staff at Fun with Taxes, each week, scour the internet for obscure, interesting, and little noticed tax and accounting news stories which could, for better or worse, impact your tax obligation.

Bob Jensen's Accounting, Finance, and Business section of bookmarks can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

From InternetWeek on January 15, 2001

States Test Systems For E-Comm Taxation

Hosted tax-collection systems to be tested next month by a coalition of states and merchants may be a precursor for how Internet sales taxes will ultimately be managed.

The tests are part of a multistate effort to take paperwork out of tax administration for merchants and tax authorities. It also aims to recover tax dollars that may otherwise slip through the cracks of interstate and Internet commerce.

The four states--Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin--will test an Internet-based tax calculation and remission system using software and services from several vendors. Experts advise e-businesses to observe the tests closely, as the systems being tested represent a cost-effective way to manage the complexities of evolving tax code, particularly in an e-business setting. 

Read the rest: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eB4w0Bdl6n0V30ClHD 

NetLedger Trial Users,

Throughout the past year we have been making significant enhancements to our product line. NetLedger is one completely integrated online business application, including accounting, payroll, online commerce, online bill payments, purchasing, time and expense reporting and more. By combining the anytime, anywhere access of the internet with our powerful integrated applications, we are enabling thousands of growing businesses to be more efficient and effective everyday.

On February 1, our pricing will change to $9.95 per month per user for our powerful core accounting application. We would like to encourage you to join NetLedger today and lock in today's current pricing of $4.95 per month per user.

We are confident that the value of NetLedger to your growing business will far exceed the monthly cost. Call us NOW at 1-800-NETLEDGER to sign up before the price change takes effect on February 1.

Sincerely, The NetLedger Staff

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

The company that produces the widely used FICO credit scores has given into FTC pressure and will offer consumers disclosure on their credit standing --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41179,00.html 

A new kind of geography --- Degree Confluence Project at http://confluence.org/ 

The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.

An old kind of geography --- National Geographic Channel at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/channel/ 

California Deserts --- http://www.californiadesert.gov/ (There may be more if California's power goes out.)

Travelago http://www.travelago.com/ 

We put the world at your fingertips with easy-to-play streaming videos of more than 1,000 U.S. and international destinations - plus videos of hotels, attractions, activities and more in each destination.

But if you want to tour the heavens, go to the Virtual Tour of the Galaxy --- http://www.funone.com/2001/01/trip/index.html 

I added the following to my introductory accounting theory lecture at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/theory.htm 

From The Wall Street Journal's WSJ Educator Reviews on January 11, 2001

* ARTICLE 4 Letters to the Editor: My Market Theory? Forget Theories By George Soros 01/08/01 Page A33

ARTICLE URL: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB978920295412462366.djm 

RELATED ARTICLE: Commentary: Are Markets Efficient? No, Arbitrage is Inherently Risky By Andrei Shleifer 12/28/00 Page A10

ARTICLE URL: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB977962931458900004.djm 

RELATED ARTICLE: Commentary: Are Markets Efficient? Yes, Even If They Make Errors By Burton G. Malkiel 12/28/00 Page A10

ARTICLE URL: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB977962553540358908.djm 

TOPICS: Market Efficiency, Trading Strategies (Financial Accounting)

In a letter to the editor, George Soros responds to two finance professors debating market efficiency by arguing that their theories are likely incomplete, and proposing a new theory called 'reflexivity.'

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1. What does Prof. Shleifer's claim is the best argument for market efficiency? What does he claim is the best argument against market efficiency? What are the conclusions Prof. Shleifer draws about the necessity for government regulation?

2. What are some of the behavioral and pyschological arguments against market efficiency? What is Prof. Malkiel's response? Why does Prof. Malkiel use a profitable trading strategy as the benchmark for evaluating market efficiency?

3. What is Mr. Soros' critique of the arguments of Prof. Malkiel and Shleifer? How does his theory improve on their arguments? What is Mr. Soros' prescription for a better world?

4. What is 'mark-to-market' or 'fair value' accounting? What are its advantages and disadvantages relative to historical cost accounting? What elements of the financial statements are 'marked-to-market'? What are the assumptions underlying fair value accounting? If markets are inefficient, is fair value accounting better than historical cost accounting? Does your answer change if markets are efficient (in Malkiel's sense) but mispricing occurs frequently?

5. Advanced homework: Download the article "How are stock prices affected by the location of trade? By Kenneth Froot and Emil Dabora, Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 53 No. 2, August 1999" from http://www.elsevier.com:80/homepage/sae/econbase/finec/menu.sht  What are some of the reasons the authors examine for why the prices of Royal Dutch and Shell deviate from theoretical arbitrage pricing? What are the implications for Prof. Shleifer's arguments?

From Phil Livingston, President of the Financial Executives Institute (FEI)

SEC Study of Stock Market Efficiency This week, the SEC published a controversial but important comparison study of the efficiency of the NYSE and the NASDAQ markets. The study analyzed the spreads and execution times in each market. It is a fascinating subject. The differences in the NYSE centralized auction market model and the dealer-sponsored decentralized NASDAQ is an important one to understand for public companies. Each market has its strengths and appropriate application. I won't try to summarize the study, but rather leave that to your own assessment of the piece. 

Here is a link to the report --- http://www.sec.gov/news/ordrxm.htm 

Here is a quote from the report:

In a speech today at Stanford Law School, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt said, "The study is a careful, independent attempt to apply an established methodology to data not previously available. And I believe the study also provides important indicators of the answer to the question it was designed to address. Its findings strongly suggest that order interaction improves the prices received by customers. For Nasdaq, it confirms a challenge it faces and quantifies what most traders freely acknowledge – the ability to trade inside the best displayed quotes is substantially limited. For the NYSE, it sheds further light on the time it takes for incoming orders to interact with trading interest on the floor – time its customers have long pressed this market to reduce. More broadly it provides context for the question of what immediate executions are worth to investors. One doesn't need a crystal ball to predict some degree of convergence of the two market models, each attempting to develop strengths of the other. Indeed, both have concrete plans to do so. Yet if the study does nothing more than increase pressure on both markets to respond to the longstanding demands of investors, it will have served the public well."

From Phil Livingston, President of the Financial Executives Institute (FEI)

Similarly, I am pulling together examples of companies' ethical conduct codes. In fact here's a link to our first contribution from our friends at the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. (A&P) --- http://www.fei.org/finrep/conduct.cfm 

If you missed this on PBS, you really missed something.  Jazz (by Ken Burns on music and history) --- http://www.pbs.org/jazz/ 

MS Excel Tutorial and Applications
From the Scout Report on January 11, 2001

Between the Sheets [MS Excel] 
Economics http://www.bized.ac.uk/stafsup/options/sheets/econ_index.htm  
Accounting http://www.bized.ac.uk/stafsup/options/sheets/acc_index.htm  
Business http://www.bized.ac.uk/stafsup/options/sheets/bus_index.htm 

These three guides from the British Website BizEd help users understand the ways to use spreadsheets in economics, accounting, and business research. The tutorials all start with the same general information: introductions for both students and teachers, a guide to downloadable spreadsheets, a guide to using spreadsheets, and a glossary of important terms. However, each of the guides offers a different collection of spreadsheets, which require Microsoft Excel 97. The economics tutorial includes spreadsheets on cost analysis, elasticity of demand, and profit maximization. The business section provides spreadsheets on markups and margins, gearing, depreciation, and cost analysis. Finally, the accounting tutorial features an introduction to balance sheets and income statements, budgeting, and cost volume profit analysis.

Kodak eMagazine --- http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/magazine/ 

Economic and Political Weekly ---  http://www.epw.org.in/ 

Economic and Political Weekly
is a social science journal featuring

* research articles in economics, sociology, political science and other emerging disciplines
* scholarly commentary on topical developments
* in-depth reports on people’s struggles
* regular columns by eminent social scientists
* book reviews
* weekly statistical updates
* analytical review of company performances
* monthly review of the money market
plus
a periodical series of special statistics on the economy and society.

EPW also publishes

Review of Political Economy: January and July
Review of Women Studies; April and October
Review of Labour:
Review of Agriculture;
Review of Management and Industry
plus
Special issues every year on
*Banking and Finance
*The Budget and the Economy
*Thematic collections of research articles

EPW traces it roots to the Economic Weekly established by Sachin Chaudhuri in 1949. Since l966, the EPW has been published by the Sameeksha Trust.

The pages of the EPW have featured some of the most relevant debates, particularly in development economics, sociology and socio-political issues.

Asia Business Today http://www.asiabusinesstoday.org/ 

AsiaBusinessToday is an online resource developed by the Asia Society for information on U.S./Asia economic and business relations, Asia's role in the international economy, and the costs and benefits of economic 'globalization.' Because AsiaBusinessToday is continually growing, we are always interested to hear your suggestions for content partnerships and sponsorships. Please email webmaster@asiasource.orgor  contact us to discuss ideas and possible collaborative projects.

AsiaBusinessToday 
725 Park Avenue New York, NY 10021 
Tel: (212) 288-6400 Fax: (212) 452-1422 Email: webmaster@asiasource.org 

The FCC's apparent edict that AOL make its popular instant-messaging service compatible with messaging applications offered by rivals isn't what it seems. AOL doesn't have to share unless or until it begins offering video conferencing --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41161,00.html 

The Archaeology Channel (streaming videos) http://www.archaeologychannel.org/ 

"The Military Get Mightier," --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1112000/1112411.stm 

The US military is planning to turn soldiers into supermen by fitting them with powered exoskeletons.

The research arm of the US military is spending $50m to develop new technologies that will improve the speed, strength and endurance of soldiers.

The research programme is aiming to give soldiers better protection against enemy fire, the ability to tote bigger guns, run faster, communicate better and help them avoid friendly fire.

Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920 (Marketing, History) http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/ 

The Justice Department releases its new manual on how to search and seize computers and electronic storage devices. Police and prosecutors aren't exactly hamstrung by the new guidelines --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,41133,00.html 

Banking Industry Special ---  http://special.northernlight.com/banking/index.html 

The new G4 debuted by Steve Jobs during his keynote at Macworld this week includes a SuperDrive that allows users to burn DVDs and music CDs. Naturally, the hacker community is excited about all the unstated -- and illegal? --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41142,00.html 

Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley (History)  http://library.stanford.edu/mac/ 

The Real HAL: Artificial Intelligence in Space --- http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/12/27/part.four/ 

When we first meet HAL in "2001," it seems as if there's nothing this computer can't do. HAL steers the Discovery spacecraft toward Jupiter, maintains the life support systems, plays a wicked game of chess, has opinions about sketches drawn by one of the astronauts, and deftly handles questions from a BBC interviewer. Later, we'll discover that HAL can even read lips.

Soon we wonder whether HAL is more like a human than a machine. Is its artificial intelligence really artificial? Even one of the astronauts admits he's not sure whether HAL's emotional responses to the interview questions are genuine or just part of the programming.

HAL's downfall begins when he exhibits one of the basic qualities of being human. He screws up. The astronauts begin to doubt his abilities and the plot takes its well-known conspiratorial and murderous twists.

At the beginning of the year 2001, we have no computers with the impressive abilities of HAL. But we do have Deep Space 1. This half-ton spacecraft was launched in October of 1998 for the purpose of testing new space technologies, including artificial intelligence.

"This is the first time that any spacecraft has truly relied on artificial intelligence," says Dr. Marc Rayman, chief mission engineer for Deep Space 1 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The whole point of Deep Space 1 is to test advanced technologies that are very risky, too risky for science missions to rely on. Deep Space 1 takes the risks so that future missions don't have to."

In some ways, Deep Space 1 is a lot like HAL. The Autonomous Navigation system steers the craft by comparing its position to well-known stars and asteroids. It can think for itself by using software called a Remote Agent. This system is given a set of goals by ground controllers, but it decides how to carry them out. The Beacon Monitor provides feedback to the Earth, with messages ranging from "everything's fine" to "I need help now!"

"All three of these (systems) are able to make decisions on their own. And that's really the key," says Rayman. "With the autonomy, we transfer responsibility from humans on the ground onto the spacecraft. "

International Crime Threat Assessment --- http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/NSC/html/documents/pub45270/pub45270index.html 

The FASB bent to pressures from industry and previously expressed concerns by industry, the Financial Executives Institute (FEI), the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), and others.  The dispute centers mostly on the definition of "control"  You can read the following at http://www.fei.org/newsletters/express/feiexpress36.htm#FASB 
 
The proposed standard will require consolidation of entities that you control and it provides a very unorthodox definition of what is meant by control -- a point that has been a major source of controversy. Specifically, the proposed standard includes a series of presumptions that, if met, would lead to consolidation unless management can provide persuasive evidence that rebuts the presumption*. These presumptions include:
  1. Ownership of a large minority interest in an entity in which all other shareholdings are widely dispersed. For example, a company than owns 35% of an entity's voting stock (and other holdings are dispersed) and has cast more than half of the votes in the most recent election would be presumed to control that entity.
  2. Ownership of convertible securities (options, warrants, convertible debt, etc.) that would be economic to convert and would result in a majority voting interest. For example, a company owns warrants convertible to 50% of an entity's stock - and those warrants are "in the money." It is clear that holding such securities as an investment (that is, to earn a return rather than to indirectly control) is not sufficient to rebut the presumption. It is also clear that there will be a number of troubling consequences that result from this presumption - such as requiring equity method accounting for holdings of securities that would result in a 25% voting interest if converted.
  3. Ownership of the sole general partner (GP) interest in a limited partnership if the limited partners are unable to remove the GP or dissolve the partnership. It does not matter that the GP's interest is 1% (or less) or that the GP functions more or less as a manager for the limited partners.
The main objections are that the proposed rule cannot be made operational in an effective and efficient manner.

Offshore & Privacy Secrets --- http://permanenttourist.com/ 
This is their claim --- handle this website with care and, perhaps, a healthy dose of skepticism.

There are many people, besides the government, who absolutely don't want you to find out more about the hard-hitting offshore & privacy secrets published at this site. Please look over your shoulder to make sure that none of them is watching:

Hi Bob,

I've just joined The Dangerous Books Affiliate Program. They offer a generous 40% commission on the first level sales, then 10% commission on second level sales.

I really urge you to sign-up, it looks to be one of the most generous affiliate programs around.

Think about it, most affiliate programs pay a 10-15% commission but these guys pay you a generous 40% + 10%. Their products are well priced to earn you decent money as well!

RegardsGo to: http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=6157 

Andy Viking at Mixed@Online 

From 'landscaped' living rooms to electronic art, the film 'Antitrust' illustrates just how push-the-envelope modern today's living and working spaces can be --- http://www.latimes.com/business/cutting/20010111/t000002814.html 

Make a game (craft) out of folding money.
Money Origami ---  http://www.umva.com/~clay/money/ 

Prison Diaries (from NPR) --- http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/prisondiaries/  

Forwarded by Aaron Knostam

There is a interesting music protection controversy going on. The music industry is trying hard to prevent a group of college professors from publishing there results: See: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/index.html 

Analysis of how Congress' new rules on patients' rights and privacy requirements will change the flow of health information online --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,40989,00.html 

New federal regulations designed to keep health information private have some cash-strapped hospitals worried. But tech companies able to help with compliance are seeing green --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41075,00.html 

Network Computing, January 8, 2001. p. 7  reports that Netscape 6 is a "quantum leap forward in standards support while stumbling backward in stability --- http://www.nwc.com/1201/1201sp5.html 

Microsoft .NET News

".NET Framework Overview," by Jerome Kuptz 11 Jan 2001 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/02/index3a.html 

It seems the Redmond giant believes that the holy grail of Internet development has been found, and its name is ".NET Framework."

As Microsoft explains in its FAQ, the .NET Framework is an "environment for building, deploying and running Web services and other applications. It consists of three main parts: the Common Language Runtime, the Framework classes, and ASP.NET."

But I, a mere programmer, view things a little more simply: The .NET Framework is basically just a single platform that anybody can develop for, using a system similar to Java/JVM. Only unlike Java/JVM, there's no language barrier with .NET: The languages available to the developer upon installation of the SDK (software development kit) are Managed C++, C#, Visual Basic and JScript; even more are on the way.

That said, like Java/JVM, .NET comes with its own set of pros and cons, something every developer needs to consider when it comes to choosing one platform over another:

.NET Pros

 

.NET Cons

Visual Studio for Applications, scheduled to ship by the end of the year, will let users customize Web software --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0101162/2674384/ 

JASC software is good stuff.  I have repeatedly advocated Quick View Plus as a cheap way to open up email attachments and other documents (such as MS Word and MS Excel documents) without risk of virus infection.  For faculty grading student projects, this is a wonderful protection.  The JASC website is at http://www.jasc.com/ 

If your New Year's Resolution is to be more organized, this deal is for you! The Jasc Organization Pack includes Jasc Media Center Plus 3 and the Jasc Quick View Plus 6 Upgrade for only $48. That's a $20 saving off the regular price of $68. To order, go to:

http://www.jasc.com/promo.asp?CID=32128 

The Jasc Organization Pack includes the latest and greatest in multimedia viewing and organization technology. Both Quick View Plus and Media Center Plus offer support for more file formats than their competitors. Plus, like all Jasc products, each product goes above and beyond to bring you robust software at an extremely affordable price.

Quick View Plus 6 Upgrade offers: + Brand-new navigation featuring an Explorer-like interface + New Quick Compress feature to create and extract zip files + Auto-zip compresses large email attachments automatically + Support for expensive formats such as AutoCAD DXF, Microsoft Project, and more + Provides seamless integration with popular browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 & Netscape Navigator 4 + Plus much more

Add Media Center Plus and take control of your graphics and multimedia files: 

+ Organize all your photos, graphics, and more regardless of where they're located 
+ Manage files in the intuitive, easy-to-use album approach 
+ Instantly share files by exporting directly to the Web 
+ Easily create a slideshow complete with background music 
+ Print photos in standard photo sizes - wallet to 8 x 10 + And much more

Don't be held hostage by an email attachment you can't read or a file you can't find ever again. Get the Jasc Organization Pack today for only $48 (plus shipping and handling)!* You'll never find a deal better than this - a $20 savings off the regular price. To order today:

http://www.jasc.com/promo.asp?CID=32128 

*ATTENTION CANADA CUSTOMERS: The promotional price of this package is $72 CDN plus applicable taxes, shipping and handling.

This offer is valid in the US & Canada only and ends February 28, 2001. To order by phone in the US and Canada, please call 1-800-622-2793 and mention code 32128.

THE JASC GUARANTEE If you are dissatisfied with your purchase from Jasc Software, you will receive a refund if you request it within 30 days of the original ship date. http://www.jasc.com/returns.asp 

SITE LICENSES Jasc Software offers volume discounts on site licensing, enterprise agreements, and investment protection agreements for qualified purchasers. Whether you are a corporate, academic, or government user, Jasc Software has a licensing solution tailored to your specific needs. For a custom quotation, call us at (800) 622-2793 option 2. We'll be glad to help.

Figuring out the nuts and bolts of setting up your e-commerce site and accepting online payments can be time-consuming and complex.

Now let VeriSign help you understand this process-with our new FREE TECHNICAL White Paper at http://www.verisign.com/cgi-bin/go.cgi?a=e095525910038000 .

You'll learn how VeriSign's SSL Server IDs and Payment Gateway Services let you provide:

* Authentication - Assure your customers that your site is legitimate. * Confidentiality - Keep sensitive web transactions and communications private. * Data Integrity - Protect data transmission from third-party alterations. * Nonrepudiation - Validate transactions to authenticate your customers' intent. * Payment Gateway - Process credit card transactions in real-time!

Get the e-Payment-enabling TECHNICAL solutions you need. Go to http://www.verisign.com/cgi-bin/go.cgi?a=e095525910038000  now for your FREE Technical White Paper.

To FAS 133 buffs (Accounting for Derivative Financial Instruments and Hedging Activities).  This is a message from Ira.

I thought you might be interested in reading a recent article that I co-authored with John Ensminger, "The Fallout From FAS 133," (with J. Ensminger), Regulation (The CATO Review of Business and Government), Vol. 23, No. 4, 2000.

The article deals with the disparity of the treatment of derivatives with respect to financial reporting (i.e., accounting) on one hand, versus tax treatment, on the other.

You can find a copy of the article on my web site. Click on "Articles." It's the last one listed under Articles Relating to General Derivatives Markets. I hope you'll find it to be thought provoking.

Ira Kawaller & Company, LLC (718) 694-6270 kawaller@idt.net www.kawaller.com 

Bob Jensen's gateway to FAS 133 is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm 

Geneer Executive Briefings--a whitepaper series focusing on the hottest topics in today's business world. These whitepapers have been developed to help organizations understand key technology issues and trends that Geneer believes will have significant impact on the future of business.

To receive the Wireless Future whitepaper from Geneer, go to: http://destinationsite.com/c?c=216042.46524.0.8864.0 

AECMers,

Dennis Ryan at www.emazing.com  sends a tip on easy access to those long URLs that Bob sometimes sends us--you know the ones that disappear off the right of your screen:

Both Internet Explorer and Netscape display the target address at the bottom of the browser window when you place the cursor on a hot link, as we noted (I haven't used Opera in a while so I don't know if it also does this). Netscape doesn't have IE's "Properties" box, but it does have the handy "Copy Link Location" feature. Just right-click on the target link, select "Copy Link Location," and paste it into the location bar or other document. IE does the same with "Copy Shortcut." Right-click on the link, choose "Copy Shortcut," and paste. Both methods are quicker than copying and pasting URLs from the location bar or the Properties box, but make sure you're copying the right target URL!

- Dennis Ryan

E. Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU] 

January 15th edition of the Internet Essentials 2001 Newsletter for the financial professional. XBRL news includes business reporting for XBRL beyond financial statements and a great XBRL information Web --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. XBRL: Creating a Plethora of Internet Reporting Possibilities 
2. Must See XBRL Web Site 
3. Wired.com Tech News Bits Highlights 
4. Packing Much More Music and Letting Your Eyes Be Your Mouse 
5. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

That "Must See" site on XBRL --- http://www.xbrlsolutions.com/

Try out the  XBRL Instance Document Validator!

Try out the XBRL Custom Taxonomy Builder!

