Archive for April 25th, 2011

Re: gas prices … President mocks (other) politicians and their 3-point plans … and offers up his 4-point plan

April 25, 2011

In his weekly radio address, speaking on fast rising gas prices, Obama said:

“Whenever gas prices shoot up, like clockwork, you see politicians racing to the cameras, waving three-point plans for two dollar gas.”

Literally in the next paragraph, he offered up his 4-point plan.

  • Safe and responsible production of oil at home
  • Rooting out cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets
  • Ending the subsidies given to oil and gas companies
  • Investing in tomorrow’s clean, renewable energy sources: hybrids and electric cars

Whew!

Finally a game-changing 4-point plan … albeit with a couple of holes:

  • Domestic production … Obama has capitalized on the BP blowout to stop practically all new US domestic oil production
  • Fraud & abuse … just like the fraud & abuse being rooted out of the healthcare system.  I’ll take the under bet.
  • Oil company subsidies … strip the oil companies of subsidies and they’ll lower prices at the pump …  hmmm, so that’s how business works
  • Electric cars … birth to date, about 1,000 Chevy Volts have been sold.  Not exactly the iPad adoption rate.

Ken’s Plan: Start drilling, release strategic reserves and, most important, stop devaluing the dollar.

Posted in Oil & Energy | Leave a Comment »

Skating through B-school …

April 25, 2011

Punch line: The NY Times reports that b-school students are slackers … especially those specializing in management and marketing.

Ouch.

* * * * *

From the N.Y. Times …

The family of majors under the business umbrella — including finance, accounting, marketing, management and “general business” — accounts for just over 20 percent, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study.

But, all evidence suggests that student “disengagement” is at its worst in  business education.

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class.

Business majors have the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.

You’ll hear pervasive anxiety about student apathy, especially in “soft” fields like management and marketing, which account for the majority of business majors.

Scholars in the field point to three sources of trouble.

First,  too many business students chose their majors “by default.”

“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters.”

Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it.

Third, group assignments — a staple of management and marketing education —  are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college.

A business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That’s because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there’s the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing.

Without some kind of hard constraint — like the licensure tests that accounting and finance students must face — courses inexorably become less rigorous.

Thanks to GB for feeding the lead.

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Posted in Education - Academics | Leave a Comment »