Do you know about wind deflectors? it is an automobile accessory which is typically attached to the front hood, sunroof, and window areas of a car. if you have a car, then you can easily find it. Deflectors attached to the front hood generally protect a vehicle from damage due to flying debris. Wind deflectors [...]
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admin on May 4th, 2010
1. What is a university? There are two definitions of a university used between the three schools mentioned above. The definition that Penn uses, given by Mark Frazier Lloyd, Director of the University Archives, is “the co-existence, under a single institutional umbrella, of more than one faculty.” [10] The other definition was given by Stacy B. Gould, University Archivist for the College of William and Mary. She stated, “a course of graduate studies was the requisite for the status of university.”
One modern dictionary (American Heritage, 4th edition) defines “university:”
- An institution for higher learning with teaching and research facilities constituting a graduate school and professional schools that award master’s degrees and doctorates and an undergraduate division that awards bachelor’s degrees. [11]
Webster’s 1913 dictionary says:
- An institution organized and incorporated for the purpose of imparting instruction, examining students, and otherwise promoting education in the higher branches of literature, science, art, etc., empowered to confer degrees in the several arts and faculties, as in theology, law, medicine, music, etc. A university may exist without having any college connected with it, or it may consist of but one college, or it may comprise an assemblage of colleges established in any place, with professors for instructing students in the sciences and other branches of learning. [12]
1a. A related question: To be a university, must an institution have “university” in its name? Boston College, Dartmouth College, and the College of William and Mary continue to name themselves as “colleges” for historical reasons, but each of these institutions is, in fact, a university.
2. What does it mean to be the “oldest” university? The statement “X is the oldest Y,” generally refers the length of time that X has existed. (e.g. if Max is the oldest doctor, the reference is to Max’s age. If Max is 50 years old, but only a doctor for 7 years, and Cindy is 43 years old and has been a doctor for 15 years, then Max is the older doctor.) In this instance, the “oldest” university is the one with the earliest date of founding.
Complications arise in the case of institutions, however, because in tangled corporate histories it is not always clear when old and new institutions should be regarded as the same. This arises in the case of Penn: is it correct to say that the College of Philadelphia changed its name to the University of the State of Pennsylvania? Or is it more correct to say that the latter was actually a completely new institution, which later merged with the College of Philadelphia to form the University of Pennsylvania?
3. What does it mean to be the “first” university? The statement “X is the first Y,” generally refers to the date on which X became a Y. (In the above example, Cindy was the first doctor of the two.) By this definition, the “first” university is the one which actually became a university before any of the others, regardless of when it was founded.
To complicate matters, a school which was termed a university in the 1700s would not meet the current criteria for such an institution. As an analog, no doctor who practiced medicine in the 1700s, even having attended medical school at the time and having received a formal education in the field would qualify to receive an M.D. under today’s standards, and thus would not be considered a doctor. But it would be incorrect to state that there weren’t any doctors in the 1700s. Similarly, it would be incorrect to state that there were no universities in the 1700s.
admin on May 4th, 2010
November 27, 1779 is the date of chartering of the “University of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” [4]), however, 1740 is the year in which the institution that became the University of Pennsylvania was created. Many dispute Penn’s founding date of 1740, including Princeton University, but most scholars agree that 1740 is a legitimate date.
1791 is the year when the “University of Pennsylvania” was chartered.
These events are sometimes presented as if they were simply a change in name in a single institution, but the actual history, summarized in an article from Penn’s archives department is complicated.