XBRL is a framework that will allow the financial community a standards-based method to prepare, publish in a variety of formats, exchange and analyze financial reports and the information they contain. It will also permit the automatic exchange and reliable extraction of financial information among various software applications

Bob Jensen's "XML, XHTML, XFRML XBRL, XForm, and RDF Watch" is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/xmlrdf.htm 

The fifteen best movies in the Year 2000 according to Newsweek, January 15, 2001, pp. 60-61 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/512670.asp 

1. WONDER BOYS Michael Douglas redefined himself playing a pothead novelist-teacher at the end of his rope in Curtis Hanson’s hilarious and melancholy comedy. Subtle, literate and generous toward its misfit characters, this wonderful ensemble piece showed what Hollywood artistry, left to its own devices, could achieve.

2. YI YI In three incredibly rich hours, Taiwan’s Edward Yang unfolds the lives and loves of a middle-class Taipei family, making the quotidian luminous. This intimate, deeply human epic crosses all borders.

3. ERIN BROCKOVICH Giving Julia Roberts the best role of her career, Steven Soderbergh took a familiar social-problem formula and shook the stuffing out of it. Video trailers.  Funny, sexy and rousing, this girl-and-Goliath fable was mainstream Hollywood filmmaking at its most satisfying.

4. RATCATCHER With this first film, a bleak tale of a deprived childhood in the slums of Glasgow, a film-making star was born. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay is the real McCoy: a visionary whose images are so striking and fresh they transform horror into poetry.

5. AN AFFAIR OF LOVE In the year’s most trenchant love story (originally titled “Une Liaison pornographique”), a nameless woman (a great Nathalie Baye) and nameless man (Sergi Lopez) meet through a personal ad for an anonymous sexual tryst in a Paris hotel room. It turns into something far more complex, as this riveting film chronicles in stunningly precise emotional detail.

6. BILLY ELLIOT The beguiling Jamie Bell dances his way out of the coal mines in Stephen Daldry’s charming, exuberant quasi musical. This is one “feel good” movie you can actually feel good about feeling good about.

7. YOU CAN COUNT ON ME The best American indie movie was Kenneth Lonergan’s beautifully written account of a brother and sister (the extraordinary Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney) re-encountering each other in upstate New York. Here are “family values” as they’re really lived, expressed through tangled feelings of love, resentment, loyalty and regret.

8. TRAFFIC Soderbergh strikes again: this time with an ambitious, exciting epic about the ravages of drugs on our culture. The huge cast is flawless, led by the mesmerizing Benicio Del Toro as a Tijuana cop trying to hold onto his soul in a ruthless world. Newsweek On Air Movies: Best of 2000

9. BEFORE NIGHT FALLS Lyrical, sensual and shattering, Julian Schnabel’s memorial to the late gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem) is a devastating indictment of the Castro regime, which could tolerate neither Arena’s sexuality nor his creativity. This fever-pitched film takes us places we’ve never been.

10. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON Who could have guessed the year’s most exhilarating action film would come from the director of “Sense and Sensibility”? A magical blend of love story, historical epic and martial arts, Ang Lee’s high-flying entertainment was a killer mix of poetry and pizzazz.

11. HUMAN RESOURCES All the subjects American movies avoid—blue-collar work, class, capitalism—are explored with documentary-style vividness and heartbreaking force in this French movie about a son who returns to work as a manager in the factory where his father has toiled all his life.

12. ALMOST FAMOUS A group sing-along to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” summed up the contagious rock-and-roll spirit of Cameron Crowe’s look back at his early days as a precocious music critic. This early-’70s coming-of-age drama was a cinematic love-in.

13. CROUPIER This smart, tricky British neo film noir from director Mike Hodges and writer Paul Mayersberg mixed gambling, writing and larceny into a fresh criminal cocktail with a potent kick at the end.

14. CHICKEN RUN Nick Park and Peter Lord’s remix of “The Great Escape”—with Claymation chickens, no less—lit up a bleak summer with its droll English wit and giddy imagination. A chick flick for all ages and, we suspect, for all time.

15. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH There’s nothing genteel about Terence Davies’s powerful and painful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s most savage novel. It charts the fall of Lily Bart (a haunting Gillian Anderson), undone by the malice of high society and her own conflicted desires. The movie rarely raises its voice, but you can hear it scream.

BEST ACTORS Javier Bardem (‘Before Night Falls’) Michael Douglas (‘Wonder Boys’) John Cusack (‘High Fidelity’) Ed Harris (‘Pollock’) Geoffrey Rush (‘Quills’)

BEST ACTRESSES Laura Linney (‘You Can Count on Me’) Nathalie Baye (‘An Affair of Love’ and ‘Venus Beauty Institute’) Julia Roberts (‘Erin Brockovich’) Marcia Gay Harden (‘Pollock’) Bjork (‘Dancer in the Dark’)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTORS Benicio Del Toro (‘Traffic’) Aaron Eckhart (‘Erin Brockovich’) Jeffrey Wright (‘Shaft’) Joaquin Phoenix (‘The Yards,’ ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Quills’) Willem Dafoe (‘Shadow of the Vampire’)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESSES Samantha Morton (‘Jesus’ Son’) Elaine May (‘Small Time Crooks’) Frances McDormand (‘Wonder Boys’) Erika Christensen (‘Traffic’) Julie Walters (‘Billy Elliot’)

From The Best, Worst, & Most Unusual (Noteworthy Achievements, Events, Feats, & Blunders of Every Conceivable Kind), by Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler (Galahad Books, New York, 1976).  (Foreign films are occasionally mentioned, but I think they were mostly overlooked.)

Best Silent Film --- The Gold Rush

Best Film --- Citizen Kane (starring Orson Wells)

Worst Films (my vote is for The Blair Witch Project, including the website at http://blairwitch.godgames.com/ )

Best Adaptation from a Novel --- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (The long-awaited sequel did not fare as well.)

Best Westerns

Worst Western --- The Tall Men (with Clark Gable and Robert Ryan)

Best Antiwar Film --- All Quiet on the Western Front (starring Lew Ayres)

Best Children's Film --- The Wizard of Oz 

Best Full-Length Cartoons

Best Comedy --- A Night at the Opera (If you like the Marx Brothers)

Best Musical --- Singin' in the Rain (with Gene Kelly)

Best Mystery --- The Maltese Falcon (with Humphrey Bogart)

Best Science Fiction Film --- The Incredible Shrinking Man

Best Horror Film --- The Night of the Living Dead

Best Monster Film --- Frankenstein (With Boris Karloff)

Best Documentaries ---

Best Film Biography --- Ivan the Terrible 

Best Historical Drama --- The Battleship Potemkin

Most Unusual Film --- Sleep (by? --- You've probably  guessed already, Andy Warhol)

Must Unusual Pornographic Movie --- a movie produced by England's Chessington Zoo that was aimed only at the zoo's primate population.  The movie was intended to arouse their flagging sex lives.  The outcomes were less than satisfactory.  "The orangutans were only interested in the projector.  The gorillas became aggressive.  But Cressida (an eight-year-old female chimp) was just overcome with passion."

What on earth could have made me think of Senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Awards at this very moment?  http://www.taxpayer.net/goldenfleece/about.htm 
Note that the Golden Fleece Awards have been revived --- http://www.taxpayer.net/goldenfleece/about.htm#revival 

Criteria for Awards
The new Fleece will be awarded to projects and programs that:

Andy Rooney's Thoughts on Life 

I remember it well!  Seems to be good source material for another nostalgia song from the Statler Brothers.
Forwarded by Auntie Bev

If you are old enough...take a stroll with me...close your eyes...and go back...before the Internet...before semiautomatics and back... before SEGA or Super Nintendo...way back...

I'm talkin' bout hide and go seek at dusk. Sittin' on the porch, Simon Says, Kick the Can, Red light, Green light. Lunch boxes with a thermos...chocolate milk, going home for lunch, penny candy from the store, hopscotch, butterscotch, skates with keys, Jacks, Mother May I? Hula Hoops and sunflower seeds, Whist and Old Maid and Crazy Eights, wax lips and mustaches, Mary Janes, saddleshoes and Coke bottles with the names of cities on the bottom, running through the sprinkler, circle pins, bobby pins, Mickey Mouse Club, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Fran & Ollie, Spin & Marty...all in black & white.

When around the corner seemed far away, and going downtown seemed like going somewhere. Bedtime, climbing trees, making forts...backyard shows, lemonade stands, Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, sittin' on the curb, starin at clouds, jumping down the steps, jumping on the bed, pillow fights, getting "company," ribbon candy, angel hair on the Christmas tree, Jackie Gleason, white gloves, walking to church, walking to the movie theater, being tickled to death, running till you were out of breath, laughing so hard that your stomach hurt, being tired from playin' ...Remember that? Not steppin' on a crack or you'll break your mother's back...paper chains at Christmas, silhouettes of Lincoln and Washington...the smell of paste in school and Evening in Paris.

What about the girl that had the big bubbly handwriting, who dotted her "i's" with hearts?? The Stroll, popcorn balls, & sock hops... Remember when...when there were two types of sneakers for girls and boys (Keds & PF Flyer) and the only time you wore them at school was for "gym." And the girls had those ugly uniforms.

When it took five minutes for the TV to warm up. When nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school. When nobody owned a purebred dog.

When a quarter was a decent allowance, and another quarter, a huge bonus. When you'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny. When girls neither dated nor kissed until late high school, if then. When your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces. When all of your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done, everyday and wore high heels.

When you got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time. And, you didn't pay for air. And, you got trading stamps to boot! When laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box.

When any parent could discipline any kid, or feed him or use him to carry groceries, and nobody, not even the kid, thought a thing of it. When it was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents. When they threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed...and did! When the worst thing you could do at school was smoke in the bathrooms, flunk a test or chew gum. And the prom was in the auditorium and we danced to an orchestra, and all the girls wore pastel gowns and the boys wore suits for the first time and we stayed out all night.

When a '57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady and girls wore a class ring with an inch of wrapped dental floss or yarn coated with pastel frost nail polish so it would fit her finger.

And no one ever asked where the car keys were cause they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked. And you got in big trouble if you accidentally locked the doors at home, since no one ever had a key. Remember lying on your back on the grass with your friends and saying things like "That cloud looks like a..." And playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game. Back then, baseball was not a psychological group learning experience -- it was a game. Remember when stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals 'cause no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger. And...with all our progress...don't you just wish...just once...you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace...and share it with the children of the 80's and 90's ...

So send this on to someone who can still remember Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Laurel & Hardy, Howdy Doody and The Peanut Gallery, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow Knows, Nellie Belle, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk...as well as the sound of a reel mower on Saturday morning, and summers filled with bike rides, playing in cowboy land, baseball games, bowling and visits to the pool...and eating Kool-aid powder with sugar.

When being sent to the principal's office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited a misbehaving student at home. Basically, we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn't because of drive by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat! But we all survived because their love was greater than the  threat.

Didn't that feel good, just to go back and say, Yeah, I remember that!

Bob Jensen's nostalgia --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm 

Erika Jensen's nostalgia --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas00.htm 

Message from the new Vice President of the United States

The below letter was published on the Washington Post and is making its way on Military.com and other web sites. 

On my way to work last week, I stopped behind a purple Geo Metro with my least favorite bumper sticker ever plastered across the back. It read: "It'll be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber." 

At that moment, I realized who the most undervalued and under appreciated segment of society is. And it ain't teachers. Teachers, I believe, rank second on that list. Heading the list are the men and women of the armed forces, who, throughout history, have protected our country from the Hitler's and Stalin's - they who would have had our white children marching to the school bus in jackboots and our minority children locked up in laboratories and labor camps. 

The U.S. military - the most powerful and influential group of people in the world, hands-down - gets an awfully bad rap these days. Many Americans seem to think that simply because the communist Soviet Union no longer exists, the world is as safe as Beaver Cleaver's neighborhood. This, of course, ignores three facts: 

1) Dozens of countries have nuclear weapons that could take out millions of people with the turn of a key. 

2) Leaders of several countries (e.g. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Lebanon and perhaps China and Russia) would love to see the U.S. and its people blown to pieces and, most importantly 

3) The U.S. has the greatest collection of human, economic, natural and technological resources anywhere on Earth, making it the greatest natural target for military aggression. 

Though some would like to fashion the U.S. of the 21st Century as a flowery feel-good fantasy where war and violence are mere after thoughts of a time gone by, that can never be the case. As bad as our crime and drug problems are, we're still considered the jewel of the planet by the half of the world that has yet to make its first phone call. 

In ancient Greece, the people of Athens were unparalleled world leaders in art, philosophy and technology. Their rivals in Sparta were not; instead, the Spartans built massive, well-trained armies. When the two countries fought, who won? Sparta. And guess who lost their entire civilization because they didn't think it was important to build an appropriate army? Athens! Right now, the U.S. has the best of Athens and Sparta: we are the most cultured and most well-defended country in the world. As we continue to lower our defenses by devaluing the military, we open ourselves wider and wider to a takeover. A takeover of the U.S.? 

Ridiculous, one might say. But why does it seem so unlikely? Because the power and protection of the U.S. military has been so overwhelming in the last century that Americans have been free to enjoy a comfort level unlike any in the world. We all take it for granted that we will never be invaded by another country, but few other countries can afford to be so sure of themselves. It's not only Americans who can go to bed feeling safe. 

Children everywhere from Israel to England, from Brazil to Japan - know that, if their country is attacked, the U.S. will be there to help. On TV, the military is often represented by stiff, buttoned-down generals or the occasional drill sergeant who is accused of feeling up a female recruit. In reality, things are much different. The men and women of the armed forces are, in most ways, just like everyone else: they are mechanics, pilots, cooks, photographers, engineers, secretaries and X-ray technicians. They work from 8 to 5 and then come home to their families. 

The one difference comes when the U.S. or any of its allies is threatened by a foreign power. In that case, military people pack up and ship out, off to fight - and many times die - so the rest of the country, including teachers, can continue their lives without interruption. 

Teachers mold young minds into intelligent, independent people, and they should be admired for the job they do; however, I don't know any teachers who are required to catch bullets and swallow shrapnel if so ordered by the principal. So, old-fashioned as it may seem, I'm happy to give my taxes to the military and tell the tots and teachers to fire up the oven if they want extra dough. Make muffins, cookies and candy and be happy you're allowed to. Because, as the old saying goes, if it wasn't for the U.S. military, we'd all be speakin' German now." 

"It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you."

-- Dick Cheney

And that's the way it was on January 19, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

The Intuit accounting vortal is at http://www.intuitadvisor.com/intuit/vortal/gtf/gvortal.gtf 

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

January 12, 2001

Quotes of the Week 

To our fans, winning isn't everything, but it ranks right up there with oxygen.
Lou Holtz (while he was still the University of Notre Dame football coach.)

The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.
B.B. King

An act of justice closes the book on a misdeed;
An act of vengeance writes one of its own.
Mairly vos Servant in Parade

The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.
Doug Englebert

Rabe's Rule of the Bedroom:  The spouse who snores louder always falls asleep first.

Rosenbaum's Rule:  The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.

Parent's Law:  By the time you're right, you're dead.

My forthcoming technology in education workshops --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations 

341
"Workshop on the Future of e-Business and E-Education," Asian Pacific Conference on International Accounting Issues, October 27, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Host:  Professor Benjamin Tai 
http://www.ltsi.fea.usp.br/13APC/13APC.htm  

340
"Cross Border Business of Education in the 21st Century," Third Globalization Conference Sponsored Jointly by the American Accounting Association and Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft für Betriebswirtschaft e.V. Conference 2001, Cross-Border Business Combinations and Strategic Alliances, June 23, 2001, Berlin, Germany.  Host:  Professor Peter Moeller Aachen University of Technology. 
http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/meetings/global3/meetinginfo.htm 

???
I am organizing a workshop for August 10 prior to the annual American Accounting Association meetings in Atlanta.  Thus far I have lined up four outstanding speakers, including speakers who will discuss how content is designed and delivered in the prestigious Fathom learning portal and UNext (delivering courses for Carnegie-Mellon, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Stanford, and the London School of Economics).  A speaker will also demonstrate how he designed the online learning supplements for the popular Horngren, Harrison, and Bamber basic accounting textbook.

339
"Distance Learning" Accounting Programs Leadership Group (APLG) of the American Accounting Association, Two Workshops, February 5, 2001 in  Ft. Lauderdale, FL.  Host:  Professor Don Finn, Louisiana State University.
http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aapg/2001/aplgbroch.htm 

Wow Site of the Week (Librarian's Index to the Internet) --- http://lii.org/ 

Arts - Architecture | Museums | Performing | more...
Automobiles - Motorcycles
Business - Investing | Taxes | more...
California - Government & Politics | - San Francisco Bay Area | - Southern California | - more...
Computers - Software | Viruses | more...
Cultures (World) - Anthropology | Africa | Asia | Europe | LatA | MidE | NorA
Disabled - more...
Education - Distance | K-12 | Colleges | Aid | more...
Families - Best places | Homes
Food - Recipes | Restaurants | more...
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual
Geography - more...
Government - Federal | International | more...
Health - Diseases | Nutrition | more...		 History - Genealogy | Ancient | Medieval | Military | U.S.
Images - Clip Art, Graphics, Pictures
Internet - E-mail | Evaluating | Filtering | Training | more...
Jobs - Listings | Resumes | more...
Kids - Fun | Health | Homework | Net Safety | Parents | Teachers
Language - English | Spanish | more...
Law - Censorship | Copyright | Crime | more...
Libraries - Public | for Librarians
Literature - Authors | Genres | Publishers | more...
Media - News | Newspapers | Periodicals | Radio | TV
Medicine - Diseases | more...
Men - Health
Music - Jazz | Lyrics | Rock | more...
Organizations - Associations | Nonprofits		 People - Collected Biographies
Politics - Elections | more...
Recreation - Games | Gardening | Movies | Outdoor | Pets | more...
Reference Desk - Almanacs | Dictionaries | Holidays | Phone Books | Statistics | more...
Religion & Philosophy - Christianity | Islam | Judaism | Mythology | Philosophy | more...
Science - Animals | Astronomy | Environment | Math | Technology | more...
Searching the Internet - more...
Seniors
Sports - Baseball | Olympics | Tennis | more...
Travel - Lodgings | Places | Transportation | more...
Weather - Tides | more...
Women - Health | History | Politics | Studies

Amazon.com was a Holiday bright spot for retailing.  Internet sales for the last quarter of the Year 2000 almost reached $1 billion.  Someday the company may even have revenues that exceed expenses --- http://www.internetweek.com/story/INW20010109S0003  
http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2672435,00.html  

Coming soon: Palm electronic wallets --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0101091/2672092/ 

Electronic Book, e-Book, eBook, eJournals, and Electronic Journal Watch --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

A great index of electronic journals (although admittedly not comprehensive)--- http://www.emporia.edu/libsv/ejw/ 

Supporting Campus, Community, and Distance Education
Accounting
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Botany
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Environmental
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Literature
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Physics
Electronic Journals
Websites
Agriculture
Electronic Journals
Websites		  Business & Economics
Electronic Journals
Websites		  Foreign Language
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Mathematics
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Political Science 
Electronic Journals
Websites
Anthropology
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Chemistry
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Geography
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Medical & Health
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Psychology
Electronic Journals
Websites
Archaeology
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Communication 
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Goverment Documents
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Music
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Religion
Electronic Journals
Websites
Architecture 
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Computer Science 
Electronic Journals
Websites		 History
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Nursing
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Sociology
Electronic Journals
Websites
Art 
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Earth Science 
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Journalism
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Nutrition
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Theatre
Electronic Journals
Websites
Astronomy
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Education
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Law
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Philosophy
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Zoology
Electronic Journals
Websites
Biology
Electronic Journals
Websites		 English
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Library Information
Electronic Journals
Websites		 PhysEd & Recreation 
Electronic Journals
Websites		 Gender Studies
Electronic Journals
Websites
Multi-Search Engines Fulltext Sources Distance Learning Ethnic Studies Teaching Tools
Genealogy Dictionaries Plus Career Information Grant Sources Web Site Evaluation
 Kansas Sites  Radio & TV Stations  Newspapers  Fun & Useful Stuff  Copyright Information

There are over 600,000,000 web pages on the Web.   Information is Power!   Search engines only scratch the surface, and many sites available herein cannot be found on a search engine.   These web sites that are listed are meant to be a starting point for finding useful information on the Internet, especially useful for faculty who require students to complete web site analysis assignments. This is not a comprehensive listing, but rather an attempt to gather some of the most representative sources for information within each discipline.  This should serve as a gateway to research information on the Internet.  Go the  "Search Engines" page to continue beyond the sites contained herein.

For finding electronic books, you might try the following  websites:

Barnes & Noble --- http://ebooks.barnesandnoble.com/index.asp?userid=64FN1H4YTL 

Over 1,000 free books for the Rocket e-Book Library --- http://www.rocket-library.com/ 

eBooks.com --- http://www.ebooks.com/ 

Children's & Educational (9 titles)
Computing & Information Technology (8 titles)
Earth Sciences, Geography, Environment, Planning (7 titles)
Economics, Finance, Business & Industry (161 titles)
Family, Home & Practical Interest (19 titles)
Fiction (51 titles)
Humanities (12 titles)
Language, Literature & Biography (10 titles)
Law (7 titles)
Mathematics & Science (6 titles)
Reference, Information & Interdisciplinary Subjects (15 titles)
Social Sciences (22 titles)
Sport, Travel, Leisure Interests & Tourism (5 titles)
Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Veterinary Science (1 title)

The eBook store at Barnes & Noble--- http://ebooks.barnesandnoble.com/index.asp?userid=2OCW3SU9XZ 

University of Chicago listing of electronic books and journals --- http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/f/dtml?dtml=/e/db/index.dtml 

Macmillan Publishing's electronic computer books --- http://cma.zdnet.com/texis/zdrewards/mcpmore.html 

Listings of electronic journals in accounting (some are more reference databases and websites than journals)

City Sites: An Electronic Book --- http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/citysites/overview.htm 

E-Publishing Ink A Novella (Free) --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,40859,00.html 
Approach to Marketing Award-winning horror author Douglas Clegg releases Purity as a free e-book, with the hope that readers will thank him by buying his other published works. Also: More e-book devices are set to arrive. 

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books and electronic journals can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

"e-Books:  enhancing the Educational Experience," Syllabus, January 2001, 48-49.  I didn't find this article to contain new information, but it is a nice summary of some of the advantages of e-Books to students.  Syllabus is slow about posting current articles to the Web, but the article will eventually be available at http://www.syllabus.com/.

