In the Elections 2012 coverage on Know, experts from across The University of Texas at Austin weigh in on the politics and the issues, from the economy, the environment and demographics to immigration, energy, social change and more.
In this seventh conversation of our elections series, McCombs School of Business Professor Robert Prentice discusses the impact of business ethics scandals on presidential election strategy.
Learn more about our faculty experts:
Robert Prentice is a lawyer with a focus on corporate governance, regulatory oversight and ethical decision making. He is an expert on securities fraud, insider trading, the value of securities regulation and the legal liability of accountants. He is the founding chair of the newly created Department of Business, Government and Society at the McCombs School.
James Henson is a lecturer in the Department of Government and directs the Texas Politics Project, which seeks to educate students and Texans about state government, politics and history through a dynamic website and speaker series. It also conducts regular statewide issues and political polls. The Texas Politics Project is The University of Texas at Austin?s home for the UT/Texas Tribune Poll, a statewide survey of public opinion on issues and elections in Texas.
Tags: cleaning and tools, electrical, Food and Restaurant, home improvement, home repair, home upgrades, tools and equipments
Home improvement choices are somewhat personal in nature. If you will be living in your home for a long time, then you can make decisions about what you like the best. If you are selling within a relatively short period of time, then there are a lot of factors to take into account. This article will give you ideas on how you can make good decisions when it comes to your home-improvement projects.
If you are working on your home yourself, make sure to purchase high quality tools and supplies. It may cost more at the start, but will cost you less in the long run. Higher quality products last longer and survive general wear better. Tools can be expensive and you don?t want to have to replace them regularly.
Don?t throw out paintbrushes and rollers each time you use them! They can be cleaned and reused as long as you take care of them. Paint pans can be cleaned by letting them dry and then peeling off the paint. Don?t waste your money on pan liners as cleaning the pan itself is simple.
Before you start enjoying your backyard this summer it is a good idea to evaluate the condition of your deck. Check for rotting wood or holes and repair or replace the problem areas. You will be prepared for the summer and this will save you time and money in the long run.
Fix up the entrance to your house by giving it a new coat of paint and a new welcome mat. Your entrance plays an important role in how you welcome your guests into your home. Extra touches like an attractive welcome mat and a pretty potted plant by your entrance will create a positive impression on your visitors.
Home improvements can be a lot of fun when you do it yourself. Make them more enjoyable by having a positive attitude and enjoying the job along the way. Take before and after photos to show your friends and family what you did as the job progressed and feel the pride of doing it yourself.
Before removing and replacing old wood floors attempt to refinish them first. In many cases, the original wood flooring of your home has a great deal more value than if you were to replace it. At the same time, many wood floors can be refinished and look as new as ever with less cost than replacing the wood floors altogether.
Maintaining a level head and a drive for perfection during home remodeling can be a bit hard. There is a lot going on, and you have to be able to ?roll with the punches? so to speak. The ideas in this article have shown you how you can have a beautiful home without breaking the banks and showcase your own personal style while not killing your resale value.
For more useful information, please visit Color Changing LED Lights; optionally you can also go to for more information.
ABSTRACT:? California Local Government Finance Almanac data including Tables featuring California City (Monterey County) Sales & Use Tax Rates, Transient Occupancy Tax Rates and Property Tax Revenues Per Resident (2008-09) & Property Tax Revenues Per Resident?Carmel-by-the-Sea (1991-92 through 2008-09) and Loss of City Vehicle License Fee (VLF) Revenues Due to SB89 (2011) Estimated FY2011-12 Impact are presented; an ADDENDUM of links to municipal finance resources is provided.
CaliforniaCity (MontereyCounty)
Sales & Use Tax Rates, Transient Occupancy Tax Rates & Property Tax Revenues Per Resident (2008-09)
Data Last Updated: 5/7/2012
CITY
Property Tax Revenues/Resident (2008-09)
7.250%
7.250%
7.250%
Carmel-by-the-Sea
7.250%
10.0%
1,007
Del Rey Oaks
8.250%
10.0%
?? 262
8.250%
12.0%
?? 124
7.250%
10.0%
?? 208
8.250%
10.0%
?? 262
7.250%
7.750%
10.0%
???? 91
7.750%
?? 298
8.250%
12.0%
???? 51
NOTES:
Sales & Use Tax Rates
Of 37 cities/areas in MontereyCounty, thirty-one cities/areas have sales tax rate of 7.250%, including Carmel, two cities (Salinas and SandCity) have sales tax rate of 7.750% and four cities (Del Rey Oaks, Marina, Pacific Grove and Seaside) have sales tax rate of 8.250 %?
