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Admission with advanced placement
will be considered for individuals who completed a pre-professional
bachelor degree program in architecture or design. Applicants are
considered for advanced placement by the Admissions Committee and
evaluated in relation to the quality of work expected of students
entering the second year of design. If advanced placement status is
granted an equivalence of 12 credit hours (two semesters of
architectural design) will be given and the student will be placed
in the first semester of the second year design studio.



Applicants should be able to demonstrate fundamental skills of
building design and demonstrate a facility in advanced tectonic
composition. This is often demonstrated through plan and section
representations of complex building proposals that also indicate an
awareness of more advanced structural and programmatic
relationships.



Equivalency
Evaluation

To be considered for equivalency credit for previous coursework,
applicants must submit course syllabi and transcripts from that
previous coursework for review by a faculty member charged with
reviewing that area of study (history, building technology,
professional practice, etc…). This faculty member will then
determine if equivalency credit is appropriate for equivalency
credit in ARCH 551: Analog/Freehand Drawing and Arch. 552
Analog/Digital Constructed Drawing, samples of academic or
professional work must also be included for review.

The maximum total number of
equivalency credits granted is 40.



Note on Professional
Accreditation
The new professional Master of
Architecture program was granted candidacy status by the National
Architectural Accrediting Board in 2004.

more information
regarding NAAB

BigGovernmentIsBack—BigTime

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Big Government Is Back—Big Time

U.S. policymakers reconsider the relationship between government
and the private sector.

By Michael Freedman | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 7, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Feb 16, 2009

Have you noticed that Barack Obama sounds more like the president
of France every day? When Obama said in his Inaugural Address that
it was time to get past stale arguments over whether government is
big or small, he was echoing the eclectic philosophy of Nicolas
Sarkozy, who champions markets one day and state industrial
"champions" the next. When Obama called Wall Street "shameful" and
greedy, he was articulating what the French have always thought,
and endorsing Sarkozy's recent dismissal of the "crazy" idea that
markets are always right. In endorsing the "Buy American" rules
that would steer the billions in U.S. stimulus spending toward
domestic manufacturers, members of the Obama administration were
seconding the old French culture of "economic patriotism." And when
Obama moved to cap the pay of executives at financial firms in line
for the federal bailout at $500,000, he was forcing on them a
massive pay cut that Sarkozy had already coaxed from French bank
leaders when he gathered them together last month and got them to
agree, publicly, that they would forgo bonuses.

It was with a distinctly continental sniff that Obama said top
bank brass had shown "bad taste" by taking their bonuses despite
massive losses.

Obama's rhetoric and actions reflect how quickly the debate has
changed over the past several months. Until the financial crisis
began last year, this kind of business bashing and protectionism
was largely relegated to the far left, and it seemed axiomatic in
the United States that the business of America was business. But
with an urgency not seen since Ronald Reagan declared that
government was in fact the problem, policymakers are now
reconsidering the relationship between government and the private
sector. At its most basic level, the nearly $1 trillion U.S.
stimulus package now being dissected on Capitol Hill is a fight
over how great a role the federal government will play in what had
been, for decades, private economic life. And while it's impossible
to know just what the day after the crisis will look like, the
broad contours of the new economic world are becoming visible.

One of the more lasting effects will be a steady drift toward
what could be called a European model of governance, regulation and
paternalism. Already, big government is on the rise—projected
public-spending figures show the United States will move ever
closer to European averages over the next two years. More
specifically, in the absence of a robust private sector (or at
least public confidence in business) the U.S. government will be
forced to fill the gap, firmly directing businesses in all sorts of
ways—regulating some industries (particularly banking and the
automotive sector) with big-brother vigilance, favoring others like
clean energy with grants and loans, and turning still others—health
care, pensions—into virtual wards of the state. Harvard economist
Ken Rogoff predicts the United States will move toward "a more
centralized, redistributional health-care system, as Europe already
has," with a greater emphasis on the environment, higher regulation
and increased protectionism. "I take the 2008 U.S. elections as
marking a turn toward continental Europe," he says.