In brief, in 1779 the College of Philadelphia was directed by provost William Smith. One might have expected it to have become the “University of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” but this did not occur. “Since the Revolutionary state legislature felt that the board of trustees led by Provost Smith contained too many suspected loyalist sympathizers, they created a new board of trustees.” Thus, the University of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was created de novo. A schism occurred, with an attenuated College of Philadelphia continuing under Dr. Smith’s direction. In 1791 Pennsylvania adopted a new state constitution which merged the College of Philadelphia and the University of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania into the “University of Pennsylvania,” with a board of trustees made up of twelve men from each of the two parent institutions. “It is this institution and this board of trustees that has continued to this day.”
admin on May 4th, 2010
First university in the United States is a status asserted by more than one U.S. university. In the U.S. there is no official definition of what entitles an institution to be considered a university versus a college, and the common understanding of “university” has evolved over time. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica tells the story of the gradual emergence of U.S. “universities” thus:[1]
| “ |
In the United States the word university has been applied to institutions of the most diverse character, and it is only since 1880 or thereabouts that an effort has been seriously made to distinguish between collegiate and university instruction; nor has that effort yet completely succeeded. Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale … were organized in the days of colonial poverty, on the plans of the English colleges which constitute the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Graduates of Harvard and Yale carried these British traditions to other places, and similar colleges grew up in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Rhode Island…. Around or near these nuclei, during the course of the 19th century, one or more professional schools were frequently attached, and so the word university was naturally applied to a group of schools associated more or less closely with a central school or college. Harvard, for example, most comprehensive of all, has seventeen distinct departments, and Yale has almost as many. Columbia and Penn have a similar scope. In the latter part of the 19th century Yale, Columbia, Princeton and Brown, in recognition of their enlargement, formally changed their titles from colleges to universities. |
” |
The issue is further confused by the fact that at time of founding of many of the institutions in question, the U.S. didn’t exist as a country. Moreover, questions of institutional continuity sometimes make it difficult to determine the true “age” of any institution.
admin on May 4th, 2010
The Johns Hopkins University’s website states “The Johns Hopkins University is the first research university in the United States.” The distinctively American model of the research university came into being in the nineteenth century when the German model of the elite scientific research institute offering specialized graduate training was “grafted” onto the traditional American undergraduate liberal arts college. Following the lead of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, fifteen American institutions came to define the American research university: some of them private, such as Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Pennsylvania, and Yale; others, state and land grant universities, such as the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, and the University of California; still others, new universities made possible by private bequests, such as Stanford, Caltech, MIT, and the University of Chicago. These institutions have produced the vast majority of Ph.D.s in the nation for the past century. Many here today are graduates of these elite universities, and very nearly everyone who has attended a college or university in the nation has been taught by faculty who are their graduates.[7]
admin on May 4th, 2010
Obama administration economic guru Larry Summers may end up being best remembered for almost single-handedly destroyed the Harvard University endowment fund as a result of misguided instructions he gave the fund’s management during his tenure as Harvard University president from 2002 to 2006.Summers, currently director of the White House National Economic Council, called for an aggressive investment strategy in which Harvard’ endowment fund engaged in risky strategies, including derivative strategies that have burdened the nation’ largest university endowment with billions of dollars in toxic
As a result, the Harvard endowment, which peaked at $36.9 billion in June 2008, has since lost some 30 percent of its value, dropping to $26 billion, according to Bloomberg News.
admin on May 4th, 2010
Harvard College, originally for men, was founded in 1636 with a grant from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638 it was named for John Harvard, its first benefactor. During the 1640s the college expanded despite inadequate finances, and in 1650 it was incorporated and chartered by the General Court. Intended to be an institution for the education of Puritan ministers, it grew to be an institution of general education, and new and more liberal subjects and policies were introduced.
In the 18th cent., particularly under John Leverett (1708-24), enrollment and campus facilities increased and the religious attachment to Congregationalism declined. Systematic theological instruction was inaugurated in 1721 with the establishment of a professorship of divinity, and by 1827, with the opening of Divinity Hall, Harvard became a nucleus of theological teaching in New England. In its early years the college was largely supported by the colony and the New England community as a whole, but support soon came in the form of gifts, and in 1823 the last state grant was received. Under Charles W. Eliot, the college became a great modern university. Its physical plant and curriculum were expanded, the graduate school was established, and the law and medical schools were reorganized. Eliot is also noted for his introduction of the elective system at Harvard.
