Blaming Deregulation

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/05/AR2008100501253.html

Monday, October 6, 2008; Page A15

The financial turmoil has pushed the Obama campaign into the lead, and this is mostly justified. Barack Obama is more thoughtful on the economy than his opponent, and his bench of advisers is superior. But there’s a troubling side to the Democratic advance. The claim that the financial crisis reflects Bush-McCain deregulation is not only nonsense. It is the sort of nonsense that could matter.

That gave central bankers a choice: Should they carry on targeting regular consumer inflation, which Chinese exports had pushed down, or should they restrain asset inflation, which Chinese savings had pushed upward? Alan Greenspan’s Fed chose to stand aside as asset prices rose; it preferred to deal with bubbles after they popped by cutting interest rates rather than by preventing those bubbles from inflating. After the dot-com bubble, this clean-up-later policy worked fine. With the real estate bubble, it has proved disastrous.

So the first cause of the crisis lies with the Fed, not with deregulation. If too much money was lent and borrowed, it was because Chinese savings made capital cheap and the Fed was not aggressive enough in hiking interest rates to counteract that. Moreover, the Fed’s track record of cutting interest rates to clear up previous bubbles had created a seductive one-way bet. Financial engineers built huge mountains of debt partly because they expected to profit in good times — and then be rescued by the Fed when they got into trouble.

Of course, the financiers did create those piles of debt, and they certainly deserve some blame for today’s crisis. But was the financiers’ miscalculation caused by deregulation? Not really.

The key financiers in this game were not the mortgage lenders, the ratings agencies or the investment banks that created those now infamous mortgage securities. In different ways, these players were all peddling financial snake oil, but as Columbia University’s Charles Calomiris observes, there will always be snake-oil salesmen. Rather, the key financiers were the ones who bought the toxic mortgage products. If they hadn’t been willing to buy snake oil, nobody would have been peddling it.

Who were the purchasers? They were by no means unregulated. U.S. investment banks, regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, bought piles of toxic waste. U.S. commercial banks, regulated by several agencies, including the Fed, also devoured large quantities. European banks, which faced a different and supposedly more up-to-date supervisory scheme, turn out to have been just as rash. By contrast, lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part — though they are now vulnerable to the broader credit crunch because they operate with borrowed money.

If that doesn’t convince you that deregulation is the wrong scapegoat, consider this: The appetite for toxic mortgages was fueled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the super-regulated housing finance companies. Calomiris calculates that Fannie and Freddie bought more than a third of the $3 trillion in junk mortgages created during the bubble and that they did so because heavy government oversight obliged them to push money toward marginal home purchasers. There’s a vigorous argument about whether Calomiris’s number is too high. But everyone concedes that Fannie and Freddie poured fuel on the fire to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

So blaming deregulation for the financial mess is misguided. But it is dangerous, too, because one of the big challenges for the next president will be to defend markets against the inevitable backlash that follows this crisis. Even before finance went haywire, the Doha trade negotiations had collapsed; wage stagnation for middle-class Americans had raised legitimate questions about whom the market system served; and the food-price spike had driven many emerging economies to give up on global agricultural markets as a source of food security. Coming on top of all these challenges, the financial turmoil is bound to intensify skepticism about markets. Framing the mess as the product of deregulation will make the backlash nastier.

The next president will have to make some subtle choices. In certain areas, markets need to be reformed — by pushing murky “over-the-counter” trades between banks onto transparent exchanges, for example. In other areas, government needs to fix itself — by not subsidizing reckless mortgage lending. But a president who has a mandate only to reregulate will be a boxer with a missing glove. By going along with the market skepticism of his party, Obama may end up winning an election while compromising his presidency.

smallaby@cfr.org

Do Facts Matter?

Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama’s rhetoric and the media’s spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years– including the present year– denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today’s financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, five years ago.

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration “right-wing ideology” of “de-regulation” that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?

We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn’t.

Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?

Then there is the question of being against the “greed” of CEOs and for “the people.” Franklin Raines made $90 million while he was head of Fannie Mae and mismanaging that institution into crisis.

Who in Congress defended Franklin Raines? Liberal Democrats, including Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus, at least one of whom referred to the “lynching” of Raines, as if it was racist to hold him to the same standard as white CEOs.

Even after he was deposed as head of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines was consulted this year by the Obama campaign for his advice on housing!

The Washington Post criticized the McCain campaign for calling Raines an adviser to Obama, even though that fact was reported in the Washington Post itself on July 16th. The technicality and the spin here is that Raines is not officially listed as an adviser. But someone who advises is an adviser, whether or not his name appears on a letterhead.

The tie between Barack Obama and Franklin Raines is not all one-way. Obama has been the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae’s financial contributions, right after Senator Christopher Dodd.

But ties between Obama and Raines? Not if you read the mainstream media.

Facts don’t matter much politically if they are not reported.

The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public. Republicans, for reasons unknown, don’t seem to know what it is to counter-attack. They deserve to lose.

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc

Deregulation Not to Blame for Financial Woes

By Peter Wallison

The Democrats are wrong in claiming that financial services deregulation is to blame for the current financial crisis-if anything, the financial sector has seen increased regulation since the savings and loan collapse in the 1980s. The lax supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which Republicans sought to strengthen in 2005, is the true culprit of this financial crisis.

In the debate on September 26, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama argued that the current crisis in the financial markets is the result of Republican deregulation.

The advertising from his campaign has been saying the same thing, and this claim is becoming a fixed element in the talking points of Democratic candidates this year.

The credibility of the charge depends on ignoring several important facts:

- There has been a great deal of deregulation in our economy over the last 30 years, but none of it has been in the financial sector or has had anything to do with the current crisis. Almost all financial legislation, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Improvement Act of 1991, adopted after the savings and loan collapse in the late 1980s, significantly tightened the regulation of banks.

- The repeal of portions of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999-often cited by people who know nothing about that law-has no relevance whatsoever to the financial crisis, with one major exception: it permitted banks to be affiliated with firms that underwrite securities, and thus allowed Bank of America Corp. to acquire Merrill Lynch & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to buy Bear Stearns Cos. Both transactions saved the government the costs of a rescue and spared the market substantial additional turmoil.

None of the investment banks that got into financial trouble, specifically Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., were affiliated with commercial banks, and none were affected in any way by the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

It is correct to say that there has been significant deregulation in the U.S. over the last 30 years, most of it under Republican auspices. But this deregulation-in long-distance telephone rates, air fares, securities-brokerage commissions, and trucking, to name just a few sectors of the economy where it occurred-has produced substantial competition and innovation, driving down consumer costs and producing vast improvements and efficiencies in our economy.

The Internet, for example, wouldn’t have been economically possible without the deregulation of data-transfer rates. Amazon.com Inc., one of the most popular Internet vendors, wouldn’t have been viable without trucking deregulation.

- Republicans have favored financial regulation where it was necessary, as in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while the Democrats have opposed it. In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a tough regulatory bill for Fannie and Freddie over the unanimous opposition of committee Democrats. The opposition of the Democrats when the bill reached the full Senate made its enactment impossible.

Barack Obama did nothing; John McCain endorsed the bill in a speech on the Senate floor.

- The subprime and other junk mortgages that Fannie and Freddie bought-and the market in these mortgages that their buying spawned-are the underlying cause of the financial crisis. These are the mortgages that the Treasury Department is asking for congressional authority to buy. If the Democrats had allowed the Fannie and Freddie reform legislation to become law in 2005, the entire financial crisis might have been avoided.

Policies that center on deregulation are probably hard for the voting public to grasp, and that has allowed Democratic candidates to spread the idea that there is a connection between deregulation and the current crisis. But an Obama victory, based in part on the claim that deregulation has caused the financial crisis, will create a mandate for new regulation where it isn’t necessary and will do harm to our economy.

Just google: bail-out pelosi stupid woman. You will see.

If the crisis is inevitable, let it be. After all, we all should be responsible for what we’ve done.

MaCain should stay central, rather than move to the right, if he is to win the election.

I tried hard to leave my first position and move here. I thought it was because of the dull environment that made me unhappy and life sucked in every way. After I moved here, I find it is really not the place, but rather your attitude, or how you live your life matters. If you are coward, lazy, then nothing can save you. If you are not satisfied, then do you best to change it. If you don’t like yourself, why do you expect others to like you? After all, we are what we repeatedly do. To develop a good habits takes guts and will to break away from your comfort zone, and resist the temptation for ease and desire. Though it may be hard, the reward is your confidence, and consequently your achievements.

If that is what you want, why not do it now?

This is the first time after I came back to town that I feel how far away we are from each other. Maybe that’s because it is also the first time I feel that both of us stopped trying to pull each other closer. We both have holes in our hearts that we can’t fill for each other, no matter how intense we feel we love. You crave for a social life; I crave for a person who has his whole heart for me. Since when have we had the holes? I only hope someday they will disappear.

It Never Rains In Southern California
Albert Hammond

Got on board a westbound seven-forty-seven
Didn’t think before deciding what to do
All that talk of opportunities
TV breaks and movies
Rang true, sure rang true

Seems it never rains in Southern California
Seems I’ve often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But, girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours, man, it pours

Out of work, I’m out of my head
Out of self-respect, I’m out of bread
I’m underloved, I’m underfed
I wanna go home

It never rains in California
But, girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours, man, it pours

Will you tell the folks back home I nearly made it
Had offers but don’t know which one to take
Please, don’t tell them how you found me
Don’t tell them how you found me
Gimme a break, gimme a break

Seems it never rains in Southern California
Seems I’ve often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But, girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours, man, it pours

Although the temperature is still high here, the summer is over. It’s time to work now!

For Aquarius: new sights, sounds and people capture your interest; an importnat presentation goes over very well; you and your hot new crush share a valuable interest.

I know, I know, there’s something wrong with me. But it does sound reasonable and true. I mean the middle part of course.

