In 2017 my Website was migrated to the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
Contact me at rjensen@trinity.edu if you really need to file that is missing.

Another Sunrise in the White Mountains

It's still cold and raining with a wind that makes you want a lining in your jacket.
But the flowers that I planted in late May are thriving on the rain.
This year I mostly planted pansies, snap dragons, verbena, alyssum, and bordering yellow-bidens.
Now you will see the flowers of my labor.

Last summer I planted a medium-sized Polka Weigela
This year its full of blossoms and thriving with pink blossoms.

And our clematis vines have huge white and pinkish blossoms.

And the wild roses in the front lawn.

The beautiful, beautiful lupines came in late and are staying late.

Below is the well where we get our propane.
It would be cold even in the summer if we did not have cute porcelain Swedish stoves
that supplement the furnace heat in each of four rooms in our cottage.
This summer we've turned on the stoves and even the furnace on a lot of days. Sigh!

And I will close with some fun pictures that I did not take.
In college I had a "used" 1951 Chev that was exactly like this one (only darker green)
The girls swooned more when I traded it for a 1957 Olds Convertible.
 

My next new car may be a fuel-economy Mustang hybrid

Old Barns and Old People --- http://www.dc2net.com/Old-Barns.htm

Life on a Train Slide Show --- Click Here

The states that do not charge a sales tax are Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon. On June 10, the IRS announced that new car buyers in states with no sales tax are entitled to take the new car sales tax deduction under IRC § 164(b)(6) (IR-2009-60) --- http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Web/20091796.htm 

Tidbits on July 2, 2009
Bob Jensen

For earlier editions of Tidbits go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

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

Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   

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

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

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

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
Bob Jensen's search helpers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Education Technology Search --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Distance Education Search --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Search for Listservs, Blogs, and Social Networks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

Bob Jensen's essay on the financial crisis bailout's aftermath and an alphabet soup of appendices can be found at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free Online College Courses --- http://universitiesandcolleges.org/

On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Discovery Channel's SOMALI PIRATE TAKEDOWN THE REAL STORY  --- Click Here
http://insidesomalia.org/200906231348/News/Travel/New-Footage-of-release-of-Captain-Phillips-by-US-Navy-Seals.html

Video:  100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists ---
http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2009/06/18/100-incredible-lectures-from-the-worlds-top-scientists/

Iran:  Up, Up, and Away in My Beautiful Balloon --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFrjZVHIQDE
It's nice to see something soaring into space besides test rockets.

Video: The Energy Problem and the Interplay Between Basic and Applied Research (serious research) --- Click Here
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-energy-problem-and-the-interplay-between-basic-and-applied-research/

Fox News:  Alleged Evidence of Reincarnation --- http://www.fox8.com/wjw-reincarnation-txt,0,1190900.story

Put $100 Million Budget Cut Into Perspective --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE
Good Teaching Video (must watch to the end when the coin cutter is illustrated)

American RadioWorks: Bridge to Somewhere http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/infrastructure/

Video:  President Obama earlier admitted that the Cap and Trade legislation may "skyrocket" electricity bills ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xOxwW4Toio

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

My Beautiful America --- http://oldbluewebdesigns.com/mybeautifulamerica.htm

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization --- http://www.rnh.com/ 

Video: Ti lascio una canzone - 'O sole mio: Trio Ginoble-Boschetto-Barone (what talent) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqUkUjeF4-c

Leading Female Musicians from Around the World
FEMLINK: The International Video Collage http://www.femlink.org/

500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&col_id=522

Holy Crap We're Getting Older (amen) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49GavdGWtac

Little kid with the right dancing moves --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10uyOXYQ3YE

Gulls attacking and injuring whales --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8116551.stm

Web outfits like Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2

TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.slacker.com/
Gerald Trites likes this international radio site --- http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:  Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
Also try Jango --- http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) --- http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live --- http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note U.S. Army Band recordings --- http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp

Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials) --- http://www.slacker.com/ 

Photographs and Art

Old Barns and Old People --- http://www.dc2net.com/Old-Barns.htm

Rare and Beautiful Books in Biology and Medicine
Turning the Pages Online --- http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/intro.htm

From Northwestern University
Rare photographs of East Africa ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3853&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Images from the History of Medicine --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/ihm/ 

Life on a Train Slide Show --- Click Here

British Museum: London 1753
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/britain/london_1753/london_1753.aspx 

The British Museum: Research http://www.britishmuseum.org/research.aspx

Edinburgh World Heritage --- http://www.ewht.org.uk/Home.aspx 

Taking Liberties (U.K. history) ---  http://www.bl.uk/takingliberties

University of Nebraska-Lincoln: An Architectural Tour of Historic UNL http://historicbuildings.unl.edu/

National Maritime Museum: Jewelry http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/index.cfm/category/jewellery 

A damaged B-17 made it back to England in WW II because a German pilot refused to shoot at the crippled bomber ---
http://www.snopes.com/military/charliebrown.asp

Can you tell the difference between a blind date and an ugly dog --- http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/features/mutts/blog/2009/06/if_you_can_take_it_a_few_more.html
There was an old saying that the difference between an Aggie date and a catfish is that one is a fish.

Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History

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

Centre for Overseas History: E-cyclopaedia of Portuguese Expansion http://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/eve/index.php?lang=en

500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&col_id=522

100 Greatest Discoveries in Physics (video) --- http://www.documentary-log.com/d281-100-greatest-discoveries-physics/
Most were important enough to be authenticated before being considered worthy discoveries

It isn't uncommon to find literature rendered in the style of Twitter's trademarked 140-character blasts. But it's rare for such tweets to make their way into print. Yet that's the concept behind a new book penned by two rising University of Chicago sophomores, titled Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less. The project's Web site calls it "a humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format."
Erica R. Hendry, "'Twitterature': Tweeting Classics on the Web," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3843&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bad Writing Contest,
The results are in for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2009. The annual award -- from the English department at San Jose State University -- honors the worst opening sentences for imaginary novels. This year's winner, David McKenzie, offered the following: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."
"Bad Writing Contest," Inside Higher Ed, June 30, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/30/qt#202292

Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

The Climate Change Climate Change:  The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.) The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages. Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
Declan McCullagh, CBS News, June 26, 2009 --- http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/06/26/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5117890.shtml 

Global Warming Hysteria, by John Stossel, ABC News 20/20, June 29, 2009 ---
http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/06/-global-warming-hysteria.html

It's been an exceptionally cold summer thus far in the White Mountains. It's been even worse suffering through global warming in the Arctic. Here's something you won't hear about on MSNBC or in The New York Times or from Al Gore's lips --- the "record late" summer in the Arctic.
It is the winter that refuses to go away in northern Manitoba and most of the eastern Arctic. Prolonged cold snowy conditions in the Hudson Bay area are expected to obliterate the breeding season for migratory birds and most other species of wildlife this year. . According to Environment Canada, the spring of 2009 is record-late in the eastern Arctic with virtually 100 per cent snow cover from James Bay north as of June 11
Robert Alison, "Big chill in Churchill Winter," Winnipeg Free Press, June 13, 2009 ---
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/big-chill-in-churchill-47992231.html 

Video:  President Obama earlier admitted that the Cap and Trade legislation may "skyrocket" electricity bills ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xOxwW4Toio

Most of the large media networks are becoming infomercials for the Democratic Party and President Obama
"A few nights ago, I was up tossing and turning, trying to figure out exactly what to say," Obama said at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner. "Finally, when I couldn't get back to sleep, I rolled over and asked Brian Williams what he thought." The punch line aimed at the NBC Nightly News anchor - who recently hosted a warm and fuzzy, two-night prime time White House special on Obama - produced guffaws among the assembled correspondents because it played on a perception, among U.S. conservatives at least, that the top U.S. networks are in bed with the new administration.
Sheldon Alberts, "No room for Republicans on all-Obama U.S. networks," June 23, 2009 --- Click Here
Jensen Comment
What is most dangerous is that these infomercials for Obama never mention that stacking trillions of dollars on top of trillions of dollars in deficits spells economic disaster. Commentators virtually all dwell on the egalitarian need for spending, not the need for fiscal responsibility. Nobody mentions that the eventual equal distribution of zero is zero.

ABC special - a White House Infomercial? --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2277515/posts 

EGADs! Pending Collapse of the Overspending U.S. Economy to Be Financed With Hot Air
President Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed budget rules that would allow Congress to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt to jump-start the administration's emerging health care overhaul. The "pay-as-you-go" budget formula plan is significantly weaker than a proposal Obama issued with little fanfare last month. It would carve out about $2.5 trillion worth of exemptions for Obama's priorities over the next decade. His health care reform plan also would get a green light to run big deficits in its early years. But over a decade, Congress would have to come up with money to cover those early year deficits. Obama's latest proposal for addressing deficits urges Congress to pass a law requiring lawmakers to pay for new spending programs and tax cuts without further adding to exploding deficits projected to total about $10 trillion over the next decade.
Andrew Taylor, "Obama: It's OK to borrow to pay for health care:  Obama-proposed budget rules allow deficits to swell to pay for health care plan," Yahoo News, June 8, 2009 ---
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Obama-Its-OK-to-borrow-to-pay-apf-15483626.html?.v=13
Jensen Comment
The frightening part of this is that the added $10 trillion does not include the entitlements obligations of Obama's Universal Health Plan. That will add up to another $100 trillion to the current $100 trillion in entitlements obligations.

Contrarian guru Marc Faber predicts we'll soon see inflation of 10 to 20 percent. The numbers will rise so fast because the government "massively" understates the country's inflation rate, Faber said. To get a true reading he advises ditching core inflation numbers, including the Consumer Price Index. "It's a lie what they publish," Faber told CNBC. "If you underweigh education costs, and if you underweigh health care costs, then you come to a totally different result," he said.
"Faber: 20 Percent Inflation Coming," MoneyNews, June 25, 2009 --- http://moneynews.com/streettalk/marc_faber_inflation/2009/06/25/229165.html

The Census Bureau estimates that the number of uninsured amounts to 45.7 million people. But the agency might be overcounting by millions due to faulty assumptions. Another problem: That 45.7 million figure includes undocumented immigrants, even though they aren't likely to be covered under new laws. But that hasn't stopped both parties in Congress from using the flawed numbers liberally, as they debate health-care overhaul this summer. That's a reprise of what happened 15 years ago, when the Clinton health plan foundered under differing cost estimates wielded by opponents. But such projections are even more uncertain than today's fuzzy count of the uninsured, depending on tricky assumptions about people's economic choices. "There is a range of uncertainty in health legislation that probably exceeds that of most other issues before Congress," says Robert D. Reischauer, who headed the Congressional Budget Office when it was analyzing the Clinton health plan. These sorts of numbers made headlines last week when the CBO dealt a blow to a bill introduced by Sen. Edward Kennedy. The congressional budget watchdog, which relied in part on the 45.7 million uninsured number, said the bill would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, and reduce the number of uninsured Americans by just 17 million, leaving tens of millions of people without coverage. But the CBO was evaluating just one piece of a larger proposal. For one thing, it omitted a proposed expansion of Medicaid, which would have reduced the number of uninsured further. "They didn't model his whole plan," says Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Thornton May, "The Unhealthy Accounting of Uninsured Americans:  Some Estimates Put the Number at 45.7 Million People, but Faulty Assumptions Could Be Inflating the Projections,"  The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124579852347944191.html#mod=todays_us_page_one

Obama's trillion-dollar healthcare bill: Pelosi's version would cost us $3 trillion.
Deroy Murdock, The Washington Times, June 27, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/27/obamas-trillion-dollar-bill/

Who is funding the Obamacare campaign?
Michelle Malkin, Townhall, June 27, 2009 --- http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/27/behind-the-scene/

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

Bob Jensen’s threads on impending disaster --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#NationalDebt