Transient Occupancy Tax Rates ? California Cities (March 2011)
Total 431 cities, mean 9.6%, maximum 15.0%, minimum 3.5%, median 10.0%.
Only one city, Anaheim, has a TOT of 15.0%.
Six cities have a TOT of 14.0%, including Beverly Hills, Inglewood, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Monica.?
Tourist Destination Cities:
Calistoga, Heraldsburg, St. Helena,Yountville @ 12.0%
Carpinteria, Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach, Manhattan Beach, Monterey, Newport Beach, Ojai @ 10.0%
Monterey Peninsula Cities
? ? ? Marina & Seaside @ 12.0%
Carmel, Del Rey Oaks, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Salinas @ 10.0%
Property Tax Revenues Per Resident?Carmel-by-the-Sea (1991-92 through 2008-09)
Fiscal Year
Property Tax Revenues Per Resident
1991-92
?293
1992-93
?270
1993-94
?281
1994-95
?295
1995-96
?303
1996-97
?313
1997-98
?329
1998-99
?351
1999-2000
?409
2000-01
?503
2001-02
?555
2002-03
?602
2003-04
?703
2004-05
?728
2005-06
?829
2006-07
?919
2007-08
?957
2008-09
1,007
Estimated FY2011-12 Impact
Lost Motor Vehicle License Fee (Total)
?SOURCE:
ADDENDUM:
You pay fees and taxes to government but . . . How much goes to cities? How do they spend it?
Property Tax: How much goes to your city? 21%
Sales Tax: For each taxable dollar you spend, you pay sales tax to $ 0.01 (13%)
Vehicle License & Registration Fees Where do they go?? Cities 3%
Acer made something of a splash when it trotted out its Timeline Ultra series of Ultrabooks at CES; those waves are just now hitting the shore with a full-on release in the UK under a tweaked Aspire M5 name. Both the 14- and 15-inch models are now known to be packing Intel's Ivy Bridge-era third-generation Core processors, and the "dedicated" video we heard about in January is NVIDIA's Kepler-based GeForce GT 640M, which we saw in the Timeline Ultra M3. Either new PC is still under 20mm (0.8 inches) thick with the option of an SSD, like the M3, but slapping the M5 badge on top means a much narrower display bezel, a backlit keyboard and other more upscale touches that show where your money's going. Picking the 15-inch model adds an optical drive along with a keypad for number-crunching. Mum's the word on exact specs and that all-important pricing, but those questions will be answered by the time the M5 hits British shops in mid-June. Now all that's left is to know when the new Aspire reaches the other side of the Atlantic.
The Centers for Disease and Prevention released their annual health report for 2011 on Wednesday. The report contains more than 150 data tables on the U.S. population's well-being, with a special focus on socioeconomic status. Here are a few of the interesting tidbits we found. For more, visit www.cdc.gov . The Bible Belt needs more doctors. On average, there were 25 physicians for every 10,000 people in the U.S. in 2009. The Northeast, Hawaii and Minnesota had the highest ratio of doctors to patients, while states in the South and Rocky Mountain-areas had fewer than 21 per 10,000. Your education level affects your kids' weight. The CDC collected data on childhood obesity between 2007 and 2010. Where the head of the household had a college degree, 7 to 11% of children aged 2 to 19 were obese. But when the head of the household was a high school dropout, 22 to 24% of the children were obese. Cigarette smoking is still on the decline. In 2010, 19% of U.S. adults smoked, down 2% from 2009. Over the last decade cigarette smoking among students in 12th grade has decreased from 33% to 22% for male students and from 30% to 16% for female students. Fewer teens are giving birth. Between 1998 and 2008, birth rates declined 27% for teenagers between the ages of 15 and 17. The gap is widening in education? In 2006, men without a high school diploma were expected to live 9.3 years less than those with a Bachelor's degree. The difference is two years more than it was in 1996. A similar gap increase holds true for women. ? and narrowing in racial disparities. While the gap between life expectancy rates for African Americans and whites still exists, the gap has narrowed over the last two decades. Hispanics still have higher life expectancies than both ethnic groups. We're getting better at getting check-ups. In 2010, 59% of people over the age of 50 underwent a recent colorectal test or procedure, compared to 34% in 2000. Heart disease is still the No 1. killer. In 2008, 617,000 people died from heart disease-related causes. The prevalence among adult men and women has remained fairly steady for the last decade. Our children are fat, but not getting fatter. In 2010, approximately one in every five children was obese. Yet that rate has stayed pretty steady since 2007. That year, 19.6% of children aged 6 to 11 were obese. In 2010, it was 18%. Most people aren't moving enough. In 2010 more than half of American adults failed to meet the government's recommended daily physical activity levels. It was worse for the elderly ? approximately 70% of those over 75 didn't meet the requirements. Filed under: Adolescent Health , Cancer , CDC , Children?s Health , Living Well , Men?s Health , Obesity , Smoking , Women?s Health Tagged: Jacque Wilson ? CNN.com writer/producer
My last trade recommendation on Ford (F) was to continue shorting or holding puts from the $11.20 area.