When Edwin asked me a couple of days ago where I wanted to go for dinner, the first thing came to my mind was In-N-Out. I’ve been missing it ever since I had it while I was in CA the first summer. And, today, I read a article from In Touch (yes, I should be ashamed of myself) about Brangelina. Brad is fed up with their stay in France and misses his home. He joked to his friends, “send In-N-Out burgers”.

Good or bad, only time will tell. But at least the good thing is that I don’t have to lie anymore. Just remember what I told myself last Thanksgiving: live life to the fullest, even if just for the sake of what I’ve given up. And remember, spoon, little superman, zz, vera, nan, and ek will always be there for me.

This is what Tong left on my MSN this morning, all of a sudden, out of nothing. But I know why she said that, and it means a lot to me. Though we’ve never talked about it, I always know, even when we were kids, that we are much alike and we share the same desire and ambition to live life to the full. So, yes, I will.

I couldn’t help crying when I saw the pictures – everything looks so familiar, but now they have been left behind of our lives forever. Remember what is said on the decoration stone that we bought from the flower shop? The one who touches your life will be in your heart forever. I believe that includes places too. No matter how you hate the place, when you leave, you feel that you lose something; because you realize that it is not the place that frustrates you, but what in your heart.

You didn’t know how much I missed you during the past ten months, just as you don’t know how I am going to miss you in the months ahead. Memories and feelings grow with me, actually they grow in me. Before I know, they become part of my body. That’s why when I tried to cut them out, the pain was unbearable, and I realized that I would never, ever be parted with them. I know I need to be strong and positive, but please let me save it to tomorrow, because today, with you flying to a place that is thousands of miles away from me, I am simply vulnerable and sad.

I know this is not really a place for documenting research progress. But just for convenience and a way of forcing myself to be more productive, can I keep a research log here?

I will be in CA alone, literally, without any furniture for at least half month. Even though the school generously covers all the moving expense, I screwed things up because of my laziness.

Several lessons are learned from this trouble. First, never assume the world is same as you expected, especially when it comes to issues related to others. I thought I had an oral agreement with the rental office that if I move out this month and they find people to take my lease, my last month rent can be waived. However, a week ago, the rental office told me that I have to move out this month and I had to pay the last month rent, regardless the agreement, because the contract said so. But why did not they object the agreement two months ago? This is largely my fault. I should have read the contract and asked all the consequences, especially the adversary ones, when I submitted the moving out notice. It was them who tricked me into this trouble, but it was me who is stupid and lazy enough to be trapped.

Second, everything takes time. It may be ok to assume away leadtime, but in the real world, leadtime plays a critical role in determining the sequence of events. In fact, the difficulty of scheduling and planning of many business is largely due to the uncertain leadtime. For example, I should have noticed the school and planned my moving much earlier, instead of two weeks ahead. Consequently, I should have gave more flexibility in terms of my moving out time. I could have stayed until the end of July. But why did I offer to move out this month (except the rent incentive)? Had not been the prompt response from the moving company (not the school), I would end up in a much bigger trouble. I even forget a very basic principle as an engineering background: redundancy is always desirable, and critical to the reliability of a system.

Besides the nightmare with my rental office, there are still more trouble to experience: I got to pay three weeks car rental fees and live without furniture for at least half month. If our experiences mean something for our future, just wish I do not have to learn in such hard way every time.

I can’t say that I am a big fan of French movies, but from time to time, I find ones that touch my heart. Like this one, Jeux d’enfants, which has been translated into English as Love Me If You Dare, and into Chinese as 两小无猜. The two translations seem to suggest two totally different movies – the latter conveys something about innocence and pure love, while the former is filled with seduction and temptation. However, the film indeed tells a story about both.

Do you dare to make the bride cry at a wedding? Do you dare to stand on a rail with your eyes closed? Do you dare to cut off contact for ten years? Do you dare to smile even when facing tragedies? To me, Sophie and Julien just met too young. They thought they had the entire life ahead of them, and they could do anything about it and still would end up together. They lived by playing, and played by living. Sophie didn’t have the usual, careless elegance that French women had, she was from Poland after all. But she had something even more attractive: her passion and her wildness. Actually there were nothing that they dare not do to, even dying together in a cement wall. It was their way to say no to being an adult, which means ”to have a speedometer that marks 210 and not driving over 60”. It was their final rebellion, but wasn’t that a price too high to pay?

Lakers won the game 4, which they must win. However, it is hard to see that they can survive the next two guest games in Boston. It is clear that Lakers are good at offence, but they are too slow to defend Celtics.

I am reading old posts and come across this one: THOUSANDS MILES AWAY, written at the same time one year ago. The only difference is that we are on the opposite side of the story.

5.22. Thousand miles apart, over three time zone, plus a month away, God seems to test the five months new Union with his most demanding tempo-spacial distance. Only one day apart, life has witnessed a drastic change in mood-weather with uneasiness permeating everywhere. We all know the life will not be the same a month later, no matter how we keep calling each other. Just wish such temporary apart will kindle more sparkles to our ‘Union’.

I am thinking, which one is more difficult, being in the old place without someone or being in a new place without someone? I would prefer the former – at least I can go to the places that we went together and feel your presence… But I agree, it’s a test – we can try our best, but we don’t know the result.

5.23. Life is just like a long journey. In many cases, what you experience on the way are more important than the destination itself. When you arrive at the destination, the purpose that encourages your whole trip is all of sudden disappeared. And that makes one feel lost. At least that is my feeling from road trips.

By the way, when labeled with ‘Dialogue’, it means dialogue. So the direct inputs on the post, rather than comments, are expected

“When you arrive at the destination, the purpose that encourages your whole trip is all of sudden disappeared. And that makes one feel lost.” This was exactly what my brother said when I talked to him last night. Are we the same kind of person? If so, I won’t be surprised. It may be our destiny that we’ll have to endure more in life, but in return, we experience more and therefore live a fuller life.

5.24. We all know the incident is the solely result of somebody’s paranoia. I’ll stand by you in any case.

5.25. Understanding – that’s all what I am asking for now. It’s hard to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, especially when we are apart and under different circumstances. Also, it’s a mutual thing. Let’s try our best!

5.27. It has been almost a week. I can still feel your touch, though we are thousands of miles away. Everyday, I try to be positive, but the only happy time I have is the time when we talk. But now, talking is harder and harder. Shutting down again? Long-distance is difficult enough. Don’t torture us anymore, please!

5.28. Well, the machine resumes working status again with a decreasing failure rate due to the careful maintenance by the technician.

Technorati : OLD POSTS

Apple announced new 3G iPhone with added GPS and A-GPS functions beginning at 200 USD. They finally get the price right. It is unclear whether it is the pressure from the competitors, such as Nokia, or the overall economic situations. But finally they put their foot down to the earth.

With her driving back to the east is the end of this incredible episode. It was a short and intense week with emotional burst, memory, love, fear, hope, etc. It was just too quick, too hard to digest and see clearly what it really means for the future.

But shall we dance again?

Another Day in Paradise:

…

The problem with Chinese government is that, even if this time they may be right, they just don’t have the credibility necessary to convey the truth.

” It is the choice of man. A man takes pleasure in being a man–the peaceful night, the monotony, and this ordinary life. To put it simple, a man enjoys the solitude road to the fucking awesome. “

So that is the distance you wish, and I will respect it.

But if the past has any meaning for the future, just wish this is not a solo place.

Technorati : INFORMATION, NEWS, TIBET

By DAVID BARBOZA

Published: March 25, 2008

SHANGHAI – Chinese officials have sharply criticized foreign reporters here over their coverage of the riots in Tibet, accusing them of biased reporting and preventing them from traveling to Tibet or neighboring provinces to report on the unrest.

The government has also begun a propaganda campaign aimed at persuading the public that the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, instigated the violence in Tibet on March 14 and that China was a victim of separatist terrorist activity.

The Tibetan government in exile said Tuesday that the death toll from the demonstrations was about 140. Previously, it had said that 99 protesters had died. China has put the death toll at 22.

The Chinese government’s effort is the clearest sign yet of its concern that the Tibet unrest, as well as antigovernment protests over Darfur, could disrupt the Olympic Games this summer in Beijing.

The government appears to be blocking foreign Web sites inside China and censoring foreign television broadcasts here about Tibet. Youtube.com was blocked after the riots began, and CNN and BBC broadcasts regularly go black after mention of riots in Tibet. The New York Times Web site appears to have been blocked or censored in recent days.

Over the weekend, the government allowed Chinese Web sites, which are usually heavily censored for political content, to post sharp critiques of foreign news media reports about Tibet and to show graphic, violent images of Tibetans looting and attacking ethnically Han Chinese in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, on March 14.

The images have fueled outrage in China and led to a flurry of Web postings vehemently critical of Tibetans.

State-controlled news media have been allowed to report from Tibet and neighboring areas where violent protests occurred. But foreign journalists have been denied access to Tibet and blocked from reaching neighboring regions with large Tibetan populations. Many foreign reporters who managed to get into Tibet after the riots were forced to leave.

Foreign journalists in China say these actions violate the government’s pledge to give them greater press freedoms and access to the country in the months leading to the Olympics.

“At a time when China is promising to become more open with the world, this is a big disappointment,” said Jocelyn Ford, a freelance journalist based in Beijing and chairwoman of the media freedoms committee of the Foreign Correspondents Club there.

To appease foreign reporters, Beijing told several journalists Monday that a group of about 12 correspondents would be able to travel to Lhasa for a special government-guided tour of the city this week. Whether they will be allowed to interview people independently is unclear.

The government has issued no official statement criticizing the foreign news media. But in recent days state-controlled newspapers, television stations and Internet sites have been carrying stories and commentary with a common theme: foreign media distortions. The official Xinhua news agency released a story over the weekend suggesting that film shown by CNN misrepresented the situation. CNN, in a statement, said its coverage was accurate.

“I used to think the Western media were fair,” wrote one person who posted comments online, according to China Daily. “But how could they turn a blind eye to the killing and arson by rioters?”