"From P-books to E-books:  The E-book will be more than a substitute P-book. What will be the social and psychological impacts on the generations of kids who first meet Spot and Sam on E-books in kindergarten?" by Larry Press, Professor of Computer Information Systems at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is contributing editor at the Communications of the ACM and OnTheInternet, and studies the global diffusion of the Internet --- http://www.cisp.org/imp/june_2000/06_00press.htm 

"An MBA as Easy as 1-2-3? Online Programs Make It Possible," By: Mary G. Rodman, http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28469.xml 

Where to Begin Your Search
When seeking the best program for you, remember to inquire about the institution's accreditation and admission requirements. For a complete listing of programs you can use the searchable database at Peterson's Education and Career Center, www.petersons.com/dlearn. Here, you will be able to sift through approximately 30 programs that are completely online and 57 that require some campus visits.

The best way to narrow your search may be to join a bulletin board discussion at petersons.com. Here, experts and students dish out advice on distance education programs around the world. A steady visitor to the discussion is Dr. John Bear, Ph.D. His long-standing advocacy for distance education has resulted in a helpful book, Bear's Guide to Earning College Degrees Nontraditionally. It is designed for anyone considering an online education. Visit his Web page at www.degree.net.

Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#VirtualUniversities 

And don't forget Yahoo's comprehensive list --- http://dir.yahoo.com/Education/Distance_Learning/ 

Education World's Best of 2000 http://www.education-world.com/best_of/2000/articles.shtml 

The Year 2000 In Pictures (Photography, Time Magazine) --- http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/yip2000/ 

Capture the Moment (Pulitzer Prize-winning pictures and stories) http://www.newseum.org/pulitzer/ 

The Canadian Encyclopedia (History) http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ 

CollegeValues.org --- http://www.collegevalues.org/ 

The website for information and scholarship on character in college!

CollegeValues.org includes two major resources designed to encourage discussion, research, and educational strategies on character development in college:

l.THE JOURNAL OF COLLEGE AND CHARACTER is an electronic peer reviewed journal on character education issues, research, best practices, and application in higher education.

2.CHARACTER CLEARINGHOUSE provides a national information center for current educational strategies, best practices, leadership efforts, student perspectives, events, and discussion to assist colleges and universities in their efforts to promote moral and civic responsibility.

Reply from Linda Kidwell

Those who are interested in academic character, as reflected in the idea of academic integrity, will also be interested in the Center for Academic Integrity website, http://www.academicintegrity.org. It is a group of colleges and universities sharing resources and experience on issues of academic integrity and integrity on campuses in general. I highly recommend the site as well as the organization.

From an accounting perspective, I have been working on honor codes as they pertain to the development of professional integrity in accounting students for the past three or four years. If anyone is interested in my article, "Student Honor Codes as a Tool for Teaching Professional Ethics," forthcoming in the Journal of Business Ethics, I would be happy to send you a copy.

Linda Kidwell [lak@NIAGARA.EDU]
Niagara University

SNOW (Special Needs Opportunity Windows) http://snow.utoronto.ca/index.html 
(Handicapped, Education)

The Virtual Museum of Education Iconics (History)  http://education.umn.edu/EdPA/iconics/ 

Images can be educative; some images are of education themes. Images of education may romanticize, illustrate, or detail the history and experience of education in the context of  institutions and other settings. Education imagery may be understood by both iconographic description and interpretation.

"Education Iconics" is the name of a field of inquiry and teaching at the University of Minnesota. The term "iconics" is an abridgment coined to denote both iconographic and iconologic inquiry into the visual expression of educational themes. An analysis and understanding of educational beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices in the societies where the images were both produced and used is possible through the study of education iconics.

The collective study of education iconics relates most closely to the history of education. This knowledge base is also of value to the more general perspectives of art history, general intellectual or social history, and cultural anthropology, as well as the cross-disciplinary studies of Classical Traditions, Humanities, Religious Studies, Women's Studies, and American Studies.

The scope of the Virtual Museum of Education Iconics image collection is extensive. This collection includes images of artifacts that date from ancient Greece to the 20th century; from locations around the globe. Some images within the collection are offered as context examples to clarify ideas, or geographically locate subjects.

The Virtual Museum's Tours and Galleries present imagery relating to specific topics, mediums, or geographic locations. For those seeking specific images, or imagery based on thematic criteria, the searchable database is offered as a research tool. The Lecture Hall   features illustrated studies of education imagery, and the Reading Room enables student access to current course related materials.

Comparison Pricing (Marketing Shopping) from InformationWeek Online January 8, 2001 --- http://www.smartshop.com/ 

The self-proclaimed largest online comparison-shopping site, Smartshop.com, is adding wireless capabilities, up to a point. Consumers with Palm VIIs and WAP-enabled cell phones can use Smartshop to compare prices and other features of items from partner online merchants, using iConverse technology.

But there's a catch. Mobile consumers still have to buy the items from their PCs until Smartshop adds wireless purchasing software early this year.

Partner online merchants with the desired items are listed for easy comparison of pricing, special promotions, availability, shipping methods and costs, credit cards accepted, and return policies, according to Smartshop.

"Extending its comparison-shopping service to those with wireless devices is a smart move for the company, as consumers actually standing in a retail store in front of a TV they want to buy could check competing offers from online merchants in order to get the best price," says Laura DiDio, a Giga Information Group analyst. "This is an implementation of wireless that people can really use because it has value."

Users can download special software to a Palm VII from www.smartshop.com  or bookmark wireless.smartshop.com on their WAP phones.

THE TOP 100 PRODUCTS OF 2000! http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?72332:2700840 

The year’s biggest tech flops
From viruses to dumb extortion plots, here’s to a weird 2000 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/509342.asp 

Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies --- http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/ 

Ernst & Young claims to be the first Big 5 accounting firm to create a separate operating company to provide online multimedia training and education  --- http://www.ey.com/global/gcr.nsf/US/12-11-00_-_Release_-_News_Room_-_Ernst_%26_Young_LLP 

New York — December 11, 2000 — Intellinex LLC, one of the largest providers of eLearning solutions, has completed the previously announced acquisition of Teach.com, a leading provider of online PC and business skills training courseware. The acquisition of Teach.com furthers Intellinex's growth as a one-stop provider of eLearning solutions.

Teach.com offers scalable technology and off-the-shelf courseware including an extensive library of Web-delivered personal computer and business skills training and support courseware and the SmartTrainer(R) content delivery platform, a proprietary 32-bit, browser-based engine.

Including sales from Teach.com, Intellinex is targeting revenue of over $100 million in the first 12 months of operation. In 1999, Teach.com had $6.5 million in revenue. Its customers include General Electric, AT&T, Dell Computer, Sun Microsystems, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemical and the Internal Revenue Service. Intellinex's customers include Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly and Ernst & Young.

"The completion of this acquisition strengthens Intellinex's position as a one-stop provider of corporate learning solutions in the rapidly growing global eLearning market," said Intellinex Chairman and CEO Michael Powers. "The acquisition of Teach.com enhances our product line and our ability to provide the highest quality products and services for our customers."

This was the first acquisition for Intellinex. Teach.com's 90 employees at facilities in Elk Grove Village, Ill. and Golden, Colo. have joined Intellinex and are expected to play an important role in supporting its future growth. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

About Intellinex Intellinex is one of the largest providers of customized eLearning solutions that deliver and transform the value of knowledge for companies and their customers. A new stand-alone business of Ernst & Young LLP, Intellinex integrates innovative technology, flexible content and learning services to help clients work smarter. The 500 employees of Intellinex are dedicated to providing eLearning products and services that are second to none to organizations around the world. Visit us at www.intellinex.com.

Intellinex refers to Intellinex LLC, an eLearning venture of Ernst & Young LLP. Ernst & Young refers to the U.S. firm of Ernst & Young LLP and other members of the global Ernst & Young organization.

Other links of possible interest regarding Intellinex include the following:

http://accountingeducation.com/news/news1281.html 

http://myplanner.key3media.com/comdex/fall2000/planner/ExhibitorDetail.CFM?ID=936 

http://www.fortuneelearning.com/intellinex/ 

http://www.tmcorp.com/online_doin_ernst.html 

"Make Your Mark in SPREADSHEETS," by Mark W. Lehman, Journal of Accountancy, January 2001, 29-38 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jan2001/lehman.htm 

Just for Educators from the AICPA --- http://www.aicpa.org/edu/justedu.htm 

 
Accounting Education: Charting the Course through a Perilous Future
Taylor Report on Student and Academic Research Study
AICPA Core Competency Framework for Entry into the Accounting Profession (The Framework)
150-Hour Education Requirement
Academic and Career Development
Best Academic Practices
CPA Examination Reformation and Computerization
CPA Vision Project
Conferences
Curriculum Development Guidance
Education Programs and Services
Educational and Professional Updates
Pathfinders
Publications

No Place Like the Future --- Andrew Zipern on Microsoft's House of Tomorrow --- http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1546 

IF THE JETSONS expressed post-war America's subconscious desire to live in an effortless, gadget-filled future, the Microsoft house is today's Internet economy version. Filled with PCs, wireless gizmos, and digital music players (all networked together) the Microsoft Home sets the stage "for families to begin adopting technologies into their homes that simplify daily tasks, enhance their entertainment experiences, and increase communication at home and away." At least that's what the press release says.

Bentley College has some great financial resources at Bentley College's http://ecampus.bentley.edu/dept/fi/finance/resource.htm 

Academic Journals
"theoretical and empirical research and articles in areas of corporate finance, investments, capital and security markets, banking, financial management and quantitative methods of particular relevance to financial researchers"

Financial Markets 
"accurate and timely information about stock market activity, equity and index options, highlights, statistical data and much more through links to leading stock exchanges" 

Market Quotes 
"information on U.S. markets, World markets, bonds, currencies and latest performance data on stocks and corporate profile" 

Financial News 
"business and financial news from all over the world through leading newspapers, magazines and television" 

Professional Organizations 
"links to premiere academic organizations devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about finance" 

Glossaries 
" browse through interactive Financial Encyclopaedia and other finance information bases"

For another listing of glossaries in Accounting, Finance, and Business, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbus.htm 

Will Congressional Web Learning Report Gather Momentum or Only Gather Dust? By Margaret W. Goldsbororough, NY Times on the Web, January 3, 2001 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/03/technology/03EDUCATION.html

Capitol Hill insiders and educational analysts are hopeful that several of the key recommendations made in a Congressional panel's report on web-based learning will be acted upon this year.

The Commission on Web-based Education identified seven key points in its report on harnessing the learning power of the Internet. And while some of the recommendations may be too ambitious to garner immediate support, commission members and others say they believe quick progress will be made on at least three: removing regulatory barriers, expanding broadband access and improving teacher training.

Rep. Johnny Isakson, the Georgia Republican who served as vice chairman of the commission, said he will introduce stand-alone legislation to forward the commission's goals. Debate on the recommendations, however, may not begin until lawmakers begin reviewing omnibus school funding measures.

Barnes & Noble will pay authors a 35% royalty!
Barnes & Noble Digital decides to become a publisher ---  http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,41056,00.html 

Figuring that nobody knows how to market e-books better than those who sell books for a living, retailer Barnes & Noble Digital will soon become a virtual publishing house.

"After all, it’s bookstores that have always had the most power in their ability to recommend books and move titles," said Simon Lipskar of the Writer's House.

Hoping to attract readers, all e-books will be priced under $8. Authors, meanwhile, will want to know if their titles will be sold at other venues.

Barnes & Noble Digital will launch this spring with the digital imprint of "The Book of Counted Sorrows," by Dean Koontz. But contrary to published reports, BN.com is not just culling titles from out of print book lists and established authors. Michael Fragnito and his editorial staff are actively seeking new talent.

Barnes & Noble Digital will try to attract authors with competitive advances and a flat rate of 35 percent of the cover price. The best incentive may be that it can provide a one-stop, direct-to-market process. It also will provide authors the ability to track the progress of sales, which hasn't always been easy.

"In our conversations with (agents) we keep hearing that writers want to be treated like grown-ups, get fair treatment and know how their books are selling," Fragnito said. "We are going to offer them all that."

BN.com is also considering giving authors the ability to become more involved in marketing their titles than they have been at traditional houses. One author-inspired idea that Fragnito is considering is letting a writer invest part of the book advance back into the marketing budget of his or her title.

According to one agent, a serious reservation about the new imprint is that while Barnes and Noble (stores and website) accounts for 10 percent of all books sold in the United States, what will happen to BN.com-published books at other book outlets?

Reply from John C. Roberts, Jr.

B&N took a significant step in this area when they acquired Fatbrain.com last November. Fatbrain was only a four year old company at that time but they had made significant progress in providing both digital content and paper books. There offerings were mostly for engineers and scientists, hence the name fatbrain. They were also pioneers in developing secure digital content that could be sold over the web with a low degree of copyright problems. Most of Fatbrain's current business is providing digital content to corporations both in the form of digital reference books and also converting the corporations paper documents to a digital format for easy distribution of the company's net.

Last March Fatbrain created the MightyWords™ subsidiary to capitalize on mass-market digital-publishing opportunities. In June MightyWords™ was spun off as an independent company with a $20 million investment by B&N and $16 million form other investors. Fatbrain kept about 23% of the company. It appears that the acquisition of Fatbrain will also give B&N full control of MightyWords™.

Prior to the purchase of Fatbrain, B&N had already been using MightyWords™ to distribute digital books. This content is not for e-books but are normally available in secure, downloadable PDF files for the user to read on screen or print as they wish. I personally believe that e-books will be the established standard in the future but these PDF files do give people without an e-book the opportunity to purchase and read digital format without the additional equipment purchase. These files are also meant to be read using Glassbook or Microsoft Reader.

I guess my main point in this rambling is that I believe B&N is uniquely positioned to offer digital content due to these recent acquisitions.

You can check out Fatbrain at http://www.fatbrain.com  and MightyWords™ at http://www.mightywords.com 

John C. Roberts, Jr. 
St. Johns River Community College 
283 College Drive Orange Park, FL 32065 (904) 276-6816 FAX (904) 276-6888

 

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books (eBooks, e-Books) are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

Free courses from Barnes & Noble University --- http://www.barnesandnobleuniversity.com/ 

Greetings Barnes & Noble.com Customers!

If your New Year's resolution is to learn new things and not spend a lot of money doing it then Barnes & Noble University is the place to start! Our latest round of FREE online courses is the biggest yet, with many new classes from top authors and experts. Classes start on January 8th but you can enroll now and get a head start with the reading material. Check out the complete course list at the end of this email to find one that's perfect for you, then visit the Barnes & Noble University site today to enroll.

New classes start January 8th -- visit Barnes & Noble University today to enroll.

New Course Highlights

Today's Weather Is...
If you've ever watched the Weather Channel and wanted to understand rain, sleet, and snow, you will love this course! It's taught by Eric Pinder, staff writer at Mount Washington Meteorological Observatory and the author of Tying Down the Wind: Adventures in the Worst Weather on Earth.

Key Concepts in Taking the SAT and ACT
Whether you are a student or a parent, this course, taught in conjunction with The Princeton Review, will give you the most personal, effective and efficient ways to maximize test scores and get into the right college or graduate school.

21st Century Job Hunting
This class will start off with a live BNU launch lecture on job hunting, given by Martin Yate, on Monday, January 8th at 5pm ET. Sign up for this class and get the opportunity to talk with bestselling author and course creator Yate about strategies for finding the best jobs of the 21st Century.

Click here for Today's Weather Is...
Click here for Key Concepts in Taking the SAT and ACT
Click here for 21st Century Job Hunting

See You in School,

The Barnes & Noble University Team
Complete List of Classes Now Open for Registration
Advanced Photoshop
All Aboard: The Railroad in American    History New!
The Brain and How It Works
Introduction to C++ by Metroworks
Introduction to Programming
Introduction to XML
The Night Sky: An Introduction to    Astronomy
Today's Weather Is... New!
Web Site Design and Management
Click here to learn more!
Finding Love Online: A Practical Guide
The Grace in Dying New!
Organizing from the Inside Out New!
Stress, Sanity and Survival
Un-Diet Your Way to a Healthy Body New!
Yoga for Novices
21st Century Job Hunting New!
Click here to learn more!
Building Your Own Herb Garden
Introduction to Chess New!
Introduction to Wine
Solo Travel
Today's Weather Is... New!
Click here to learn more!
The Beatles!
A Brief History of Elvis
Introduction to Film Noir
Jazz: A History of America's Music
Picasso, Braque, and the Dawn of Cubism
Click here to learn more!
Moby Dick: From Fact to Fiction
The Poet's Table: Walt Whitman's    Poetry & Prose
Teaching Children Literature Using    Harry Potter
Walking Through Shakespeare: The    Tragedies
Writing for Children
Click here to learn more!
All Aboard: The Railroad in American    History New!
The Beatles!
Being Jewish in Today's World
A Brief History of Elvis
Imagine: Visionaries Discuss a Better    America
Jazz: A History of America's Music
Click here to learn more!
Branding Your Business on the    Internet New!
Business Etiquette
Key Concepts in Taking the SAT and    ACT New!
Managing Personal Finances with    Quicken
Online Investing
Organizing from the Inside Out New!
21st Century Job Hunting New!
Click here to learn more!
Balancing Act: Practical Tips for Putting    First Things First
Exploring Herbal Medicine
The Grace in Dying New!
Improving Communication Skills to Get    What You Want
Stress, Sanity and Survival
Un-Diet Your Way to a Healthy Body    New!
Yoga for Novices
Click here to learn more!

A portion of a message sent from Janet Flatley

From the Wall St Journal - Interactive Edition - January 5, 2001 - more news about online education for the younger student and future possibilities.
Janet

Review & Outlook Taste The Virtual School If you were putting an addition on your home, which contractor would you have more faith in: the guy who enthuses over every new heating, plumbing or electrical fad -- or the crusty old skeptic who likes things done the old-fashioned way and embraces only the best new tools? Well, it strikes us that schooling is no different. Take K12.com (www.k12.com http://www.k12.com/home.html   ). If anyone is going to offer an online education, it's reassuring to see that the names at the top are Bill Bennett and David Gelernter, two men who have been loudly skeptical about the role of computers in the classroom.

Mr. Bennett, of course, is the former secretary of education, and Mr. Gelernter, K12's chief technology adviser, is the Yale professor of computer science who had a package sent by the Unabomber blow up in his face. As this newspaper reported at the time of the announcement, their for-profit school is backed by a $10 million investment from Knowledge Universe Learning Group, formed by junk-bond king Michael Milken, his brother Lowell and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Atomic Dog is seeking accounting education material --- http://www.atomicdogpub.com/ 

Dear Professor Jensen,

(Parts addressed only to me are deleted)

Atomic Dog is focused on taking the best of what traditional publishing was - great people and great ideas - and liberating those people to use the technologies available today to build better content, better products, better value. The Atomic Dog model is simple: we work with talented instructors to create great content. We demonstrate the benefits of that content to instructors. We then offer students options in how the content is delivered: they can purchase it as an online, interactive text, or order and receive it in print form. We serve students by offering materials for a fair price, and putting them in control of the delivery method

Tom Romaniak [tomr@atomicdogpub.com] 

Instructors - Review and Adopt Books
Our content is available in either print or web-based mediums, remarkably current, extremely flexible, and backed by the support structures you have grown to expect.

Students - Purchase Books
No long lines. No empty shelves. You are just a few clicks away from filling your Backpack with the books your instructor has assigned.

Authors - Write Books
Atomic Dog seeks to return the publishing environment to one that is driven by the author, their ideas, and the feedback they receive from the customer - instructors and students. If you are interested in being an active part in the future of publishing we would love to hear from you.

WizeUP is now offering a new series of Digital Textbooks.  Our products bring together the textbooks you know and trust with the power of technology and the Internet.  We are working together with:

Our products can be used seamlessly with your curriculum.  The Digital Textbooks follow the printed textbooks page-by-page, graphic-by-graphic -- while bringing the power of digital technology and interactivity to your students.  Students can download the Digital Textbooks onto their computers.  They can take notes electronically, highlight key passages digitally, leverage powerful search capabilities, and work through interactive learning tools, multimedia enhancements, and other powerful features.

Our leading titles include textbooks from authors such as:

Call us to receive a free copy of your Digital Textbook (1-800-458-2627) and to find out if your title is available for Fall '00.  Call now before your summer begins.

Sincerely,

David Gray
Chief Executive Officer
WizeUp.com

WizeUp
90 William Street @ 1 Silicon Alley Plaza, Suite 506
New York, NY  10038
Telephone: (800) 458-2627
www.wizeup.com

My threads to electronic books can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

"RTFM: A Guide to Online Research," by Steve Champeon --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/08/index2a.html 

This is a great article, but it takes some time and effort to plow through it all.

Webmonkey's How To Library

Authoring
Design
Multimedia
E-Business
Programming
Backend
Jobs

The year’s biggest tech flops
From viruses to dumb extortion plots, here’s to a weird 2000 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/509342.asp 

The New Untouchables:  On the Beat with the SEC's Internet Fraud Squad --- http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/indepth/2001/01/02/24054 

Net Tightens Around the Hacktivists --- http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,416954,00.html 

"If you want to catch hold of a hacker, you need the brains of a hacker," says an official from India, where teenagers will be employed as cyber-cops --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,40951,00.html 

Stan Gibson says we should get ready for the next IT security headache: Hacking for profit --- http://www.eweek.com/b/pcwt0101036/2666428/ 

Music and movie companies aren't waiting for the courts to decide the fate of file trading. They aren't waiting for foolproof encryption. They're tracking pirates on the Web, and letting them know they know --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,40866,00.html 

Napster CEO shares his resolutions
Hank Barry plans to make the music file-swapping site 'prosper as a real business' in 2001.--- http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2669467,00.html  

Web hoaxes and false postings have spawned a new breed of firms that monitor the Net to track what's being said about their clients and the competition. But they'll cost you --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,40798,00.html 

Tutorials on Investing, Portfolio Management, and Personal Finance

Bonehead Finance --- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Bonehead_Finance/ 

Strategies and Tactics --- http://www.strategies-tactics.com/ 

Investor Solutions Inc. (Asset Management) --- http://www.fee-only-advisor.com/ 

American Association of Individual Investors --- http://www.aaii.org/ 

Geoportals.com (Guides to Investment Links) --- http://www.geoinvest.com/ 

For many others, see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

Creator fights to keep Web Simple:  Berners-Lee recalls invention's birth --- http://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/merc/docs/033115.htm 

futurefeedforward (News of the Future) --- http://www.futurefeedforward.com/ 

International Crime Threat Assessment http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/NSC/html/documents/pub45270/pub45270index.html 

From Syllabus News on January 9, 2001
Over 350 million Internet users of more than 100 million web hosts!  And to think it was barely 10 years ago when there were only a few thousand Internet users and 50 Web users.