Blame the Jews for Everything That's Wrong in Iran
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s top Muslim leader, accused “dirty Zionists" and “Zionist media” for being behind charges that the results of the election were rigged. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner two hours after the voting stations closed a week ago on Friday.
Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, "Iran Blames ‘Dirty Zionists;’ At Least 19 Dead," Israel National News, June 20, 2009 --- http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/131965

Hardline Islamists have condemned four young Somali men to a double amputation for stealing mobile phones and guns. They will each have a hand and a leg cut off after being convicted by a Sharia court in the capital, Mogadishu.
"Somali 'thieves' face amputation," BBC News, June 22, 2009 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8113429.stm

Almost every program the Left supports to "help" the poor in this country is surreptitiously designed to de-motivate them and keep them dependent on the government.
John Hawkins, "Five More Myths the Left Has Created for Itself,:Townhall, June 23, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnHawkins/2009/06/23/five_more_myths_the_left_has_created_about_itself

The Obama administration plans to kill a controversial Bush administration spy satellite program at the Department of Homeland Security, according to officials familiar with the decision. The program came under fire from its inception two years ago. Democratic lawmakers said it would lead to domestic spying . . . Supporters of the program lamented what they said was the loss of an important new terrorism-fighting tool for natural disasters and terrorist attacks, as well as border security.
Siobhan Gorman, "White House to Abandon Spy-Satellite Program," The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124572555214540265.html

Earmark Pork Mostly for Mississippi
The emergency war funding bill that President Barack Obama is expected to sign soon has mushroomed into a catch-all for many lawmakers' favorite projects. Obama originally sought $83.5 billion in April, mostly to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the time Congress rewrote the bill and passed it last week, the price had jumped to $105.9 billion. That included money for a new $1 billion "cash for clunkers" auto trade-in program, $2.1 billion for eight C-17 Globemaster aircraft, $5 billion to help the International Monetary Fund and $500 million in earmarks, mostly for Mississippi.
David Lightman and Nancy A. Youssef, "Congress stuffs war-funding bill with cash for other items," McClatchy, June 22, 2009 --- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/70488.html

Update in 2009:  More of Barney's Rubble
Back when the housing mania was taking off, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank famously said he wanted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to "roll the dice" in the name of affordable housing. That didn't turn out so well, but Mr. Frank has since only accumulated more power. And now he is returning to the scene of the calamity -- with your money. He and New York Representative Anthony Weiner have sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers. You read that right. After two years of telling us how lax lending standards drove up the market and led to loans that should never have been made, Mr. Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to take more risk in condo developments with high percentages of unsold units, high delinquency rates or high concentrations of ownership within the development.
"Barney the Underwriter:  Telling Fannie Mae to take more credit risk. Now there's an idea," The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124580784452945093.html
Jensen Comment
Remember that Fannie and Freddie are now owned entirely by the Federal government that can and is simply printing money without having to tax or borrow. So who cares how much Fannie and Freddie lose loaning to deadbeat borrowers. Let the credit bubble commence all over again!
Barney's Rubble --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Rubble

Rep. Barney Frank says that unless Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac relax their recent tightening of mortgage standards on new condominiums, the economic recovery could be threatened.
New York Post, June 29, 2009 --- Click Here
Jensen Comment
I don't know what Barney is complaining about. Fannie and Freddie are now losing a billion dollars a day, and Barney owns both of them. Why doesn't he increase the losses to $2 per day and stop yammering?

Trillions for Fannie but not millions for advanced fighter jets
The F-22 Raptor, the most advanced fighter jet in the world, is in a dogfight with a tough adversary: Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Frank, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said Tuesday he is “vigorously” opposed to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 fighter jet. Frank has called recent congressional efforts to add more money for the production of the F-22 a “major assault” on President Obama’s efforts to control military spending. Frank is intent on striking $369 million authorized for the procurement of advance materials and items necessary to build 12 additional F-22s.
Roxana Tiron, "Frank 'vigorously' opposed to F-22 fighter," The Hill, June 23, 2009 ---
http://thehill.com/business--lobby/frank-vigorously-opposed-to-f-22-fighter-jet-2009-06-23.html

B A controversial law in Massachusetts could go national if Congressman Barney Frank gets his way. Frank has filed a bill that would eliminate federal penalties for personal possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana. It would also make the penalty for using marijuana in public just $100. "I think John Stuart Mill had it right in the 1850s," said Congressman Frank, "when he argued that individuals should have the right to do what they want in private, so long as they don't hurt anyone else. It's a matter of personal liberty.
"Barney Frank Files Bill To Decriminalize Pot," WBZtv, June 19, 2009 --- http://wbztv.com/local/marijuana.federal.penalty.2.1052437.html

... unless the university (U.C. Berkeley) took steps to "guide" admissions decisions, the University of California campuses would be dominated by Asians. When Connerly asked, "What would be wrong with that?", the UC administrator told him that Asians are "too dull -- they study, study, study." . . . To deal with the Asian "menace," the UC Regents have proposed, starting in 2010, that no longer will the top 12.5 percent of students based on statewide performance be automatically admitted. Students won't have to take SAT subject matter tests. Grades and test scores will no longer weigh so heavily in admission decisions. This is simply gross racial discrimination against those "dull" Asian students who "study, study, study" in favor of "interesting" black, white and Hispanic students who don't "study, study, study."
Ward Connerly as quoted by Walter E. Williams, "Vicious Academic Liberals," Townhall, June 24, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/06/24/vicious_academic_liberals
Connerly's full article is at www.mindingthecampus.com
Ward Connerly is a former U.C. Regent.
Bob Jensen's threads on affirmative action admissions and academic standards are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicStandards

More on the greatest swindles of the world
General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE. As a result, GE has joined major banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for...
Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis, "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue Industrial Giant Becomes Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program," The Washington Post, June 29, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html?hpid=topnews
Jensen Comment
GE thus becomes the biggest winner under both the TARP and the Cap-and-Trade give away legislation. It is a major producer of wind turbines and other machinery for generating electricity under alternative forms of energy. The government will pay GE billions for this equipment. GE Capital is also "Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program." Sort of makes you wonder why GE's NBC network never criticizes liberal spending in Congress.
Jensen's threads on the bank rescue swindle are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm z
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

"The (Horrible) Cost of Doing Something," by John Stossel, ABC News 20/20 ---
http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/06/the-cost-of-doing-something.html

The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
"The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold," by Andy Kroll, The Nation, May 26, 2009 ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/kroll/print

Voters be Damned:  Even if California has the highest taxes among the 50 states, those taxes should be higher
For Time Magazine, Kevin O'Leary has decided that he's figured out why California is in such a budget mess. Is it because the state indulges over generous social programs, or always has some of the highest taxes in the nation, or because the denizens of its capitol in Sacramento are paragons of waste, fraud and theft? Nope. It's because California has Proposition 13, a measure that prevents state government from too easily raising taxes. Yep, O'Leary thinks California is in a mess because it doesn't have high enough taxes. And it's all Reagan's fault.
Todd Huston, "Time Blames Calif. Budget Mess on... Low Taxes?" Newsbusters, June 28, 2009 ---
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/warner-todd-huston/2009/06/28/time-blames-calif-budget-mess-low-taxes

Sincerity is Only Union Label Deep
When a company called Ausra filed plans for a big solar power plant in California, it was deluged with demands from a union group that it study the effect on creatures like the short-nosed kangaroo rat and the ferruginous hawk. By contrast, when a competitor, BrightSource Energy, filed plans for an even bigger solar plant that would affect the imperiled desert tortoise, the same union group, California Unions for Reliable Energy, raised no complaint. Instead, it urged regulators to approve the project as quickly as possible. One big difference between the projects? Ausra had rejected demands that it use only union workers to build its solar farm, while BrightSource pledged to hire labor-friendly contractors. As California moves to license dozens of huge solar power plants to meet the state’s renewable energy goals, some developers contend they are being pressured to sign agreements pledging to use union labor. If they refuse, they say, they can count on the union group to demand costly environmental studies and deliver hostile testimony at public hearings.
Todd Woody, New York Times Business Office, June 20, 2009 --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2275961/posts

One clear trend line has emerged in the California Democrat's 2 1/2 -year reign as speaker, and that's a slow but steady rise in unpopularity. Shortly after she became the first woman to serve as House speaker, just 25 percent of voters disapproved of her, according to a Post-ABC poll in January 2007. Now, almost twice as many people disapprove of her performance.
"Approval Ratings for Pelosi Hit a New Low," The Washington Post, June 23, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/22/AR2009062202972.html

Walpin's defenders believe Obama fired him because Walpin was a successful whistle-blower, who blew the whistle on the president's friends and pet causes.
Debra J. Saunders, "Bad Times for Whistle Blowers," Townhall, June 23, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/DebraJSaunders/2009/06/23/bad_times_for_whistle-blowers

No reward for healthy living, non-smoking, vegetarian diets, and safe sex
The House Democrat and Kennedy-Dodd proposals do all they can to prevent health-insurance premium rates and coverage terms from reflecting the health status -- and thus health-related behavior -- of any insured person. Health status would not be permitted to affect coverage decisions, terms or pricing. Age-related variation in premium rates would also be significantly constrained in relation to risk. Benefit design and marketing of coverage would be regulated in an attempt to keep insurers from rewarding healthier people. Retrospective "risk adjustment" would be employed to reallocate funds from insurers that experience lower medical costs to those with higher costs. If an insurer were to attract relatively more healthy people -- or keep more people healthy -- it would run the risk of paying some or all of the gains to competitors.
Scott E. Harrington, "Reform Needs Healthy Life Incentives:  Sen. Kennedy doesn't want insurers to reward good behavior," The Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124623169143066199.html

Union thug Andy Stern brags about his access to the White House. Why not? It’s good to be the king’s friend. Stern’s friendship with the king is really paying off. Obama has made few cuts in his 2010 budget, but took an axe to the funding for the agency charged with enforcing laws broken by union thugs. The Department of Labor’s Office of Labor Management Standards’ (OLMS) budget was cut 9%.
Kevin Collins, The Collins Report, June 29, 2009 --- http://www.collinsreport.net/

Piotr Stanczak did not exhibit the slightest hint of hesitation when the Pakistani Taliban asked him to choose between execution and conversion to Islam. Whether the Polish geologist acted out of pride or religious conviction, he decided to pay through his blood to save his faith, a choice that bewildered his killers and keep them talking about him with respect after his murder.
Earth Times, June 29, 2009 --- Click Here

Of all the proposals in President Barack Obama's breathtakingly ambitious agenda to foster long-term economic decline, by far the biggest is the Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill, which the House of Representatives passed with the narrowest of majorities late Friday evening. This bill by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is more damaging than the $787 billion stimulus, the proposed huge increases in federal spending and corresponding increases in the national debt, the takeover of GM and Chrysler, and the proposed tax hikes on the wealthy - combined. Enacting Waxman-Markey (H. R. 2454 . . .
Myron Ebell, "Waxman-Markey is Hilarious, but the Joke is on Us," Townhall, June 29, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/columnists/MyronEbell/2009/06/29/waxman-markey_is_hilarious,_but_the_joke_is_on_us
Jensen Comment
Some conservatives voted for it because it will likely double or triple electricity prices, especially in rural America. Some liberals like ultra liberal Dennis Kucinich voted against it because of the cost of subsides to coal companies and the fact that its impact on reducing carbon emissions is nil.

"Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch and, you know, I think that he was [audience applause]. And I think, I really think George W is dumber [more audience laughter and applause]."
To which the network genius and super scholar Bill Mahar responded "Definitely."
Oliver Stone ---
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2009/06/27/oliver-stone-reagan-was-dumb-son-bitch-who-spawned-bush

Failed Banks List as of June 22, 2009 (including 2008 failures) --- http://www.cnbc.com/id/31049457

"3 Reasons To Stop Obsessing Over Obama's Birth Certificate," By John Hawkins, Townhall, June 30, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnHawkins/2009/06/30/3_reasons_to_stop_obsessing_over_obamas_birth_certificate 

Although New Haven's firefighters deservedly won in the Supreme Court, it is deeply depressing that they won narrowly -- 5-4. The egregious behavior by that city's government, in a context of racial rabble-rousing, did not seem legally suspect to even one of the court's four liberals, whose harmony seemed to reflect result-oriented rather than law-driven reasoning.
George Will, "On Race, the Slog Goes On," Townhall, June 29, 2009 --- http://townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2009/06/29/on_race,_the_slog_goes_on

"Higher-Education Experts Are Relieved at Supreme Court Ruling on Employment Tests," by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 30, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/06/21050n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

“All the evidence demonstrates that the City rejected the test results because the higher scoring candidates were white. Without some other justification, this express, race-based decision-making is prohibited,” wrote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy for the majority, which comprised Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.