Gao Zhikai, a former Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, said the foreign media were partly to blame and contended that many of the reports about Tibet had been biased. “If you read the foreign media, the only message you can get is that China is very heavy-handed, and they are doing a lot of bad things in Tibet, and they are totally out of their minds,” Mr. Gao said. “And they talk about the Dalai Lama as if he’s God.”

James Miles, a journalist with The Economist who happened to be in Lhasa during the riots, was praised on Chinese state television, though, after he reported in The Economist and gave an interview to CNN describing the riots and saying that Tibetans were singling out Han Chinese, burning their shops, throwing stones and assaulting them.

The point, some Chinese commentators said, was that the rioters were killing innocent Chinese rather than that the government was shooting protesters.

The government also repeats over and over that the riots were orchestrated by the “Dalai clique” to upstage the Olympics.

The Dalai Lama has said in the past week that he did not organize the riots and that he supports the decision to allow China to hold the Olympics.

The government also insists that the foreign news media do not understand Tibet or efforts by the government to bring prosperity to the region.

Journalists here say the travel and reporting restrictions are making things worse. “Reporters are not even allowed to see the whole story in Tibet,” said Ms. Ford with the Foreign Correspondents Club in Beijing. “We don’t even know why people rioted or what they wanted.”

Georg Blume, a reporter for the German newspaper Die Zeit, was one of the few Western journalists to get into Lhasa after the riots. He arrived on March 15, he said, and saw huge areas damaged by riots, fires and looting.

He says some Tibetans who took part in the riots said they were proud that they were finally able to stand up to the Chinese; others said they were ashamed of the violence.

They complained about social discrimination, unequal pay and rumors that almost everyone had heard that Tibetan monks had been arrested, and even killed, in the days before the riots.

Technorati : INFORMATION, NEWS, TIBET

Had I chosen again, I would get Nissan Z instead of the current car.

Source: http://www.nissanusa.com/z/

I’ve never seen breaking news on Yahoo! Finance shown like this.

How much risk one should take is always a tough and crucial decision.

Beyond the Noise on Free Trade

By N. GREGORY MANKIW

Published: March 16, 2008

NO issue divides economists and mere Muggles more than the debate over globalization and international trade. Where the high priests of the dismal science see opportunity through the magic of the market’s invisible hand, Joe Sixpack sees a threat to his livelihood. This gap in perspective grows especially wide whenever the economy experiences short-run difficulties, as it is now. By all indications, the issue could come to dominate the presidential campaign.

Economists are, overwhelmingly, free traders. A 2006 poll of Ph.D. members of the American Economic Association found that 87.5 percent agreed that “the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade.”

The benefits from an open world trading system are standard fare in introductory economics courses. In my freshman course at Harvard, we start studying the topic in the second week, and we return to issues of globalization throughout the year. The basic lessons can be traced back to Adam Smith of the 18th century and David Ricardo of the 19th century: Trade between two countries creates winners and losers, but it leaves both nations with greater overall prosperity.

The general public, however, is less likely to take its cue from Adam Smith than from Lou Dobbs. In December, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked Americans, “Do you think the fact that the American economy has become increasingly global is good because it has opened up new markets for American products and resulted in more jobs, or bad because it has subjected American companies and employees to unfair competition and cheap labor?”

When this question was asked a decade ago, the public was almost evenly split. In the recent poll, however, only 28 percent endorsed globalization, while 58 percent opposed it. As the economy continues to weaken from problems in the housing and credit markets, you can expect to hear more about foreigners stealing American jobs, regardless of the true merits of the case.

This shift of public opinion toward economic isolationism may well become a political problem for John McCain. Compared with those of either of his possible Democratic rivals, his track record shows him to be a more unequivocal free trader. Here are some examples:

•

In 2002, Mr. McCain voted to give the president “trade promotion authority,” under which trade agreements were no longer subject to amendment by Congress. Barack Obama was not yet in the Senate at that time, but Hillary Rodham Clinton voted against the measure.

•

In April 2005, Mr. McCain voted to table a bill proposed by Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, that would have authorized a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese imports if China failed to revalue its currency. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama voted in support of the tariff proposal.

•

Also in April 2005, when 58 senators asked President Bush not to offer large cuts in farm subsidies as part of the Doha trade negotiations, Mr. McCain declined to put his name on the letter. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama were among the signatories defending the subsidies.

•

In June 2005, Mr. McCain voted to ratify the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement, which lowered trade barriers with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama voted against the treaty (although, in his most recent book, Mr. Obama wrote, “over all, Cafta was probably a net plus for the U.S. economy”).

•

In recent months Mr. McCain has expressed support for the pending free-trade agreement with South Korea, the world’s 12th-largest economy and the seventh-largest trading partner of the United States. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama oppose it.

The most prominent recent flare-up in this debate is over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Negotiations for Nafta began under the first President Bush, and the treaty was eventually passed under (the first?) President Clinton.

Al Gore famously debated Ross Perot about the measure on “Larry King Live” on CNN. While Mr. Perot warned of a “giant sucking sound” sending American jobs south of the border, Mr. Gore gave Mr. Perot a framed portrait of Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley, the congressmen responsible for the tariffs that in the 1930s helped make the Depression great. It was a fine moment, both for political theater and mainstream economics.

Today, Nafta could be hailed as a successful example of the bipartisanship that Mr. Obama promises. Most economists agree with Lawrence H. Summers, a Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, who has said that Nafta “was really a watershed as to whether America was going to stand for larger markets, was going to stand for forward defense of our interests by trying to have a more integrated global economy.”

“It contributed to the strength of our economy,” he added, “both because of more exports and because imports helped to reduce inflation.”

Instead of becoming a beacon of bipartisanship, however, Nafta is the latest whipping boy for the anti-globalization crowd. During their last debate, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama said they would withdraw from the treaty unless Canada and Mexico agreed to further concessions. Canadian authorities were quick to respond that if negotiations were reopened, they would ask for some concessions of their own. True to form, Mr. McCain offered his unconditional support for the landmark agreement.

With the two political parties apparently divided on trade policy, you might expect those free-trade-loving economists to be predominantly Republicans. But that’s not the case. One reason is that economists are not single-issue voters. Like everyone else, they are divided over contentious issues like health policy, the Bush tax cuts and the war in Iraq.

BUT another reason is that many economists don’t really believe the populist rhetoric coming from the Clinton and Obama campaigns. They expect that once in office, either candidate would pursue a policy more like that of Mr. Clinton, who relied heavily on the advice of economic moderates like Mr. Summers and Robert E. Rubin, another former Treasury secretary. When reports surfaced recently of an Obama economic adviser telling the Canadian government to ignore his candidate’s anti-Nafta rhetoric, some people were appalled, but many Democratic economists I know were secretly relieved.

It is hard to be confident, however, that on issues of trade policy either Democratic candidate would act like the last Democratic president. Maybe the candidates’ records as legislators are not good indicators of what their policies might be as president. Maybe campaign rhetoric about Nafta is nothing more than that. But counting on it requires, one might say, the audacity of hope.

N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to President Bush and advised Mitt Romney in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

I really do not have anything to say today.

Just browse through the old posts, which frozen the feelings at that particular point of time, especially with music there.

CNNMoney.com
Economy: Who the candidates really listen to
Wednesday March 5, 12:40 pm ET
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer

You might think that being part of a presidential candidate’s brain trust would mean high-level meetings in plush quarters with good food.

Not exactly. There are high-level meetings – but they’re more likely to be conducted by phone or on the fly between stump speeches.

As for the food, when asked what surprised him most about campaign life, John McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said, “How much I like eating out of vending machines.”

But of course, with an economy to save and crowds to sway, who has time for dinner?

The economy is front and center in people’s minds, and the leading presidential candidates are relying on economic experts to help them win the pocketbook persuasion game.

Here’s a look at the top economic advisers to the leading candidates.

McCain campaign: Douglas Holtz-Eakin

Holtz-Eakin, chief economic adviser to Republican John McCain, is doing his best to upend the old saw that economics is the dismal science.

“The first thing the economics adviser brings to any campaign staff is a hip coolness and bling,” he wrote in the New York Times Freakonomics blog. “Economists want to be valued for their minds and respected for their command of policy proposals … but it just doesn’t work that way,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and former chief economist on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, is well-respected among deficit hawks for his positions on less-than-hip issues like entitlement reform, for which he’s advocated early and often.

In his view, the sooner the long-term shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security are addressed, the better for the economy. Shoring up both programs would involve tough choices when it comes to spending cuts, Holtz-Eakin has said, a route he believes would be more effective than tax increases. Both he and other economists estimate the economy is not likely to grow enough to offset the mandatory spending pressures that will build as Baby Boomers retire.

The country’s “current fiscal policy is unsustainable, as even draconian restraint in the annual spending on defense and nondefense programs are insufficient to guarantee that the current level of taxation will be sufficient to cover promises to seniors in retirement and health programs,” Holtz-Eakin wrote last spring in a public policy journal. “In short, U.S. fiscal policy requires fundamental shifts.”

Delaying reform, he went on to say, “will likely rely more heavily on tax increases to bring the budget into alignment because waiting permits spending to grow and tax increases are ‘quicker’ than benefit reductions.”

Obama campaign: Austan Goolsbee

Austan Goolsbee, a 38-year-old University of Chicago economics professor who advises Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama, is new to the presidential campaign scene. He is mostly an outside-the-Beltway guy, although he is a member of the panel of economists that advises the Congressional Budget Office.

Goolsbee said that one of the hardest parts of his job on the campaign trail was getting used to “having a BlackBerry buzzing on my hip 30 times an hour. It’s not the sort of thing you deal with as an economics professor.”

Neither is the current controversy over a conversation he had with a Canadian official about NAFTA.

But he is used to the politically fraught debate over how much to tax high-income Americans. In his estimate, the sky won’t fall if the top tax rate returns to 39.6% from the current 35%.

In one of his New York Times columns, Goolsbee points to data showing income for the top 1% of earners rose disproportionately relative to everyone else both when tax rates fell and when they rose.