Radcliffe, Graduate Schools, and Other Facilities
From two distinct schools, Radcliffe College for women (est. 1879, chartered 1894) and Harvard evolved in the 1970s into coordinate colleges with shared facilities and professors; all degrees were granted by Harvard. In 1999, Radcliffe officially merged with Harvard College, which became a coeducational undergraduate institution. At the same time the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard was established. The university also has graduate schools of divinity (1816), law (1817), arts and sciences (1872), education (1920), business (1908), and design (1936). Harvard also has schools of medicine (1782), public health (1922), and dental medicine (1941). The school of public administration (1936) was reorganized as the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1966.
Harvard’s original library was founded in 1638 with a bequest of 400 books from John Harvard. By the early 21st cent., the university had more than 80 libraries with numerous special divisions. Its main branch is the Harry E. Widener Memorial Library (1915). The largest university collection in the world, the libraries house more than 15 million volumes as well as papers, manuscripts, incunabula, prints, digital resources, and other materials. Among the university’s many museums are the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Fogg, Sackler, and Busch-Reisinger museums of art. Harvard is closely associated with numerous research facilities, including the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Arnold Arboretum, Harvard Forest, a center for Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and a center for Italian renaissance studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy.
admin on May 4th, 2010
Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — Harvard University’s failed bet that interest rates would rise cost the world’s richest school at least $500 million in payments to escape derivatives that backfired.
Harvard paid $497.6 million to investment banks during the fiscal year ended June 30 to get out of $1.1 billion of interest-rate swaps intended to hedge variable-rate debt for capital projects, the school’s annual report said. The university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said it also agreed to pay $425 million over 30 to 40 years to offset an additional $764 million in swaps.
The transactions began losing value last year as central banks slashed benchmark lending rates, forcing the university to post collateral with lenders, said Daniel Shore, Harvard’s chief financial officer. Some agreements require that the parties post collateral if there are significant changes in interest rates.
“When we went into the fall, we had some serious liquidity management issues we were dealing with and the collateral postings on the swaps was one,” Shore said in an interview yesterday. “In evaluating our liquidity position, we wanted to get some stability and some safety.”
Harvard sold $2.5 billion in bonds in the fiscal year, in part to pay for the swap exit, even as the school’s endowment recorded its biggest loss in 40 years, the report released yesterday said. This is the first time the university has detailed the cost of exiting its swaps.
Further Pressure
“Substantial losses” in Harvard’s General Operating Account, a pool of cash from which bills are paid, further put pressure on the school, the report said. The net asset value of the account fell to $3.7 billion from $6.6 billion during the fiscal year, according to the report.
Harvard has typically invested a large portion of this operating account alongside the endowment, generating “significant positive investment results,” the report said. This year, the endowment’s losses hurt Harvard’s cash, according to the report.
Swaps are a type of derivative where two parties agree to exchange payments tied to a financing, typically receiving a variable-rate for a fixed-rate payment. The terminated contracts include three tied to $431.7 million of bonds the university sold in 2005 and 2007, the annual report said.
Unwinding Swaps
From New York to San Francisco Bay, tax-exempt issuers have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to unwind bond-and-swap transactions officials initially said would cut borrowing costs. The deals fell apart when municipal-bond insurers, who backed much of the underlying debt, lost their AAA ratings in 2008 and interest rates, instead of climbing, plunged to record lows in the worst credit crisis since the Great Depression.
The swaps are often pegged to Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association lending benchmarks or the three- month dollar London-Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor. Libor closed yesterday at 0.28 percent, from a 10-year high of 6.89 percent on June 1, 2000.
Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; Georgetown University in Washington and Rockefeller University in New York have reported losses related to interest-rate swaps, in some cases prompting the schools to pay termination fees to end the contracts.
Lawrence Summers
The annual report provides new details on Harvard’s derivative-related losses. Many were entered into in 2004, said Harvard spokeswoman Christine Heenan. Lawrence Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, was the university’s president at the time. White House spokesman Matthew Vogel declined to comment.
Harvard Management Co., which administers the endowment, has been run since July 2008 by Jane Mendillo, former chief investment officer of nearby Wellesley College. She took over from Mohamed El-Erian, now chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., which oversees the world’s largest bond fund from Newport Beach, California. He succeeded Jack Meyer, who ran it for 15 years, in February 2006.