While the decision is more expansive than some legal experts had predicted, it will likely do little to undermine race-based admissions policies at colleges, said Robert M. O’Neil, emeritus professor of law at the University of Virginia and director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. The majority opinion is based entirely on a hiring practice by a municipal government and doesn’t mention the Supreme Court’s landmark 2003 decisions regarding college admissions. Those cases were Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the limited use of race in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School; and Gratz v. Bollinger, which struck down the same university’s undergraduate admissions policy, which also gave preference to minority students.

In those decisions, Mr. O’Neil explained, the court ruled on a constitutional issue: whether the policies violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

In Gratz, the court also found that the admissions policy violated a federal statute—Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in programs that receive federal aid. But in Ricci, the justices ruled that the City of New Haven violated only a statute, Title VII, and they did not discuss whether throwing out the firefighter test violated any constitutional rights.

Experts Divided on Effects

Higher-education legal experts were more divided over whether Monday’s ruling would affect university employment practices.

Ada Meloy, general counsel at the American Council on Education, said colleges’ hiring practices would be unaffected. “The opinions rendered today do not explicitly or impliedly threaten the complex and nuanced faculty hiring or promotion procedures used in most institutions which struggle to increase diversity while complying with the law,” Ms. Meloy said.

But Roger Clegg, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, which filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs in Ricci, disagreed. “Unfortunately a lot of universities do weigh race and ethnicity in their hiring and promotion practices,” he said. “And if you do that, you are on legally thin ice.”

For example, sometimes a university hiring committee, after getting an initial pool of five finalists, will throw out that pool if the panel doesn’t like the racial makeup of that pool, he said.

Mr. Lorber countered that that kind of an action would already have been illegal under the law. Monday’s decision only deals narrowly with hiring or promotional policies that rely solely on a standardized test, like New Haven used.

If a faculty committee, however, chose to hire someone from a pool of equally qualified candidates, it could still use gender or race as the deciding factor, Mr. Lorber said.

The enormous amount of analysis that will arise from the ruling will, however, have a large impact on one particular sector of higher education, he added: “It’s going to affect law schools, because there will be 17 million law-review articles written.”

Also see http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/30/newhaven

Luxury ocean liners in Russia are offering pirate hunting cruises aboard armed private yachts off the Somali coast. Wealthy punters pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous waters in the world hoping to be attacked by raiders. When attacked, they retaliate with grenade launchers, machine guns and rocket launchers, reports Austrian business paper Wirtschaftsblatt. Passengers, who can pay an extra £5 a day for an AK-47 machine gun and £7 for 100 rounds of ammo, are also protected by a squad of ex special forces troops.
Free Republic, June 28, 2009 --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2281239/posts
Exciting Cruise Slide Show --- Click Here
Also see http://www.somalicruises.com/#greensboring_loves_you

"We'll Need to Raise Taxes Soon Expect Congress to seriously consider a value-added tax," by Robert C. Altman, The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124631646572370703.html

Sometime soon, perhaps in 2010, Main Street and financial markets will exert irresistible pressure to reduce the deficit.

The problem is the deficit's sheer size, which goes way beyond potential savings from cuts in discretionary spending or defense. It's entirely possible that Medicare and Social Security will already have been addressed, and thus taken off the table. In short we'll have to raise taxes.

Today, the U.S. ranks next to last among the 28 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations in total federal revenue as a share of GDP. Our federal revenues represent 18% of national output, down from 20% just 10 years ago. That makes the mismatch between our spending and our revenue very large, producing the huge deficits we face.

We all know the recent and bitter history of tax struggles in Washington, let alone Mr. Obama's pledge to exempt those earning less than $250,000 from higher income taxes. This suggests that, possibly next year, Congress will seriously consider a value-added tax (VAT). A bipartisan deficit reduction commission, structured like the one on Social Security headed by Alan Greenspan in 1982, may be necessary to create sufficient support for a VAT or other new taxes.

This challenge may be the toughest one Mr. Obama faces in his first term. Fortunately, the new president is enormously gifted. That's important, because it is no longer a matter of whether tax revenues must increase, but how.

Mr. Altman, founder and chairman of Evercore Partners, was deputy secretary of the Treasury in the first Clinton administration.

From Simoleon Sense on July 29, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/the-science-of-economic-bubbles-and-busts/

The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts
Brilliant introduction to economic bubbles- article covers psychology, economics, neurology, and finance.

Click Here To Read About The Science Of Economic Bubbles & Busts
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-science-of-economic-bubbles

Introduction (Via Scientific American)

The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has prompted a reassessment of how financial markets work and how people make decisions about money

Key Concepts (Via Scientific American)

1. The worldwide financial meltdown has caused a new examination of why markets sometimes become overheated and then come crashing down.
2. The dot-com blowup and the subsequent housing and credit crises highlight how psychological quirks sometimes trump rationality in investment decision making. Understanding these behaviors elucidates the genesis of booms and busts.
3. New models of market dynamics try to protect against financial blowups by mirroring more accurately how markets work. Meanwhile more intelligent regulation may gently steer the home buyer or the retirement saver away from bad decisions.

Click Here To Read About The Science Of Economic Bubbles & Busts

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

How times changed as Congress added disabled people (possibly at birth) and other recipients to Social Security. The original terms of Social Security under FDR would not have brought us to this Social Security crisis if Congress had not drained the Trust Fund for unrelated social programs:

Our Social Security
Franklin Delano. Roosevelt (Terms of Office March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945), a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program.  He Promised:
       
1.)     That participation in the Program would be Completely voluntary,
2.)     That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first   $1,400 of their annual Incomes into the Program,
3.)     That the money the participants elected to put Into the Program would be deductible from Their income for tax purposes each year,
4.)     That the money the participants put into the Independent 'Trust Fund' rather than into the General operating fund, and therefore, would Only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other Government program, and
5.)     That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income.
Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to 'Put Away' . . . 

Legless frogs mystery solved
Around the world, frogs are found with missing or misshaped limbs, a striking deformity that many researchers believe is caused by chemical pollution. However, tests on frogs and toads have revealed a more natural, benign cause. The deformed frogs are actually victims of the predatory habits of dragonfly nymphs, which eat the legs of tadpoles. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, researchers started getting reports of numerous wild frogs or toads being found with extra legs or arms, or with limbs that were partly formed or missing completely. The cause of these deformities soon became a hotly contested issue.
Matt Walker, BBC News, June 25, 2009 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8116000/8116692.stm

Video: Financial Reporting in Today’s Economy - Buyouts, Takeovers, Downsizing ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-financial-reporting-in-todays-economy-buyouts-takeovers-downsizing/

The John Stewart & Jim Cramer battle made numerous rounds and yet the question still remains- should the financial media be held accountable for failing to warn citizens of the economic/financial downturn?

Introduction (Via Fora.TV)

Should financial media be held accountable for their failure to have warned the public of the current economic downturn? What steps are being taken to avoid this happening in the future?

A panel of leading financial reporters assess the global crisis and discuss the ‘perfect storm’ of events that led to it. Aspiring journalists will hear how to avoid the perils and pitfalls of the profession, and media observers can decide for themselves if the media is to blame.

About the Speaker (Via Fora.TV)

Liz Claman - Liz Claman joined FOX Business Network (FBN) as an anchor in October 2007. Her debut included an exclusive interview with Berkshire Hathaway CEO and legendary investor Warren Buffett.

Alan Murray - Alan Murray is a Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal and Executive Editor for the Journal Online. He also has editorial responsibility for Wall Street Journal television, books, conferences, and the MarketWatch web site. Mr. Murray spent a decade as the Journal’s Washington bureau chief.

Jeff Bercovici - Jeff Bercovici joined Conde Nast Portfolio from Radar magazine, where he was part of the relaunch team for both the online and print editions.

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory and financial reporting are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm

"Using Psychology To Save You From Yourself (with audio) ," by Alix Spiegel, NPR, June 12, 2009 ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104803094&sc=nl&cc=es-20090628

The city of Greensboro, N.C., has experimented with a program designed for teenage mothers. To prevent these teens from having another child, the city offered each of them $1 a day for every day they were not pregnant. It turns out that the psychological power of that small daily payment is huge. A single dollar a day was enough to push the rate of teen pregnancy down, saving all the incredible costs — human and financial — that go with teen parenting.

Cass Sunstein, President Obama's pick to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was a vocal supporter of the program, because it was an economic policy that shaped itself around human psychology. Sunstein is just one of a number of high-level appointees now working in the Obama administration who favors this kind of approach.

All are devotees of behavioral economics — a school of economic thought greatly influenced by psychological research — which argues that the human animal is hard-wired to make errors when it comes to decision-making, and therefore people need a little "nudge" to make decisions that are in their own best interests.

And that is exactly what Obama administration officials plan to do: By taking account of human psychology, they hope to save you from yourself.

This is the story of how obscure psychological research into human decision-making first revolutionized economics and now appears poised to remake the relationship between the government and its citizens.

How Behavioral Economics Came To Be

The ideas that underlie the Obama administration's approach to social policies got their start in 1955 with Daniel Kahneman. Then a young psychologist in the Israeli army, Kahneman's primary job was to try to figure out which of his fellow soldiers might make good officers. To do this, Kahneman ran the men through an unusual exercise: He organized them into groups of eight, took away all their insignia so know one knew who had a higher rank, and told them to lift an enormous telephone pole over a 6-foot wall.

Kahneman felt the exercise was incredibly revealing. "We could see who was a leader, who was taking charge," Kahneman says. "We could see who was a quitter, who gave up. And we thought that what we saw before us is how they would behave in combat."

Certain of their wisdom, Kahneman and his fellow psychologists would make recommendations after the exercise. The chosen men would go to officer school, and Kahneman would move on to the next batch of soldiers. There was only one problem: Kahneman and his colleagues were terrible at it.

Every month or so, Kahneman would get feedback from the school about his picks, and "there was absolutely no relationship between what we saw and what people saw who examined them for six months in officer training school," he says.

But here's the remarkable thing: Despite the negative feedback, Kahneman's faith in his own ability was unshaken.

"The next day after getting those statistics, we put them there in front of the wall, gave them a telephone pole, and we were just as convinced as ever that we knew what kind of officer they were going to be."

People Make Irrational Choices

Kahneman was surprised by the pure visceral power of his own certainty. He eventually coined a phrase for it: "illusion of validity."

It's a problem that afflicts us all, says Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on this subject. From stockbrokers to baseball scouts, people have a huge amount of confidence in their own judgment, even in the face of evidence that their judgment is wrong.

But that mistake is just one of many cognitive errors identified by Kahneman and his frequent collaborator, psychologist Amos Tversky. For more than a decade, the two worked together cataloging the ways the human mind systematically misjudges the world around it.

For instance, Kahneman and Tversky identified "anchoring bias." It turns out that whenever you are exposed to a number, you are influenced by that number whether you intend to be influenced or not.

This is why, for example, the minimum payments suggested on your credit card bill tend to be low. That number frames your expectation, so you pay less of the bill than you might otherwise, your interest continues to grow, and your credit card company makes more money than if you had not had your expectations influenced by the low number.

Through their research, Kahneman and Tversky identified dozens of these biases and errors in judgment, which together painted a certain picture of the human animal. Human beings, it turns out, don't always make good decisions, and frequently the choices they do make aren't in their best interest.