“Seeing the same pattern … indicates that tax cuts weren’t responsible. It suggests that cuts for high-income taxpayers likely gave windfalls to those whose incomes were already rising sharply because of broader market forces,” he wrote.

Though he’s advising a Democrat, he’s managed to garner respect from some unlikely corners. “[Goolsbee] seems to be the sort of person – amiable, empirical and reasonable – you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be,” conservative columnist George Will wrote last October.

Clinton campaign: Gene Sperling

Far more seasoned on the political trail than Goolsbee or Holtz-Eakin is Gene Sperling, economic adviser to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Sperling is a longtime member of the Clinton camp. He was national economic adviser to President Bill Clinton and currently is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which is run by John Podesta, who served as President Clinton’s chief of staff.

What most surprised Sperling about campaign life this time around is how early candidates started talking about policy. In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign put out major proposals five months before Election Day. “This time, the policy announcements were starting a year before Iowa!”

While at the White House, Sperling played a central role in formulating economic policy, from coordinating the president’s Social Security and debt reduction efforts to helping expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income workers.

Following his time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Sperling lent his talents to the Hollywood-version of the White House as a consultant and writer for “The West Wing.” That job, he said, did as much for his personal life as his time in the White House did for his professional one. At his first meeting with the show’s writers, he was seated next to a first-year writer who later became his wife.

In his book “The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity,” Sperling calls for balancing the advantages of a global economy with the goals of protecting workers.

“With hundreds of millions of new middle-class consumers coming into the world economy, we should be confident that in the long run America will win more than it loses from an open global economy,” he writes. “What practical options do we have between simply assuming greater globalization will lift all boats, and resorting to self-defeating protectionism?”

I had dinner with two junior faculty members. I was shocked to know that L. works everyday from 8am to 12am for six days a week! Amazing! It is true that if you want to achieve something, you got to push yourself hard. He actually puts a refrigerator, a microwave and a coffee maker in his office. He eats his lunch in his office… He was not kidding. I can see from his eyes how badly he wants it…

I am really moved…

There is a skeleton in everybody’s heart which is carefully hidden and shows no one. Yesterday I happened to learn some striking and unbelievable past of the one I know well. At first it was really shocking. But it simply confirms my belief that we all live with masks, just a matter of how thick you ware. The world would not be livable if all of us take off the masks.

Mint chocolate chip is Omaba’s favorite ice cream flavor!

Apparently, people do not always say what they really mean. The resultant conflict of words and actions can be extremly confusing. So is Obama on the issue of NAFTA:

Obama campaign mum on NAFTA contact with Canada

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080228/turkey_Gates_080228/20080229?hub=TopStories

PLEASE CITE APPROPRIATELY. Yes. That is from the responding email when I requested a paper which cannot be found online. That last sentence is kind of offending. It reminds me of your opinion of insecurity of some people: the degree of security is a nondecreasing function of people’s competence.

So is the case of this paper: English problem such as
‘On the other hand, …. On the other hand’. Five levels 0,1,2,3,5. I know there are five levels, but shouldn’t it be 0,1,2,3,4? Equation (1) and (4) are apparently wrong. They give the proposed heuristic a fancy name. But it is simply a rolling horizon scheme, hardly a new heuristic…

To be fair, at least the author sent me the paper. But isn’t it that bar too low?

This is the third time I review a paper. I find one problem in academia very distasteful. Many people work on the same problem for many years, with each publication justified by just an epsilon improvement. Of course, they can justify such approach as conducting a focused research with a strong theme. It is just not my taste: how boring the life would be!

The paper I am reviewing falls in this category. The original paper solve an interesting convex optimization problem decently:
s.t. . The following up paper, however, simply replaces the constraint with a convex term in the objective function: . What a boring paper:(

Even if you read books, which might be the most boring ones in the world, you may burst into laughs sometimes.

“Stata displays this partly for the entertianment value. Placing something on the screen periodicaly convinces you that your computer is still working.”

“The argument over style versus substance makes Sen. Clinton a little like the car dealer trying to persuade a buyer that the solid but somewhat staid sedan she offers is a better bet than the sexy but potentially unreliable sports car available down the street.” – Gerald F. Seib, Will Obama Deliver the Beef? in today’s WSJ.

Plus, this one is sexy yet reliable. How can you possibly pass? Check out the position papers on http://www.barackobama.com/.

One irony of the life is that, the ones you love are not always the ones that love you. So are my visits.

RIVERSIDE, CA

The worst time when I had so many things due.

One of them got to work!

It’s just so absurd – Romney is marrying my mom! I don’t remember the whole story, which is not important because it wouldn’t make any sense anyway. All I remember are his eyes and eyebrows, particular, and the way he looked at me. I am definitely in love with Romney – only his look though.

When was the last time you felt so strong about something?

I caught cold this weekend. Really bad one. Cannot do anything but lay down.

The point is, you cannot just lay down. You have so many responsibilities to fulfill, teaching, exams, paper to review, computation needs to be done…

I am tired. Why life is like this? What’s the point?

The weather was so bad today, so I decided to ride the bus to school. I thought it was such a great idea and even planned to take bus everyday, until, I realized that the bus didn’t make the turn that lead to my apartment complex. So there was me, standing in the snow and waiting for a friend to pick me up…

As you said, simple, little things change one’s opinions and feelings of other people. Will your opinion change after you read this? What’s the old Chinese saying? You don’t do things that you don’t want other people to do to you to other people. Politicians are dirty, but some are more decent and graceful than others.

Beginning with the South Carolina debate, and continuing as an applause line in many stump speeches thereafter, Hillary Clinton has accused Barack Obama of representing an inner-city slum lord while practicing law in Chicago. Of all people, Sen. Clinton should know better.

During the Whitewater investigation, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated the legal work performed by Mrs. Clinton, then a partner in the Rose law firm, on behalf of Jim McDougal and his bank, Madison Guaranty. Mr. Starr believed that Mrs. Clinton helped orchestrate the fraudulent land deal known as Castle Grande. He subpoenaed her billing records, hauled her before a grand jury, and relentlessly pursued her.

In her defense, Mrs. Clinton and her attorneys asserted that her involvement in the matter was de minimus. As one of independent counsels who preceded Mr. Starr, I was interviewed repeatedly on the subject. I wholeheartedly defended Mrs. Clinton.

I believed that the evidence revealed that Mrs. Clinton, who spent a total of only 60 hours of work on the case over a 15-month period, was not substantially involved in the matter and did nothing improper in her work on behalf of Madison Guaranty. In the end, no charges were brought against Mrs. Clinton because there was insufficient evidence to prove that she knowingly assisted anyone in the perpetration of a fraud.

Yet, when an opportunity presented itself in the debate, Mrs. Clinton, without so much as a blink of an eye or the slightest blush, denounced Sen. Obama for representing “Tony Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.” Her accusation invites scrutiny. Not so much for the truth of the accusation (the facts are quite straightforward and completely benign) but as a window into Mrs. Clinton’s character and as a lens with which to see whether a Clinton presidency will be a vehicle for change.

The facts are well documented: Upon graduation from Harvard Law School in 1991, Mr. Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law review, could have named his job at any law firm or corporate legal department in America. Instead, he selected a boutique civil rights law firm, Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he represented community organizers, discrimination victims and black voters trying to force a redrawing of city ward boundaries.

During his tenure at Miner Barnhill, the firm accepted the representation of the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., a nonprofit group that redeveloped a run-down property on Chicago’s South Side. Mr. Rezko, not the client of the firm, was assisting Woodland with City housing redevelopment projects. As a junior associate, Mr. Obama was asked by his supervising attorney, William Miceli, to do about five hours of basic due diligence and document review. That began and ended his involvement in the case.

No one who has ever practiced law, let alone Mrs. Clinton, could argue, with a clear conscience, that these five hours on behalf of a church group that partnered with a man who at a later point in time would be alleged to be a scoundrel equated to knowingly representing a Chicago slumlord. Yet she could not resist leveling the accusation.

I suggest that this provides a window into Mrs. Clinton’s character because notwithstanding the enormous suffering she had to endure when accused of wrongful conduct in her representation of Madison Guaranty — a representation that appears to have been no more than a routine business transaction — she is willing to behave no differently than did her Whitewater accusers if she can gain politically. She appears to have learned no lessons from the Starr investigation.

Mrs. Clinton’s willingness to ignore the truth for short-term political advantage is exactly what breeds the partisanship that’s paralyzed Washington for too many years, and the cynicism felt by so many Americans, especially the young. Getting ahead by any means possible is the strategy. Once elected, the candidate falsely believes that he or she will be able to set things right and govern differently. All that was said in the campaign is rationalized — it will be forgiven and forgotten as part of the hyperbole of the election process.

Sadly, it just isn’t so. No one forgets and no one forgives in Washington. (Ask John Kerry if he has gotten over the Swift boat smear campaign.) How you get elected defines who you will be once in power. Mrs. Clinton has shown us with this one simple, baseless accusation why it will be hard for her candidacy to represent a change. She appears too comfortable with the politics of personal destruction if she can gain a political advantage.

You always talk about forever. How long is forever? In many cases, it is like asymptotic analysis: the distance is an arbitrary small epsilon, no matter how small it is, just never meet, or only meet in the sense of forever.

Such a cute song, though a bit too country. Reminds me of the adolescent years.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

If I was a flower growing wild and free
All I’d want is you to be my sweet honey bee.
And if I was a tree growing tall and greeen
All I’d want is you to shade me and be my leaves

If I was a flower growing wild and free
All I’d want is you to be my sweet honey bee.
And if I was a tree growing tall and greeen
All I’d want is you to shade me and be my leaves

All I want is you, will you be my bride
Take me by the hand and stand by my side
All I want is you, will you stay with me?
Hold me in your arms and sway me like the sea.

If you were a river in the mountains tall,
The rumble of your water would be my call.
If you were the winter, I know I’d be the snow
Just as long as you were with me, let the cold winds blow

All I want is you, will you be my bride
Take me by the hand and stand by my side
All I want is you, will you stay with me?
Hold me in your arms and sway me like the sea.