Internet Hosts Reach 100 Million Worldwide

Telcordia Technologies recently reported that the number of Internet hosts has reached 100 million and has grown by 45 percent in the past year. Internet hosts include network elements such as routers, Web servers, mail servers, work- stations in universities and businesses, and ports in modem banks of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The number of hosts is considered one of the most accurate measures of the size of the Internet. Telcordia's NetSizer, a Web-based tool that mea sures and forecasts a variety of Internet statistics, produces Internet host counts. New Internet statistics under exploration at Telcordia point to the possibility of relationships among Internet growth, electronic commerce, and economic changes.

NetSizer reports that there are more than 350 million Internet users worldwide, with an average of 3.4 users per host. In the United States there are approximately 2.4 Internet users per host, while in some developing countries such as China and India, there are more than 100 Internet users per host.

For more information, visit www.netsizer.com. 

The Most Hated Man in Web Porn --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,40829,00.html 
Luke Ford really only wanted to write about the cyberporn industry on his website. Then he started zeroing in on the problems of one of the sector's most controversial proprietors. And now just about everybody seems to hate him.

From Yahoo (English Literature, History)

BloomsburyMagazine.com --- http://www.BloomsburyMagazine.com/ 

Taking its name from a legendary group of very clever English people (Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes), this jam-packed literary salon is aimed squarely at the serious reader. Yes, they do sell books, nevertheless the commentary is impeccable: a discussion of corporate globalism and Naomi Klein's No Logo, "bursts of dirty thundering" from Hunter Thompson's latest collection of letters, and Martin Amis and the messy divide between the novel and memoir. You'll also find a handy summation of last year's literary highlights.

A new acronym to memorize is PDE

Oracle Corp. has brought out Oracle Product Development Exchange (PDE), a comprehensive collaborative product development and product lifecycle management solution.  It allows companies from all industries--such as manufacturing, construction, retail or graphic design--to bring team members together to collaboratively develop, design and review projects or products.

Currently, online collaboration is rare.  A recent Forrester Research report indicates that only 12 percent of companies are actively using the Web in their product development process.  PDE harnesses the power of an exchange environment in which global, multi-company team members can come together to securely share product information, project schedules and performance metrics in real time.  For example, a retail company based in San Francisco could, via a Web browser, review a proposed graphic from its design firm in New York and in real time mark up the copy and reach a final decision.

PDE provides project collaboration tools that automate notifications and facilitate the reduction of time and expense associated with conventional communication methods.  Utilizing these collaboration tools, it can facilitate virtual design conferences where CAD drawings can be viewed and marked-up by attendees in separate locations.  Drawings can then be cataloged in the Oracle Internet File System (iFS), which guarantees that valuable intellectual capital is securely held in the database, where it can be searched and versions can be maintained.

I have a document entitled "Threads on the P2P, PDE, Collaboration, and the Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/Pointera/FreeNet Paradigm Shift in Web" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Forwarded by Michelle Bushey

In collaboration with the American Council on Education, the AAUP has just published: ‘Good Practice in Tenure Evaluation, Advice for Tenured Faculty, Department Chairs, and Academic Administrators.’

I have a copy which can be borrowed.

You can get your own copy by sending 15$ to
ACE Fulfillment Service
Department 191
Washington, DC 20055

Or you can see it on the web (and download) at http://www.acenet.edu/bookstore/new.cfm 

On January 7, the Digital Duo (PBS) show featured do-it-yourself firewalls.  On campus, most of us hide behind the University's firewall.  For our home computers, however, there are a range of confusing firewall alternatives.  The Digital Duo's summary of firewalls is on Show No. 405 at http://www.digitalduo.com/405_dig.html.

Buildin' a Firewall: (Some are free)

Inoculate!: 

Buildin' a Firewall 
It was a bright, sunny day in southern California, a day like any other. A woman – we'll call her Alice – had left her house to run a few errands, leaving her computer and Web connection on. When she returned home, something very unusual was happening. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that the cursor on her PC was moving on it's own! As she rushed over, she saw the cursor open up her tax files and start scrolling through the documents as if searching for something. Then, with a terrible clarity it dawned on her – the invisible hand was after the one thing she couldn't live without, the thing that identified her very being – her social security number! Aaahhhh!

It's a pretty scary thought, but not an unusual occurrence. These kinds of break-ins can easily happen if you don't protect yourself. Along with all the wonderful things the Web has brought us, it has also ushered in an era of increased security risks arising from no-goodniks seeking your personal info. Most of the evildoers – aptly called "crackers" – break into your machine and use it as a launching pad for large-scale attacks against organizations like NASA or the IRS. But some crackers will come after your personal data. Luckily, there are some software products available that you can use to protect yourself against most of these ne'er-do-wells.

The most common protection comes from something called a "firewall." A firewall is a barrier between your computer and the outside world. There are both hardware and software firewalls available, but in this segment we look at a few software firewalls. The hardware variety is complex and expensive and doesn't make sense for the average home or small business computer user.

Your computer is far more likely to be at risk if you have an "always-on" connection like cable or DSL. That's because the longer you're online, the more time a cracker has to figure out how to sneak onto your system. Dial-up connections aren't immune to crackers either – they just present fewer opportunities.

We looked at three firewall packages: Norton's Internet Security 2001, Network Ice's BlackICE Defender and Zone Labs' ZoneAlarm. There are small differences between them, but they all perform the main task very well – protecting your computer. All three packages let you choose how secure your firewall will be: low, medium or high security. A low security filter will let you perform most types of Internet activity like e-mail or Web surfing without interfering. But a low filter might try to stop you from downloading a program from the Net. A high security filter will alert you about anything having to do with Internet activity on your computer – like e-mail, or Web surfing, or downloading a program from the Net. This can be as annoying as it is helpful. It just depends on how paranoid you want or need to be. BlackICE gives you more options that the other two packages: Trusting, Cautious, Nervous and Paranoid. There is no one best solution, each package has its strengths.

ZoneAlarm's major strength is that it's free to consumers and is easy to set up. You don't have to struggle with advanced settings – although you can. Sometimes its warnings pop up too frequently, requiring you to click the "close" box again and again – which, again, can be very annoying.

BlackICE isn't free. It costs $40 and is suited for the more technically inclined. You'll feel like a master spy when you use it. It lets you see exactly who or what is probing your computer. Susie was surprised to find out that her machine was constantly being probed by outsiders. Someone even checked to see if she had a RAT or Remote Access Trojan horse on her computer. Now that's pretty scary. A RAT basically gives a cracker total control over your machine. So, you ask, why would anyone have a RAT on their machine? RATs were originally designed for IT folks in a corporate setting to be able to fix your computer remotely. Unfortunately RATs are being put to use in far less benign ways. A cracker, disguising him-/herself as a Microsoft tech person, might send you an e-mail with an innocent looking program attached. When you install this program, often just by clicking on it, it installs the RAT on your machine and the cracker has total access to your life. Ack!

Firewalls are also very good to acquire if you have a home network. When you share printers and files on your home network, you open yourself up to enormous security risks from the outside. Basically you're inviting anyone and everyone to share your printers and files. Most home networking kits don't include firewalls, probably because the companies that produce them don't want to acknowledge their vulnerability. That might discourage the unwary consumer from buying their product.

One of the cooler features in Norton's firewall package is ad-blocking. The package includes a program that removes virtually all of the ad banners from Web pages – which has the added advantage of speeding up Web surfing considerably, without messing up page layout. Norton's package also lets you hide yourself from Web sites so they can't keep track of where you're coming from or where you're going. However Norton's firewall has a tricky interface and costs a hefty $80.

If you'd like a quick, free, vulnerability checkup, visit the Web site GRC.com and click a button called "Shields Up!". Watch as it probes your machine and tells you how vulnerable you are and what you need for protection. Then maybe you'll be convinced that you shouldn't go surfing without a firewall.

Save/Delete Steve: He has ZoneAlarm on his machine and it's stopped quite a few intruders. Big Save. The others are fine too so Save them. Susie: Save ZoneAlarm for people who want a simple free program. Save BlackICE Defender for folks who are a little more tech-savvy, and Norton's Internet Security 2001 for about everyone else

Inoculate! 
What's scarier than a cracker? More ubiquitous than a hacker? More infectious than the common cold? A computer virus! If the Love Bug virus has taught us anything, it is that the Net is a dangerous place – and any bug worth its code can spread to epidemic proportions in less time than it takes for you to get over a case of the flu!

Computer viruses are little, tiny programs that are disguised as something innocuous or are completely hidden within programs, documents, or floppies. You catch a virus when an infected e-mail, document, disk or program is loaded (down- or up-) onto your computer. Once loaded, the virus delivers its payload. The payload can be fun and innocent – like playing little songs for you once a day. Or the payload can be catastrophic – like wiping out your entire hard drive, and those of your closest friends. It's a wild, woolly, virus-filled Web out there, and we're here to help.

One way to keep viruses out is to screen everything that comes into your computer: e-mails, floppies, zip disks and the like. But to do that well you need anti-virus software. The top two products on the market are McAfee's Virus Scan and Norton AntiVirus. . They're pretty similar. They will keep you safe from most bugs. They'll go online and retrieve updated vaccines to protect you from the newest creations by the mostly disaffected youth who write the virulent code. But beware: there is a time lag between the moment a new virus hits the info highway and when the cure is available. You need to be dogged and ever-vigilant in your immunization strategy.

Many people are under the impression that an anti-virus program protects them all the time. But that's not the case. E-mail is an especially effective transport mode for viruses to jump from host to host. The first rule of virus-prevention is: Never open an e-mail attachment from someone you don't know. And, in light of the Love Bug you'd also better be careful with attachments from someone you do know! The Love Bug spread itself through e-mail, replicating itself when the mail was opened, and then sending its clones out to everyone in the newly infected computer's e-mail address book. So you got it, and so did Grandma, your niece, your cousin and all your colleagues. The lesson? Unless you're expecting an attachment, don't open it. Worst case you'll have to send a letter back to your friend to make sure that the attachment is legit.

For example, Susie got an e-mail from a PR guy that stated "I LOVE YOU" in the subject line. Either that guy had stepped way over the line of protocol and was about to loose his job, or his e-mail contained a possible virus. Luckily Susie deleted it – saving herself from infection by what soon became known as the worst virus infestation ever: the Love Bug.

If you choose to install anti-virus software, make sure you understand how it works. Steve had Norton AntiVirus on his machine for months but didn't realize that the program was not checking for virus updates regularly. That's something you should do every week or so.

No matter how vigilant you are, and no matter how fast the anti-virus software folks work, there will always be new, sneakier, better viruses. Companies like IBM and Symantec (the maker of Norton AntiVirus) are developing something called the Digital Immune System. This program would automatically detect when you've been infected by a virus. Like the real virus hunters, it would isolate a virus sample, send a copy of it to a central server which would automatically create a cure and send it back – much like the CDC operates (Yeah, right.). But that magic bullet is still a long way off.

In addition to using anti-virus software, you should also back-up your system every month or so, just to be safe. Another protective measure you can take is to use software packages on the market like Adaptec's GoBack. It isn't an official anti-virus program but it does let you reset your computer to go back to a previous state – say, the state it was in the morning before you were infected. That way you can recover most of your work and all of your computer if you happen to get broad-sided by a bug with less-than-loving intentions.

So get yourself some anti-virus software, keep it updated, and suspect everybody. Remember Typhoid Mary? Even the innocent can spread bugs.

Bob Jensen's email message to the Digital Duo on January 8, 2001

In your Show Number 405 and other shows you repeatedly warn about opening email attachments or other files that may contain viruses (especially macro viruses).  However, you never mentioned that the most common files (DOC files, XLS files, etc.) can be safely opened in JASC's QuickView Plus (which is a very cheap software item from the same company that developed Paint Shop Pro).  Go to http://www.jasc.com/ ($49).  QuickView Plus is very easy to both install and run.  Among other things it lets you read your email attachments without virus risks.  

Now you CAN open virtually any file and email attachment with Quick View Plus – the easy way to view virtually any file.

  • Saves money and time – views files from programs you don't have installed on your computer
  • Views email attachments instantly, whether you have the original application or not
  • Views graphics, documents, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, zip files, and more
  • Gives you access to over 200 Windows, DOS, Macintosh, and Internet file types
  • Supports new formats including Visio, Project, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint 2000
  • Includes built-in zip program – no need to buy a separate zip program
  • Views virtually any file – saves time and money
  • Views email attachments instantly
  • Maintains formatting of the original document
  • Protects against troublesome macro viruses
  • Prints files with fully formatted output
  • Cuts the cost of buying expensive software just to view files
  • Integrates with popular browsers and email programs
  
Dear XXXXXX,
Thank you for your informative information.  Erika and I will be going to Berlin in June where I am invited to lecture at Humbold-Universitat.
 
I have not had time to open up your attached documents.  Off the wall, however, I worry about the future of any electronic books upon which content is "frozen" in this era of being able to download revised work (e.g., with added reviews and correction) in real time.  Already we are seeing major publishers make their most profitable textbooks available for downloading (with software that restricts printing to one copy).  See WizeUp's impressive list of textbooks at http://www.wizeup.com/.  The publishers include the following:
 
:

  • Addison Wesley                                W. H. Freeman                                        South-Western College Publishing

  • Allyn & Bacon                                   Harcourt College Publishers                     St. Martin's Press

  • Bedford Books                                  Houghton Mifflin                                      Wadsworth Publishing Company

  • The Dryden Press                              W. W. Norton                                          Worth Publishers
I review other alternatives for electronic books at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
 
In this new competitive environment, I am hesitant to recommend investing in any type of CD-type book or other "fixed" medium that locks up the text and does not facilitate Web downloading and instructor customizations.  Even device books (Rocket e-Book, Softbook, and EveryBook) make online libraries and downloading of updated materials very easy.  The key is to have a disk in the device that can be re-written with new download updates.  As I understand it, your PC-Cards are not re-writeable.  This might be perceived as an advantage to publishers, but it will never be perceived as advantageous to customers having choices such as those mentioned above.
 
My other concern is that publishers rarely have made any profits on CD-books.  There are exceptions in such cases as ADAM, but most CD book ventures have been financial failures.  Publishers have produced thousands of CD books that just would not sell, including many books with great audio and video content.
 
Since DVD readers are cheap and have great audio and video qualities, what is the advantage of your book over DVD books?  Since PCs now have great audio playback using MP3 compression, what is the advantage of your book over downloading books such as the WizeUp books mentioned above as well as existing device books (Rocket e-Book, Softbook, and EveryBook)?  Microsoft's new ClearType provides fantastic resolution for text reading on PC screens.  It is not likely that you can claim superior reading quality.
 
My own prediction is that publishers will move toward site licensing on controlled systems such as Blackboard.  Blackboard now has libraries that can be customized for each course.  Publishers may start selling site licenses for each course and only store the book on a Blackboard server having controlled access to content.  See my threads on Blackboard at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/blackboard.htm 
 
I hate to sound negative on this, but until you have conducted controlled experiments comparing the Device-XXXXXBooks with DVD, EveryBook, and WizeUp alternatives, it is not clear what your competitive advantage will be in this era of high competition in "cheap" electronic books.  I suspect that one advantage may be that there are no consumer encoders for Device-XXXXXBooks, thereby giving publishers added copyright protections.  However, CD books that have no such restraints on computers have not fared well with customers.  Why would devices with added restraints fare better?
 
The problem is not so much the advantages of the Device-XXXXXBook over hard copy.  The problem is the isolation of the comparative advantages of the Device-XXXXXBook over other electronic book alternatives vis-a-vis some of its disadvantages.  As far as I can tell, only one type of device might really catch on --- that would be affordable virtual reality headgear.  But thus far, this seems to be cost prohibitive.
 
Can you be more specific as to your business model and why you think The Device-XXXXXBook will do better than other electronic books?

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212
Voice: (210) 999-7347  Fax:  (210) 999-8134 
Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen

From FEI President Phil Livingston on January 4, 2000

On Dec. 20, 2000, the FASB met and tentatively decided that ALL goodwill recorded on the balance sheet will be subject to the new impairment testing rules, and therefore no longer amortized. Obviously, this is an important decision, and will apply only when and if the new business combinations accounting standard is adopted and issued. Until then, the existing rules apply. In the same press release (which you can read in full on www.fasb.org), the Board indicated that it would be reviewing the pooling issue, beginning in January 2001. The FASB indicated that the final standard might be published in the second quarter.

Why Web Browsers Haven't Standardized by Eric Meyer 22 September 1998 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/38/index1a.html 

Writing for Skimmers 
There is such an abundance of information available online that it is impossible to fully read everything that comes across your screen. For that reason, you'll want to skim this article for tips on cutting text at your Web site. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2388 

From InformationWeek Online January 4, 2001

Raven Won't Fly To KM's Rescue

A year after promising customers a software suite to make corporate "knowledge" indexable and searchable, IBM's Lotus division is preparing to release the main component. But experts warn that the software, called Raven, will be immature and incomplete, especially when compared with Lotus's initial description of a single knowledge management command center.

Lotus will introduce a component called Discovery Server next week designed to catalog documents from various information sources—such as document management systems, corporate databases or Web sites—in a searchable database, as well as derive information about the authors of those documents to catalog their expertise. The other half of Raven, portal software called K- Station, was introduced last September at Lotusphere Berlin.

Still, questions about what Raven does, how it works, and how it will plug into existing information systems have barely begun to be answered. Early users of knowledge management products from other vendors are taking a gradual approach, focusing on departmental business processes and introducing technology tailored to those processes.

"We explicitly downplay the technology, and get the community to focus on the kinds of interactions that are going to be important to this team or group or community," said John Old, an IT manager who oversees knowledge management at Texaco. "We talk about technology once they figure out how they want to really operate." – David Drucker

More on knowledge management: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eBuZ0Bdl6n0V30CWwF 

On January 7, 2001, Computer Chronicles (PBS) featured a fast-printing inkjet printer that can efficiently print both in black and white and in color.  Standard color pages take about four seconds per page.  The product is the Epson Stylus Color 980 printer --- http://www.epson.com/ 

Matag's version of eTailing form InternetWeek on January 10, 2001

Since getting a digital makeover last year, Maytag Corp.'s Neptune washer and dryer have become the company's best-selling appliances. In two weeks they will become the first products Maytag sells through its Web site.

However, the company is not going to sell them directly. Rather, Maytag will take orders and then route them to a retail partner closest to the customer's home. While company officials have teamed up with two undisclosed retailers, Maytag is negotiating with others as well. Maytag's key distributors are independent stores and Sears.

When Maytag begins taking orders online the week after next, it will essentially pass data, put in an electronic shopping cart, to the retailer. Maytag is using BroadVision e-commerce software, which includes a Web-based shopping cart. --Ted Kemp

Keep reading: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eBzs0Bdl6n0V30Cexy 

The IASC ( http://www.iasc.org.uk/ ) has restructured, has much larger budgets, and is growing in power and influence for harmonizing international versus national accounting standards.  Somewhat surprisingly, Pierre Greffe, CFO of Chicago's First Bank, reports that many corporations prefer the complex and relatively tough U.S. GAAP over the somewhat "looser" standards of other nations and the IASC:

As the longstanding effort to reconcile U.S. accounting standards with generally looser international norms continues, many finance officers are rooting for the U.S. standards to prevail.  Pierre Greffe, CFO of  Chicago's Harris Bank, is cautiously optimistic that this will happen.
"Talking Reconciliation,", by Ramona Dzinkowski, Financial Executive, January/February 2001, p. 45.  This article is not online from its publisher, the Financial Executives Institute --- http://www.fei.org/.

Hi Bob.

I'm Colin Ong, Principal Consultant of MR=MC Consultancy, a HR/Internet research firm based in Singapore. I am in the process of researching for my second internet workbook on how the Internet has affected both the workplace and how we live. Workbook 1 has just hit the bookstores and Workbook 2 is projected to be ready by April 2001.

Both workbooks are targetted towards top management and decision-makers in Asia. My publisher and I will also seek ways in converting my workbooks into ebook format. This will give contributors more exposure to Asia-Pacific-based companies.

Workbook 2 will be concentrated about HR strategies in the New Economy Workplace. A sample of these questions can be found in http://www.mrmc.com.sg/questions 

I hope to be granted the permission to profile Technology Glossary at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm  as a Positive Case-Study for my workbook. I will also like to use a selection of definitions of the terms.

I will also ensure that the proper accreditation and links be provided to ensure that my readers will be aware that you are the source of this information.

The following were part of Workbook 1:

Gerry McGovern of NUA Surveys, Jay Levinson of Guerrilla Marketing, Bigstep, Animation.com, Patentcafe.com, Copywriting.net, Mightywords.com, Startupfailures.com, Clickz.com, Humanclick and Managementhelp.org etc

I eagerly wait for your positive reply.

Thanks for your kind consideration and keep up the great work,

Colin Ong Principal Consultant MR=MC Consultancy http://www.mrmc.com.sg  
Singapore Publisher's Website: http://www.yourchoicemag.com  
Copyrighted B2F2B Model: http://www.b2f2b.com 

What we traditionally teach in intermediate and advanced accounting courses no longer prepares accounting students for the future. And the CPA examination tends to focus on the shrinking tip of the financial information iceberg. The 1980/81 President Mary Stone of the American Accounting Association stated the following:

****************************************************************************

A point that I believe we need to keep in mind as we look to the future, however, is that financial information (that is to say traditional GAAP-based accounting information) is an increasingly smaller subset of the information that is being used for decision making and monitoring performance. We all know this-the Bedford Committee made this point 14 years ago when it concluded that the accounting profession was becoming a “broad information” profession. The Jenkins Committee stressed this point in 1994 when it recommended greater emphasis on the development and disclosure of nonfinancial performance measures. Research studies provide evidence of the declining relevance of GAAP-based financial information by documenting a decrease in the association of stock market prices and earnings in certain industries. The AAA affirmed the importance of unrecognized assets at its 2000 Annual Meeting when it presented the Wildman Award to Baruch Lev for his studies of the market’s valuation of research and development costs.

