What Do Incoming Freshmen Know?

Every year, Beloit College publishes "a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college". They just published their 11th "Mindset List." Here are a few tidbits:

• Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team
• GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
• Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.
• All have had a relative--or known about a friend's relative--who died comfortably at home with Hospice.
• WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling.
• Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court.
• Schools have always been concerned about multiculturalism.
• There have always been gay rabbis.
• Roseanne Barr has never been invited to sing the National Anthem again. (a good thing, IMO)
  
• Their parents may have watched The American Gladiators on TV the day they were born.
• They never heard an attendant ask “Want me to check under the hood?”
• They have never known life without Seinfeld references from a show about “nothing.”
• There have always been charter schools.

Read the whole thing here.

CFA Level 2 Results

I finally got to the CFA Institute Website for my Level 2 results - of course, the server was overloaded for the first half hour after results were made available. Once again, it wasn't pretty, but I passed. CFAI only gives a very broad idea as to how candidates scored, but based on their report, I scored above 70% on approximately 60% of the material, between 50% and 70% on 25% of the material, and below 50% on the remaining 15% of the material.

But who cares? I passed.

So for now, it's back to research. Here's what's on my plate:

• Finish two papers that are somewhere between initial results and finished manuscript. They WILL be done by mid-September to submit to a conference. On one, I'm the data guy. On the other, I'll probably do the initial draft.
  
• Do the final edits on a paper that's previously been rejected and reworked. It should be done by next week to send out to yet another journal
• Finish updating the data set to add another 5 years of data for another paper that was rejected, then redo all the analyses. I get to play "data monkey" on this one too, and my coauthor gets to do the rewrite.

I also have a syllabus to write for my new MBA class. I taught it once before, but that was years ago. This'll be the first time teaching MBA since 2001, so it should be fun.

Forecast For Blogging: Light

Been dealing with taxes the last few days (I took an extension, so I have to have it done by 8/15).

Someone PLEASE shoot me now!

Arghhh! A reader reminded me that (unlike in previous years), the extensions are now until October, not August. At least they're done now.

What Do You Give A Guy For His 50th Birthday?

I just turned 50 this weekend (insert codger joke here). So, Unknown Wife and I got a sitter and went out to eat some sushi and see The Dark Knight.

But after church today, we stopped by a Learning Express (basically a place with educational toys). Right there on the shelves was a Water Balloon slingshot (in case you're wondering, here's a link to a similar model). When we got home, I got my neighbor who lives three doors down to help me out and started launching balloons down the street and over the trees. We soon had the Unknown Daughter and the neighbor's three sons try to catch water balloons we launched from about 60-80 yards away.

Back in college we used to make a similar contraption called a "Funnellator" by attaching surgical rubber tubing to a funnel. We used it to launch water balloons (and other, far more disgusting things) almost 200 yards with our deluxe model. It surprising how many other contemporaries had similar experiences. In fact, a member of the advisory board for our student-managed investment fund once told me (after a few beers) that he's used a Funnellator to launch a sheep's brain (yes, you heard me right, a sheep's brain - he was a Biology major before he switched to Finance) almost 150 yards to land in at the front-door of one of the sororities' houses.

My neighbor and I are thinking about modifications to the store-bought model to see if we can bring it up to code. After all, you never know when the development down the street might try to attack us. We might bring the engineering professor down the street into the loop to see if we can make something more automated.

Preparedness is all.

Hospital Slang

A comprehensive list

Dogbert Knows Earnings Management.

The second one is pretty timely - particularly since pension assumptions are covered in Level 2 of the CFA curriculum.

The Day My Butt Went Psycho

No, this is not a post about gastrointestinal difficulties.

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about a new trend in books for boys. It turns out that they don't like to read as much as girls, unless it involves stuff that's gross or at least somewhat inappropriate (real news flash there, eh?). Hence the title of this post. It's the title of a new children's book by Zack Freeman. Here's the description from Amazon:

Zack Freeman is ready to tell his story...the story of a brave young boy and his crazy runaway butt. The story of a crack butt-fighting unit called the B-team, a legendary Butt Hunter's formidable daughter, and some of the ugliest and meanest butts ever to roam the face of the Earth. A story of endurance that takes Zack on an epic journey across the Great Windy Desert, through the Brown Forest, and over the Sea of Butts before descending into the heart of an explosive buttcano to confront the biggest, ugliest, and meanest butt of them all!It's a story you and your butt will never forget!

Another book the article mentions is "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger" by Kevin Bolger.

So boys like off-kilter, gross, and tasteless stuff. Who could have known? Of course, when I brought up the article at the breakfast table, Unknown Wife thought it was inappropriate and tasteless. I, on the other hand, when right over to the computer and ordered the books from our library for the Unknown Son. He's pretty excited about themsince he's just about done with his latest in the Captain Underpants series.

Meanwhile, Unknown Daughter is reading Fairytopia. Thus speaks the chromosomal divide.