If you were a wink, I’d be a nod
If you were a seed, well I’d be a pod.
If you were the floor, I’d wanna be the rug
And if you were a kiss, I know I’d be a hug

All I want is you, will you be my bride
Take me by the hand and stand by my side
All I want is you, will you stay with me?
Hold me in your arms and sway me like the sea.

If you were the wood, I’d be the fire.
If you were the love, I’d be the desire.
If you were a castle, I’d be your moat,
And if you were an ocean, I’d learn to float.

All I want is you, will you be my bride
Take me by the hand and stand by my side
All I want is you, will you stay with me?
Hold me in your arms and sway me like the sea.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

temporarily or forever?

The primary thing for me now is concentration. I have to be focused in order to get things done. Note that the overhead is too high for parallel precesses.

My mode is as cold as the weather. I am stuck here. Just don’t know how to get out of it. When is Spring?

Ledger, he says, was morose over losing his life with Williams and their baby daughter in Brooklyn. He may not have committed suicide, but he carried on, my source says, with little regard for his health or well-being.It’s hard for the average movie fan, including yours truly, to totally grasp why a guy like Heath Ledger drop-dead handsome, popular, incredibly talented could be depressed about anything.

My source reminds me: “Youre being paid $10 million and wondering if youre worth it. Then your girlfriend kicks you out, youre separated from your child and youre thinking: ‘I’m a big movie star but not popular at home.’ Thats when the trouble starts.”

I’ve always been wondering what happened between him and Michelle. I never think Michelle is good enough for him, but since they have a daughter together, I hope that he’s found his true love. Is this the way she returns for true love?! I hope his heart was not broken when he died. He will forever be one of my favorite character – the handsome, cool, and sweet Patrick in 10 Things I Hate about You.

Edwards was like, I want to say that there are three people in the debate, but not two. Poor guy…

You have a African American, you have a woman, and…., huh,…., you have John.

I had students feedback for my classes. The result is not encouraging. Most of students complained that 1) the pace is too fast, 2) my explanation is not clear, 3) the lecture notes are too hard to follow, 4) they need more examples.

I also talked to G. in the party. He gave me some advises. Americans in general hate math notations. They are scared of those symbols. In contrast, they love to build the class around intuitions. Here in States students have different attitudes as Asians. They don’t face fierce competition as we do. Their life is very relaxed. If this is their culture, if this is their expectation. Then why bother? I don’t deserve to suffer this. Just go easy teach what they can easily learn, test what they were taught in the class. And that is it. We don’t have obligation to teach them more.

This also confirmed my impression. Just go easy stuff, easy grade. If class is easy, they are happy. Don’t teach too much, don’t expect them to work outside the classroom for anything new. They don’t have that attitude. They just want to be fed with formulas and then plug in the numbers. Independent thinking is what they hate most.

According to these information, I should dramatically change my teaching philosophy. I must truly believe that I must lower the level of difficulty. What I really care now should not be how much I teach them, but my teaching evaluation. They don’t deserve my efforts. Therefore, keep it as simple as they want. The first thing I need to do is to change my lecture notes, switching to more easy ones. This is critical. I will use the slides provided by the publisher. I will give easier homework and exams.

1) I will adopt the minimal principle: go very slow with minimal knowledge but verbose explanation.

2). Exercise class every Friday. No matter how tedious they are.

3). They expect they see the homework problems before they head for homework.

As an adult, I should be mature enough to figure out that I need their teaching evaluation for survival. The key is that, if the material is little and easy, they can easily understand. Then they will not complain much. If that is what they want, then sell it that way. I have no obligation to make them think. After all, if they really want to learn, they should not end up here and they will learn any way.

Isn’t it a sad fact that patients don’t know what is good for them? I give up. I am just too good for them (by the way, since this is so offensive to you, I deleted it from the title. At least I need to make you happy ).

Acknowledgment: http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2008/jan/BINGO_CARD.pdf

Through my project, I learned several lessons, some of them in a pretty hard ways. First, you got to have the passion for your work, no matter you like it or not at the beginning. Without it, you can easily be distracted and the work will be dragged on forever. Second, concentration. Any serious work demands long time of focus. Great discoveries or results, those most likely not so obvious, come to you only after long time of hard thinking. Therefore, one should devote a bulk of time to the work, rather than fragmental slots. Third, use simple models to gain intuitions and insights. You have to think it through before you dive into technical details. If things do not work for the simple models, they can hardly work for more sophisticated models. Fourth, intuition is a crucial aspect of this process. Things that do not make sense are useless. Finally, always document and save results. It is not only for the current project, but rather a quick ramp up for your next similar project.

And they don’t serve on Sunday. Sorry.

I need to write this down because I’m afraid that I will forget it before I can figure it out. It was in my dream last night – I haven’t felt that warm and peace for a long time.

Regarding the new estimation of the schedule after multiple delays that Boeing 787 has suffered, the executive who charges the program said that, the latest assessment is more accurate than past guidance, because the October outlook was “based more on analysis,” and this projection reflects more experience and a better understanding of the work involved.

I keep wondering, what else could you base your assessment on?

Thank you again for pointing out the practice in companies and the second way to model the long term forecast. Very helpful

We really should team up for a paper.

Thanks for your patience and spending time in discussing a boring problem when you were really tired. Really appreciated ‘

{Lesson learned: }intuition is more important than the technical details. Unless the things make intuitive sense, they do not warrant the effects.

This is absolutely a hilarous and touching movie – one of the best movies that I’ve seen in recently years. Juno is such a cool, funny, brave, and sweet girl. Love her. And the songs in the movie are beautiful.

Paulie Bleeker: Come on, let me carry your bag.
Juno MacGuff: Oh, what’s another ten pounds?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vanessa Loring: Your parents are probably wondering where you are.
Juno MacGuff: Nah… I mean, I’m already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mac MacGuff: Who is the kid?
Juno MacGuff: The-the baby? I don’t really know much about it other than, I mean, it has fingernails, allegedly.
Bren: Nails, really?
Juno MacGuff: Yeah!
Mac MacGuff: No, I know I mean who’s the father, Juno?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Juno MacGuff: You should’ve gone to China, you know, ’cause I hear they give away babies like free iPods. You know, they pretty much just put them in those t-shirt guns and shoot them out at sporting events.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Juno MacGuff: As far as boyfriends go, Paulie Bleeker is totally boss. He is the cheese to my macaroni.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Paulie Bleeker: I still have your underwear.
Juno MacGuff: I still have your virginity.
Paulie Bleeker: Shut up.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gerta Rauss: So how far along are you?
Juno MacGuff: I’m a junior.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mac MacGuff: That’s kind of skanky. Isn’t that what the girls call it these days? Skanky? You know, tore up from the floor up?

Kobe He: Clinton

Jiazi Hua: Obama

Money on the stake: $40

Lessons learned: You have to have confidence of the game in order to win.

TBC… Another $ 1000.

Kobe He: Clinton, Romney

Jiazi Hua: Obama, Huckabee

Money on the stake: $40

Lessons learned: You have to understand the game in order to win.

TBC… Another $40.

This is definitely something that you feel proud of yourself. And I am pretty sure that I’ll be reminded of this zillions of times in the future. What you may not have known is how much it means to me. I feel love, warmth, caring… Though I was exhausted (…… OK, I know you have something to say here, please feel free to add whatever you want) , it was one of the best days in my life.

Acknowledgment: this post is inspired by somebody’s fantastic idea.

I have never been away, if it means the heart. I have never dropped the hands, if it means love. You have never lost, if it means us. There are certain moments in our life that no one can help. The real difference is how we view the life.

“Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity…” —Gilda Radner

I’ve been thinking about my way back, but finally, I realize, or more precisely I should say I admit, that there is no way back, and there never has been. I just cannot imagine being back, pretending nothing happened. Unless you tell everything, and count on other people’s mercy.

It’s actually nothing new, not to me, and not to you. We’ve known this from the first night, but we’ve both been denying it. I deny because I am scared. No matter how independent I am, I need to know that there is somebody who is always there for me, who makes me feel warm and secure, who is always willing to feed me, without being fed up by me… You deny because you don’t want to take the responsibility, for my future. It is easy and comfortable to say that it is between me and somebody else, but has nothing to do with you. You are correct, it is a decision that I need to make, but how can it be that easy for you to walk away without looking at me struggling there desperately?

After I came back last week, she asked me what happened, and then asked me whether you had promised me a good future. She’s always been the most practical girl and there is nothing wrong about it. However, the only thing I could do was shaking my head at the other end of the phone and feeling the tears going down my cheek. I’ve been waiting the whole week for you to say something to me. I wasn’t expecting a promise or anything like that, I just wanted you to say that you understand my pain and you care, and give me some strength to face the difficult life that is waiting for me. But I guess I am disappointed again. And I guess I’ll have to accept it. There is nothing to regret though – I once stapled the little note on my desk, I once decided to do whatever it takes, I once put my heart, my love, my happiness in somebody’s hands; but the hands dropped… 愿赌服输 – it’s that simple.

I walked out of the accident without any scratch and emotional shock. What was in my mind was the preparation of the Monday’s class and the exam questions. I was just too tired to think of anything else.

In an alien land, who cares if you are perished or not. As long as you are alive, you got continue your duty, your responsibility, your work and your life. Therefore, save your sentiments, you got job to do tomorrow.

Finally I realized that it is not either-or, but a question about life itself. So, be brave, and stay positive.

Creation is fun. So is the accomplishment.

So the life can be classified into two parts, before and after the accident. Luckily, I could experience both of them.

Can a Google Phone Connect With Carriers?

Amol Sharma. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Oct 30, 2007. pg. B.1

Google Inc. is close to unveiling its long-planned strategy to shake up the wireless market, people familiar with the matter say. The Web giant’s ambitious goal: to make applications and services as accessible on cellphones as they are on the Internet.

In a move likely to kick off an intense debate about the future shape of the cellphone industry, Google wants to make it easier for cellphone customers to get a variety of extra services on their phones — from maps to social-networking features to video-sharing. To get its way, however, the search giant will have to overcome resistance from wireless carriers and deal with potentially thorny security and privacy issues.