These and other sources tell us that students whose study is confined solely to cost-based GAAP financial statements are unlikely to be prepared to work in an economy in which many of the companies with the largest market capitalizations are ones with few fixed assets and quarter after quarter of net losses.

The new book, Cracking the Value Code <http://iil.indiainfoline.com/pefi/bore/br07.html>, by Boulton, Libert, and Samek, argues that the new economy demands a new language and a new set of measurement principles. It calls for valuing employee and supplier assets, customer assets, intellectual capital, and other intangibles that are the crucial drivers of value in the information economy.

Source: "What Will We Teach?," by Mary S. Stone, Accounting Education News, Fall 2000 --- <http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aen/fall00/item01.htm>.

Reply from Dennis Beresford

Bob,

I copied your comments for your accounting theory class and will read them in the next couple of days. I will send you any comments I have, although at first glance they appear quite comprehensive.

I had read Mary Stone's commentary a couple of days ago. While the part you quoted in your email message were important, I was even more impressed with another part of Mary's remarks:

"Although Stewart’s description might be viewed as ominous by some, I believe that as accounting professors it should make us feel more optimistic. After all, information is a key ingredient of knowledge. And as accounting professors, we have a track record of educating students to:

Turn data into information, Summarize information, Distinguish relevant from irrelevant information, Attest to the reliability of information, and Communicate information effectively.

Arguably, these are skills that are becoming more, rather than less, valuable. Students in the new economy who do not develop the knowledge and skills to work with information are disadvantaged. Hence as educators, one of our most important social responsibilities is to keep the ranks of the informationally disadvantaged low."

I'm not as sure as Mary that accounting educators have such a great track record with respect to these "knowledge skills." Rather, I think that most of us tend to inundate students with rules. In my experience, it isn't until after several years in the business world that the best accountants actually start to figure out how to turn data into information, etc. While I certainly agree that we need to consider intangibles and similar developments as Baruch Lev is doing, if accounting educators could truly accomplish Mary's objectives we would be doing a great job.

Best wishes for a wonderful 2001 and keep up the great work of helping all of us to improve.

Denny Beresford

****************************************************************************

The above remarks from Dr. Stone are quoted near the end of a brief lecture that I prepared for the beginning of my ACCT 5341 accounting theory course. If any of you have comments on how I can improve these lecture notes, please let me know. The link is at <http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/theory.htm>.

Second generation video recorders can support multiple video feeds and offer almost unlimited storage. Fans will be able to pick their viewpoint for stadium broadcasts and see more movies on demand --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,40493,00.html 

In authoring ... We see XML on the map, but the entire networked world just isn't ready for it yet. What we really need is a baby-step between HTML and XML. Sven Heinicke gives us the run-down on XHTML --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/50/index2a.html 

"Microsoft’s cunning plan," Economist.com, January 4, 2001 --- http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=464938 

Microsoft’s dominance of the PC marketplace stems from its ownership of the Windows operating system. Windows provides basic functions, such as drawing windows and menus on the screen, managing network communications and accessing disk-drives, on which all PC software can draw. This ensures the consistency and compatibility of different pieces of software, and provides programmers with building blocks that can be stuck together to make complex products. Microsoft, in turn, benefits by controlling and defining the platform.

With .NET, Microsoft’s plan is to establish a new platform. Instead of writing PC software that runs on Windows, the idea is that programmers will write Internet software that runs on .NET. Like Windows, .NET will provide the basic blocks from which more complex software can be constructed. The key difference is that, whereas PC software runs on a single machine, .NET software will involve interactions between many machines connected via the Internet and providing services to each other.

This is, to some extent, already happening on the Internet. Online publishing, for example, involves millions of machines (web servers) providing a service (offering pages) to other machines (PCs running web browsers). All this is possible because the protocols for formatting, requesting and transmitting web pages have been standardised. Microsoft’s aim with .NET is to provide the framework for machines to offer other services, such as credit-card authentication, airline reservations or English-French translation, over the Internet. And by providing a complete set of tools to build and link such services, Microsoft hopes to establish a new standard, just as it did with Windows.

This will work, however, only if Microsoft can persuade programmers to write software that runs on its new platform. So this summer, a big step in its .NET strategy will be to provide a set of programming tools, called Visual Studio.NET, to start the ball rolling. If Microsoft can establish a new Internet-based platform, its fortunes will no longer be tied so closely to those of the PC, and it will be better placed to profit from the expected proliferation of non-PC devices, such as smart telephones and set-top boxes.

The rise of .NET does not mean that Microsoft intends to abandon Windows, however. Instead, it hopes that the growth of the .NET platform will drive demand for powerful server software, and hence for Windows 2000 and its associated server add-ons. Furthermore, Microsoft will ensure that .NET services work best when used on PCs running Windows.

Reorganising itself around .NET, rather than Windows, is a shrewd way for Microsoft to respond to the growing importance of the Internet. But, just as significant, the move to a more Internet-centric way of doing things will also make it easier for Microsoft to earn money from its applications software. Instead of selling its Office suite in shrink-wrapped boxes, Microsoft plans to transform it into a subscription-based online service.

Investments and Personal Finance (Tips When Buying a Home)
HUD Buyer's Kit ---- http://www.hud.gov/buyhome.html 

Here is another search engine for your page:  
Multimeta: ( http://www.multimeta.com/ )  
This is a fast meta search engine (simultaneous searches in  the major search engines, free URL submission service).   There is even an e-mail feature that allows to receive the  search results by e-mail.  
Best regards,  
Mehul Trivedi

Bob Jensen's search links and search helpers can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

In yet another attempt to return to profitability, Corel is expected to sell off its Linux business ... and then announce details of its joint venture with Microsoft --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,41066,00.html 

Anatomy of Disgust http://www.channel4.com/nextstep/disgust/ 

CyberRadio --- Find your favorite artist or radio station http://www.akoo.com/ 

Hi Bernadine and Peter,

In the world of messaging, threaded usually refers to some linkage of related messages or reference items. It may be done in a variety of ways. My way is to simply post related messages to a single web page. For example, messages that I receive and references that I find about electronic books and electronic journals are posted to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

A more sophisticated way of threading is to have some search code such that when searching for Category 2352332, all messages and references on that category's topic will pop out of a giant database (or threaded databases) on a variety of topics.

In the future, threading will be done with meta-tags, notably RDF, XML, XFORM, and XBRL. You can read more about these in my threads at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/xmlrdf.htm 

Most of the popular course authoring and delivery systems have "message threading" capabilities. For example, Blackboard allows us to thread messages. Suppose you will receive 863 messages from your students this semester. Blackboard has a utility that allows you to pull up messages on given "threaded" topics.

Threading usually is more efficient and reliable than keyword searching. When searching the Internet for keywords such as "derivative" may get you 1.654,347 hits on mathematical derivatives and 246,987 hits on financial instruments derivatives. If you had threaded indexing or meta-tags, you could avoid all the redundant hits. More importantly, you can also find documents on a topic even when those documents do not use your searching keyword.

Hope this helps. Keep in mind that these are only my subjective opinions on the matter. In a sense, threading messages is similar to threading a patchwork quilt. Rather than having swatches of cloth scattered around the house, you can thread them into one quilt. The main difference between cloth threading and message threading is that messages can be threaded into multiple "quilts." 

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu  
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

-----Original Message----- 
From: Bernadine and Peter Raiskums [mailto:berna@gci.net]  
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2001 7:12 PM 
To: Jensen, Robert Subject: Re: e-books

Thank you for your response - I did visit two of the sites your message linked to, and now wondering about a definition for "threaded" as you use the word. I didn't find it in the glossary, nor at my favorite reference www.bartleby.com/61. Can you enlighten me please?

CareerJournal - the Wall Street Journal --- http://www.CareerJournal.com/ 

JVC says its new Digital VCR protects against piracy and offers better quality than DVD disks because the content is too large to copy. But the $2,000 could keep it from most consumers for some time. Andy Patrizio reports from CES in Las Vegas --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,41045,00.html 

Development of art in the digital age --- http://010101.sfmoma.org/ 

Please forward this announcement to colleagues who are interested in using information technology tools more effectively in their work.

As always, we seek illuminating articles that will assist educators as they face the challenge of integrating information technology tools in teaching and in managing educational organizations. Please review our call for manuscripts at http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/call.asp  and send me a note if you would like to contribute such an article.

Jim -- 
James L. Morrison morrison@unc.edu  
Professor of Educational Leadership 
CB 3500 Peabody Hall 
Editor, The Technology Source UNC-Chapel Hill 
http://horizon.unc.edu/TS  
Chapel Hill , NC 27599 Editor Emeritus, On the Horizon Phone: 919 962-2517 http://www.camfordpublishing.com  Fax: 919 962-1693

IN THIS ISSUE:

Albert Ip and Roni Linser introduce this issue of The Technology Source with their assessment of a Web-based role-play model that they use to teach their world politics class at the University of Melbourne. By virtually filling the shoes of various local statesmen, world leaders, and media figures, students experience politics hands-on, an approach that Ip and Linser believe fosters long-term retention. In addition to challenging students to take responsibility for tough diplomatic issues, the model offers opportunities for creativity and enjoyment. As Ip and Linser explain, "the increase of fun and playfulness, which enhance student motivation, justifies the effort."

John Hibbs discusses the importance of maximizing technology use in his commentary on the format of distance education conferences. Hibbs shares an illuminating fantasy with readers: a chat with a kingpin in distance education who defends face-to-face conferences. But with a $3,000 cost per attendee, double that for international attendees, Hibbs contends, "Something about this story doesn't seem quite right. . . ." He reminds us that up-to-date technology can make conferences, much like classrooms, cost-effective, efficient, and accessible to all.

Stephen Downes takes Hibbs' argument a step further, arguing in this issue's second commentary that the approach to conferences Hibbs describes is representative of a deeper attitude: a general discrediting of online discourse, even among distance education professionals. To Downes, the hypocrisy is that "while distance educators talk about online learning as inclusive and empowering, their practice remains exclusive and disempowering."

While technological advances are revolutionizing distance education, Ellen Chaffee cautions against overlooking the importance of universal access. In this issue's third commentary, she explains, "Rather than viewing technology as a tool for delivery, like an interactive video system, we can view technology as a tool for learning, like a textbook or problem set." She cites improved student and faculty experiences at Valley City State University and Mayville State University as evidence for the successes of universal access, emphasizing that those successes are well worth additional costs.

Like the authors of our assessment article, Diann Schindler-Ender calls for greater interaction on the Web. In our fourth commentary, Schindler-Ender argues that the human resource shortage faced by many institutions means that their future success hinges on the ability to attract skilled and competent candidates. The way to tackle this potential employment crisis, she emphasizes, is to take the job search process to the Web, following the examples of business and industry. She concludes that "online employee recruitment promises a fast, easy, cost-efficient, and effective tool for addressing a fast-approaching human resource crisis."

Joel Foreman has much experience with the world of distance education. In his case study of WebCT, a course management system (CMS), Foreman discloses the current benefits and disadvantages of the system, suggesting improvements that may encourage more teachers to use a CMS in their courses. Foreman predicts that, like farmers trading mules for tractors, teachers' adoption of improved course management systems represents a new era in instruction.

In our second case study, Grover Furr discusses Internet technology in the classroom, sharing his insight into teaching using streaming audio. The technology allows Furr's and others' lectures to be accessible outside of class, encouraging further study of the material and making time in class more active. Overall, Furr explains, "With this simple and cheap streaming audio technology, I can use all of my class time to enhance student-centered, interactive education."

In faculty and staff development, Ann Luck takes Technology Source readers for another visit to Penn State's World Campus to share the online course development process. Those who remember last spring's case study, in which Luck first introduced this exciting distance learning program, will be eager to learn how World Campus faculty and staff create their courses in a team environment and to read Luck's advice for avoiding common pitfalls. Those who didn't catch last spring's article won't want to miss out again.

This issue's spotlight shines on "JURIST: The Legal Education Network," a site with a plethora of resources for those interested in legal studies. As Stephen Downes reveals, the site is a must-view for students, professors, librarians, and practicing lawyers alike. It offers extensive material on conferences, books and articles, law schools, bar exams, current laws and legislation, and job openings. Check out Downes's article and see why he calls it "probably the best educational portal on the Internet today."

Sometimes traditional numerical, multiple-choice, or fill-in-the-blank questioning drills just can't be beat when it comes to promoting and assessing student learning. Yet educators must weigh the advantages of such assignments against the tedious hours required to grade individual exercises. Often, too much time on paperwork means too little time for creative lesson planning and meaningful interaction with students. John C. Dutton has a solution to this problem: WebAssign, which he touts as "a better homework delivery tool"--better, that is, not only at delivering questions to students, but also at grading their responses and providing them with instant feedback, freeing teachers' time for what really matters.

January 5th edition of the Internet Essentials 2001 Newsletter for the financial professional. Great news about XBRL to report this week from Bryant College to Singapore --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. The XBRL Educational Resource Center at Bryant College 
2. AICPA's 2001 Top Ten Technologies List 
3. XBRL in the Top Ten Hottest News Items on Accounting Web 
4. Singapore Establishes an XBRL Task Force 
5. XBRL Opens up a Request for Requirements for XBRL version 2.0 Specification 
6. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML New stories every day!

From The Best, Worst, & Most Unusual (Noteworthy Achievements, Events, Feats, & Blunders of Every Conceivable Kind), by Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler (Galahad Books, New York, 1976)

Best Shakespearean Plays:  Hamlet and Othello

Worst Shakespearean Plays:  Titus Andronicus (Savage and gore without a rhyme or reason) and Timone of Athens (Plotless)

Worst American Actor (Actually an English immigrant in 1828):  George Jones was psychotically obsessed with playing only the Mad Prince  in Hamlet.  As Jones grew increasingly insane, the audiences found increasing humor in his performances in  Hamlet.  Eventually he became too "mad" to play the Mad Prince.  He also authored a book claiming the Israelites were the first inhabitants of North and South America.

Best Broadway Musical:  My Fair Lady 
(I prefer Porgy and Bess (for the score) and Oklahoma (for the choreography and ballet dancing)

Best Comedy:  The Misanthrope by Moliere.
Worst Comedy:  Pleasure Man by Mae West

Best Playwright of the 20th Century:  George Bernard Shaw (especially for Candida).  
Second place goes to Sean O'Casey (The Plough and the Stars, Juno, and The Paycock).

Worst Theatrical Act (Eventually the Cherry Sisters erected a wire screen in front of the Olympia Theatre stage to protect themselves from flying fruits, vegetables, and other garbage thrown by the displeased audiences).  The show was produced by Oscar Hammerstein at a time when he was broke and in need of a quick buck.  Just proves the same person can do the best and the worst of most anything.  Hammerstein stated:  "I've been putting on the best talent and it hasn't gone over.  I'm going to try the worst."  The show eventually took to the road where Midwest audiences stared in disbelief.  Sounds like a precursor to The Gong Show and many other modern-day television productions.  But it does not help to thrown garbage at the garbage on your TV set.

More about how to lie and deceive with statistics 
STATS: Statistical Assessment Service http://www.stats.org/index.html 
Note especially the Dubious Data Awards of 2000

The Top Ten Silliest, Most Misleading Stories of the New Millennium (at least, we think it’s ten, and we’re pretty sure that the Millennium has already started) Yes, science fans, it’s that time of year again, when STATS -- the Statistical Assessment Service -- looks back with amusement at the glitches and goofs served up by the media over the last twelve months. It was a banner year for dubiousity, ranging from failed presidential pop quizzes (Vajpayee, Lee, and um, that general from Pakistan -- we knew that) to the amazing electoral counting catastrophe (we thought those were boxes of Florida grapefruit; turns out that’s just what happens to a pregnant chad). So, return with us now to those thrilling stories from yesteryear...

1). “Well, OK, maybe it’s the SECOND time in 50 million years...” The August 19 New York Times front page was a real scorcher – complete with color photograph. “The North Pole is melting” read the first sentence. It seems tourists on a Russian ice-breaker saw open water in the middle of the polar ice, clicked the shutter, and rushed right to The Times with “evidence that global warming may be real and already affecting climate.” It was a sight “presumably never before seen by humans... the last time the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago.” National Public Radio also heralded the news (Aug. 22), but their science reporter, Richard Harris, started to notice the story’s own thin ice, and got a skeptical response from other Arctic experts. It turns out during a typical summer, about 90 percent of the high Arctic is covered with ice, but about 10 percent of the time there’s open water over the pole. The Times started backtracking, and on August 29 revisited the entire matter with a Science Times article altering the claim and its link to global warming.

2). Perhaps you should stick to the swimsuit competition? Could nuclear power plants be a cause of infant mortality? This charge was leveled in Washington, DC (Reuters Apr. 27) by activist groups coupled with the star power of supermodel Christie Brinkley. Though infant mortality rates have been in sharp decline at the same time that nuclear power spread around the country, the activists had an angle -- improvements in infant health were linked to the closing of nuclear plants. But a quick call to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) by Newsday reporter Earl Lane pulled the plug. An NCI study that examined 900,000 cancer deaths in counties near nuclear facilities showed that childhood deaths from diseases such as leukemia were actually higher before, not after, their construction. If anything, the facilities were associated with better infant health.

3). Migrating Monarchs Take Wrong Turn? What was the notorious Butterfly Ballot doing in wintry Canada, so far from its Palm Beach electoral home? The December 7 issue of Nature presented research from a Canadian psychologist who offered ballot choices to shoppers at the Bonnie Doon Mall in Edmonton, Alberta. It seems that 3 out of 53 Canadian shoppers made the alleged “Buchanan error”on the ballot form; that is, they got confused and voted for the wrong candidate. The San Francisco Chronicle (Dec. 1) and other papers were quick to net the story, reporting evidence of “systematic confusion” and arguing the data “call into question the validity of the presidential election results.” A story with, er, wings, or just a lepidopteran let down?

It turns out the methodology was meandering. The shoppers were only a “convenience sample” not even representative of Canadians, much less Floridians. Second, the study acknowledged that “there was no relation between the amount of confusion and errors” made (so much for “systematic”). Besides, the Associated Press (Nov. 10) had already reported butterfly ballot “research” from Bossier City, Louisiana. Down there two fourth grade teachers had tested 22 kids on the same confusing format, with zero errors.

4). “So, have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Reuters reported a poll (Feb. 4) which illustrated that “although most smokers in the US know that cigarettes can cause heart and lung disease, few have been able to kick the habit.” In fact, out of the 70 percent of the sampled respondents who had ever tried to quit, none had succeeded. Unfortunately, this should have come as little surprise, since the poll specifically sampled “more than 1,000 adult smokers.” No quitters allowed.

5). The View From... Lake Rudolf? It’’s not exactly “Eurocentric,” but there’s definitely something wrong here. According to the BBC (Oct. 30), research into the last universal common ancestor of human males living today “gives an intriguing insight into the journey of our ancestors across the planet, from eastern Africa into the Middle East, then to southeast and southern Asia, then New Guinea and Australia, and finally to Europe and Central Asia” (emphasis added)

It seems that modern man hasn’t yet reached North or South America. Perhaps the controversy over Kennewick Man goes deeper than we think.

6). Kindergarten Cop-out An Associated Press story, “Federal study shows kindergarten improves all young minds” (Dec. 4), seemed to suggest that kindergarten was a very good thing. From a sample of 22,000 children who attended kindergarten, the study found that five times as many of them could do simple sums as in the previous year.

But the fifth paragraph of the story reveals how the study doesn’t really prove anything about children’s education in general: “The Education Department-funded study offers no comparison with children who do not attend kindergarten.” In other words, we don’t know whether kindergarten-educated children are better off than other children. All the study showed was that kindergarten helps educate children who are in kindergarten. But “all young minds?” – we just don’t know.

7). Fuzzy Math Nobody at the AP raised an eyebrow when its Oct. 28 story, “Clinton signs law to combat violence against women,” repeated the President’s claim, “‘Every 12 seconds, another woman is beaten,’ he said. ‘That's nearly 900,000 victims every year.’”

Errr, no. One incident every twelve seconds translates to over two and one half million incidents a year. Or, looked at the other way, 900,000 incidents a year is one every 35 seconds. Either way, those two figures don’t add up.

8). Cashew, Cashew, We All Fall Down New York Times columnist Paul Krugman found another way to criticize anti-globalization protestors in his April 19 column, “A Real Nut Case.” He claimed that the World Bank’s intervention in Mozambique’s cashew industry benefitted the country’s poor farmers, who had suffered compared with the nation’s 10,000 nut processing workers.

Unfortunately for Mr. Krugman, and for Mozambique as well, investigations later in the year by the Washington Post (“A Less Than Helpful Hand; World Bank, IMF Blamed for Fall of Mozambican Cashew Industry,” Oct. 18) and Knight Ridder (“World Bank Policies Had Mixed Results in Mozambique,” Sep. 17) found that the World Bank’s policies had not only put over 7,500 factory workers out of a job in one of the world’s poorest countries, but that the farmers who were supposed to have benefitted had lost out to nut speculators, many of them foreign.

(Thanks to TomPaine.com for initially drawing our attention to this one).

9). Ancestral Vices A sense of perspective is important when you deal with statistics. A spokesman for the White House Office of Drug Control Policy clearly lost his when he responded to a study on the number of drug offenders in prison by saying, “Over the same period of time, drug use has gone down and crime is at an all-time low.” (“Drug Offenders Jailed at High Rate, AP, Jul. 27)

While crime has gone down recently, it still has not reached the low levels it began to leave behind in the late Sixties. Murder rates are lower than in the gangster-ridden 1920's and 1930's, but far above the levels of the 1950's and the first two decades of the century.

Of course, we don’t have the data to talk about crime levels before that, but perhaps the spokesman had something else in mind. When Cain murdered Abel, after all, the homicide rate peaked at 25,000 per 100,000 individuals. And the Garden of Eden suffered a 50 percent larceny rate, which was, naturally, motivated by a desire for illegal substances.

10). And Finally... “Hyper-hyperbole. It’s massive!”-- article title in the UK newspaper The Observer, Feb. 27, criticizing news media which make exaggerated claims to bolster their arguments.

“It’s apocalypse now as world boils over.”-- headline in the same newspaper, same day.