So far, thanks to further deterioration in the euro crisis, Ford has continued it's steady downtrend towards $10 per share.
Here is a look at the updated chart:
(Click to enlarge)
This time, I've added the 100 DMA to show the recent bearish cross of the 50 DMA under the 100 DMA. Despite RSI showing an oversold indication, the stock has continued to move lower, with only moderate bullish retracements.
As I noted in the last recommendation, absolutely nothing has indicated any sort of support for the stock. For those who believe the P/E is "too cheap," I'd like to point out once again that based on my earnings prediction of about $1.25 for fiscal 2012, the stock will be trading at 9 times earnings; a healthy valuation for a classic cyclical approaching the end of its cycle.
Last year, the stock didn't stop its rather violent downtrend until $9. With (more) rumors of an imminent Greece exit from the euro beginning to swirl again, Ford's status as a consumer and credit dependent cyclical is once again likely to lead the stock significantly lower in the intermediate term.
A Greek exit could cause a complete lack of confidence in the European periphery (i.e. Spain and Italy), resulting in huge bank failures and a potential systemic crisis. With credit fueling a large bulk of consumer car purchases, further market fragility or a general crisis will result in weaker consumer spending and fewer materialized sales. Not to mention, Ford may have to shut down several European operations in order to reduce variable costs.
For those waiting for an entry point, wait for longs to absolutely capitulate, or wait until some signs of a bottom start appearing. The market as a whole is currently undergoing a major turning point, so entry here is a pretty poor gamble.
Getting news from the Internet not as divisive as many assumePublic release date: 15-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Craig Chamberlain cdchambe@illinois.edu 217-333-2894 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. The Internet is changing the way people get their news, but there's little proof that it is fragmenting or polarizing the news audience the way many assume, says professor David Tewksbury, the head of the University of Illinois department of communication.
"Many things that we thought were going to be really horrible have not yet happened," Tewksbury said.
Five years ago he was very worried. He feared the wide-open choice the Internet provided would encourage people to put on "intellectual blinders."
They would personalize their news habits and pay attention only to what they cared about, ignoring other news, especially about government and public affairs, he thought. They would be shaped by highly segmented and opinionated news sources.
But that was before he reviewed the research to co-write "News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century," with former Illinois doctoral student Jason Rittenberg. The book was published recently by Oxford University Press.
The research does suggest that maybe half of online news consumers are very selective in what they follow, with more than half of those focused on sports, Tewksbury said. But the other half are seeking out a broad cross-section of news, which is better than what he and other researchers believed and feared, and in keeping with how people read newspapers.
"We don't have a lot of evidence that public affairs knowledge is going down because of audience fragmentation," Tewksbury said. "Many people know quite a bit about what's going on. They are attending to news in a relatively uniform fashion. It's not as if everyone has suddenly become more ignorant than they used to be."
Many previous books have looked at how online journalism gets done, and others at how audiences consume online news, Tewksbury said, but he and Rittenberg tried to bring the two together and look at the larger picture.
"We're trying to cover a large territory with this book," Tewksbury said. "We integrate huge areas of research, where we're trying to talk about content and audiences and how they fit together."
The book also plays out a tension between the co-authors' perspectives, Tewksbury said. Rittenberg, in his late 20s, was focused more on the possibilities of the technology, including its benefits for democracy. Tewksbury, in his late 40s, was more concerned with how people interact with the technology. He was worried about factors that might be segmenting, fragmenting and polarizing the news audience and society.
One of his goals in the book, in fact, was trying to describe how those factors and trends might interact, Tewksbury said.