Google is trying to loosen the grip wireless carriers have over the software and services consumers can access on cellphones. Carriers have considerable clout, especially in the U.S., where they control distribution of phones to consumers through their retail stores.

Within the next two weeks, Google is expected to announce advanced software and services that would allow handset makers to bring Google- powered phones to market by the middle of next year, people familiar with the situation say. In recent months Google has approached several U.S. and foreign handset manufacturers about the idea of building phones tailored to Google software, with Taiwan’s HTC Corp. and South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc. mentioned in the industry as potential contenders. Google is also seeking partnerships with wireless operators. In the U.S., it has the most traction with Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA, while in Europe it is pursuing relationships with France Telecom’s Orange SA and Hutchison Whampoa Ltd.’s 3 U.K., people familiar with the matter say. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

The Google-powered phones are expected to wrap together several Google applications — among them, its search engine, Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail email — that have already made their way onto some mobile devices. The most radical element of the plan, though, is Google’s push to make the phones’ software “open” right down to the operating system, the layer that controls applications and interacts with the hardware. That means independent software developers would get access to the tools they need to build additional phone features.

Developers could, for instance, more easily create services that take advantage of users’ Global Positioning System location, contact lists and Web-browsing habits. They also would be able to interact with Google Maps and other Google applications. The idea is that a range of new social networking, mapping and other services would emerge, just as they have on the open, mostly unfettered Web. Google, meanwhile, could gather user data to show targeted ads to cellphone users.

“The most likely scenario from a Google perspective is to build some, if you will, inspirational platform [applications]; but primarily focus on getting third parties to do it because that’s where the innovation will come from,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at the All Things Digital conference in May. He said that “the new model of these phones is going to be person-to-person” with people exchanging videos and other types of data.

While many software developers are likely to cheer Google’s open wireless platform, there are some potential risks for consumers. If Google isn’t careful, sensitive user information could end up in the wrong hands, leading to spamming, stalking or other invasions of privacy.

There is broad momentum already to make software development on mobile phones easier and more open. Apple Inc. initially limited the kinds of applications it allowed outside developers to make for its iPhone, but the company recently said it would release tools next year to broaden the range of features allowed. (Handset maker Nokia Corp. said its new Internet and multimedia platform, Ovi, is open to third- party applications.)

Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile operating system already gives software developers access to a range of tools to build programs for consumers, though the company does put all new services through a certification process to screen for programs that could hack into a customer’s phone or pose other risks.

Microsoft executives question what impact Google will have. “The idea that there are all these things software developers can’t do — it’s just not true,” said John O’Rourke, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile unit said. “It’s hard to imagine what huge breakthroughs [Google] is going to have.”

Google’s push comes as carriers are under pressure on other fronts to relax their hold on the wireless market. They face litigation over “locking” of phones, which prevents people from transferring devices from one provider to another.

Sprint Nextel Corp. agreed this month to unlock the phones of departing customers as part of a settlement in a California class- action lawsuit. Google and others, meanwhile, have criticized carriers for being a bottleneck on what software and services consumers can access.

Google helped push through controversial rules for a coming spectrum auction at the Federal Communications Commission that would result in a new cellular network open to all devices and software applications, even those not favored by an operator. Google has said it will probably bid for the frequencies.

For now, the company knows it has no choice but to work with operators to make its open platform successful. D.P. Venkatesh, CEO of mPortal Inc., which makes software for wireless operators, puts it this way: “There are a few things carriers control that will always keep them in charge at the end of the day.”

Teaching should not disturb my life. Just leave them alone. I teach what I want, and they learn what they want. Make a easy grading. Everybody is happy.

Saved at least some embarrassment, didn’t I?

So many good ones – I don’t even know how to choose… )))))

I’ve been like this for almost a week. I can’t be alone at home, I can’t sleep throughout the whole night, I can’t concentrate even if I have my favorite books in front of me… There is this unsettled, restless, anxious feeling in my heart – I’ve been on the run, but I don’t know what I am tyring to run away from.  Where is the peace that used to be in my mind? 

I eventually got everything right. The program should run about 12 hours to get the all the experiments done. I should get the result by this noon. However, this morning I accidentally clicked the ‘close’, terminating a 70% finished thread! A waste of 8 hours. Now I have to rerun the program again, from which I shall not expect the result until tonight.

1. 火锅

2. 油焖大虾

3. 炸酱面

To be Continued…

It is hard to be apart far away, especially in this sensational season. However, we should also be content that at least there is someone we love and loves us. Knowing so would give us so much strength to live a joyful life, weather together or apart.

Last night was the first midterm of my class. Although my office hours was only an hour and a half in the afternoon, I started to have students come to my office at 9:30AM. Some of them assumed that my exam was like other exams they took, which they could cram for a day and would be fine. But soon after they started, they realized that it was not, and this was where the panic started. We occupied the entire sofa area, in the end, even a janitor couldn’t stand it and he opened a conference room for us.

The kids were like, I’m scared, will you hate us after the exam, I feel so embarrassed, I will come to your office hours every time in the future, I promise I’ll do well next time… Well, it’s not too far away from my college years, whenever I see them, I see myself several years earlier. I just cannot get mad with them – I was like that, and classes were definitely not on the top of the priority list. I don’t worry about them either, they will learn sooner or later what they want to do and where they want to put their focus on. It’s the growing up thing – nobody can do it for you and the experience along the way is the fun part. All I can do for them now is be there and be helpful when they want to learn.

Finish class preparation (continuous r.v., normal r.v., and exponetial r.v.) today for the next two weeks. I will get relative free time for two weeks then.

Suddenly, life seems terribly harsh to me. One day, you have everything; but the next, the whole world is gone. In order to live through it, I have to remind myself of the beautiful things that are still there.

1. There is someone, although far away, whom I love deeply; also there is someone, although far away, who love me (hopefully deeply). And the lucky part is that they are the same person.

2. Everything is temporary, good or bad.

3. I am not alone.

4. There are a lot of worse things.

5. I have youth on my side, or at least in my heart.

6. Even if I get hurt, I grow stronger out of it.  

The historical continuous winning record for Jiazi Hua is 3:0, while that for Kobe he is 7:0. The followings are actually data after historical event of 7:0 (Twice).

Date Score Rate Fund History (2007)
04.21 4:6 2:1 650 4:6
04.23 0:2 4:1 648 4:8
04.24 0:1 5:1 647 4:9
05.02 0:2 5:1 645 4:11
05.03 1:1 2:1 645 5:12 (Coffee, cleared)
10.15 0:2 4:1 4 5:14

The article reminds me of a conversation I had with a German who just moved to the States. He is not used to, or even a bit annoyed by the way Americans interact with each other. At the surface, you feel that everybody is nice and friendly; but eveything stops at the surface, leaving you a feeling that it’s all kind of fake. The example he gave was, when he shopped at Walmart, the cashiers greeted him pleasantly. He was like, come on, I don’t think you feel that happy to be a cashier, especially at Walmart, why don’t you show some attitude?! I laughed when I heard it. I can understand what he meant, after all, I grew up in a city where strangers don’t smile at each other, even when they are not yelling at each other.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see that Americans, at least people in the corporate world, are taking this a step even further…

Deloitte Tries a Different Sales Pitch for Women

Erin White. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Oct 8, 2007. pg. B.1

Nancy Camarota, a customer-relations executive at Allied Waste Industries Inc., said she thought it was odd when a Deloitte & Touche USA LLP consultant used an exclamation point in an email. “Guys do not use exclamation points,” she thought. “Is he making fun of me?”

She later learned the email reflected a new Deloitte strategy to approach women clients differently than men. Among other things, Deloitte is training consultants to sit across from women at a table, rather than next to them, and to bring subordinates to meetings because women value knowing the people who do the work. In the case of the exclamation point, Ms. Camarota had used one in an earlier email; the Deloitte consultant says he was responding to her enthusiasm as part of the new program.

The strategy is based on a simple, yet radical, idea: Just as women consumers shop differently than men, Deloitte believes businesswomen shop for professional services differently than men. “You need to understand where women are coming from,” says Cathy Benko, a Deloitte partner who runs the program.

Ms. Benko started exploring the issue while researching ways to retain and attract female employees. She teamed up with TrendSight Group, a Winnetka, Ill., consulting firm and after interviewing senior women executives and Deloitte employees, they concluded that the same discovery process women use when doing personal shopping applies to purchasing business services. A woman might go into a store for black pants, for example, but then see something else she likes and buy that, too, or change her mind. Men just buy the pants.

“Men think, ‘She’s so fickle’,” says Ms. Benko. But “she’s not fickle at all — she’s using this process of discovery.”

Deloitte began offering four-hour workshops on gender differences to its employees last year. Among its other suggestions:

Don’t be frustrated if female clients reevaluate or modify their initial requests; because they discover as they shop, women may be very receptive to suggestions about other services.

Women clients want to know and trust their consultants personally as well as professionally; sharing personal details can help build trust.

Women often prefer business lunches to dinners, because they tend to have more responsibilities at home. And they may be more receptive to evening social invitations if asked with sufficient time to make arrangements at home.

Body language differs by gender. Men tend to stare as they listen and nod to signify they understand. Women may nod when they don’t yet understand to encourage the speaker to keep talking. And while consultants often seat themselves beside a male client as their “right hand man,” women are more comfortable seated face to face.

There’s no doubt that Deloitte has to tread carefully. What some clients might see as sensitivity, others could find patronizing.”It’s a great idea to pay attention to women as a people of influence,” says Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, a vice president at Catalyst, a research and advisory group on women in business. But “if stereotypes seep in there, that’s not helpful.”

Denise Fedewa, a leading researcher on women’s buying habits at the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago, says, “My first gut reaction is, ‘Yeah that makes sense.’” But she adds that she would like to see research backing up the theory. She also questions whether such gender differences apply as strongly among younger workers. “It might be less true with maybe the generation of women that are just coming into those positions,” she says.