In the realm of academic psychology, this isn't much of a revelation — psychologists see people as flawed in all kinds of ways. So, if the ideas of Kahneman and Tversky had simply stayed in the realm of academic psychology, there wouldn't be much of a story to tell.

Continued in article

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

"A Wandering Mind Heads:  Straight Toward Insight Researchers Map the Anatomy." The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124535297048828601.html 

It happened to Archimedes in the bath. To Descartes it took place in bed while watching flies on his ceiling. And to Newton it occurred in an orchard, when he saw an apple fall. Each had a moment of insight. To Archimedes came a way to calculate density and volume; to Descartes, the idea of coordinate geometry; and to Newton, the law of universal gravity.

Five light-bulb moments of understanding that revolutionized science.

In our fables of science and discovery, the crucial role of insight is a cherished theme. To these epiphanies, we owe the concept of alternating electrical current, the discovery of penicillin, and on a less lofty note, the invention of Post-its, ice-cream cones, and Velcro. The burst of mental clarity can be so powerful that, as legend would have it, Archimedes jumped out of his tub and ran naked through the streets, shouting to his startled neighbors: "Eureka! I've got it."

In today's innovation economy, engineers, economists and policy makers are eager to foster creative thinking among knowledge workers. Until recently, these sorts of revelations were too elusive for serious scientific study. Scholars suspect the story of Archimedes isn't even entirely true. Lately, though, researchers have been able to document the brain's behavior during Eureka moments by recording brain-wave patterns and imaging the neural circuits that become active as volunteers struggle to solve anagrams, riddles and other brain teasers.

Following the brain as it rises to a mental challenge, scientists are seeking their own insights into these light-bulb flashes of understanding, but they are as hard to define clinically as they are to study in a lab.

To be sure, we've all had our "Aha" moments. They materialize without warning, often through an unconscious shift in mental perspective that can abruptly alter how we perceive a problem. "An 'aha' moment is any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light," says psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "It could be the solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke; or suddenly recognizing a face. It could be realizing that a friend of yours is not really a friend."

These sudden insights, they found, are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically. "Your brain is really working quite hard before this moment of insight," says psychologist Mark Wheeler at the University of Pittsburgh. "There is a lot going on behind the scenes."

In fact, our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind is wandering and we've actually lost track of our thoughts, a new brain-scanning study suggests. "Solving a problem with insight is fundamentally different from solving a problem analytically," Dr. Kounios says. "There really are different brain mechanisms involved."

By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.

"People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty," says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As measured by brain activity, however, "mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem."

She suspects that the flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. "You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight," she says.

In a series of experiments over the past five years, Dr. Kounios and his collaborator Mark Jung-Beeman at Northwestern University used brain scanners and EEG sensors to study insights taking form below the surface of self-awareness. They recorded the neural activity of volunteers wrestling with word puzzles and scanned their brains as they sought solutions.

Some volunteers found answers by methodically working through the possibilities. Some were stumped. For others, even though the solution seemed to come out of nowhere, they had no doubt it was correct.

In those cases, the EEG recordings revealed a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain's right hemisphere, which is involved in handling associations and assembling elements of a problem. The brain broadcast that signal one-third of a second before a volunteer experienced their conscious moment of insight -- an eternity at the speed of thought.

The scientists may have recorded the first snapshots of a Eureka moment. "It almost certainly reflects the popping into awareness of a solution," says Dr. Kounios.

In addition, they found that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate.

"You want to quiet the noise in your head to solidify that fragile germ of an idea," says Dr. Jung-Beeman at Northwestern.

At the University of London's Goldsmith College, psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya also has been probing for insight moments by peppering people with verbal puzzles.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I'm having a hard time finding a worthy "aha" moment in accountancy. It certainly would not be Pacioli's double entry contribution since double entry accounting is thought to have been used for over 1,000 years before Pacioli. There have been aha moments in the invention of derivative contracts, but none of them to my knowledge are attributable to accountants. There have been some seminal accounting ideas such as ABC costing, but I think a team of people at Deere is credited for ABC Costing.

What are some "aha" moments in the history of accounting that are attributed to one person's original/seminal idea? 
A short summary of the history of accounting is available at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory

New Ways of Cheating

"Should Definitions of Cheating Change in the Age of Texting?" Chronicle of Higher Education, June 25, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3850&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Over at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blogs, Mark Bauerlein raised some interesting questions this week about students’ views of cheating.

Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, points to a new survey showing that about half of students have used their cellphones or other technology to cheat, and that many students do not consider their behavior to be cheating.

He suggests that they may have a point. “Don’t we see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead the healthy spread of ‘participatory culture’?” Mr. Bauerlein wrote. “In the digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the definition of cheating. Right?”

Bob Jensen votes not to change the definition of cheating in the age of texting!

June 29, 2009 reply from Glen L Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]

These kind of cheating stories verge on just being silly. How blind (no offense to blind people) would a professor have to be to not notice a student using a cell phone to send and receive text messages? My students are allowed only their exam and a writing device on the surface of the desk--everything else is put away. It would be pretty obvious if they were texting with a device in their lap.

And what would those text messages look like? If you gave a multiple choice exam, would the student send out each question they were unsure of AND the 4 or 5 answers to each question? How many questions would they have to send out to significantly impact their exam results? For an essay question, do they send out the question and then get an "essay" back, which they then transcribe from a small screen?

Next thing you know, someone is going to claim that fluoride in drinking water is a communist plot.

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Accounting & Information Systems,
COBAE
California State University,
Northridge 18111 Nordhoff ST
Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948 818.677.2461 (messages)
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f

June 30, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Glen,

Some new kinds of cheating are more clever than texting --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#NewKindOfCheating 

For example, do you check every pencil used on every exam, or could a student slip in a smartpen?

"Computing on Paper: Livescribe's smartpen turns a sheet of paper into a computer," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, December 13, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19892/?nlid=749&a=f 

Bob Jensen

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

New Ways of Cheating --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#NewKindOfCheating

College campuses display a striking uniformity of thought
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield once famously advised a conservative colleague to wait until he had tenure and only then to "hoist the Jolly Roger." But few professors are getting around to hoisting the Jolly Roger at all. Either they don't have a viewpoint that is different from their colleagues, or they've decided that if they are going to remain at one place for several decades, they'd rather just get along. Is tenure to blame for the unanimity of thinking in American universities? It's hard to tell. But shouldn't the burden of proof be on the people who want jobs for life?
Naomi Schafer Riley, "Tenure and Academic Freedom:  College campuses display a striking uniformity of thought," The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571593663539265.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

Bob Jensen's threads on tenure are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
Modules exist at other points at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

The University of Kansas Versus the Publishers of Expensive Research Journals
The University of Kansas is becoming the first public university -- following moves by all or parts of institutions such as Harvard and Stanford Universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- to make all faculty journal articles available free in digital form. Chancellor Robert Hemenway proposed the policy, which was endorsed by the Faculty Senate. The articles will be placed in KU ScholarWorks, a digital repository. Open access advocates see the creation of such repositories as a way to spread knowledge at a time that many journal subscriptions are too expensive for many academic institutions or individuals.
Inside Higher Ed, June 29, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/29/qt#202186

Jensen Comment
If you look under the index for accounting or business, go to "School of Business." I found the database to be quite deficient in published accounting research papers by members of the University of Kansas accounting faculty. It does not, for example, contain Accounting Review publications of Michael Ettredge. I suspect it will be better with working papers before they are published than it is with copyrighted articles after publication.

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

Deepening Scholarship of LGBT Studies

"Fifty Years After Stonewall," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, June 24, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee247

When the police conducted a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village, during the early hours of June 28, 1969, the drag queens did not go quietly. In grief at the death of Judy Garland one week earlier, and just plain tired of being harassed, they fought back -- hurling bricks, trashing cop cars, and in general proving that it is a really bad idea to mess with anybody brave enough to cross-dress in public.

Before you knew it, the Black Panther Party was extending solidarity to the Gay Liberation Front. And now, four decades later, an African-American president is being criticized -- even by some straight Republicans -- for his administration’s inadequate commitment to marriage rights for same-sex couples. Social change often moves in ways that are stranger than anyone can predict.

Today the abbreviation LGBT (covering lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people) is commonplace. Things only become esoteric when people start adding Q (questioning) and I (intersex). And the scholarship keeps deepening. Six years ago, after publishing a brief survey of historical research on gay and lesbian life, I felt reasonably well-informed (at least for a rather unadventurous heteroetcetera). But having just read a new book by Sherry Wolfe called Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation (Haymarket) a few days ago, I am trying to process the information that there were sex-change operations in Soviet Russia during the 1920s. (This was abolished, of course, once Stalinism charted its straight and narrow path to misery.) Who knew? Who, indeed, could even have imagined?

Well, not me, anyway. But the approaching anniversary of Stonewall seemed like a good occasion to consider what the future of LGBT scholarship might bring. I wrote to some well-informed sources to ask:

Continued in article

Affirmative Action College Initiatives for Gay Students --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GayAdmissionPreferences

Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness fractures on campus --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectnessFracture

Organized Crime Enforcement Italian Style

"Mafia blamed for $134bn fake Treasury bills," Financial Times, June 18, 2009 ---
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/82091ec2-5c2f-11de-aea3-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

One summer afternoon, two “Japanese” men in their 50s on a slow train from Italy to Switzerland said they had nothing to declare at the frontier point of Chiasso. But in a false bottom of one of their suitcases, Italian customs officers and ministry of finance police discovered a staggering $134bn (€97bn, £82bn) in US Treasury bills.

Whether the men are really Japanese, as their passports declare, is unclear but Italian and US secret services working together soon concluded that the bills and accompanying bank documents were most probably counterfeit, the latest handiwork of the Italian Mafia.

Few details have been revealed beyond a June 4 statement by the Italian finance police announcing the seizure of 249 US Treasury bills, each of $500m, and 10 “Kennedy” bonds, used as intergovernment payments, of $1bn each. The men were apparently tailed by the Italian authorities.

The mystery deepened on Thursday as an Italian blog quoted Colonel Rodolfo Mecarelli of the Como provincial finance police as saying the two men had been released. The colonel and police headquarters in Rome both declined to respond to questions from the Financial Times.

“They are all fraudulent, it’s obvious. We don’t even have paper securities outstanding for that value,’’ said Mckayla Braden, senior adviser for public affairs at the Bureau of Public Debt at the US Treasury department. “This type of scam has been going on for years.’’

Continued in article

Drunken States of Shame and Fame
North Dakota, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Alaska have the highest drunk driver fatalities as a percentage of traffic. New Hampshire, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, and Utah have the lowest percentages.
See the graph of all 50 states at (scroll down)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124537195041529851.html#mod=todays_us_page_one
Jensen Comment
Laws on the books can be nearly useless. In Texas, the drunk drivers are arrested. But since judges are poorly paid and need re-election funding, too many judges are in the pockets of defense lawyers who get drunk driving convictions thrown out before the trials even begin. The same can be said of speeding tickets in Texas. Offenders simply keep crooked lawyers on retainers and tear up their tickets.

A Strange Link From Snopes
A man who busted into an Australian gas station and demanded money was told by the unimpressed clerk that no payments will be made to unarmed robbers ---
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2009/06/22/Clerk-No-weapon-no-robbery/UPI-97461245688826/
Jensen Comment
Reminds me of the Woody Allen movie where the bank teller required that he (the robber) first show her his gun. Then I vaguely recall that she had to go get his "withdrawal" authorized.

Bob Jensen's threads on listservs, blogs, and social networks are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

Maine - is   was one of the highest taxed states in the nation --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation

"Maine Miracle:  Finally, a state that cuts tax rates on the rich," The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571672694839297.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

At last, there's a place in America where tax cutting to promote growth and attract jobs is back in fashion. Who would have thought it would be Maine?