Most researchers "are taking just a bite out of what is really a big picture," rather than "nailing down all the parts of that picture," he said. They are jumping to conclusions, for instance, about how news preferences connect with or influence news consumers' views (that is, people who watch Fox News will believe A, and those who watch CNN will believe B).
Tewksbury instead sees it as a process. "We can talk about fragmentation and polarization as being sort of steps," he said.
"If you attend to a particular kind of content in a consistent fashion, you'll learn different facts than others in that consistent fashion, and you'll form opinions that are based on that difference in the facts," he said.
The problem in connecting the dots, however, is that it's usually not that clean and straightforward, Tewksbury said.
"The biggest problem here is that people choose, and the Internet is an environment that lets people choose, actively and all the time," he said. That makes determining how people might be polarized by their news choices a tough assignment.
Someone can watch a partisan news source and have opinions that match with its news, he said, "but we really have a hard time pinning down which came first. That is exactly where future research needs to go."
###
Tewksbury talks about his research interests in this
five-minute video biography: http://www.communication.illinois.edu/video/?destinationID=jaRYIE6ncUSyNPHSzc8G5g&contentID=18WhFQqyNkWiE7HHv7CzdQ
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Getting news from the Internet not as divisive as many assumePublic release date: 15-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Craig Chamberlain cdchambe@illinois.edu 217-333-2894 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. The Internet is changing the way people get their news, but there's little proof that it is fragmenting or polarizing the news audience the way many assume, says professor David Tewksbury, the head of the University of Illinois department of communication.
"Many things that we thought were going to be really horrible have not yet happened," Tewksbury said.
Five years ago he was very worried. He feared the wide-open choice the Internet provided would encourage people to put on "intellectual blinders."
They would personalize their news habits and pay attention only to what they cared about, ignoring other news, especially about government and public affairs, he thought. They would be shaped by highly segmented and opinionated news sources.
But that was before he reviewed the research to co-write "News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century," with former Illinois doctoral student Jason Rittenberg. The book was published recently by Oxford University Press.
The research does suggest that maybe half of online news consumers are very selective in what they follow, with more than half of those focused on sports, Tewksbury said. But the other half are seeking out a broad cross-section of news, which is better than what he and other researchers believed and feared, and in keeping with how people read newspapers.
"We don't have a lot of evidence that public affairs knowledge is going down because of audience fragmentation," Tewksbury said. "Many people know quite a bit about what's going on. They are attending to news in a relatively uniform fashion. It's not as if everyone has suddenly become more ignorant than they used to be."
Many previous books have looked at how online journalism gets done, and others at how audiences consume online news, Tewksbury said, but he and Rittenberg tried to bring the two together and look at the larger picture.
"We're trying to cover a large territory with this book," Tewksbury said. "We integrate huge areas of research, where we're trying to talk about content and audiences and how they fit together."
The book also plays out a tension between the co-authors' perspectives, Tewksbury said. Rittenberg, in his late 20s, was focused more on the possibilities of the technology, including its benefits for democracy. Tewksbury, in his late 40s, was more concerned with how people interact with the technology. He was worried about factors that might be segmenting, fragmenting and polarizing the news audience and society.
One of his goals in the book, in fact, was trying to describe how those factors and trends might interact, Tewksbury said.
Most researchers "are taking just a bite out of what is really a big picture," rather than "nailing down all the parts of that picture," he said. They are jumping to conclusions, for instance, about how news preferences connect with or influence news consumers' views (that is, people who watch Fox News will believe A, and those who watch CNN will believe B).
Tewksbury instead sees it as a process. "We can talk about fragmentation and polarization as being sort of steps," he said.
"If you attend to a particular kind of content in a consistent fashion, you'll learn different facts than others in that consistent fashion, and you'll form opinions that are based on that difference in the facts," he said.
The problem in connecting the dots, however, is that it's usually not that clean and straightforward, Tewksbury said.
"The biggest problem here is that people choose, and the Internet is an environment that lets people choose, actively and all the time," he said. That makes determining how people might be polarized by their news choices a tough assignment.
Someone can watch a partisan news source and have opinions that match with its news, he said, "but we really have a hard time pinning down which came first. That is exactly where future research needs to go."
###
Tewksbury talks about his research interests in this
five-minute video biography: http://www.communication.illinois.edu/video/?destinationID=jaRYIE6ncUSyNPHSzc8G5g&contentID=18WhFQqyNkWiE7HHv7CzdQ
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 15-May-2012
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