Tapping into women’s professional psyches has become more important as more women become corporate decision makers. While women remain scarce at the top of major companies, they occupy about half of all managerial and professional positions in the U.S., including 37% of the management jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They are also 41% of purchasing managers and 60% of accountants and auditors. “We’re interacting with women more, and they’re in real decision-making roles in our clients,” says Tim Hanley, a Deloitte partner in Milwaukee.

Companies such as American Express Co. and International Business Machines Corp. target women business owners with such tactics as sponsored conferences and networking events, but they say they don’t systematically pitch women differently than men.

Deloitte rival Ernst & Young LLP is also advising employees on how to take women’s sensibilities into account, offering courses and speakers on such topics as gender differences in communication styles.

Ms. Benko says Deloitte doesn’t have statistics on whether the approach has won new business, or on how many of its clients are women. But she says attendees have told her the training has helped them.

Jonathan Copulsky, a Deloitte consulting partner in Chicago, was initially skeptical of the idea. “We make such an effort . . . trying to ignore some gender differences in terms of how we treat people,” he recalls thinking. “This seems to be a step back.” But he changed his mind after attending a workshop and putting some of the training to use while working with Ms. Camarota, who manages customer issues for Allied’s corporate, municipal and residential customers.

Ms. Camarota says she wasn’t sure what to make of Mr. Copulsky’s treatment. He told her he couldn’t meet in person immediately because a family issue was keeping him in Chicago. “I was like, ‘Whoa,’” she recalls. “Consultants don’t do that. They say, ‘I have another appointment, I have a conflict.’”

When they did meet in person, Mr. Copulsky let Ms. Camarota lead the conversation. Normally, he says, he’s quick to propose his own ideas. But facilitators at the workshop had suggested listening and asking questions first.

During another discussion, two more-senior Allied executives dropped in to suggest their ideas. Mr. Copulsky listened, but he didn’t give their ideas more weight than Ms. Camarota’s. That scored points with her. “As a woman, as a decision maker, if guys come into the picture, they’re generally deferred to,” she says. “I didn’t get that from Jonathan.”

Mr. Copulsky says he was following the workshop’s teachings that women sometimes interpret experiences differently than men and believe they are being slighted because they are women. As Ms. Benko explains, a man and a woman may each be treated rudely by a car dealer. A woman would say “he treated me like that because of my gender, and men would say he treated me like that because he’s a jerk.”

Certain amount of pressure proved to be a bless of our life. Without it, few things, if any, can be achieved. We have to accept that many of us are natural slackers and tend to procrastinate whenever possible. Only under pressure can we exert due efforts to finish the tasks.

That’s why we need certain degree of concentration if lack of pressure poses a serious problem. By focusing on one single task, our mind can hardly be distracted and so the accomplishment of the tasks will not be far away.

We are what we repeatedly do. Just need the will to forge the habit, with the love for the good, and the hatred of the evil.

It has been a while since I moved. Life is largely settled, for both good and bad. The relative easy environment tends to lure you to live with the easy life. But deep inside I know that is not I want. I got to constantly remind myself of my circumstance. It is not terrible to be in an adversary environment, but would be an end of the world if you lose the courage and the will to fight.

I am so frustrated by today’s class. Not because I had bad performance, but because of one student keeping asking most basic questions, which even a middle school student should know. Her classmates were also annoyed.

The paper has been dragged me for too long. Like it or it, I must get it done this week!!!

I’ve learned a lot these days, not intellectually, but rather spiritually. Along with aging, we see more clearly the limits as well as potentials of our abilities. In this process, what is plainly true and yet hard to follow is the impact of inertia, or posed otherwise, the power of good habits and then detrimental effects of laziness. They are just the different side of the same coin. We are what we repeatedly do. Just as one may get used to a proactive life style, one may equally well slide into vicious cycle of the laziness and disincentive.

That is how far intelligence can help us. The real strength of any understanding lies in action.

Clutter is death; it leads to thrashing. Keep desk clear: focus on one thing at a time.  And a good filing system: touch each piece of paper and each email ONCE.

•

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Found this in the draft, which I wrote about two weeks ago. I don’t want to experience that kind of pain anymore, but I still want to post it here just because it was so real and I didn’t think I would ever recover from it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I saw this quote last week: “A part of you has grown in me. And so you see, it’s you and me together forever; and never apart, maybe in distance, but never in heart.” I liked it so much because I believed this was exactly what was happening. But all of a sudden, the person who has been growing with me is gone, leaving a huge huge empty hole in my heart and my body. The emptiness is invasive and destructive.

During the only Bible study I’ve ever been to, the first question asked was what kinds of person you think are blessed. The first thing came to my mind was, people who can be with their loved ones and be loved. Then I thought about it longer and deeper, different ideas came up, and when I finally started to think about why I didn’t feel that I was blessed, I found my answer – blessed people are people with goals. They are happy simply because they know what they want. If they want a happy marriage, they strive to make it work, no matter how hard it can be sometimes; if they want a successful career, they work hard to prepare themselves for it; if they want, say stuffed animals, they simply go and win them! As Dr. Pausch put it,  brink walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things. If you don’t know what you want, walls are just there for absolutely no reasons, and then you’ll be frustrated. I still can’t say academia is for me, but at least I know now that operations management is something that I’d love to do. So, in that sense, I should be happier than I was four months ago.

Now, about rules. You do need rules in order to achieve your goals, but I grew up with pretty much no rules at all. But now I am amazed by the power of rules. About two weeks ago, I printed a little piece of paper saying “No Internet browsing in office, a rule – but not an option” and posted on my desk. After that, indeed, I haven’t been to any websites, except reading WSJ, when I am in office. It’s really amazing. All the problems I had with Internet, shopping, reading random stuff, went away, well, at least when I am in office. And given that I spend at least 8 hours in office everyday, it’s not bad, not bad at all. I don’t want to say things like living everyday as if it’s the last day of your life, it’s way too cliche, but everyday, step a bit closer to the walls that you want to break.

I went to Meijer with short pants and T-shirt for grocery shopping at 10pm. When I went to Deli session and asked the employee if they were still operating, she responded in a cool manner saying that they were closed at 9:30pm and DISCOUNTED FOOD IS ON THE SHELF. I am confused: do I really look like the one seeking discounted food? Or because the time I shopped? I wish it was the second reason

I am going to build a fantasy world in ten days. This world consists of only logic, rules, and numbers. Every step should be carefully documented. I have learned a hard lesson that although it may seem wasting time of documenting in the first place, its benefit of reusability far outweights the cost

I found that group activities worked well for my students. These activities are especially beneficial to less motivated students. For some reason, those smart kids are likely sitting together, so are less so students. Therefore, each group has to figure out their own answers. The benefit to me is that I do not need to lecture the whole fifty minutes, which was physically demanding.

Got to take care of my weight. Two months of indulging in food result in twenty pounds weight increase, which put tremendous pressure on my knees. And because the concern of the knees, I tend to exercise less. This in turn puts more weight on. A vicious cycle.

The only way to break such cycle is to reduce the intake of fatty food, no matter how tasty they are

Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Sep 27, 2007 

As a boy, Randy Pausch painted an elevator door, a submarine and mathematical formulas on his bedroom walls. His parents let him do it, encouraging his creativity.

Last week, Dr. Pausch, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told this story in a lecture to 400 students and colleagues.

“If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let ‘em do it,” he said. “Don’t worry about resale values.”

As I wrote last week, his talk was a riveting and rollicking journey through the lessons of his life. It was also his last lecture, since he has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months.

After he spoke, his only plans were to quietly spend whatever time he has left with his wife and three young children. He never imagined the whirlwind that would envelop him. As video clips of his speech spread across the Internet, thousands of people contacted him to say he had made a profound impact on their lives. Many were moved to tears by his words — and moved to action. Parents everywhere vowed to let their kids do what they’d like on their bedroom walls.

“I am going to go right home and let my daughter paint her wall the bright pink she has been desiring instead of the ‘resalable’ vanilla I wanted,” Carol Castle of Spring Creek, Nev., wrote to me in an email to forward to Dr. Pausch.

People wanted Dr. Pausch to know that his talk had inspired them to quit pitying themselves, or to move on from divorces, or to pay more attention to their families. One woman wrote that his words had given her the strength to leave an abusive relationship. And terminally ill people wrote that they would try to live their lives as the 46-year- old Dr. Pausch is living his. “I’m dying and I’m having fun,” he said in the lecture. “And I’m going to keep having fun every day, because there’s no other way to play it.”

For Don Frankenfeld of Rapid City, S.D., watching the full lecture was “the best hour I have spent in years.” Many echoed that sentiment.

ABC News, which featured Dr. Pausch on “Good Morning America,” named him its “Person of the Week.” Other media descended on him. And hundreds of bloggers world-wide wrote essays celebrating him as their new hero. Their headlines were effusive: “Best Lecture Ever,” “The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Seen,” “Randy Pausch, Worth Every Second.”

In his lecture, Dr. Pausch had said, “Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things.” Scores of Web sites now feature those words. Some include photos of brick walls for emphasis. Meanwhile, rabbis and ministers shared his brick-wall metaphor in sermons this past weekend.

Some compared the lecture to Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man Alive” speech. A 15-year-old girl told Dr. Pausch that her AP English class had been analyzing the Gehrig speech, and “I have a feeling that we’ll be analyzing your speech for years to come.” Already, the Naperville, Ill., Central High School speech team plans to have a student deliver the Pausch speech word for word in competition.

As Dr. Pausch’s fans emailed his speech to friends, some were sheepish. “I am a deeply cynical person who reminds people frequently not to send me those sappy feel-good emails,” wrote Mark Pfeifer, a technology manager at a New York investment bank. “Randy Pausch’s lecture moved me deeply, and I intend to forward it on.”

In Miami, retiree Ronald Trazenfeld emailed the lecture to friends with a note to “stop complaining about bad service and shoddy merchandise.” He suggested they instead hug someone they love.