This month the Democratic legislature and Governor John Baldacci broke with Obamanomics and enacted a sweeping tax reform that is almost, but not quite, a flat tax. The new law junks the state's graduated income tax structure with a top rate of 8.5% and replaces it with a simple 6.5% flat rate tax on almost everyone. Those with earnings above $250,000 will pay a surtax rate of 0.35%, for a 6.85% rate. Maine's tax rate will fall to 20th from seventh highest among the states. To offset the lower rates and a larger family deduction, the plan cuts the state budget by some $300 million to $5.8 billion, closes tax loopholes and expands the 5% state sales tax to services that have been exempt, such as ski lift tickets.

This is a big income tax cut, especially given that so many other states in the Northeast and East -- Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York -- have been increasing rates. "We're definitely going against the grain here," Mr. Baldacci tells us. "We hope these lower tax rates will encourage and reward work, and that the lower capital gains tax [of 6.85%] brings more investment into the state."

These changes alone are hardly going to earn the Pine Tree State the reputation of "pro-business." Neighboring New Hampshire still has no income or sales tax. And last year Maine was ranked as having the third worst business climate for states by the Small Business Survival Committee. Still, no state has improved its economic attractiveness more than Maine has this year.

One question is how Democrats in Augusta were able to withstand the cries by interest groups of "tax cuts for the rich?" Mr. Baldacci's snappy reply: "Without employers, you don't have employees." He adds: "The best social services program is a job." Wise and timely advice for both Democrats and Republicans as the recession rolls on and budgets get squeezed.

Jensen Comment
What may be a good idea for state taxation may not be a good idea for the Federal government. States face a huge problem in that, if taxes get relatively high on businesses and higher income residents, they are free to relocate or resist locating in high taxation states in the first place. New York, for example, is a very high taxation state that has lost millions of well-heeled citizens to Florida, New Hampshire (well maybe not freezing New Hampshire), and Texas. New York has lost businesses to most all the other states. Companies are now leaving high taxation states like Michigan and California and building new plants in Louisiana and Mississippi and Texas. But when these people and businesses relocate they usually are still living and working within the United States (exiting the country is an entirely different set of problems). Hence, they are still paying Federal taxes. I think the flat tax is much more problematic for the nation as a whole, although a flat tax to pay for nationalized health care bears looking into on a serious basis. The flat tax will burden the poor, but then again the poor will heavily burden a national health program.

And Maine still faces another huge problem in attracting businesses. Labor unions in Maine wield a lot of power relative to many other states. Business firms often avoid states with labor union power, which is why GM and Chrysler and Ford do not want to build their new automobile and parts manufacturing factories in Michigan where it would be nice to rebuild decayed cities like Flint and Detroit. Michigan's high taxes and labor union power stand in the way of recovery. Limiting punitive damages is also another way of attracting new business. Texas has benefitted in this regard by capping the punitive damages cash cow for lawyers.

Children are no longer miracles in California
To help balance its budget, California has reduced the state tax credit for dependents. The change will increase a family's California taxes for 2009 by about $210 per dependent compared with 2008 . . . At the same time it slashed the dependent credit, the state also raised all tax rates by one-quarter of 1 percent.
Kathleen Pender, "State cuts tax exemptions for kids," San Francisco Chronicle, June 23, 2009 ---
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/23/BUN418BJU3.DTL

But California government workers are miracles in retirement
Those named are former public employees and their dependents who receive an annual pension of more than $100,000. Atop one list is a former city administrator from the small Southern California town of Vernon, whose annual pension is $499,674.84. The so-called $100k Club movement has raised privacy concerns and frustrated pension officials who point out that only a tiny fraction of retirees receive that much and that most pensions are far smaller. It has also hit a nerve among private-sector workers whose retirement savings have been devastated.
Craig Karmin, "Group Shines Light on Hefty Government Pensions Focus on Highly Paid Retirees Is Aimed at Cutting Future Public Benefits, but Critics Say Most Payouts Are Far Smaller," The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124580096328044597.html#mod=todays_us_page_one

The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
"The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold," by Andy Kroll, The Nation, May 26, 2009 ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/kroll/print

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Jensen's threads how your money was put to word (fraudulently) to pay for the mistakes of the so-called professionals of finance --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout

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

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

"Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship," by Christina Hoff Sommers, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, June 26, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i40/40sommers.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"Harder to kill than a vampire." That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors. Consider what happened recently when I sent an e-mail message to the Berkeley law professor Nancy K.D. Lemon pointing out that the highly praised textbook that she edited, Domestic Violence Law (second edition, Thomson/West, 2005), contained errors.

Her reply began:

"I appreciate and share your concern for veracity in all of our scholarship. However, I would expect a colleague who is genuinely concerned about such matters to contact me directly and give me a chance to respond before launching a public attack on me and my work, and then contacting me after the fact."

I confess: I had indeed publicly criticized Lemon's book, in campus lectures and in a post on FeministLawProfessors.com. I had always thought that that was the usual practice of intellectual argument. Disagreement is aired, error corrected, truth affirmed. Indeed, I was moved to write to her because of the deep consternation of law students who had attended my lectures: If authoritative textbooks contain errors, how are students to know whether they are being educated or indoctrinated? Lemon's book has been in law-school classrooms for years.

One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.

Lemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:

"The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe."

Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase "rule of thumb" did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.

A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, "The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease." Not true. When I recently read Zorza's assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, "That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study." The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.

Zorza also informs readers that "between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence." Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.

Few students would guess that the Lemon book is anything less than reliable. The University of California at Berkeley's online faculty profile of Lemon hails it as the "premiere" text of the genre. It is part of a leading casebook series, published by Thomson/West, whose board of academic advisers, prominently listed next to the title page, includes many eminent law professors.

I mentioned these problems in my message to Lemon. She replied:

"I have looked into your assertions and requested documentation from Joan Zorza regarding the March of Dimes study and the statistics on battered women in emergency rooms. She provided both of these promptly."

If that's the case, Zorza and Lemon might share their documentation with Leavitt, of the March of Dimes, who is emphatic that it does not exist. They might also contact the Centers for Disease Control statistician Janey Hsiao, who wrote to me that "among ED [Emergency Department] visits made by females, the percent of having physical abuse by spouse or partner is 0.02 percent in 2003 and 0.01 percent in 2005."

Here is what Lemon says about Cheryl Ward Smith's essay on Romulus and the rule of thumb:

"I made a few minor editorial changes in the Smith piece so that it is more accurate. However, overall it appeared to be correct."

A few minor editorial changes? Students deserve better. So do women victimized by violence.

Feminist misinformation is pervasive. In their eye-opening book, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies (Lexington Books, 2003), the professors Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge describe the "sea of propaganda" that overwhelms the contemporary feminist classroom. The formidable Christine Rosen (formerly Stolba), in her 2002 report on the five leading women's-studies textbooks, found them rife with falsehoods, half-truths, and "deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries." Are there serious scholars in women's studies? Yes, of course. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis; Janet Zollinger Giele, a sociologist at Brandeis; and Anne Mellor, a literary scholar at UCLA, to name just three, are models of academic excellence and integrity. But they are the exception. Lemon's book typifies the departmental mind-set.

Consider The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (2008), by the feminist scholar Joni Seager, chair of the Hunter College geography department. Now in its fourth edition, Seager's atlas was named "reference book of the year" by the American Library Association when it was published. "Nobody should be without this book," says the feminist icon Gloria Steinem. "A wealth of fascinating information," enthuses The Washington Post. Fascinating, maybe. But the information is misleading and, at least in one instance, flat-out false.

One color-coded map illustrates how women are kept "in their place" by restrictions on their mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking as bad in this respect as Somalia, Uganda, Yemen, Niger, and Libya. All are coded with the same shade of green to indicate places where "patriarchal assumptions" operate in "potent combination with fundamentalist religious interpretations." Seager's logic? She notes that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman as his wife by raping her. The United States gets the same low rating on Seager's charts because, she notes, "State legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001." Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, that U.S. abortion law is exceptionally liberal among the nations of the world, and that the activism and controversy surrounding the issue of abortion in the United States is a sign of a vigorous free democracy working out its disagreements.

On another map, the United States gets the same rating for domestic violence as Uganda and Haiti. Seager backs up that verdict with that erroneous and ubiquitous emergency-room factoid: "22 percent-35 percent of women who visit a hospital emergency room do so because of domestic violence."

The critical work of 21st-century feminism will be to help women in the developing world, especially in Muslim societies, in their struggle for basic rights. False depictions of the United States as an oppressive "patriarchy" are a ludicrous distraction. If American women are as oppressed as Ugandan women, then American feminists would be right to focus on their domestic travails and let the Ugandan women fend for themselves.

All books have mistakes, so why pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank.

Why should it matter if a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:

1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.

2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from the women's-studies textbooks to women's advocacy groups and then into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he explained, "The purpose of this council is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy." He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.

3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.

"Thug," "parasite," "dangerous," a "female impersonator" — those are some of the labels applied to me when I exposed specious feminist statistics in my 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? (Come to think of it, none of my critics contacted me directly with their concerns before launching their public attacks.) According to Susan Friedman, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "Sommers' diachronic discourse is easily unveiled as synchronic discourse in drag. ... She practices ... metonymic historiography." That one hurt! But my views, as well as my metonymic historiography, are always open to correction. So I'll continue to follow the work of the academic feminists — to criticize it when it is wrong, and to learn from it when it is right.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism? (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and The War Against Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2000), and editor of The Science on Women and Science, forthcoming from the AEI Press.\

Jensen Comment
Problems I have with feminism and feminist scholarship is that it is sometimes hypocritical in the sense that conservatism is anti-feminist even if it is supportive of feminism, including the explosion of career opportunities for women in accounting that is sometimes viewed as counter to liberal feminism. Conservative women just aren't allowed in the club. It almost seems that feminists are disappointed when women make huge strides in professional career opportunities for women such as when the accounting profession is now hiring significantly more than 50% of the accounting graduates with serious initiatives for retaining and promoting women. Another problem is that feminist researchers and scholars tend, in my viewpoint, to often make mountains out of mole hills that distracts from their more serious scholarship. The unwillingness to correct for errors is a new one to me. Why am I not surprised?

Criticism of feminist movements, scholarship, and research just is not politically correct ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness

States hunt smokers who dodge sales tax
The tough measures are having the desired effect. Nearly $23 million of the anticipated $27.5 million in back cigarette taxes has been collected via upfront payments and deferred payment plans, Ms. Brassell said. The federal Jenkins Act mandates that tobacco sellers identify out-of-state customers and report their purchases to each buyer's state tobacco tax administrator.
Kristi Jourdan, "States hunt smokers who dodge sales tax," Washington Times, June 19, 2009 --- http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/19/dc-smokes-out-tax-scofflaws/ 

Jensen Comment
This legislation is mainly aimed at buyers who ship cigarettes into the state via common carriers such as UPS and black market buyers of tobacco products who avoid taxes on substantial amounts of cigarette products. It's more difficult to force vendors in tax-free states to demand photo identification of onsite buyers who pay cash for smaller amounts such as less than $200 worth even though buyers might shop around in a state and accumulate thousands of dollars in onsite purchases.

Government Efficiency and Sound Management in Action
"After Losing $20 Million in Equipment, Federal Health-Care Agency Won $500 Million Earmark in Stimulus; Agency’s HQ Had 10 Pieces of IT Equipment Per Worker," by Monica Gabriel, CNS News, June 19, 2009 --- http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49591

The $787 billion stimulus bill that President Obama signed in February awarded the Indian Health Service with an earmark for $500 million in new funding, including $85 million specifically set aside for “health information technology activities,” even though a Government Accountability Office audit released the previous June concluded that mismanagement of the IHS had allowed $15.8 million worth of equipment to be lost or stolen between 2004 and 2007.

The GAO report released in June 2008 also concluded that wasteful spending by the Indian Health Service had resulted in the service’s headquarters possessing 10 pieces of IT equipment for every employee who worked there.

The report was entitled: "IHS Mismanagment Led to Millions of Dollars in Lost or Stolen Property."