Other sites on this topic:

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~johnson/talks/27.5.99.chris.html 

http://www.mcn.net/~jimloy/howtolie.html 

http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/a-liestt.html 

http://www.robelle.com/library/smugbook/stats.html 

Forwarded by Anthony Digiovani

Love is grand;
Divorce is a hundred grand.


I am in shape.
Round is a shape.


Time may be a great healer,
but it's a lousy beautician.


Never be afraid to try something new.
Remember, amateurs built the ark.
Professionals built the Titanic.


Conscience is what hurts when everything
else feels so good.


Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand.


Even if you are on the right track,
you'll get run over if you just sit there.


Politicians and diapers have one thing in common.
They should both be changed regularly and for the same reason.


An optimist thinks that this is the best possible world.
A pessimist fears that this is true.


There will always be death and taxes;
however, death doesn't get worse every year.


In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.


Dijon vu -- the same mustard as before.


I am a nutritional overachiever.


I plan on living forever. So far, so good.


A day without sunshine is like night.


If marriage were outlawed,
only outlaws would have in-laws.


It's frustrating when you know all the answers,
but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.


The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right
time, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.


Brain cells come and brain cells go,
but fat cells live forever.


Age doesn't always bring wisdom.
Sometimes age comes alone.


Life not only begins at forty,
It also begins to show and even more at Sixty


You don't stop laughing because you grow old,
you grow old because you stopped laughing

Quotes forwarded by Dick Haar

"And God said: Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me. And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan." * George Burns

"What are the three words guaranteed to humiliate men everywhere? 'Hold my purse.' " * Sandra Bullock

"The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire and the computer will ask, 'Specify type of goat.'" * Jason Alexander (George Castanza on Seinfeld)

"Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships." * Sharon Stone

" Honesty is the key to a relationship. If you can fake that, you're in." * Courtney Cox (Monica on "Friends")

"There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do." * Henry Kissenger (former US Secretary of State)

"My cousin just died. He was only 19. He got stung by a bee - the natural enemy of a tightrope walker." * Dan Rather (News anchorman)

"I saw a woman wearing a sweatshirt with 'Guess' on it. I said, 'Thyroid problem?'" * Arnold Schwarzenegger

"Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps." * Tiger Woods

I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves." * Jerry Garcia (Grateful Dead)

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." * Jack Nicholson

"Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is." * Barbara Bush (Former US First Lady)

And that's the way it was on January 12, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

The Intuit accounting vortal is at http://www.intuitadvisor.com/intuit/vortal/gtf/gvortal.gtf 

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 

January 5, 2001

Quotes of the Week 

It distresses us to return work that is not perfect.
Epitaph on Grave Marker
(However, the quote originated on a note pinned on a spot that a laundry service failed to remove.)

The best time to make friends is before you need them.
Ethel Barrymore

Self-reflection is the school of wisdom
Balthasar Gracian

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost.
 J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
Alexander Pope

Happy New Year To My Many Friends:  Auld Lang Syne,  Robert Burns
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And auld lang syne?

Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne.


2. And surely, ye'll be your pint stowp!
And surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
Chorus: 		3. We twa hae mn about the braes
And pou'd the gowans fine;
But we've wander'd mony a weary foot
Sin' auld lang syne.
Chorus:

4. We two hae paidled i' the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne.
Chorus:

5. And here's a hand, my trusty fiere,
And gie's a hand o' thine;
And we'll tak' a right gude-willy waught,
For auld lang syne.
Chorus:

10,000 Folk Songs (Printed lyrics and download music) --- http://ingeb.org/home.html 

What we traditionally teach in intermediate and advanced accounting courses no longer prepares accounting students for the future.  And the CPA examination tends to focus on the shrinking tip of the financial information iceberg.  The 1980/81 President Mary Stone of the American Accounting Association stated the following:

A point that I believe we need to keep in mind as we look to the future, however, is that financial information (that is to say traditional GAAP-based accounting information) is an increasingly smaller subset of the information that is being used for decision making and monitoring performance. We all know this—the Bedford Committee made this point 14 years ago when it concluded that the accounting profession was becoming a “broad information” profession. The Jenkins Committee stressed this point in 1994 when it recommended greater emphasis on the development and disclosure of nonfinancial performance measures. Research studies provide evidence of the declining relevance of GAAP-based financial information by documenting a decrease in the association of stock market prices and earnings in certain industries. The AAA affirmed the importance of unrecognized assets at its 2000 Annual Meeting when it presented the Wildman Award to Baruch Lev for his studies of the market’s valuation of research and development costs.

These and other sources tell us that students whose study is confined solely to cost-based GAAP financial statements are unlikely to be prepared to work in an economy in which many of the companies with the largest market capitalizations are ones with few fixed assets and quarter after quarter of net losses.

The new book, Cracking the Value Code, by BoultonLibert, and Samek, argues that the new economy demands a new language and a new set of measurement principles. It calls for valuing employee and supplier assets, customer assets, intellectual capital, and other intangibles that are the crucial drivers of value in the information economy.

Source: "What Will We Teach," by Mary S. Stone, Accounting Education News, Fall 2000 --- http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aen/fall00/item01.htm.

The above remarks from Dr. Stone are quoted near the end of a brief lecture that I prepared for the beginning of my ACCT 5341 accounting theory course.  If any of you have comments on how I can improve these lecture notes, please let me know.  The link is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/theory.htm.

The new acronym to memorize is P2P
Not just a chaotic haven for Napster fans, peer-to-peer networking is getting praise from the button-down side of e-commerce for the business problems it can solve.  http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0012201/2663715/ 

Also see Microsoft's P2P Play at http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2668849,00.html 

In general, Microsoft plans to incorporate new P2P features into future versions of Windows, Stutz said. "It's not like we'll say, 'This is the peer-to-peer operating system,'" he said. "Peer-to-peer features have already started showing up in our products." Those projects include:

Stutz said that Microsoft has long provided P2P technologies in various incarnations, starting with the file sharing and printer sharing features that have been embedded into Windows for years. Other Microsoft applications operate in a P2P fashion, sending information directly from one computer to another. In addition, Microsoft Office 10 will incorporate MSN Messenger Service for person-to-person collaboration.

For my Threads on the Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/Pointera/FreeNet Paradigm Shift in Web Serving and Searching, go to  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

In my opinion, P2P and knowledge bases will be the next big thing in education and training.  Especially in areas that are highly technical, experts will begin file sharing of their expertise on a P2P basis.  For example, instructors and trainers may then download them to create custom knowledge bases that can be diced and sliced for each course each time it is taught or designed for web delivery.  Software like Blackboard is moving toward customized libraries.  See http://www.utexas.edu/computer/news/features/0010/customization.html 

I really enjoy the Digital Duo on PBS.  This is a weekly show largely focused upon technology products you may need and those products you most likely do not need.  The show tends to be critical in a humorous way.  Walt Mossberg (WSJ Technology Editor) always has a module on this show.  The homepage is at http://www.digitalduo.com/index.html 

Yesterday the Duo (a re-run over the holidays) focused heavily upon digital cameras and websites for developing/storing digital photographs.  The number one point is to avoid Kodak due to high cost relative to competitor alternatives for online developing and storing of photographs.  This show is Number 404 at http://www.digitalduo.com/404_dig.html 

Note especially the Duo's recommended reference to Imaging Resources at http://www.imaging-resource.com/ 

Digital Cameras: Reviews
Digital Cameras: Image Comparisons
Digital Cameras: Hints, Tips & FAQs
Scanner Reviews
News
Questions? Answers? Visit our Q&A Forum!

Bob Jensen likes Homestead at http://www.homestead.com/~site/PhotoCenter/index_out.ffhtml 

One use that many educators are making of digital cameras is in pasting student photographs on seating charts the first week of classes.

Bob Jensen's short summary of resources for educators can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/newfaculty.htm#Resources 

The longer set of resources can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

Commentaries on digital cameras by two old pros in accounting education (one of them is really an OLD):

Reply from Barry Rice

I've been doing this for about three years now using my Sony Mavica. It is very helpful to me since I have trouble remembering names. Each semester, on the first day of class, I tell them to make sure they have a "good hair day" for the next class because I will be taking their picture.

However, the primary use of the pictures is to project them on the classroom screen in random order to call on them to answer questions about the lecture, homework, etc. I first started using pictures of students to do this seven and a half years ago using a VHS camera and then capturing one frame for each student on my office PC. My colleague, George Wright and I thought we would be crucified for this approach. In fact, some students hate it but others love it. The bottom line is that it keeps them awake and participating in class because their picture can appear on the screen at any second. When it's up there, it is their turn to answer the question. There is never any doubt about who is being called on. The random aspect adds a lot to the tension. They can never relax.

Obviously it is much easier to pull this off today with the digital cameras. As far as the software goes, George originally wrote a program to randomly project the old captured .bmp files on the screen. Today we use CompuPic from Photodex to randomly project the .JPG pics. It can be purchased for $39.95 and downloaded at http://www.photodex.com/. A free trial version can also be downloaded. It took me 2-4 hours to digitize the semester's pics in the old days. Today, it takes about five minutes to transfer the semester's pics to the campus network so they can be available to me in any classroom on campus.

Another technique I use to add a little interest is to use some old, digitized pics of me mixed in with theirs. When my pic comes up, they are off the hook and I have to answer the question. I use two or three different pics of myself during the semester. They seem to get a kick out of the one with my date at the Va. Tech Ring Dance when I was a junior there in 1962.

I have put a couple of pics on the Web at http://pacioli.loyola.edu/rice/pics/ so you can see the approach I take. I have them hold up a piece of paper with their first name and Rice ID#. We make a big joke about how they looks like pics from a police lineup. I choose these two students because both of them had authorized their pictures being used on the AAA Technology CD-ROM which featured a section on my virtual lecture approach. I don't think they will mind having their pictures her for a month or so.

Regarding publishing students' pics on the Web, I don't feel a need to do so for my undergraduate classes. However, I have published graduate students' pics with their written permission on our Blackboard Web site for their use for the last two years. They are only available to students in the class.

I love this approach to keeping students engaged in the learning process and have never understood why I have never heard of anyone else using it. Have any of you done this? If you try it, please let us AECMers know how it worked out.

Happy New Year!

Barry Rice www.barryrice.com 

Reply from Ron Tidd

In this vein, the one place where my Tech university is really using technology is in providing professors with thumbnail photos of students along with the class roster. (Unfortunately, both are on printed paper!)

I thought I would add that for the last 7-years or so I have video-taped the presentations that students are required to give in every upper-division course that I teach. For the last two years, I have digitized them and made them available over the university network so that students can review them.

I plan two more stages of development: 1) Embed the digital videos in a web page that includes my comments and evaluation; 2) Use them to develop a portfolio for students to assess their improvement and for P&T committees to assess the success of my approach.

Being the devious person that I am, I have also threatened to show the videos at future reunions.

Ronald R. Tidd [rrtidd@MTU.EDU] 

Wow Site of the Week 

Fathom:  A must see for looking into the crystal ball of knowledge portals:  http://www.fathom.com/ 
However, at this point I cannot get some parts of this portal to work.  For example, the Business and Finance section fails for me.  Maybe I am just not doing it properly.

Fathom Partners to Date:

You love to delve into new ideas. You take pleasure in discussion, even if it gets heated, even if you could argue the other point of view just as well. You were born to live in the knowledge economy.

You're going to Hong Kong on business and want to probe deeper than the sound bites on the nightly news. You're tired of web searches that result in 20,347 different kinds of nonsense.

You're a doctor with a crush on art history. You're a fireman with a passion for paleontology. You've recently retired and you've heard that people with active minds live longer.

You want to participate in the world of ideas, even if those ideas can be challenging and counter-intuitive and complex, because you like it, because it's good for your career, because it's good for your soul, because you can.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/00/04/fathom.html 

Fathom, a for-profit spin-off, implements one aspect of Columbia's three-part digital media strategy, which also includes Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning and Columbia Media Enterprises.

Fathom will address the most serious weakness of information on the Worldwide Web, the inability to authenticate the bulk of its content. All Fathom original content will be authenticated, meaning that the knowledge will be attributed to the appropriate educational or cultural institution and its faculty or professional staff. Fathom's standards of academic and editorial integrity will be monitored by the Fathom Academic Council, a panel of selected senior faculty and curators from participating institutions, which will be chaired by Columbia Provost Jonathan Cole.

Offering the best free content of universities, libraries, and museums, Fathom will enable a worldwide audience of students, working adults, and lifelong learners to explore subjects of professional or personal interest. Much of Fathom's content has never been available outside of the participating institutions.

Examples of Fathom content currently in development include:

A "Main Street" for knowledge and education, Fathom will include a comprehensive directory of related online courses offered by universities and cultural institutions, plus textbooks and other academic titles, specialized periodicals, individual articles and other publications, CD-ROMs, academic travel, and learning resources. Users will enroll in online courses through Fathom, with tuition fees, accreditation, and admission policies set at the discretion of the offering university or cultural institution.

Fathom users will have the opportunity to interact and collaborate with the leading experts in their field. Fathom's unique architecture will provide a powerful "search and explore capability" that will allow users to follow their interests, independently or with expert guidance, across the widest possible range of subjects.

Yahoo! Internet Life Names Fathom as 'Best Learning Portal'

Unique Interactive Knowledge Site Selected as One of the 100 Best Web Sites for 2001 NEW YORK, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Yahoo! Internet Life has named Fathom ( http://www.fathom.com ) as the ``Best Learning Portal'' in its 5th Annual ``Top of the Net'' issue (on sale December 19). As the leading consumer lifestyle magazine covering the Internet, Yahoo! Internet Life praised Fathom's dynamic e-knowledge site for its vast collection of intellectual resources, convenience, degree of user interactivity, and prestigious member institutions. These institutions include Columbia University, London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, The British Library, The New York Public Library, The University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, American Film Institute (AFI), RAND, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum (UK), and The Natural History Museum (UK).

Award-winning Web sites appear in the ``100 Best Sites for 2001'' feature of Yahoo! Internet Life's January 2001 issue. The sites were chosen not only for excellence in past and present performance, but because the magazine's editors believe they represent the best of the Internet as it will unfold in the upcoming year.

As the ``Best Learning Portal,'' Fathom offers visitors a wide array of online education opportunities. Fathom provides visitors with access to free content, including lectures, interviews and articles, from the world's leading creators and sources of knowledge. Visitors can also register and enroll in online courses, offered for a fee, that complement their specific interests, as well as participate in provocative online forums with experts on favorite subjects. All content on the site meets Fathom's exemplary quality standards and is authenticated, meaning that the knowledge is attributable to the appropriate academic or cultural institution and its faculty or research staff.

``It is unprecedented for us to bestow an accolade of this nature to a site that has not even officially launched,'' said Yahoo! Internet Life Editor Cree McCree. ``We thought it would have been remiss not to include Fathom because we truly believe Fathom is going to become the leader in its field.''

``We are honored to be recognized by such an esteemed publication,'' said Ann Kirschner, Ph.D., Fathom's President and CEO. ``Our goal has always been to create a site that gives users greater access to some of the world's rich intellectual resources and offers a unique, quality educational experience. It is extremely satisfying to know that Yahoo! Internet Life has selected Fathom as one of the Web's top sites.''

About Fathom

Fathom Knowledge Network Inc. is a unique interactive enterprise dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge. The company's Web site ( http://www.fathom.com ) offers unprecedented opportunities for discovery through authenticated free content, overseen by an advisory board selected from its members, as well as related knowledge and education e-commerce opportunities. Composed of the world's leading universities, museums, libraries, publishers and research institutions, Fathom includes Columbia University, London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, The British Library, The New York Public Library, The University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, American Film Institute (AFI), RAND, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum (UK), and The Natural History Museum (UK).

About Yahoo! Internet Life

Yahoo! Internet Life ( http://www.yil.com ), the world's largest consumer lifestyle magazine covering the Internet, is a monthly publication of Ziff Davis Media. With its mission to entertain, engage, educate and empower Internet enthusiasts, Yahoo! Internet Life serves the New American Consumer(TM). Reaching one in nine of all daily Internet users in America and read monthly by over 5.3 million people, Yahoo! Internet Life chronicles the culture, content and community of the Internet. In January 2001, the four year-old magazine will surpass a circulation of 1.1 million copies per month, solidifying its place as one of the fastest-growing magazines in the history of publishing. Notable accolades include recognition as one of Advertising Age's Best Magazines of 1998; a Circulation Excellence Award from Circulation Management magazine; inclusion as one of Folio magazine's Top 10 Launches for the 90s; as three consecutive Top 10 Hottest Magazine citations from Adweek; and an award from Capell's Circulation Report as Top 10 Best Performer of 1999.

SOURCE: Fathom Knowledge Network Inc.

Bob Jensen's threads on knowledge portals and vortals can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm 

Pricewaterhouse Coopers Won the Contract
Updates on my earlier notices about the U.S. Army distance education project:

From The Chronicle of Higher Education on October 30, 2000 --- http://chronicle.com/free/2000/10/2000103001u.htm 

At least six teams of corporations and colleges have submitted bids for a U.S. Army project to deliver distance-learning courses to soldiers all over the world. Many colleges, seeking to hedge their bets, are members of two or more competing teams.

Companies that have announced plans to compete for the contract include International Business Machines Corporation, NCS Pearson (a division of the giant publishing company), and the consulting and technology-outsourcing companies Arthur Andersen, Computer Science Corporation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Science Applications International Corporation. Bids were due Friday, and details of all of the bidding teams were not immediately available. However, some college administrators say there may be as many as 20 companies or teams bidding for the contract.

Each bid includes an "integrator" that would coordinate most aspects of the project, including the technology and the recruitment of colleges to offer courses. Colleges would offer their distance-education courses to the soldiers through a portal site created and maintained by the integrator.

Some teams include hundreds of academic institutions of many types. For example, I.B.M.'s team includes Georgia Virtual Technical College, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities/Minority Institutions Research Alliance, Texas A&M University at Kingsville, the University of Maryland University College, and the University of Oklahoma.

In July, Army officials announced that they would spend more than $600-million over the next six years on the new program. Last month they issued a request for proposals asking for companies and consortia to respond with plans outlining how to begin and manage the program. Military and college officials have compared the initiative to the G.I. Bill of Rights in terms of its magnitude and its impact on both soldiers and higher education.

College administrators, eager to sign up with as many potential integrators as possible, have bombarded officials of the competing companies with telephone calls.

For an earlier article on August 29, 2000 see http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/transcripts/2000/08/20000829caldera.htm 

Forwarded by Glen Gray on December 23, 2000

U.S. Army Chooses PricewaterhouseCoopers to Run Big Distance-Education Project 
By SARAH CARR <mailto:sarah.carr@chronicle.com>  
Washington 

After several months of angling among distance-education providers, the U.S. Army announced Thursday that the consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers will coordinate a $453-million project to deliver distance-learning courses to soldiers all over the world. The secretary of the Army, Louis Caldera, made the announcement at a press conference here. PricewaterhouseCoopers will serve as the "integrator" for the project, managing the technology and recruiting colleges to offer courses. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers has formed a team of 10 companies and 29 colleges to work together on the initial offering. Through the project, called Army University Access Online, the Army hopes to offer distance-education courses to all interested soldiers at little or no charge. The first courses will be offered at three Army bases next month, with Army officials estimating that 15,000 students will take courses next year. "We are essentially establishing a virtual institution for 15,000 students, and we need to open our doors in the next 30 days," says Jill J. Kidwell, the program manager for the project at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "We will definitely be ready to go, but we also have our work cut out for us." 

The companies on Pricewaterhouse Coopers team include Blackboard, which will provide the courseware, and PeopleSoft, which will coordinate the administrative system. Participating institutions include Florida State University, Northern Virginia Community College, Pennsylvania State University, and Regents College. The contract with PricewaterhouseCoopers calls for the government to pay significantly less than the $600-million the Army had originally estimated the project would cost. 

Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, says Pricewaterhouse Coopers bid came in below the Army's projections. "It was a very competitive process," he says. "We had a number of quality bids and proposals, and that particular bid was obviously a good value as well as of high quality. When you make an initial estimate, you expect that through the competitive process there will be a good deal of innovation and an efficient price will emerge." A handful of teams, each with a different integrator, vied aggressively for the contract, hoping to gain both income and prestige within the distance-learning industry. Other companies that had been in the running include International Business Machines, NCS Pearson (a division of the giant publishing company), and the consulting and technology-outsourcing companies Arthur Andersen, Computer Sciences Corporation, Electronic Data Systems, and Science Applications International Corporation. Most of the colleges and companies interested in working on the Army project signed on with several of the integrators, hoping not to be shut out when the final decision was made. "We did not have exclusive arrangements, nor did we demand exclusive arrangements," says Ms. Kidwell of PricewaterhouseCoopers. She adds that the 29 academic institutions were selected primarily for their experience in working with the military, as well as with the goal of creating a diverse mixture of institutions. "We have a process in place to begin expanding the pool of academic institutions," she adds. "I don't think that institutions should feel left out because they are not part of the initial set." 

Another PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman says the company is currently finalizing deals with other institutions, including the University of Massachusetts. Trace Urdan, an equity analyst at the investment firm of W.R. Hambrecht & Company, says he thinks the project should be particularly advantageous for some of the smaller companies working with PricewaterhouseCoopers, like Smarthinking, which offers tutoring online. Such companies, he says, will have special access not only to the Army's pool of students, but also to the 29 colleges. He adds that many industry analysts will be watching the Army's project closely in the coming months. "People will be paying attention to see how well it works, and to see if the Army likes it and renews it," he says. "It is not like it is a slam dunk. I think the program will have to continue to improve and expand."

From Syllabus News December 27, 2000

DISH Network Channel Awarded

The California Community College Satellite Network (CCCSAT) has recently been awarded a national public interest channel on the DISH Network. The channel will be launched on December 15, 2000. As a component of the California Community College system (the largest community college system in the world), CCCSAT has the distinction of being the first community college to be selected for this opportunity. Utilizing the vast resources of the California Community College system, the CCCSAT channel (CCN) (Channel 9405) will provide informational, educational and enrichment programming airing 24 hours daily, 7 days a week to over five million households.

Good morning Professor:

Given your wide experience with the net, you might already be aware, but I just discovered that the use of technology to educate is not limited to the ivy halls of universities and colleges. The Kiplinger Letter contained a reference to virtual high schools which "give students in rural, poorly funded areas Web access to courses taught in wealthier schools." Doing an Internet search, I found numerous entries including sites in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Florida, Missouri and Indiana.

www.class.com <http://www.class.com>  contained the following:

A new model for high school learning is emerging throughout the world. Known as virtual high schools (or VHS), these alternative "halls of learning" are growing out of the worldwide need to provide an equal opportunity for a quality education to each and every student, regardless of location or time.