Near the end of his lecture, Dr. Pausch had talked about earning his Ph.D., and how his mother would kiddingly introduce him: “This is my son. He’s a doctor, but not the kind who helps people.” It was a laugh line, but it led dozens of people to reassure Dr. Pausch: “You ARE the kind of doctor who helps people,” wrote Cheryl Davis of Oakland, Calif.

Dr. Pausch feels overwhelmed and moved that what began in a lecture hall with 400 people is being experienced by millions. Still, he has retained his sense of humor. “There’s a limit to how many times you can read how great you are and what an inspiration you are,” he says, “but I’m not there yet.”

Carnegie Mellon has a plan to honor Dr. Pausch. As a techie with the heart of a performer, he was a link between arts and sciences on campus. A new computer-science building is being built, and a footbridge will connect it to the arts building. The bridge will be named the Randy Pausch Memorial Footbridge.

“Based on your talk, we’re thinking of putting a brick wall on either end,” joked the university’s president, Jared Cohon, announcing the honor. He went on to say: “Randy, there will be generations of students and faculty who will not know you, but they will cross that bridge and see your name and they’ll ask those of us who did know you. And we will tell them.”

Dr. Pausch has asked Carnegie Mellon not to copyright his last lecture, and instead to leave it in the public domain. It will remain his legacy, and his footbridge, to the world.

I totally agree with this article. Great minds think alike – hedge funds and private equity aren’t everything. If you look at the background of the top CEOs, they all have experience of operations management.

Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Sep 26, 2007.

BUSINESS-SCHOOL professors are masters at critiquing everyone else’s work. They pick apart Microsoft Corp.’s strategy; they rebuke Enron- era companies for ethics breakdowns. They are so busy gazing outward that it’s unthinkable for them to rip into their own institutions.

Now Rakesh Khurana, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, is about to break that taboo.

Next month, Prof. Khurana is publishing a critique of business schools’ evolution over the past 50 years. His book, “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands,” argues that famous B-schools, including Harvard, have lost track of their original mission to produce far-sighted leaders who can help the economy run better.

As Prof. Khurana sees it, M.B.A. training has deteriorated into a race to steer students into high-paying finance and consulting jobs without caring about the graduates’ broader roles in society. “The logic of stewardship has disappeared,” he says. Panoramic, long-term thinking has given way to an almost grotesque obsession with maximizing shareholder value over increasingly brief spans.

As a result, he declares, getting an advanced degree in business no longer amounts to entry into a full-fledged profession, like law or medicine. It’s just a badge that lets graduates latch onto situations where they can jostle the actual managers of companies and make a lot of money for themselves in the process.

If Prof. Khurana wanted to torment business-school deans, alumni and current students, he couldn’t have picked a better way. For years, the B-school community has taken great pride in repeatedly redefining its mission as job markets change. It stings to be told by anyone — let alone a fellow insider — that many of these adjustments should be a source of shame, not pride.

At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, for example, swarms of graduates once headed for jobs in the car industry. Today, with auto companies locked in an unending struggle to get costs under control, that figure has sunk to just 1.5%. That doesn’t worry Dean Robert Dolan; his school now sends 66% of graduates into service- sector jobs, with consulting and finance leading the way.

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, almost half the 800 first-year students attend career chats about what it would be like to work for hedge funds or private-equity firms. Four years ago, such formal briefings didn’t exist. But booming interest in those sectors has led the school to help students prepare for possible jobs in those areas, says Michelle Antonio, Wharton’s director of M.B.A. career management.

IF BUSINESS SCHOOLS were simply trying to help students find the fastest path to riches, they should do nothing but point students toward various areas of high-octane investing. A Harvard Business School survey last year found that private-equity shops offered graduates the best pay packages of any field — a median salary of $125,000, with bonuses of more than $90,000.

That’s just the beginning. Forbes magazine’s latest list of the 400 richest Americans includes 45 newcomers this year, with 20 of them coming from the hedge-fund and private-equity communities. By contrast, high tech and traditional manufacturing are good for just two apiece. (The new industrialists hardly evoke comparisons to Andrew Carnegie; they made their money in pesticides and nondairy creamer.)

At least some business schools are uneasy about how much they want to coddle up to private-equity firms and hedge funds. Those firms’ current allure may just be another reminder of how exciting Wall Street can look at the top of a cycle, says Rebecca Joffrey, associate director of career development at Dartmouth’s Tuck School.

SHE HAS BEEN encouraging traditional industrial firms to keep sending recruiters to Tuck, even though financial firms’ pull these days is unusually strong. If capital markets slump, she explains, companies such as Cargill and PepsiCo will still be hiring when the hedge funds and private-equity firms are likely to be scaling back.

For his part, Prof. Khurana would like to see business schools take much more aggressive steps to mend their ways. He is impressed by the ways that law and medical schools certify graduates’ knowledge and require lifelong continuing education. Perhaps business schools should do something similar, he suggests.

Prof. Khurana also would like it if company managers regained some of their old authority, being able to build lasting value on dimensions that went beyond this week’s stock price. He may be too nostalgic here. All-powerful bosses didn’t always make wise decisions.

Yet Prof. Khurana has identified an important imbalance. In the current environment, many brilliant young M.B.A.s don’t aspire to be corporate chief executive officers, who struggle to uphold their agendas against pressure from all sides. These students would rather be consultants who earn big money fomenting change. Better yet, they want to be the powerful investors who hire and fire CEOs.

Until those dynamics change, it will be hard for top business schools to resume their traditional — and vital — role as training grounds for the next generation of corporate leaders.

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“Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you.”

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor, was about to give a lecture Tuesday afternoon, but before he said a word, he received a standing ovation from 400 students and colleagues.

He motioned to them to sit down. “Make me earn it,” he said.

They had come to see him give what was billed as his “last lecture.” This is a common title for talks on college campuses today. Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted “Last Lecture Series,” in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?

It can be an intriguing hour, watching healthy professors consider their demise and ruminate over subjects dear to them. At the University of Northern Iowa, instructor Penny O’Connor recently titled her lecture “Get Over Yourself.” At Cornell, Ellis Hanson, who teaches a course titled “Desire,” spoke about sex and technology.

At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch’s speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.

He began by showing his CT scans, revealing 10 tumors on his liver. But after that, he talked about living. If anyone expected him to be morose, he said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you.” He then dropped to the floor and did one-handed pushups.

Clicking through photos of himself as a boy, he talked about his childhood dreams: to win giant stuffed animals at carnivals, to walk in zero gravity, to design Disney rides, to write a World Book entry. By adulthood, he had achieved each goal. As proof, he had students carry out all the huge stuffed animals he’d won in his life, which he gave to audience members. After all, he doesn’t need them anymore.

He paid tribute to his techie background. “I’ve experienced a deathbed conversion,” he said, smiling. “I just bought a Macintosh.” Flashing his rejection letters on the screen, he talked about setbacks in his career, repeating: “Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things.” He encouraged us to be patient with others. “Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you.” After showing photos of his childhood bedroom, decorated with mathematical notations he’d drawn on the walls, he said: “If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let ‘em do it.”

While displaying photos of his bosses and students over the years, he said that helping others fulfill their dreams is even more fun than achieving your own. He talked of requiring his students to create videogames without sex and violence. “You’d be surprised how many 19- year-old boys run out of ideas when you take those possibilities away,” he said, but they all rose to the challenge.

He also saluted his parents, who let him make his childhood bedroom his domain, even if his wall etchings hurt the home’s resale value. He knew his mom was proud of him when he got his Ph.D, he said, despite how she’d introduce him: “This is my son. He’s a doctor, but not the kind who helps people.”

He then spoke about his legacy. Considered one of the nation’s foremost teachers of videogame and virtual-reality technology, he helped develop “Alice,” a Carnegie Mellon software project that allows people to easily create 3-D animations. It had one million downloads in the past year, and usage is expected to soar.

“Like Moses, I get to see the Promised Land, but I don’t get to step foot in it,” Dr. Pausch said. “That’s OK. I will live on in Alice.”

Many people have given last speeches without realizing it. The day before he was killed, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke prophetically: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.” He talked of how he had seen the Promised Land, even though “I may not get there with you.”

Dr. Pausch’s lecture, in the same way, became a call to his colleagues and students to go on without him and do great things. But he was also addressing those closer to his heart.

Near the end of his talk, he had a cake brought out for his wife, whose birthday was the day before. As she cried and they embraced on stage, the audience sang “Happy Birthday,” many wiping away their own tears.

Dr. Pausch’s speech was taped so his children, ages 5, 2 and 1, can watch it when they’re older. His last words in his last lecture were simple: “This was for my kids.” Then those of us in the audience rose for one last standing ovation.

Just so anxious to know.

Isn’t it cool? And now, you can imagine how it looks like when it’s on me…

We had department, business faculty, two meetings this afternoon. After that, we had party in the discovery museum. The buffet dinner was good. I had a good conversation with other faculty members.

Today it is little bit strange about the teaching: the second section actually had better responses than the first section. Another lesson is, some kids are slow, and you cannot cover too much. It is always better to cover just enough to get contents crossed than cover everything but nothing got crossed.

So I had my ‘debut’ The students may not as smart as the honor sections I taught before, but they are as much friendly as the honor sections, at least for my first show

Our town without you – it’s simply not the town I used to love anymore. I still drive along the same road to school; I still sit in the same office; I still go to the same place for coffee; I still go to the same bookstore to study… However, everything’s changed. I try to find something to hold on, but I couldn’t. Just like I always want to die before the person I love, I wish I could be the one who left this town. Memory is everywhere, sweet, but poisonous.  

After shopping in eight stores, I was really exhausted. However, except a thorough grocery shopping for two hundred bucks, I haven’t bought any piece of furniture yet. Anyway, I got to visit another three stores and hopefully I can buy something.

I guess I really hate hot weather. Even though it may just well be that the change of the weather, five to six degree, is negligible, I still believe such change is the major contributor to my fatigue

I got to buy my furniture tomorrow. At least a desk. Otherwise, I couldn’t work at home.