This June, a year after publication of the original GAO report, and four months after the stimulus bill earmarked $500 million in new funding for the Indian Health Service, a new GAO report revealed that the IHS was continuing to lose government property.

The new report was entitled: "Indian Health Service--Millions of Dollars in Property and Equipment Continue to be Lost or Stolen."

“We found that property continues to be lost or stolen at IHS at an alarming rate,” the GAO reported this month. “From October 2007 through January 2009, IHS identified about 1,400 items with an acquisition value of about $3.5 million that were lost or stolen agencywide. These property losses are in addition to what we identified in our June 2008 report.

“Our full headquarters inventory testing and our random sample testing of six field offices estimated that over a million dollars worth of IT equipment was lost, stolen, or unaccounted for, confirming that property management weaknesses continue at IHS,” said the new report.

Continued in article

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

So much learning now takes place online, including faculty office hours, study groups, and lectures.
What extra value are you going to need to offer to bring the students of the future to your college?
Read the new report, "The College of 2020: Students," from Chronicle Research Services.

"THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2009 ---
http://research.chronicle.com/asset/TheCollegeof2020ExecutiveSummary.pdf?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

This is the first Chronicle Research Services report in a three-part series on what higher education will look like in the year 2020. It is based on reviews of research and data on trends in higher education, interviews with experts who are shaping the future of colleges, and the results of a poll of members of a Chronicle Research Services panel of admissions officials.

To buy the full, data-rich 50-page report, see the links at the end of this Executive Summary. Later reports in this series will look at college technology and facilities in 2020, and the faculty of the future.

"The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," by  Jane Park, Creative Commons, June 26th, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15522

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) announced a new report called, “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age,” now available at MIT Press. The report is in response to our changing times, and addresses what traditional educational institutions must know to keep up. From the announcement,

“Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.”

A central finding was that “Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete. The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.”

Not coincidentally, one of the ten principles for redesigning learning institutions was open source education: “Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.”

The report is available in PDF via CC BY-NC-ND.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/Future_of_Learning.pdf

Also see http://www.convergemag.com/workforce/47240132.html

Our Compassless Colleges --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz

15 Geeky Road Trip Gadgets --- http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/06/15-geeky-road-trip-gadgets/
I will pass on all these gadgets.

Old geezer gang (all in walkers) 'tortures adviser' who lost their $4 million
A group of wealthy pensioners has been accused of kidnapping and torturing a financial adviser who lost about $4 million of their savings. The pensioners, nicknamed the "Geritol Gang" by German police after an arthritis drug, face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of subjecting German-American James Amburn to the alleged four-day ordeal.
Sydney Morning Herald, June 24, 2009 --- Click Here

Troubles in German Universities
An article in The Economist explores the problems facing German universities (lack of money compared to other countries, more students per faculty members than many countries) and current efforts to fix them. Germany's government is putting more money into the institutions, with the goal of paying for more spots. The government is also encouraging more differentiation among universities.
Inside Higher Ed, June 26, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/26/qt#202107

Admissions Scandal at the University of Illinois
Newly released e-mail messages may mark a new low in the admissions scandal that just keeps growing at the University of Illinois. The Chicago Tribune reported that the e-mails show that the chancellor of the university's Urbana-Champaign campus, Richard Herman, pressured the law school to let in an applicant favored by the then-governor, Rod Blagojevich, in return for having the governor get jobs for five law graduates with less than stellar academic records. An e-mail from Herman to the then-dean of the law school, Heidi Hurd, who was apparently balking at admitting the applicant, said that the request came "straight from the G. My apologies. Larry has promised to work on jobs (5). What counts?" Hurd's response, which suggested why the university might need to take special steps to get these students jobs: "Only very high-paying jobs in law firms that are absolutely indifferent to whether the five have passed their law school classes or the Bar." The Tribune noted that law school rankings are based in part on job placement success, so a law school would have reason to worry if even poor academic performers couldn't get jobs. University officials declined to respond to the e-mails, telling the Tribune that their first response should be to a special state panel investigating admissions at the university.
Inside Higher Ed, June 26, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/26/qt#202107

Less than 20% of U.S. college graduates in 2009 are finding meaningful employment
Appropriately (or ironically) the author of the article below is from "Hope" College
Although more than 20% of accounting graduates are finding accounting jobs, it's not like the past 30 years

"What to Advise Unemployed Graduates:  Sooner or later, students confronted with unappealing jobs will appear in their former professors' offices," by Thomas H. Benton (really William Pannapacker), The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 26, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/06/2009062601c.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

It's sinking in right now for millions of recent college graduates and their parents: no job and an uncertain future, apart from student-loan payments. There's no bailout for you, kid. Now what?

The National Association of Colleges and Employers' Student Survey shows that less than 20 percent of 2009 graduates who were looking for a job have actually found one. In comparison, more than half of the class of 2007 found jobs before graduation. The situation is apparently so bleak that many college seniors (about 41 percent) didn't even bother to look for work this spring.

I imagine all of those unemployed students sitting in their regalia and listening — with a mixture of apathy and anger — to some motivational huckster preaching the latest bootstraps gospel. They've done everything right — or so they think — and yet here they are: about to end their time as the celebrated children who have been doing "great things" in college. But they're not on their way to brilliant careers; they're headed back to their high-school bedrooms, an embarrassment to everyone, most of all themselves.

Of course, their elders have lots of advice: "I've got one word for you: plastics." "Have you tried looking at the newspaper want ads?" "There are always positions for good people." The graduates smile and nod, accepting the presents, wisely saying nothing.

Perhaps they already have been searching for months, but what they've found offers only some combination of the following: a minimum-wage job with no benefits, part time only, in a field seemingly unrelated to their degrees. Possibly the job is also physically and emotionally exhausting, involves dealing with angry customers, and requires repeating robotic sales pitches and survey questions. Many graduates are not quite ready to adapt to the conditions of entry-level employment as it is today.

Of course, they are right to detect a mild note of schadenfreude. About four years ago, I asked a class of first-year college students how many of them thought they were better than their parents. Every hand in the room went up. They were destined for great things.

It is predictable that students confronted with unappealing work — if they can find work at all — will soon appear in their former professors' offices. And, just as predictably, our tendency as professors might be to suggest graduate school to some of those students. It's what we know; most professors have never worked outside of academe, and many of us have a reflexive disdain for the kind of work that is available to recent graduates in a recession. With the support of their professors, the prospect of returning to college is almost too appealing to resist for students terrified by the realization that good jobs are hard to find (and the postgraduate labor market is too far away to worry about).

The NACE survey indicates that about 26 percent of this year's graduates plan to go to graduate school, up from about 20 percent in 2007. Even though some graduate programs in the humanities are admitting fewer students this year, plenty of new and growing programs are eager to sell students a dream of future greatness, but, depending on the program, the outcome is often a deferral of the problem that sent those students back to school in the first place.

Some of the letters I received in response to my columns about avoiding graduate school in the humanities ("Just Don't Go," The Chronicle, January 30 and March 13) were from college seniors who asked, "Isn't grad school better than the kinds of jobs available to me?"

I remember feeling exactly that way in 1990 — another recession year (though perhaps not as bad as this one) — when I graduated with a bachelor's degree in English. I was a reasonably successful undergraduate — honors program, senior thesis, good grades and recommendations — but not naïve enough to think any of that mattered to prospective employers more than actual experience.

Always in need of money, I did have a lot of work experience by the time I graduated from college. At 14, I started as a newspaper delivery boy, and then, at 16, I was proud to man the ovens in a local pizza place where I eventually became a delivery driver (a step up because of the tips). After that I loaded trucks in a refrigerated warehouse, cleaned boats at a marina, studied all night as a gas-station attendant, cut meat (and my thumb) at a supermarket deli counter, and supervised a weight room at a YMCA, which also gave me time to read.

The 2009 NACE survey indicates that 73 percent of students who did find jobs had been interns somewhere. During my last year of college I "won" what seemed like a prestigious internship at an advertising agency that went out of business just before I graduated. My primary job was fielding phone calls from its creditors, which made me comfortable talking with almost anyone who wasn't already angry. Within a few weeks, I cold-called my way into another job, working part time for a well-known corporation that markets diet programs. The manager thought I could be a diet counselor because of my experience in a weight room. When I was laid off from that position, I found work selling memberships, commission-only, in a rundown health club that went out of business in two months, but, as a result of that experience — and several new contacts — I was able to find a better sales position with a base salary at another health club.

Looking back, I see that I was developing an unintended career path in the diet and exercise industry based on very limited prior experience and having nothing to do with my academic credentials. By the end of the first year, when I started graduate school in English (yes, I know), I was an "assistant manager." I had a large, corner office with two walls of windows, a rubber tree, and a reproduction of Monet's Water Lilies. I might have moved on to manager within a few years, and maybe I would have opened my own franchise by the time I was 30.

Knowing what I know now, that scenario doesn't seem all that bad, even though at the time, I regarded it as beneath me because none of my co-workers had read Moby-Dick or Ulysses. In the end, it was that arrogance — and the promise of extraordinary job opportunities for college professors (announced everywhere in the early 90s) — that lured me back to graduate school.

I don't mean to suggest here something like, "If I did it, you can, too." I'm in no position to advise anyone about a specific job or career path; my knowledge of even the academic job market is nearing its expiration date. Mainly, I try to avoid the temptation to assume that knowledge of a few academic subjects, or even personal experience from another time and place, gives me expertise about a specific student's circumstances. However, I do think I can offer some general advice for the unemployed college graduate based on my own experiences, observations, and conversations with advisees in a variety of economic climates:

Flexibility. A good education should have prepared you to learn almost anything. Don't dismiss whole occupations as the work of "corporate drones" or regard any field as beneath you.

Mobility. If possible, look beyond the local labor market; consider opportunities in an international context. There are often unexpected zones of economic growth in the midst of any recession.

Research. Do not make decisions on the basis of inadequate information, particularly about future job prospects. Informational interviewing is the best thing you can do because you are getting up-to-date, insider's knowledge, you are practicing your interviewing skills, and you are building a network.

Networking. Most job opportunities are unadvertised; they are often filled by personal contacts. Tell everyone you know that you are job hunting.

Communication. Practice speaking with people in your desired occupation; make your résumés and cover letter flawless and perfectly tailored for the positions you are seeking. Develop a variety of ways of describing your aptitudes and experiences to deploy in interviews.

Professionalism. Cultivate a positive attitude, mind your manners, dress appropriately, and build a reputation for integrity and reliability. Accept that you're not too good for any position — yet. And clean up your Facebook page.

Respect. Remember that there are plenty of people without college degrees who know things that are worth learning. Get over yourself and learn the art of making fast food, folding clothes, or mowing grass — with enough care that you come to enjoy them and value those who do them well.

Training. Seek continuous training and experience in support of your emerging career path. But avoid undertaking expensive and time-consuming education for positions that may not be available by the time you finish.

Hope. You can't know the future, so why not hold on to your optimism? A tough labor market can cultivate strengths that you never developed before. Unemployment can lead to despair and flight, but it can also strengthen character.

There are many actions one can take that can contribute to a reversal of fortune, and that can ward off the despair of giving up the search entirely or fleeing into a graduate program for the wrong reasons. Perhaps the one virtue we can convey to our students that includes all of the generalizations I've made above is humility: Accept that you may have to start at the very bottom — lower than you ever imagined — but keep your eyes open, and begin your ascent without looking back while we, your former professors, applaud your progress and hope for your success, however you define it.

Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College.

Jensen Comment
If it is at all possible in desperation, recent graduates should seek out unpaid internships that provide professional experience. Experience is the name of the game after graduation and completion of certification examinations such as the CPA, CMA, IIA, CFA, etc.