Increasingly, this new approach is providing a solution to the problems facing administrators today including chronic teacher shortages, more regulation, and increasing demands from students and parents for new ways to learn.

A VHS can supplement any school district's curriculum and help solve learning problems. VHS courses are delivered online, and teacher support can be administered locally or through the Independent Study High School. Students log in to take a class, anytime and from any place with Internet access. Sophisticated communication tools furnish the mechanism for contacting teachers, taking tests, and chatting with other students.

www.vhs.concord.org <http://www.vhs.concord.org>  provides a listing of media articles concerning virtual high schools at http://vhs.concord.org/Pages/About+Us-Media+Coverage  <http://vhs.concord.org/Pages/About+Us-Media+Coverage> 

Hope your holiday is filled with joy and peace and the blessings of the season. I have fond memories of our 4 Christmases in San Antonio ... though having grown up with the white Christmases of NYC, I never got used to wearing T-shirts and shorts when that blessed event came amidst 70-80o temperatures!

Janet Flatley 
AVP-Controller 1st Fed S&L Assn 
Pt Angeles WA

Forwarded by Jagdish Gangolly:

Dear Educator,

If you are looking for a course administration system to help you maintain your classes then you may be interested in GradeSource. http://www.gradesource.com 

It is entirely web-based and free to educators. For a demonstration please visit: http://www.gradesource.com/demo/demo.asp 

GradeSource will donate a portion of its earnings back to your school. For more information please visit: http://www.gradesource.com/funds.asp 

This is a one time only mailing. We will not keep, distribute, or sell your email address.

Thank you for your valuable time.

Respectfully, The GradeSource Team

Having once attended Iowa State University (please don't ask when), I was pleased to see that the Cyclones defeated the University of Pittsburgh in the Insight.com bowl (football game) in Phoenix on December 28.  Insight.com is one of the more successful technology companies and remains a very good place to go when searching for technology goods and services (especially good deals on over 100,000 products).  Go to http://www.insight.com/cgi-bin/bp/web/gdirect.html  (There is a special section on Education products.)  They now have specials on PCs for under $350 and notebook computers for under $1,000.

New!
Bob Jensen's Threads on Webledgers for Distributed Network Computing of Accounting Systems and Business Services  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/webledger.htm

Webmonkey's Dreamweaver 4 Overview --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/01/index1a.html 

There are new graphics editing features, a revamped user interface design, improved code handling support, and a heap of features specifically designed to help you get the most out of your Web development experience.

By increasing the developer-friendliness of Dreamweaver in this version, Macromedia -- also the proud parent of Flash, Fireworks, and Generator -- looks to be really making it's move to become the one-stop shop for all of the development tools you need, and there's a great deal of inbreeding and cross-referencing among the Macromedia products: Dreamweaver 4 is being released along side Dreamweaver UltraDev 4 and Fireworks 4, so as we evaluate Dreamweaver 4, we'll also be taking a look at some of the cross-product integration that has been added to the latest versions of the software applications.

Webmonkey's summary of digital storage options --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/22/index3a.html 

Webmonkey's threaded discussion of ColdFusion --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/48/index0a.html 

Bob Jensen's summary of other resources is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 

The next generations of networks will accommodate the yearnings of the visionaries and will inspire the imaginations of traditional thinkers. Two concepts will drive the networks of the future: extensibility and collaboration. From these two forces, new and novel ways of thinking about what a business is and how business processes can operate will emerge, separating the innovators from those who fail to grasp the new possibilities within their reach --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28281.xml 

The main conclusions in the above article are that wireless LANS will no longer tie each computer down to network cables between rooms and buildings and that distributed network computing (with files and software stored on remote servers) will become very common.  For a review of Webledger alternatives that do just that for accounting and business services, see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/webledger.htm.

Pew Scholars affiliated with the American Accounting Association are Tony Catanach (Villanova) and Anita Hollander (Tulsa). It is a great honor to be selected as a Pew Scholar. I don't think they are on the Round 1 program described below, but they may appear in subsequent rounds.

I might note in passing that there is a great article on the BAM pedagogy by Catanach, Croll, and Grinaker in the November 2000 edition of Issues in Accounting Education --- http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/pubs/issues.htm 

You can listen to Dr. Catanach in a free MP3 recording at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm 

You can also read about the BAM at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm 

-----Original Message----- 
From: EDUCAUSE [mailto:EDUCAUSE@EDUCAUSE.EDU]  
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 4:47 PM To: CAT01-
ANNOUNCE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU |
Subject: Plan Now to Attend the Center for Academic Transformation Seminar

Please read and forward to a colleague:

The Center for Academic Transformation, an EDUCAUSE affiliate, is pleased to announce the following seminar:

"State-of-the-Art Learning Environments: Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign Round I Results" (co-sponsored by the Executive Forum in Information Technology at Virginia Tech) will be held February 26, 2001, at the DFW Airport Marriott South, Dallas, Texas.

Featuring the results of the first of three rounds of the Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign, faculty project leaders show how to increase quality and reduce costs using information technology. Faculty from four institutions talk about their models of course redesign, including their decisions regarding student learning objectives, course content, learning resources, course staffing and task analysis, and student and project evaluation. These models provide varied approaches that demonstrate multiple routes to success, tailored to the needs and context of each institution. For further information and registration materials, please visit http://www.center.rpi.edu/LForum/learnenv.htm l

The Department of Justice has joined in a lawsuit filed against KPMG that alleges that the accounting firm helped a client defraud the government by preparing false hospital cost reports that were submitted to Medicare and Medicaid --- http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28167.xml 

From InformationWeek Online  December 28, 2000

** Detective Database Is On The Case

In the old "Batman" TV series, the caped crusader solved many of Gotham's most dastardly crimes by plugging random bits of evidence into his Batcomputer. With a flurry of blinking lights and mechanical whirring noises, the machine would inevitably spit out the name of whichever super-villain was behind the latest plot. It's a concept that was once laughable, but today it's a reality through the use of a program called Special Investigative Unit Support System.

"[SIUSS] is a comprehensive intelligence and analytical program that is designed to take in all the information that is gained during a case and process it,"says Danny Holder, VP of sales for Anteon-CITI, a subsidiary of federal IT contractor Anteon Corp. SIUSS looks at data including vehicle registrations, arrest records, complaints, property ownership, and surveillance reports, then makes links, draws timelines, and performs tactical analysis to help law-enforcement officials solve crimes.

As an example of the software's abilities, Holder offers a hypothetical conspiracy case in which an informant provides the names of some suspects. Investigators obtain the phone records of the suspects, and run them through SIUSS, revealing patterns of calls to certain groups of people. SIUSS then associates that information with surveillance records, allowing investigators to extrapolate that the suspects are using certain people to work for them. "We begin to see some things that we didn't before," says Holder. "It can open some doors for the investigators."

The software has helped to break a number of real-life cases. Holder describes a drive-by shooting which took place at a wedding in Seattle. The description of the suspect was of an Asian male in a red Corvette, heading north. Seattle police called their colleagues to the north, in Vancouver, which has a large Asian community. The Vancouver police entered the suspect's description into SIUSS and, six weeks later, the system flagged a red Corvette that was seen during a surveillance. The suspect was later caught and convicted. Holder points out that if the surveillance information was just put in a paper report and filed, someone would have had to member the shooting and draw the necessary correlations, and the suspect might never have been caught.

There are about 500 copies of the SIUSS system being used by various local, state, and federal offices. Holder says the market will grow. He thinks that while the law-enforcement community has been slow to acquire technology, it is quickly becoming more computer savvy. "Now they want to go to the next step," he says. "They want to work smarter." - David M. Ewalt

This spring, jointly with my colleague Professor Kinsun Tam, I am teaching a graduate seminar on Security & Privacy in Internet Commerce. The course outline is at

http://www.albany.edu/acc/courses/acc680.spring2001/ 

We look forward to any comments/suggestions/critiques that the readership of the AECM listserv may have.

Respectfully submitted,

jagdish -- Jagdish S. Gangolly, 
Associate Professor (j.gangolly@albany.edu) 
State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222. Phone: (518) 442-4949 Fax: (707) 897-0601 URL: http://www.albany.edu/acc/gangolly 

Network news and products (including wireless) --- http://www.eoenabled.com/networkcomputing/default.asp?t=0&n=33659274 

While it's still too early to sort out the winners and losers this holiday season, so-called "bricks-to-clicks" retailers have gained ground on online "pure plays." http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0012271/2668192/ 

Medications Affect Calculations

Forwarded by Aaron Konstam
e Chronicle of Higher Education, From the issue dated December 15, 2000
"A Fresh Excuse for Math Mistakes," by Scott Street

You won't find a warning on a box of Dimetapp or Tavist that using such a medication may make it harder to solve mathematics problems.

But a new study by three Youngstown State University professors suggests that it does. The unpublished report concludes that some common medicines, notably antihistamines, can cause careless or unexplained errors in problem solving by both college students and their professors. That includes, according to the study, such simple blunders as "175 + 91 = 84."

The medicine "causes an instantaneous short-circuit in the brain," says Joseph Altinger, a mathematics professor at the Ohio institution. "It's like a blip, and in that blip you end up making a mistake."

Mr. Altinger first noticed the phenomenon in 1986, when he was teaching an algebra class at Youngstown State and made four errors. He had taken an over-the-counter sinus medication the night before. He didn't make another error for several weeks, and then he took another sinus pill. A day later, he made the same type of mistakes in class.

The study -- based on data gathered from more than 300 students by Mr. Altinger; Andy Chang, a statistics professor; and Sharon Shipton, a nursing professor who specializes in pharmaceuticals -- affirmed Mr. Altinger's hypothesis that medication can cause calculation errors. What's more, male students are more likely than female students to make careless mistakes.

Mr. Altinger stresses that the students do not experience any other ill effects. They "feel normal," he says.

Hi XXXXX,

I greatly appreciate the tip on the  article by Professor Ketz.  I don't agree entirely with Ed, but his article is food for thought. What Ed fails to balance in the article are some of the underlying long-term advantages of majoring in accounting and working in public accounting:

1. Auditing and tax careers are stable in the sense that, when the economy crashes and the other professions cut way back on hiring, auditors and tax accountant graduates are still in high demand. I take great comfort in the fact that our accounting graduates have job offers through the thick and the thin (the same cannot be said for our other graduates).

2. Accounting firms offer some of the best internships while students are still in undergraduate programs.

3. Auditing and tax client exposure can lead to executive-track opportunities that are often not available to other graduates. For example, one of our graduates (who was an audit manager on a medium-sized client here in San Antonio) became the client's CFO and took his senior in on the deal as the Controller. We have some computer science majors who became executives with start-up dot.coms, but those dot.com and other start-up company opportunities are fading while the accounting graduates still face opportunities of advancement with clients.

3. The client base in public accounting is relatively stable. Consultants are constantly sweating out landing new clients after their one-shot deal with existing clients terminates.

4. Some of the highest paying careers at the moment are in computer programming. But can you imagine being a computer programmer for your entire life? I admire those techie-types who have this aptitude and stamina, but many of our students who major in accounting have no aspirations to be computer programmers for the rest of their lives. Generally, computer programmers have to go back to school to get an education in accounting or business to advance up the career ladder.

I think the students should have a balanced exposure to career alternatives and be warned that high starting salaries are not the major criteria for the best careers.

I don't know how to apportion "blame" for the decline in accounting majors in the U.S. at the moment.  I do think the five-year requirement is not necessary and is most definitely part of the problem causing that decline.  I hesitate sling arrows at the Big Five. The main reason we have had so many accounting majors in the past is that the Big Five hired in good times and bad times (when majors in all other business disciplines had very few job offers in hand).  When the economy is down, the Big 5 firms are the only reliable employers still actively seeking our accounting graduates.

Until recently, public accounting was about the only startup alternative for our accounting graduates.  Industry tended to seek accountants with public accounting experience and almost never made offers to new graduates.  (I think Ed really misses the point on this one.)  We have just faced some very good times in which non-typical job opportunities and starting salaries have created more competition in career choices. The demise of dot.coms demonstrates how non-typical the past decade has been in higher education.

For some sobering thoughts on the value of traditional education vis-a-vis e-Commerce curricula, see "Harvard B-School's E-Mania," by Phil Buchanan, New York Times, December 12, 2000 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/12/opinion/12BUCH.html.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From:  XXXXX 
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 10:53 AM 
To: 'Jensen, Robert' Subject: Advice to Accounting Students

Bob...

Because of your interest in accounting education and recruiting, I thought you'd be interested in this Opinion piece by Ed Ketz at Penn State, at: <http://accounting.pro2net.com/x28277.xml> . 

 I would be interested in getting your reaction posted at  Pro2Net on this very critical issue.   For instance:   How much blame does the Big Five really share?   What must educators do now?  What can accounting majors expect from the job market?   Or anything else that may occur to you.

Thanks, 
XXXXX

I may be the only one coming down squarely on both sides of this debate.

The Critical Perspectives on Accounting Journal is planning a special issue for the forthcoming annual convention of the American Accounting Association Atlanta, August 2001. The title of the issue is entitled "AAA Inc" and aims to stimulate debate into the Association's sympathies and allegiances. We aim to promote this heavily before the meeting.

Participants in the special issue include:

Abraham Briloff, 
John Stancil <jstancil@PEOPLEPC.COM> ; 
James Groff <JGroff@UTSA.EDU> ; Ross Fuerman <RFuerman@aol.com>; 
HHENDRICKSON, <henricks@servms.fiu.edu > ; 
Brendan O'Connell <boconne2@richmond.edu> ; 
Dwight M. Owsen <owsend@ACCESS.ETSU.EDU >; 
Mary Ellen Oliverio <MOliverio@pace.edu> ; 
Prem Sikka <prems@essex.ac.uk> ; 
Paul Williams <WILLIAMSP@COMFS1.COM.NCSU.EDU> ; 
EArrington <cearring@uncg.edu> ; 
Roger Collins <rcollins@CARIBOO.BC.CA> ; 
SFilling <steven@panoptic.csustan.edu>; Robert Jensen <rjensen@trinity.edu> ; 
Ed Schribner <escribne@NMSU.EDU> ; 
Barbara Scofield <scofield_b@utpb.edu> 

As many AAA and section members are involved in this project, I would like to request that the Public Interest Section host a concurrent session(s) forum, on this topic, where those "for" and "against" the issue be invited to participate in a formal debate. I would hope that Abe Briloff would be able to the meeting. Ideally, a two-concurrent-session sequence would be ideal (a full morning) but I suspect we would have to settle into the one-session straightjacket of the convention format.

I will submit a formal paper request to you in January. This will be "in my own name" (but this email is to alert you that I am serving merely as a proxy for this larger group.

Please let me know if there is anything else I should do; and especially anyway we might secure greater elbow room for this forum.

How about brunch!

Seasonal Greetings, 
TonyTinker [TonyTinker@email.msn.com] 

This will be the first ToolBook upgrade that I will not purchase, largely for reasons mentioned in the December 20, 2000 edition of New Bookmarks at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q4.htm#122000 

In fairness, however, I will pass along a marketing message about the new Version 8.0:

Hi Bob,

Happy Holidays from click2learn.com. We're celebrating the Holidays with the release of our next version of ToolBook Instructor 8.0. I wanted to notify you of all the new improvements and new features for version 8.0.

A new "Catalog" that has been redesigned with new objects, icons, buttons, etc. The Catalog is now a dockable window. Unlike the previous version, the catalog now works in a vertical orientation, so you can dock it next to the application you're creating. No more minimizing and maximizing the Catalog window.

A brand new Actions Editor that has been redesigned to improve ease-of-use without losing any of its powerful features. The Actions Editor now incorporates a new "Actions Palette". The Actions Palette allows the Author to drag & drop actions into your action sequences, thus allowing for quicker and more efficient Authoring. Another ease-of-use function is "In-place Editing". This utility allows you to modify common properties of actions without going into the action properties dialog. Once again, this makes ToolBook easier to use without giving up any powerful functions.

The DHTML Run-time engine has been redesigned to produce a 35% improvement over version 7.2. The new DHTML deployment also allows for faster Web output to the Internet or LAN. Making changes to a particular page is now easier than ever. The new version allows for corrections to be made to one particular page without having to re-export all the pages. This will allow the Author greater flexibility when designing a particular book or content. Corrections will be made in only a few seconds.

ToolBook Instructor version 8.0 now includes a free Web Site to upload ToolBook applications and use our exclusive tracking and managing utilities.

Access to our Electronic Learning Network (eLN), a fully integrated Learning Portal. This private Web Site will be yours for free for one full year. It will allow 100 different users, and 500mb of storage capacity. The Site will allow for you to customize and create your own look and feel. Using our .Manager utility, the ToolBook Author will grant students access to an additional learning environment that is hosted and serviced by click2learn.com. If you've never deployed content to the Internet, here is the opportunity to experience online learning without having to design and pay for a Web Site. There are 11 different file types that can be uploaded, including Real Player/Real Audio, MP3's, Adobe PDF, HTML, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Authorware, Flash 4.0, Microsoft Word, Power Point, and all ToolBook applications. It's a learning environment that supports many different files, and allows for tracking and managing of your ToolBook tests, and quizzes. The results can then be downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet directly from the Site to follow student progress offline. We've created a fictitious Corporate University, entitled "ACME Technologies". This fake Site was created using .Manager, and shows examples of a logo and images, as well as colors, tag lines, hyperlinks, text, and graphics. Please examine this Site in more detail, http://home.click2learn.com/solutions/acmedemo/about.html 

ToolBook Instructor version 8.0 supports all of the Industry standards, including AICC, SCORM, and Microsoft's certification LRN. This is the only Authoring tool which supports all three Industry standards.

Obviously, our development staff has worked hard to make version 8.0 the easiest, and most powerful version yet. ToolBook Instructor will continue to be the leader because we're constantly "raising the bar" to our competitors. I would like you to examine the software in a little more detail, please click on the link to see a demo of version 8.0, http://home.click2learn.com/products/instructor.html# 

I would be happy to answer any questions concerning ToolBook Instructor version 8.0 or any general questions about the e-Learning Industry. Please contact me at your convenience.

Brian Findlay 
Account Manager click2learn.com 
A Wired World Company (800) 471-5184 x5833 (425) 637-5833 brian.findlay@click2learn.com 

Dear NetLedger User,

Throughout the past year we have been making significant enhancements to our NetLedger products and services. Our completely integrated online business application - including accounting, payroll, online commerce, online bill payments, purchasing, time and expense reporting and more - are enabling thousands of growing businesses to be more efficient and effective everyday.

In January, our pricing will change to $9.95 per month per user for our powerful core accounting application. We would like to encourage you to join NetLedger today and lock in today's current pricing of $4.95 per month per user. If you do, you will lock in this current pricing for the next three years, so act now.

We are confident that NetLedger's value to your growing business will far exceed the monthly cost. Call us NOW at 1-800-NETLEDGER to sign up.

Sincerely,

The NetLedger Staff
http://www.netledger.com/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on Webledger Systems for Networked Accounting and Business Services can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/webledger.htm 

An article on the MS/GP takeover is at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/dec00/12-21gp.asp. 

GP has always been closely tied to Microsoft software. We also use GP, although the Enterprise version. We needed to have all the elements of the BackOffice suite in order to run GP.

Roger Debreceny [rogerd@NETBOX.COM] 

From Phil Livingston at the FEI --- http://www.fei.org/newsletters/express/feiexpress50.cfm 

Frederick W. Cook & Co. just published their annual survey of stock and option grant practices at the 250 largest market cap companies. Here are some of the observations I found interesting. 18% of the Top 250 that employed stock options had vesting tied to some specific performance criteria. Of those, 76% used the criteria to accelerate vesting. Another 18% of the Top 250 used reload options. If you haven't studied reload options, you should. They are designed to encourage management ownership. 9% of the Top 250 use premium options, where the exercise price is set above the market price on the grant date. As you would expect, 99% of the Top 250 granted options to top management.

Interestingly enough, the use of stock payments in annual bonuses is increasing. There are two basic kinds of programs in place. In mandatory programs, an executive is required to take a percentage of his bonus is stock. The range is 20% to 39% of the bonus that has to be taken in stock. In elective programs, the executive can choose payment in stock up to 100% of the annual bonus. Some companies offer sweeteners to get the execs to elect more stock. General Mills is an example. The company matches one restricted share for every four restricted shares the executive takes in lieu of a cash bonus.

The broad use of executive stock ownership guidelines is interesting as well. These require the individual to own a minimum amount of stock (options don't count).

The full report is now available on-line as an Adobe Acrobat file.  See http://www.fwcook.com/top250.html 

Fair Disclosure on the Web
I've been looking at company web sites to see how they are handling Reg. FD issues. I found two interesting pieces that I want to direct your attention to. First is Intel, which despite its recent stock decline, does a great job giving forward-looking information through its quarterly "Outlook." The Outlook is published on Intel's web site. However, before you can access it, you must click through and acknowledge that you have read the disclaimer language of the SEC's "safe harbor" for forward-looking statements. It's kind of like the license acceptance dialogue box you click through when installing new software. Intel was very smart to employ that technique, maximizing the chance that the safe harbor will hold up. During its quiet period, which is currently the situation, the Outlook is not available, but here is a link to the page. http://www.intel.com/intel/finance/disclaimer_outlook.htm  

It is also interesting is that companies are employing web-based publication of their disclosure policies. Rohm and Haas is one such company. Here's a link to their policy. Ed Liebert, Treasurer of Rohm and Haas, is a member of our Committee on Corporate Finance. In our last meeting, we discussed the changes going on around Reg. FD and these policy statements. Thanks for the input, Ed!

Phil Livingston [mailmanager@feiexpress.fei.org] 

I almost deleted pooling of interest from Advanced Accounting this semester until I got feedback from one of our adjuncts who works in the not for profit world. She felt that pooling of interest will remain the primary method of acquisition for not for profits that have no current stock market value to use to calibrate the revaluation of assets needed with purchase method. So I left in the course the concept of pooling and the contrast with purchase method, but dropped the discussion of criteria.

