Accounting & Investing Info for San Antonio A & M
Sunday March 11, 2012
Students attending Southwest Teaching and Learning Conference need to register. This is the case even if you are simply observing.
Registration for TAMUSA students is free at
http://swtlc.wordpress.com/registration/
Friday March 9, 2012
I have attempted, without much success, to get professors and students interested in socionomics. This is a new social science of prediction. The idea is that our social moods are endogenously created by ourselves rather than outside forces. That mood drives societal change. This is counter intuitive, most people assume we are driven by news events. But in fact our mood drives the news.
Here Robert Prechter explains the theory in a handy 28 minute interview on RT Capital Account.
Please feel free to make a post on this site about your reaction or comments. I will be attending hte Socionomics Instiuttue Conference in Atlanta April 13-14 next month.
Wed March 7, 2012
Allen Stanford was found guilty on 13 counts of promoting Ponzi Scheme. The WSJ has the better story 
than this link but surf around and you can find more. The WSJ is not accessible to all.
Once again the SEC investigators found evidence and turned it into the SEC but the regulators did nothing.
ABC had interviewed Stanford about his promises of above market rates of return on Caribbean Cerfiticates of Deposit. he of course denied it. Ethics students will want to incorporate this story in some of their presentations.
Wh's the worst?
Stanford for taking investors for a ride.
Gullible investors for believing another too good to be true story.
The SEC, always on salary, never doing anything.
Congress for passing burdensome legislation that is never enforced on the rule breakers until it is too 
late.
Voters for putting up with it.
I report you decide.
Tuesday March 6, 2012
TAMUSA is sponsoring its fourth annual Southwest Teaching and Learning Coference March 30 and 31 at Main Campus.
Many of my graduate students are presenting Saturday March 31. I am rrequesting that undergrad students and grad students not making presentations
either volunteer as moderators
to do so contact khenrie@tamusa.tamus./edu that would be Professor Kenneth Henrie, please indicate the following to Professor Henrie who writes as follows
Or
Plan to attend presentation sessions on saturday morning at main campus. Plan on writing up your experience and impressions to post on the discussion site. I will post the program as soon as it is available.
Sunday March 4, 2012
Here are some interesting photos of WWII USA Airplane Factories.
All are government pictures so the ladies are posed and well dressed but still an interesting look back at that era. Just in time for Women's Hstory Month.
Sunday March 3, 2012
Here is a great look back at women working in aircraft factories in WW II. Just in time for
Women's History Month. That is a power drill not a rivet gun and she should be wearing eye protection.
Tuesday Feb 28, 2012
The high yen has Japanese manufacturers running for cover, why? Because goods produced in Japan using the yen are higher priced than goods produced in countries with currencies lower relative to the yen. Toyota is having trouble making money as are other Japanese firms.
The oldes joke in cost accounting tells the story of a business that lost money on every unit sold. Asked how the firm would make money the CEO replied, we will make it up on volume! That reflected the last ten years for Panasonic. The new CEO promises to focus on profit not volume.
Note in this article that Panasonic is writing its investment in Sanyo Down. This is an example of fair value accounting or using an impairment test to determine carrying values. We are studying just that in Intermed II right now.
And Elpida the largest Japanese maker of DRAM chips filed for Bankrutpcy, again the strong yen was just too strong to support exports in a competitive market.
Monday Feb 27, 2012
Olympus has installed an insder as the new President and one of their bankers as cahriman. This is hardly the fresh team that outside investors have been clammoring for. This is classic govt bank industry collusion in Japan. Years ago Boone Pickens attempted to get a seat on the Board of headlight manufacturer Kyoto. He was rebuffed.
This sort of thing is another reason Japan's markets peaked in 1989 and have not recovered since. There is a reluctaince to make big changes.
Monday Feb 27, 2012
Here is a list of the ten fastest tracks at NASCAR. Note the comment that NASCAR has changed the rules to bring speeds down in the name of safety. Hmm, really?
Eyeball the list and the ninth and tenth track come in about 188 mph. Now just how fast is that, glad you asked.
Let's convert that to feet per minute. By the way 188 mph is 300 kilometers per hour. This is the electronically limited to speed for super bikes or motorcycles like the Honda Black Hawk. Presumably that is in the name of safety as well.
188 x 5200/3600 = 271.5 feet per second! (5200 feet in a mile and 60 x 60 or 3600 seconds in an hour)
So at 188 mph one is travelling 271 feet per second. Let's put that in perspective.
A football field is 300 feet long. So at this speed one has covered 90% ( 271/300) of the field or 90 yards roughly
in, yes
one second.
I have a digital watch that counts off seconds, You might look at a watch right now to get an idea of just how quickly a second goes by.
The point of all this, do you really think that a human has fast enough reflexes, or that there is mechancial ability to adjust direction, at 271 fps. I don't think so, Consider that in the major baseball leagues, hardly anyone can do better than a 30% batting average against a pitcher throwing a baseball at 90 mph. So double that speed, put you in a 3500 pound car, and…
I suspect the person in the car is not driving so much as just pointing the car in one direction and hoping nothing goes wrong.
My point here is that one should consider all statistics in light of what is humanly possible.
Danica Patrick has moved to NASCAR and had two crashes in qualifying for Daytona 500. I wonder if she has done this sort of calculation. Earnhardt was going about 170 MPH when he crashed as I recall. We wish her well but really
wWouldn't this be just as interesting at say 100 mph? But then I thnk flag rather than tackle football results in a very different game by requiring much more agile players.
We wish Danica well.
Professor Elam 