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

Before reading this module, you may want to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_education

Blistering indictment of K-12 “math” education
Yesterday DJ Strouse, a student in MIT’s quantum computing summer school, pointed me to A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhardt, the most blistering indictment of K-12 “math” education I’ve ever encountered. Lockhardt says pretty much everything I’ve wanted to say about this subject since the age of twelve, and does so with the thunderous rage of an Old Testament prophet.  If you like math, and more so if you think you don’t like math, I implore you to read his essay with every atom of my being. Which is not to say I don’t have a few quibbles:
Scott Anderson, "The secant had it coming," MIT's Technology Review, June 19, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=349&bpid=23720&nlid=2119

Once Again:  The Controversy of Neutrality in the Setting of Accounting Standards

In Concepts Statement No. 2, the FASB asserts it should not issue a standard for the purpose of achieving some particular economic behavior. Among other things, this statement implies that the board should not set accounting standards in an attempt to bolster the economy or some industry sector. Ideally, scorekeeping should not affect how the game is played. But this is an impossible ideal since changes in rules for keeping score almost always change player behavior. Hence, accounting standards cannot be ideally neutral. The FASB, however, actively attempts not to not take political sides on changing behavior that favors certain political segments of society. In other words, the FASB still operates on the basis that fairness and transparency in the spirit of neutrality override politics. However, there is a huge gray zone that, in large measure, involves how companies, analysts, investors, creditors, and even the media react to new accounting rules. Sometimes they react in ways that are not anticipated by the FASB

"Public Workers' Free Health Care Hangs Over Taxpayers," SmartPros, June 24, 2009 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x66887.xml

Over the next 30 years, Nassau County expects to spend $3.6 billion paying health care bills for its retired workers. Already this year, it spent more for retirees' health care than it did for their pensions, according to financial statements it plans to publish Wednesday.

Suffolk County faces an even higher liability, according to its latest accounting -- $4.1 billion over 30 years, according to county comptroller Joseph Sawicki.

Free health care for life is a prized benefit of public employment, but its rapidly rising cost to taxpayers is looming into view like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, thanks to the phasing in of a national accounting rule known as GASB-45.

That rule, issued in 2004, also applies to towns, villages, school districts and public authorities. It requires the 30-year cost of retiree health benefits to be listed on their annual financial reports. This year, for the first time, governments with as little as $10 million in revenue will begin reporting those costs in their financial statements, filed at the end of this month. But they are not required to set aside money to cover those costs.

"While we're facing difficult times, now is not the time to ignore this issue and push it aside," said state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli Tuesday, calling the expense "staggering."

New York State has the highest costs in the nation for retired employees' medical care -- an estimated $55 billion over the next 30 years. It, too, paid more last year for retirees' health benefits than their pension costs. Those health costs are only going to go up, warns DiNapoli, who has proposed creating a trust fund governments can use to save for their retirees' health costs. That will reduce the long-term expense, he argues.

But at the moment, county officials seem more interested in finding ways to reduce the obligations than set aside extra money to meet them.

"Knowledge of this figure does not change the pressure on our hard-pressed county taxpayers since we only pay one year's health care bill at a time," said Nassau Comptroller Howard Weitzman, who last year worked with the county legislature on a new benefits package for nonunion employees that increased the number of years required for them to vest lifetime benefits. But his office acknowledged that nonunion employees make up only a small share of the county workforce.

In Suffolk, County Executive Steve Levy is also looking to trim benefits, and blamed the current predicament on a series of nine government downsizings approved by the legislature in eight years that were followed by new hires into many of the same positions.

"Those early retirement incentives of the 1990s are coming home to roost," he said.

Levy has required nonunion employees to contribute at least 10 percent of their health benefits, and said the issue will figure prominently in future contract talks.

"New rules have to be written for new employees coming into the game," he said.

"How well does the FASB consider the consequences of its work?" by Dennis Beresford, All Business, March 1, 1989 ---
http://www.allbusiness.com/accounting/methods-standards/105127-1.html

Neutrality is the quality that distinguishes technical decision-making from political decision-making. Neutrality is defined in FASB Concepts Statement 2 as the absence of bias that is intended to attain a predetermined result. Professor Paul B. W. Miller, who has held fellowships at both the FASB and the SEC, has written a paper titled: "Neutrality--The Forgotten Concept in Accounting Standards Setting." It is an excellent paper, but I take exception to his title. The FASB has not forgotten neutrality, even though some of its constituents may appear to have. Neutrality is written into our mission statement as a primary consideration. And the neutrality concept dominates every Board meeting discussion, every informal conversation, and every memorandum that is written at the FASB. As I have indicated, not even those who have a mandate to consider public policy matters have a firm grasp on the macroeconomic or the social consequences of their actions. The FASB has no mandate to consider public policy matters. It has said repeatedly that it is not qualified to adjudicate such matters and therefore does not seek such a mandate. Decisions on such matters properly reside in the United States Congress and with public agencies.

The only mandate the FASB has, or wants, is to formulate unbiased standards that advance the art of financial reporting for the benefit of investors, creditors, and all other users of financial information. This means standards that result in information on which economic decisions can be based with a reasonable degree of confidence.

A fear of information

Unfortunately, there is sometimes a fear that reliable, relevant financial information may bring about damaging consequences. But damaging to whom? Our democracy is based on free dissemination of reliable information. Yes, at times that kind of information has had temporarily damaging consequences for certain parties. But on balance, considering all interests, and the future as well as the present, society has concluded in favor of freedom of information. Why should we fear it in financial reporting?

Continued in article

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

In particular note the section on Post-Employment Benefits Accounting --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#CookieJar

From the Scout Report on June 19, 2009

Mozilla Firefox 3.0.11 --- http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html 

Mozilla Firefox continues to improve with each new release, and this version does not disappoint. Version 3.0.11 contains a drop-down menu with URLs from the browsing history and the bookmarks listings. The newest version of this browser also contains an add-on manager that allows visitors to save their previous trip to the Mozilla website. Additionally, visitors can also pause and resume downloads and merge forward and backward history lists. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer.

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Jalbum 8.3.5 --- http://jalbum.net/ 

Jalbum 8.3.5 offers an elegant and easy-to-use solution for users hoping to create online photo galleries. This version includes an updated photo editor, and all visitors need to do is to select the images they wish to add to their album, and the application does all of the work. Visitors can also take advantage of their templates, along with a selection of nifty-looking skins. This version is compatible with computers running Mac OS X 10.3.9 and newer.

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Juneteenth celebrants across the country hope to gain recognition for an important day in American history Juneteenth Worldwide Celebration http://www.juneteenth.com/ 

Late to Freedom's Party, Texans Spread Word of Black Holiday
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/us/late-to-freedom-s-party-texans-spread-word-of-black-holiday.html?scp=4&sq=juneteenth -ellison&st=cse  

Dishing Up Juneteenth
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/mighty-appetite/2007/06/making_room_for_juneteenth_at.html 

Letter to President Obama http://www.juneteenth.us/obama.html 

Washington Juneteenth 2009 Calendar of Events http://www.19thofjune.com/calendar/index.html 

The Handbook of Texas Online: Juneteenth http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/JJ/lkj1.html

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

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines

From the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia
The Batten Institute (for creation of knowledge about entrepreneurship) ---
http://www.darden.virginia.edu/BattenInstitute/BattenInstitute.aspx?menu_id=494 

Education Tutorials

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

Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Video:  100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists ---
http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2009/06/18/100-incredible-lectures-from-the-worlds-top-scientists/

100 Greatest Discoveries in Physics (video) --- http://www.documentary-log.com/d281-100-greatest-discoveries-physics/
Most were important enough to be authenticated before being considered worthy discoveries

Video: The Energy Problem and the Interplay Between Basic and Applied Research (serious research) --- Click Here
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-energy-problem-and-the-interplay-between-basic-and-applied-research/

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

.USDA: The Census of Agriculture --- http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/

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

University of Nebraska-Lincoln: An Architectural Tour of Historic UNL http://historicbuildings.unl.edu/

The Climate Change Climate Change:  The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.) The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages. Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
Declan McCullagh, CBS News, June 26, 2009 --- http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/06/26/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5117890.shtml 

Global Warming Hysteria, by John Stossel, ABC News 20/20, June 29, 2009 ---
http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/06/-global-warming-hysteria.html

It's been an exceptionally cold summer thus far in the White Mountains. It's been even worse suffering through global warming in the Arctic. Here's something you won't hear about on MSNBC or in The New York Times or from Al Gore's lips --- the "record late" summer in the Arctic.
It is the winter that refuses to go away in northern Manitoba and most of the eastern Arctic. Prolonged cold snowy conditions in the Hudson Bay area are expected to obliterate the breeding season for migratory birds and most other species of wildlife this year. . According to Environment Canada, the spring of 2009 is record-late in the eastern Arctic with virtually 100 per cent snow cover from James Bay north as of June 11
Robert Alison, "Big chill in Churchill Winter," Winnipeg Free Press, June 13, 2009 ---
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/big-chill-in-churchill-47992231.html 

Video:  President Obama earlier admitted that the Cap and Trade legislation may "skyrocket" electricity bills ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xOxwW4Toio

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

Social Science and Economics Tutorials

Video:  100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists ---
http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2009/06/18/100-incredible-lectures-from-the-worlds-top-scientists/

From the London School of Economics
IDEAS: Diplomacy and Strategy@LSE --- http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IDEAS/

Michigan Informatics: Informatics for the Public Health Workforce http://www.sph.umich.edu/mi-info/

From the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia
The Batten Institute (for creation of knowledge about entrepreneurship) ---
http://www.darden.virginia.edu/BattenInstitute/BattenInstitute.aspx?menu_id=494 

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

More on the greatest swindles of the world
General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE. As a result, GE has joined major banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for...
Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis, "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue Industrial Giant Becomes Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program," The Washington Post, June 29, 2009 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html?hpid=topnews
Jensen Comment
GE thus becomes the biggest winner under both the TARP and the Cap-and-Trade give away legislation. It is a major producer of wind turbines and other machinery for generating electricity under alternative forms of energy. The government will pay GE billions for this equipment. GE Capital is also "Top Recipient in Debt-Guarantee Program." Sort of makes you wonder why GE's NBC network never criticizes liberal spending in Congress.
Jensen's threads on the bank rescue swindle are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm z
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

"The (Horrible) Cost of Doing Something," by John Stossel, ABC News 20/20 ---
http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/06/the-cost-of-doing-something.html

The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
"The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold," by Andy Kroll, The Nation, May 26, 2009 ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/kroll/print

From Simoleon Sense on July 29, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/the-science-of-economic-bubbles-and-busts/

The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts
Brilliant introduction to economic bubbles- article covers psychology, economics, neurology, and finance.

Click Here To Read About The Science Of Economic Bubbles & Busts
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-science-of-economic-bubbles

Introduction (Via Scientific American)

The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has prompted a reassessment of how financial markets work and how people make decisions about money

Key Concepts (Via Scientific American)

1. The worldwide financial meltdown has caused a new examination of why markets sometimes become overheated and then come crashing down.
2. The dot-com blowup and the subsequent housing and credit crises highlight how psychological quirks sometimes trump rationality in investment decision making. Understanding these behaviors elucidates the genesis of booms and busts.
3. New models of market dynamics try to protect against financial blowups by mirroring more accurately how markets work. Meanwhile more intelligent regulation may gently steer the home buyer or the retirement saver away from bad decisions.

Click Here To Read About The Science Of Economic Bubbles & Busts

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

Law and Legal Studies

International Criminal Court --- http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC/Home 

"Colleges Offer Online Help on Copyright Law for Instructors," by Marc Beja, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3846&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

As instructors prepare for the fall semester, colleges are trying to make sure their teachers aren’t breaking any copyright laws in their lectures.

The City University of New York’s Baruch College recently released an interactive guide to using multimedia in courses.

Baruch’s online guide begins with background information on copyrighted material, presented by a computer-animated middle-age man. Instructors can then click through the system’s “Copyright Metro,” which gives step-by-step verbal and written instructions on determining what materials can be used in courses legally. There are three “metro lines” that can be taken, depending on if the instructor plans to use the material in class or online, or if they have copyright-holder permission to use the material – which gets you a ride on the “express train” to the final stop, which says you can use the material.