Barbara Scofield [scofield_b@UTPB.EDU] 
University of Texas of the Permian Basin Odessa, TX

From InformationWeek Online December 29, 2000

Outsourcing can ease many maladies -- people shortages, skill gaps, and over- ambitious corporate plans, to name three. But increasingly, it can also improve your chance of seeing the inside of a courtroom.

Through the '90s, litigation fees related to outsourcing contracts increased 40% to 50%, according to Cutter Consortium technology fellow Tom DeMarco. In fact, DeMarco says, the average company with an outsourcing contract spends the equivalent of 15% of its IT budget on litigation in general. "Many companies don't realize this because the money comes from another pocket," he says.

Hardest hit by outsourcing litigation, according to Cutter, are companies who are new to outsourcing and government agencies. "The average cost of litigation fees is greater than the cost of coding, which is the bulk of a typical IT budget," DeMarco says. What's the fighting all about? Projects never completed, obliterated project budgets, and results that bear little resemblance to original plans.

The legal headache occurs more often than thought, DeMarco says. "It's nothing for the big systems integrators to have 50 ongoing cases at once."

To prevent a showdown in court, Cutter recommends:

- Writing a contract both operations staff and management can easily understand;

- Including a master agreement explaining legal terms and definitions, a statement defining the work to be performed, and service- level agreements defining the desired criteria and deliverables;

- Crafting a user's guide that defines the different areas of the contract, and preparing separate operating guides for reference for each section of the contract;

- Confirming that the contract states what was agreed upon by the negotiators;

- Training all operating personnel on dispute resolution; and

- Sharing the information with all parties -- everyone should know what guidelines are being used to complete the work. - Elisabeth Goodridge

Recognizing that relationships with service providers are fraught with risk, IT managers are beginning to look to "prenuptial agreements" to set the terms of the relationship up front --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0012281/2665550/ 

An example of an outsourcing service is provided in the NewMedia Newsletter December 28, 2000

Online customer service/support. Companies like LivePerson.com and PeopleSupport.com can provide you with outsourced, live-on-the-Web 24/7 customer support without hiring additional customer-support staff. This addresses the "live, immediately" concern when it comes to phone-based customer support. Of course, this kind of service doesn't come for free.

Otherwise, you can provide a variety of customer-support options that can be developed with the help of firms like IslandData Corp. and RightNow Technologies, among many others. Then again, you're getting away from the live and immediate part of the program at this point.

* Follow through. Back in my days of inside sales/customer service, we had some very basic ideas drilled into our heads: ask if the customer needs any other assistance, and follow up any order or situation with some kind of acknowledgment. We didn't have e-mail back then, so we used the telephone. No matter what method you use, follow-up contact after the sale or problem resolution helps to build goodwill between you and the customer.

I know all of this seems to be very rudimentary. I think (and hope) most new-media pros would read this and think, "he ain't describing me." But if I've seen this enough, and more importantly, if Ad-Marketing List subscribers have seen this enough to mention it, we have a problem.

If you are making it difficult for your customers to communicate with you in a variety of ways, you may soon find you won't have any more buyers.

* Bob Woods ( bwoods@internet.com ) is managing editor of NewMedia.com.

Internet Resources from The Chronicle of Higher Education --- http://chronicle.com/free/resources/index.php3 

For other resources, see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/newfaculty.htm 

Greetings

Seasons Greetings to everyone, a few months ago I came across an interesting website from Professor Jensen's website called www.howstuffworks.com. Today I found a very good one I wanna share with everyone http://www.refdesk.com/ 

Enjoy the holidays 
Patrick Charles charlesp@cwdom.dm 

Eric Lundquist presents a few high-tech treats we can all wish for, but you won't find them in any store --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0012206/2665431/  

Interested in XML? Sign up for a free weekly email full of XML news, features, downloads and reviews. http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/lists/xml/subscribe.html 

Denise, 

Keep in mind that the FASB's announcement is a tentative decision. Nothing will be official until the FASB issues a final rule, which is now estimated to be no earlier than around June 2001. Companies cannot elect to follow the tentative decision early - they have to wait until it is official.

As others have noted, probably the more important decision in this project by the Board is to eliminate pooling of interests accounting. Again, this is a proposal and the Board will redeliberate the issue in January or February. I expect this to be their final position but it won't apply until after the final rule. Companies like GE will be able to complete pending deals by using pooling, if they otherwise qualify.

You mentioned that you cover this topic in a consolidation class. Keep in mind that the FASB also is proposing to change the accounting for consolidation. Rather than being based on majority ownership, it would be based on control, which would radically change the entities included in consolidated statements. Further, the FASB is considering changing a number of consolidation procedural matters, such as the accounting for "minority interest" and the accounting for sales of stock by subsidiaries. (These proposals are in still another project - on liabilities and equity.) Again, a final rule hasn't been issued and isn't expected any earlier than mid 2001. My personal view (and hope) is that this proposal won't be implemented as it won't improve accounting in this area.

You can get a current status report on these and other FASB agenda projects by going to fasb.org.

It seems to me that educators have a challenge in these areas as well as many others such as revenue recognition, distinguishing between debt and equity instruments, accounting for financial instruments, etc. There are many areas of accounting that are in transition. Whatever rules we teach now may well be outdated before students apply them or perhaps even before students are tested on them in the CPA or CMA exams. That's why I think we make a mistake in beating rules to death in accounting education, as is so prevalent in intermediate accounting, advanced accounting, and similar classes. We can't possibly give students enough understanding of all of the current rules that they will have to apply in practice. For example, how many schools include in-depth coverage of accounting for derivative instruments, yet that is the most important new rule facing the accounting profession this year end.

While some reasonable amount of "rule coverage" probably is necessary, I think the intermediate and advanced accounting classes should be focused much more on accounting concepts, research stills, and critical thinking. We can't possibly expect accounting students to know all of the rules, but we can prepare them much better by giving them a sound foundation (understanding concepts), showing them how to resolve accounting problems using technology (research skills), and emphasizing the thinking processes that help them recognize problems and then reach appropriate judgments using the foundation and research already mentioned. This will be a lot harder than teaching still more (or different) rules. But it should better prepare students for the business world and it also might make the accounting major more attractive for more students.

As a final note, to what extent do you teach students how to use accounting information rather than only how to prepare it? My personal view is that the FASB's tentative decision on non amortization of goodwill will produce better information for users of financial statements as any goodwill write downs will be caused by identifiable negative economic events rather than arbitrary amortization. Rather than just telling students that rules may be changing, I think our challenge is to explain why and help future accountants become confident about explaining to other business leaders what the accounting results can tell investors and creditors about future prospects of a company.

By the way, the FASB is actively considering accounting for financial instruments at fair value and an international paper on that topic will be issued by the Board very soon. However, there is no plan to consider adjusting property, plant and equipment to fair value, and I doubt that will happen in the foreseeable future.

I apologize for getting a little carried away, but you obviously hit a bit of a nerve on this matter. I'd be very interested in others' reactions.

Denny Beresford University of Georgia

Denise Stanley wrote:

Hi everyone! I will be teaching Advanced Accounting in the spring and I was just wondering how those of you who teach consolidations plan to deal with FASB's recent announcement that "an acquiring company can no longer amortize the goodwill associated with the acquisition." http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=34568&d=101&h=0&f=0&datefor mat=%o%20%B%20%Y 

FASB Announces End of Goodwill Amortization

"It is a landmark decision. The Financial Accounting Standards Board has announced than an acquiring company can no longer amortize the goodwill associated with the acquisition.

The ruling is tentative now, and is expected to become final by spring of 2001. It is also expected that the ruling will apply retroactively.

The decision is good news for many companies. Although amortization is strictly a paper transaction, until now companies that amortized goodwill reported expenses that depleted current earnings. Now companies will be able to present income statements that more clearly reflect the cost of doing business."

AccountingWEB US 21 December 2000 Categories: Top News, Legislation

A. Denise Stanley, MACCT, CPA Assistant Professor of Accounting Emory & Henry College Emory, Virginia 24327 adstanle@ehc.edu 540.944.6187 Voice 540.944.6223 Fax Have a great day! :)

Science and Technology in Y2K From genomes to Jupiter's moons, many important discoveries took place in 2000 --- http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2000/122600yearend/ 

Y2K began as a big nonevent: despite predictions of impending doom, most computer systems readily adapted to the new date. But what followed that first act of the new year was not uneventful--at least in terms of science and technology. Researchers in nearly every discipline made steady advances toward long-standing goals. Physicists, for instance, inched closer to such holy grails as high-temperature superconductors and quantum computers; neuroscientists gained further insight into the purpose of dreams and the origins of violence; engineers debuted a host of increasingly useful nanoscale devices and wireless gadgets. Moreover, there was no shortage of quirky, unexpected discoveries--such as the microscopic hairs on geckos' feet that help them scale just about any wall.

Those stories aside, 2000 also saw its share of real breakthroughs. Perhaps first and foremost, it will be remembered as the year in which scientists sequenced the human genome. (Also, the first complete plant genome was revealed in December.) Both the publicly funded Human Genome Project and Celera Corporation raced to finish the monumental project, and on June 26th Celera announced it had completed a first draft. At a White House ceremony, J. Craig Venter, the head of Celera, said, "Today...marks an historic point in the 100,000-year record of humanity." As if finishing the thought, Venter's counterpart at the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, told the same audience that "we have caught a glimpse of an instruction book previously known only to God."

Beyond 2000 --- http://www.beyond2000.com/news/Dec_00/story_949.html 

eWeek's

Year in Review

eWEEK analyzes the year's brightest and most challenging moments in IT -- all in all, it was one of the most eventful 12 months ever. http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0012221/2665428/ 

Looming on the horizon are signs and portents of big things to come in the IT world. By Stan Gibson. --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0012226/2665426/ 

Yahoo's Year in Review: Part One

Yahoo's Year in Review: Part Two

A great online source for references, dictionaries, quotes, great books, poetry, and much more --- http://www.bartleby.com/ 

American Masters (PBS, Film, Music, History, Literature) http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/index_basic.html 

Note that the above website has a section on Education Resources.

Art and Culture (note the use of Flash) --- http://www.artandculture.com/ACSniffer/index.html 

How many times have I started to write a novel, only to quit with some of the same frustrations noted by this great writer --- Bumps on my Head --- http://home.earthlink.net/~mchabon/ 

For authors who do get the job done, go to Yahoo's Author Series at http://promotions.yahoo.com/promotions/authors/ 

Online first chapters of books --- http://books.philly.com/chapter/nonfict/99/white_edmund.asp 

Find books --- http://www.johnholleman.com/amastatement.html 

The Free Stuff Place --- http://www.freestuffplace.com/ 

Journal E Real Stories from Planet Earth (Literature) --- http://www.journale.com/ 

HP sent 100 free digital cameras to 100 people.  See some of the (occasionally weird) results at http://www.hp.com/100cameras/ 

NPR: America's Greatest 20th Century Music --- http://npr.org/programs/specials/vote/list100.html 

The Complete History Of The Discovery Of Cinematography (Video) --- http://www.precinemahistory.net/ 

Some information about CPA online self-study courses:

I like www.surgent.com 

Scott Bonacker [scottbonacker@MOCCPA.COM]b 

Because of my location far from metro areas, I rely almost exclusively on self-study. I have found an excellent, though specifically focused, source through Financial Managers Society (www.fmsinc.org <http://www.fmsinc.org>  or (800) 275-4367). FMS sponsors telephone seminars at very reasonable cost ($149 member; $199 nonmember) on a wide variety of topics of interest to financial institutions. The beauty of these seminars is that my company pays for my CPE, and as many people as can fit into our conference room can listen in. Recent seminars covered interest rate risk, stress-testing investments, accounting update (SFAS review), and funds transfer pricing. Future seminars will cover swaps and the swap curve, privacy policy, verifying investment and profitability models, and purchase accounting. Seminar materials are sent via PDF attachments to email by KRM Information Services www.krm.com <http://www.krm.com>  which conducts the audio presentation. KRM also conducts seminars for other non-profits; for example, presentations on estate taxes and personal financial analysis for the American Bankers Assn.

Other vendors I have used carry more general topics (multiple choice format): Accountants Education Group www.accountantsed.com <http://www.accountantsed.com>  (800) 627-7310 Professional Education Services www.pescpe.com <http://www.pescpe.com>  (800) 998-5024 American Center for CPE www.accpe.com  <http://www.accpe.com>  (800) 394-6275

I have also used the following, but find their format of multiple choice plus case study/essay requires more time: American Management Assn www.amanet.org <http://www.amanet.org>  (800) 714-6395 AICPA www.aicpa.org <http://www.aicpa.org>  (888) 777-7077

Janet Flatley [jflatley@FFPA.COM] 
AVP-Controller 1st Fed S&L Assn Pt Angeles WA

The MACPA (Maryland Association of CPAs) has a lot of self study courses, both online and off. Their website is www.macpa.org and is easily navigated. The direct link to their online/self study page is http://www.macpa.org/cpe/onlinecatalog/ 

Susan Huddy, Costello & Huddy, Chartered [shuddy@CPAWORKS.COM] 

From Jesse Berst's AnchorDesk, Friday, December 29, 2000:

http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?/adeskb/adt1229/2668662:3304510 

No one wants a mailbox full of junk mail. Download
guy Preston Gralla has found three great programs
that will get rid of spam for good.

Barry Rice www.barryrice.com  

The year-end edition of Neal Hannon's Internet Essentials 2000 is now available at http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

Neal's "Wow Site of the Week":  Microvision
http://www.mvis.com/1-rsdisp.htm

There are three principal categories of applications for personal displays that span a broad range of fields of use, ranging from defense and public safety to consumer electronics and entertainment. Microvision is currently developing personal display solutions in the following areas:

Wearable "augmented reality" displays Incorporated into eyeglasses, goggles or helmets, Microvision's technology will display an image that doesn't block the user's view but will instead superimpose a high-contrast monochromatic or color image on top of it. This ability can enhance the safety, precision and productivity of professionals performing complex tasks.

Wearable three-dimensional / interactive displays Microvision's technology can be incorporated into eyeglasses, goggles or helmets to create a stereoscopic, 3-d effect. These compact, high-resolution displays can further enhance the visual realism of the interactive experience to make the simulated environment more engaging.

Hand-held two-dimensional displays Microvision's technology will be integrated into cellular phones and pagers, allowing users to tap into business networks or the Internet to view e-mail, web pages, faxes and files as if on a full-size desktop monitor. This ability affords greater convenience and utility to users of these devices.

From The Best, Worst, & Most Unusual (Noteworthy Achievements, Events, Feats, & Blunders of Every Conceivable Kind), by Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler (Galahad Books, New York, 1976)

Best mystery writer --- Ross Macdonald (Being a long-time admirer of Agatha Christie, I disagree).

Best American novel --- Moby Dick by Herman Melville 
Based upon a search at Yahoo, I found the following links:

Best American novel of the 1070s:  Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Best novel of the 20th Century:  The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Best novel of the West:  The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter van Tilburg Clark

Best novel about WWII:  The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Best American poet:  Robert Frost
Based upon a search at Yahoo, I found the following links:

Frost, Robert (1874-1963)

Best English novel --- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens --- It is now free online at http://www.homestead.com/great_expectations/ 
The Dickens Webring is at http://nav.webring.yahoo.com/hub?ring=charlesdickens&id=15&prev5 

Best English novel of the 20th Century:  Ulysses by James Joyce

Best French novel --- three winners

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust 

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert --- The online version is at http://www.litrix.com/madameb/madam001.htm 

The Red and the Black by Stendhal

Best German novel --- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Don't forget the Yahoo Author Series at http://promotions.yahoo.com/promotions/authors/ 

Find books --- http://www.johnholleman.com/amastatement.html 

The Free Stuff Place --- http://www.freestuffplace.com/ 

Quoted from the bottom of email messages from Ron Tidd (So, why can't I get any excuses from my cubalibras?):

Quote from KMWorld Online( http://www.kmworld.com/ ): 
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history-- with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila

Bob--This is being passed around the net:

After digging to a depth of 100m last year, Russian scientists found traces of copper wiring dating back 1000 years, and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network one thousand years ago.

So as not to be outdone, in the weeks that followed, American scientists dug 200m, and headlines in the US newspapers read: "US scientists have found traces of 2000 year old optical fibres, and have concluded that their ancestors already had advanced high-tech digital telephone 1000 years earlier than the Russians."

One week later, the Irish press reported the following:
"After digging as deep as 500m, Irish scientists have found absolutely nothing. They have concluded that 5000 years ago, their ancestors were already using mobile phones."

Ed

Forwarded by my neighbor and very close friend Anthony Digiovanni.

Dear Friends:

It is with the saddest heart I pass on the following...

Please join me in remembering a great icon, the veteran Pillsbury spokesman. The Pillsbury Doughboy died yesterday of a yeast infection & complications from repeated pokes in the belly. He was 71 and was buried in a lightly greased coffin.

Dozens of celebrities turned out to pay their respects, including Mrs. Butterworth, Hungry Jack, the California Raisins, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies,and Captain Crunch. The gravesite was piled high with flours. As longtime friend, Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy, describing Doughboy as a man who never knew how much he was kneaded.

Doughboy rose quickly in show business, but his later life was filled with turnovers. He was not considered a very "smart"cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes. Despite being a little flaky at times, he even still, as a crusty old man, was considered a roll model for millions. Toward the end it was thought he would rise again, but alas, he was no tart. Doughboy is survived by his wife, Play Dough; two children, John Dough and Jane Dough; plus they had one in the oven. He is also survived by his elderly father, Pop Tart.

The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.

My apologies - some of these are good and I couldn't resist forwarding part of the message

For example - chronic screen spasm forces me to reboot my computer almost every day.

Scott Bonacker, CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com

-----Original Message----- From: whatis.com Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2000 11:16 AM To: scott bonacker Subject: Word-of-the-Day: sniglet

T H E W H A T I S.C O M W O R D - O F - T H E - D A Y December 26, 2000 sniglet

TODAY'S WORD: sniglet (See the definition with hyperlinks at http://whatis.techtarget.com/WhatIs_Definition_Page/0,4152,506044,00.html)

A sniglet is a word that should be in the dictionary but isn't. Sniglets are the brainchild of comedian Rich Hall who, with a little help from his friends, wrote a series of books containing sniglets in the mid-eighties. With a little help from Rich Hall and our readers, here are some IT-related sniglets we think should be in the dictionary but aren't:

Execuglide - to maneuver oneself around the room while seated in a wheeled office chair.

Animousity - vigorously clicking your pointer device because a page is loading too slowly.

Screen spasm - pages that try to load simultaneously on your computer screen as a direct result of your animousity.

Prairedogged - the feeling of helplessness that overtakes you when co-workers in neighboring cubicles constantly pop their heads up to ask you stupid questions, offer unsolicited comments, or otherwise waste your time.

Cellphonic appraisal - the activity that occurs when a ringing cell phone causes everyone in the room to check and see if it's theirs.

Gadaboutag - the orphan html tag that's messing up your page.

Dot gone - last year's e-commerce hopeful.

Tacitician - a conference call participant who performs non-work related tasks without being overheard.

Fonesia - the affliction that strikes when you dial a phone number and forget whom you were calling just as they answer.

Egotictic - the amount of time wasted because you stubbornly refuse to look it up in the manual.

WAPathy - lack of interest in wireless technology.

Inspiration from days of old (dirt roads) --- http://dobhran.snap.com/greetings/GRinspire315.htm 

Modern Humorist --- http://www.modernhumorist.com/ 
An irreverent look at the important issues in the world.

Things That Have Been Sold in Vending Machines --- http://www.chaparraltree.com/vending/ 

Adventures In Internet Dating --- http://www.waytoopersonal.com/ 

Forwarded by Auntie Bev
                ACTUAL EPITAPHS FROM GRAVESTONES
  
    On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
                 Here lies
                 Ezekial Aikle
                 Age 102
                 The Good
                 Die Young.
  
      In a London, England cemetery:
                 Ann Mann
                 Here lies Ann Mann,
                 Who lived an old maid
                 But died an old Mann.
                 Dec. 8, 1767
  
      In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:
                 Anna Wallace
                 The children of Israel wanted bread
                 And the Lord sent them manna,
                 Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
                 And the Devil sent him Anna.
  
      Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:
                 Here lies the body
                 of Jonathan Blake
                 Stepped on the gas
                 Instead of the brake.
  
    A lawyer's epitaph in England:
                 Sir John Strange
                 Here lies an honest lawyer,
                 And that is Strange.
  
    Lester Moore was a Wells, Fargo Co. station agent for Naco, Arizona in the cowboy days of the 1880's.  He's buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery in
      Tombstone, Arizona:
                 Here lies Lester Moore
                 Four slugs from a .44
                 No Les No More.
  
      In a Georgia cemetery:
               "I told you I was sick!"
  
      John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
                 Reader if cash thou art
                 In want of any
                 Dig 4 feet deep
                 And thou wilt find a Penny.
  
      On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:
                 She always said her feet were killing her
                 but nobody believed her.
  
      In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
                 On the 22nd of June
                 - Jonathan Fiddle -
                  Went out of tune.
  
      Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:
                 Here lies the body of our Anna
                 Done to death by a banana
                 It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
                 But the skin of the thing that made her go.
  
      More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:
                 Gone away
                 Owin' moore
                 Than he could pay.
  
      Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr. Wood:
                 In Memory of Beza Wood
                 Departed this life
                 Nov. 2, 1837
                 Aged 45 yrs.
                 Here lies one Wood
                 Enclosed in wood
                 One Wood
                 Within another.
                 The outer wood
                 Is very good:
                 We cannot praise
                 The other.
  
      On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
                 Under the sod and under the trees
                 Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
                 He is not here, there's only the pod:
                 Pease shelled out and went to God.
  
      The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a consumer tip:
                 Who was fatally burned
                 March 21, 1870
                 by the explosion of a lamp
                 filled with "R.E. Danforth's
                 Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"

Repeated from the beginning.
It distresses us to return work that is not perfect.
Epitaph on Grave Marker
(However, the quote originated on a note pinned on a spot that a laundry service failed to remove.)

And that's the way it was on January 5, 2001 with a little help from my friends.  If you are an accounting practitioner or educator, please do not forget to scan http://www.accountingeducation.com/.

 

In March 2000 Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

The Intuit accounting vortal is at http://www.intuitadvisor.com/intuit/vortal/gtf/gvortal.gtf 

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

  Hline.jpg (568 bytes) Hline.jpg (568 bytes)

 Hline.jpg (568 bytes)