Harvard’s loss “says that people don’t understand the complexity of the products they are buying and selling and that doesn’t begin and end with mortgage securities,” said Robert Doty, a municipal finance adviser at American Governmental Services in Sacramento, California.
“It shows that with these products that are so highly complex, people are a long way from knowing as much about these products as they think they do,” he said.
Financing Construction
The Harvard swaps involved bonds sold to finance a medical research building, graduate housing, parking and a Center for Government and International Studies, according to reports from Moody’s Investors Service. They were also used to lock in rates for future bond sales for an expansion of the campus across the Charles River in Boston that has since been scaled back.
Harvard had 19 swap contracts with New York-based Goldman Sachs; JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Morgan Stanley; Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp. and other large banks, according to a bond-ratings report by Standard & Poor’s released on Jan. 18, 2008.
Harvard paid “a large termination fee, but within the range that we’ve heard about over the last year,” Matt Fabian, the senior analyst and managing director of Municipal Market Advisors in Westport, Connecticut, said in an e-mail. “There is a reason why, regardless of the issuer’s sophistication, there should be limits to their exposure to derivatives and variable rate bonds.”
Harvard has frozen employee salaries, slowed hiring, cut staff and offered other workers early retirement as part of a cost-cutting program to compensate for losses in its endowment. The fund, which dropped to $26 billion in value over the fiscal year from $36.9 billion, paid 38 percent of the school’s bills during that time, the report said.
Alumni Request
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard’s biggest unit, which includes its undergraduate school, is asking alumni and donors for more funds that can be used immediately and without restrictions to help close a projected $110-million deficit in its 2011 budget, Dean Michael Smith said in a recent speech. Current-use gifts rose 23 percent to $291 million from $237 million in fiscal 2008, the report said.
Harvard might have paid less to escape the swaps if it held out for better terms, Fabian said.
“A lot of issuers don’t have that kind of cash, and so they waited, and relied on their dealers’ patience and largesse to hold off terminating,” Fabian said. “If Harvard had waited, the cost of terminating may well have been lower, but they weren’t willing to take that risk.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Michael McDonald in Boston at mmcdonald10@bloomberg.net; John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net.
admin on May 4th, 2010
The damage done to Harvard is not limited to plans to expand the science facility into blue-collar Allston. Now, the university is faced with slashing faculty and staff.
Last year, more than 1,600 of Harvard’s staff were offered early retirement, and more than 500 accepted.
“Loyal alumni have contributed generously to staunch the bleeding,” the Globe wrote, “but huge deficits remain in spite of all the reductions. Harvard will be a smaller place when the dust settles, with less educational and scholarly reach. It will employ fewer people and will contribute less to local and national prosperity.”
admin on December 12th, 2009
Look at that picture, that is my own picture, that looked like a professional is not it? that so cool and i like the frame.do you know, the mobile phone picture in the right side of my picture is not the real picture, this is just the picture of picjoke.com.
There is an online website, allowing you to have fun with images. PicJoke.com will allow you to apply funny effects on your images with couple of clicks, with no need to know any basic of the image editing. I usually go to picjoke.com to create collage online and make cute decorations depends on your need. They have more than 100 effects to choose from and everyday you can make colorful and pretty photo collage online. you can make collage online there.
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PicJoke.com gives you more capabilities to create collage, funny photo effects based on your own pictures. No downloads or registration is needed.
You can upload photos from your own hard drive. PicJoke.com provides the quick link panel beside each picture it renders, which lets you quickly embed your edited photos into Facebook, friendster, Blogger, drupal, WordPress, and other social communities. Now, you can simply download the resulting funny photos your Hard Drive. There are more than 100 very different effects to choose from. And they make new effect every day.
You do not have to break your head or stress your mind looking for the way to create funny pictures or photos. No image editing experience is needed to use the site. Process is simple and straightforward. Just upload your picture, select the desired effect from the list, and it is done. Ready to redesign your picture now, lets visit the website and get one now 
admin on December 11th, 2009
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