Baruch is not alone in trying to prevent legal problems for itself or its professors. Among other institutions, Reed College has a traditional Web page that offers advice about using materials, with links to information from other college Web sites. The University of Maryland University College also has a site that has information for students and professors who want to legally use copyrighted material in classes and on the Internet.

A Fair(y) Tale:  Animated cartoon about copyright law ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.  Also see http://snipurl.com/fairu1 

American Library Association's Slide Rule Helper for Copyright Law---
http://librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/

Also see Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the dreaded DMCA are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright

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

Math Tutorials

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

History Tutorials

Rare and Beautiful Books in Biology and Medicine
Turning the Pages Online --- http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/intro.htm

Images from the History of Medicine --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/ihm/ 

Centre for Overseas History: E-cyclopaedia of Portuguese Expansion http://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/eve/index.php?lang=en

500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&col_id=522

British Museum: London 1753
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/britain/london_1753/london_1753.aspx 

The British Museum: Research http://www.britishmuseum.org/research.aspx

Edinburgh World Heritage --- http://www.ewht.org.uk/Home.aspx 

Taking Liberties (U.K. history) ---  http://www.bl.uk/takingliberties

University of Nebraska-Lincoln: An Architectural Tour of Historic UNL http://historicbuildings.unl.edu/

American RadioWorks: Bridge to Somewhere http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/infrastructure/

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization --- http://www.rnh.com/ 

National Maritime Museum: Jewelry http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/index.cfm/category/jewellery 

From Northwestern University
Rare photographs of East Africa ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3853&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

It isn't uncommon to find literature rendered in the style of Twitter's trademarked 140-character blasts. But it's rare for such tweets to make their way into print. Yet that's the concept behind a new book penned by two rising University of Chicago sophomores, titled Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less. The project's Web site calls it "a humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format."
Erica R. Hendry, "'Twitterature': Tweeting Classics on the Web," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3843&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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

Language Tutorials

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

Music Tutorials

Leading Female Musicians from Around the World
FEMLINK: The International Video Collage http://www.femlink.org/

500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&col_id=522

Dimitri Tiomkin (composer) --- http://www.dimitritiomkin.com/

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization --- http://www.rnh.com/ 

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

Writing Tutorials

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

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

June 23, 2009

• FDA Warns of E. coli Risk From Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough
• Stamina-Rx Supplements Recalled
• 4 Asthma Drugs Get New Precaution
• FDA: Some Zicam Cold Remedies Are Risky
• FDA Warns of Bacteria in Clarcon Skin Products
• New Use for Active Ingredient of Cialis
• Hydroxycut Recall Due to Liver Injuries
• Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drug Besivance Approved
• FDA Eyes Acetaminophen Liver Risk
• FDA OKs Cimzia for Rheumatoid Arthritis

 

June 24, 2009

• Mediterranean Diet May Boost Longevity
• Bariatric Surgery Cuts Women's Cancer Risk
• Migraines, Brain Lesions: New Links Seen
• Youthful Obesity Linked to Pancreatic Cancer
• Steve Jobs' Reported Liver Transplant
• Marijuana Smoke Linked to Cancer
• Patients Not Always Told of Lab Results
• Schizophrenia Linked to Early Death
• Solitude Speeds Effects of Aging
• New Therapy May Fight Prostate Cancer
• Why Buy Bottled Water? It's Convenient
• How Old Are You Inside? Blood Test May Tell

Drug and Product Watch

Drug and product warnings, alerts, and recalls

• FDA Warns of E. coli Risk From Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough
• Stamina-Rx Supplements Recalled
• 4 Asthma Drugs Get New Precaution
• FDA: Some Zicam Cold Remedies Are Risky
• FDA Warns of Bacteria in Clarcon Skin Products
• New Use for Active Ingredient of Cialis
• Hydroxycut Recall Due to Liver Injuries
• Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drug Besivance Approved
• FDA Eyes Acetaminophen Liver Risk
• FDA OKs Cimzia for Rheumatoid Arthritis

 

June 26, 2009

• Michael Jackson Dies of Reported Cardiac Arrest
• EPA: Pollution Cancer Risk Is Falling
• Generic Plan B Pill for Women 17 and Younger
• Beef Recalled Due to E. coli Risk
• 1 Million Swine Flu Cases in U.S.
• Study: Overweight People Live Longer
• Help for High-Risk Heart Attacks
• Experimental Pill Fights Inherited Cancer
• Do Bone Tests Help Monitor Osteoporosis?
• Study: Alcohol Tied to Nearly 1 in 25 Deaths
• Bariatric Surgery Cuts Women's Cancer Risk
• Vinegar May Aid in Fat Loss

 

June 25, 2009

• Michael Jackson Dies of Reported Cardiac Arrest
• Swine Flu Vaccine: The Race is On
• Fatty Diet Linked to Pancreatic Cancer
• New Clues on How Hypnosis Works
• Young, HIV-Positive, and Unaware
• EPA: Pollution Cancer Risk Is Falling
• Generic Plan B Pill for Women 17 and Younger
• Beef Recalled Due to E. coli Risk
• 1 Million Swine Flu Cases in U.S.
• Study: Overweight People Live Longer
• Help for High-Risk Heart Attacks
• Experimental Pill Fights Inherited Cancer

June 30, 2009

• Acetaminophen and Liver Injury: Are You Aware of the Risks?
• Teen Fatalism Linked to Risky Behavior
• New Rheumatoid Arthritis Drug in the Works
• Michael Jackson Dies of Reported Cardiac Arrest
• Swine Flu Vaccine: The Race is On
• Fatty Diet Linked to Pancreatic Cancer
• New Clues on How Hypnosis Works
• Young, HIV-Positive, and Unaware
• EPA: Pollution Cancer Risk Is Falling
• Farrah Fawcett Dies of Anal Cancer
• Beef Recalled Due to E. coli Risk
• 1 Million Swine Flu Cases in U.S.

 

 

"Repairing the Stroke-Damaged Brain: Noninvasive electrical therapy combined with rehab boosts recovery after stroke," by Emily Singer, MIT's Technology Review, June 24, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22921/?nlid=2126

A simple, inexpensive device that delivers electrical current to the brain noninvasively could help stroke patients recover lost motor ability. According to a new study, the treatment--transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)--in combination with occupational therapy boosted recovery better than either treatment on its own.

Many patients spontaneously recover some function in the weeks and months after suffering a stroke, as their brains reorganize to compensate for the damaged area. Scientists are searching for ways to both boost and focus this innate plasticity, thus improving neural repair. Electrical activity is one option under study: electrical current applied to the brain can modulate brain-cell activity--a crucial component of neural remodeling.

In tDCS, an electrical current is passed directly to the brain through the scalp and skull. (The treatment generates just a slight tingle, if anything, in the patient.) Previous research has shown that applying tDCS to the motor cortex can improve motor performance in healthy people and, to some extent, in stroke patients. But most previous studies have tested just a single treatment, and few have used it in conjunction with rehabilitation exercises.

In the current study, Gottfried Schlaug and his collaborators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, tested 20 patients who had suffered a stroke an average of 2.5 years previously and still had moderate to severe impairments. Patients performed 60 minutes of occupational therapy each day for five days, while also receiving a 30-minute session of either active electrical stimulation or a placebo--a fake treatment designed to mimic electrical stimulation.

The researchers used a simple device--a nine-volt battery connected to large flat sponges that are moistened and then applied to the head--that has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for delivering drugs across the skin. (The current encourages the movement of charged drug molecules across the skin.)

A week after the start of the experiment, patients given the real treatment performed much better on a number of motor tests--including tests of strength, range of movement, and practical functions such as grasping a cup--than those who received the fake treatment, improving by about 12 to 15 percent versus about 3 to 5 percent, says Schlaug. He presented the research at a conference in San Francisco this week sponsored by the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.

"Men Told Have Sex Daily to Boost Sperm Quality, Fertility," Fox News, June 30, 2009 --- http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,529525,00.html?test=latestnews

When men go without ejaculating, the number of sperm stored in the epididymis at the top of the testicle increases, hence the standard advice to have sex every two to three days if you are trying to conceive.

The longer that sperm sits in the epididymis, however, the more genetic damage it accumulates through exposure to heat and to oxygen free radicals. Regular ejaculation empties this sperm reservoir, ensuring that newly-produced sperm of higher genetic quality can get out.

Forwarded by Paula

ZIPLOC OMELET --- http://www.azcentral.com/12news/recipes/articles/2008/04/21/20080421ziplocomelet.04212008-CR.html

Have guests write their name on a quart-size Ziploc freezer bag with permanent marker.

Crack 2 eggs (large or extra-large) into the bag (not more than 2) shake to combine them.

Put out a variety of ingredients such as: cheeses, ham, onion, green pepper, tomato, hash browns, salsa, etc. If you put in hash browns, don't use the freezer type or your omelet will get watery. Use the ones from the refrigerator isle.

Each guest adds prepared ingredients of choice to their bag and shake. Make sure to get the air out of the bag and zip it up.

Place the bags into rolling, boiling water for exactly 13 minutes [we did 15 minutes]. You can usually cook 6-8 omelets in a large pot. For more, make another pot of boiling water.

Open the bags and the omelet will roll out easily. Be prepared for everyone to be amazed.

Nice to serve with fresh fruit and coffee cake; everyone gets involved in the process and a great conversation piece.

Bad Writing Contest
The results are in for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2009. The annual award -- from the English department at San Jose State University -- honors the worst opening sentences for imaginary novels. This year's winner, David McKenzie, offered the following: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."
"Bad Writing Contest," Inside Higher Ed, June 30, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/30/qt#202292

Forwarded by Maxine

Yesterday I confused by Poli-Grip with my Preparation H.
Now I talk like an a-hole but my gums don't itch.

Nominated for a Darwin Award --- http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1994-27.html
March 1989, South Carolina)
Michael Anderson Godwin was a lucky murderer whose death sentence had been commuted (after a long struggle) to life in prison. Ironically, he was sitting on the metal toilet in his cell and attempting to fix the TV set when he bit down on a live wire and electrocuted himself.

Should be nominated for a Darwin Award ---
http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/2009/June09/27/Mil_electro-27Jun09.htm
A 64-year-old man, said to be impatient after Friday’s storm because the power had not been restored to his home, took a demolition saw and tried to cut through downed wires and was electrocuted. A witness told the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office Mieczyskaw Mil of 1160 Route 97 in Pond Eddy had been drinking and attempted to cut through the cable which turned out to be a 4,800 volt feeder line that was hanging off a pole. Just after midnight on Saturday morning, the Lumberland Fire Department requested the police to the scene for a disorderly person

10 Ways You Know You're Married to a Geek Dad --- Click Here
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/06/top-10-ways-you-know-you%E2%80%99re-married-to-a-geekdad/

1. You spend your honeymoon at a theme park. (Sadly, Legoland wasn’t built then…)

2. You never know when you’ll walk into the dining room to find the table covered with a computer broken down into all its component parts.

3. He installs stilts under the legs of your bed so his comic book boxes can fit underneath.

4. He keeps his spare change in a Miss Piggy bank (with a coin slot where her cleavage would be).

5. The ornaments on your Christmas tree consist of Romulan Warbirds, shuttlecraft, and Borg cubes.

6. He asks you to dress up as Catwoman for Halloween. (Sorry, no photo of that one!)

7. He’ll patiently spend an hour building a tower for your four-year-old Superman to break down – and then comfort him when it collapses prematurely.

8. He spent more for his bicycles (and each of the kids’ bicycles) than for some of the cars you’ve owned.

9. Your kids’ college fund consists of a trunkful of first issues of his favorite comic books.

10. He’ll sit down with the kids and read through the trunkful of first issues, college fund be damned. (Well, maybe not Watchmen #1.)

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

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

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

Three Finance Blogs

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

Some Accounting Blogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Materials (especially video) from PBS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accountancy Discussion ListServs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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