This is all likely to prove very popular if the conventional
wisdom is right. Many economists think this is going to be a long,
perhaps very long, recession. In this case, the banks would largely
stabilize, thanks to the help of the federal government, but the
stimulus package would be too small and insufficiently "timely,
targeted and temporary," as Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers
has frequently suggested it needs to be. Rather than a speedy
V-shaped recovery, in which the economy quickly rebounds, the U.S.
would face a Japan-style L-shaped recovery, which is to say
extraordinarily slow growth over a decade or more. As in Europe,
slow or no growth is likely to generate greater demand for publicly
funded social services in the years to come.

Slow growth could kill rugged American individualism, too.
Health care in the U.S. is for the most part tied to employment, so
if job numbers continue to look dismal, or get even worse, an
ever-greater number of people will start looking to the government
for support. Moreover, if the New York Stock Exchange goes the way
of Tokyo, still down by more than half from its level 20 years ago,
the cultural impact will be profound. Today, basic U.S. social
services are tied to private wealth generated by the stock market:
retirement is funded through 401(k)s, for instance, and college
tuition through 529 plans and endowments that help defray costs. As
of last week the S&P 500 was down 41 percent from
its 52-week high, and if it continues to bump along at that level,
pressure will only grow on the Obama administration to step in and
take over more and more public services. Think about it, and it's
very easy to imagine a chorus of former American individualists
demanding cushy French-style pensions and free British-style health
care if their private stock funds fail to recover and unemployment
inches upward toward 10 percent and remains there.

Obama's populist rhetoric will likely subside, but already U.S.
government spending is expected to increase, approaching European
levels. A decade ago, total government spending in the United
States constituted 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent
in the euro zone—roughly a 14-point gap, according to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That gap has
declined dramatically, and by 2010, U.S. spending is expected to be
39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a
gap of just 7.2 points. To be fair, much of the big increases in
spending took place in the Bush era (in large part thanks to two
wars), but a prolonged period of low growth and greater demands on
the public sector will likely mean a further narrowing, as well as
a seismic shift in spending priorities, away, perhaps, from defense
and toward social programs. The baby boomers, meantime, will be
putting an increased demand on Medicare and Social Security.

The public seems to want the government to fill in where the
private sector cannot. Recent Gallup polls say trust in financial
institutions is lower than at any point since it started asking
that question in 1985, and 68 percent of Americans want major
corporations to have less influence than they do now—up from 52
percent in 2001. Another poll shows a 12-point jump between 1994
and 2007, to 69 percent, in the number of Americans who believe
government should do more for people who cannot care for
themselves. So aside from expanding the social safety net, the
government will have to take a greater role in guiding business
toward ends the state deems healthy for the overall economy.

This differs from European-style statism, in which governments
have been known to take a firm hand in directing individual
businesses. But the difference is only a matter of degree. The
bailout of Detroit's Big Three automakers was essentially a
protectionist measure at the expense of foreign auto manufacturers,
and is not much different from Sarkozy's controversial 2004 support
as finance minister for state intervention to protect French
manufacturing giant Alstom. Stephen Roach, a top economist at
Morgan Stanley, says a prolonged downturn will mean even further
"public-sector engineering of our economy," particularly in the
form of protectionism. "America is not France," he says. "We will
do it our way. But big government is definitely on the
ascendancy."

Going forward, the Obama administration has announced plans to
spark growth and job creation by investing in green technology, and
on the table as well is a wholesale transformation of health care.
Whether that means the United States will one day have a free,
public national health service like Great Britain's, or provide
universal insurance through a mix of public and private means, is
still a very open question. But sentiment is moving toward some
form of universal health care and will only grow if unemployment
remains high. "You can count on the fact that there will be
nationalized health care of some sort," says Peter Schwartz, head
of the Global Business Network, a San Francisco consultancy that
advises big corporations on long-term trends and strategy.
"Business is just not going to be able to carry the load."

Too much government interference can lead to the same kind of
slow growth that Europe has suffered for years. Just how to come
out from the inevitable mountain of debt is another concern. Now
one of the big debates in the U.S. is how to bridge the gap between
business and government in a way that avoids stagnation while still
satisfying the intense demand for financial and social services. In
other words, can America adopt a more European model, only with a
faster rate of growth? There may be ways. Andrew Jakabovics,
associate director of the economic-mobility program at the Center
for American Progress, a think tank that has incubated a number of
administration advisers, argues that one role for the government
could be to spur competition in lending by creating a public entity
that would guarantee certain kinds of loans—say a standard 30-year,
fixed-rate mortgage—and then allow the private sector to compete at
a standard set by the federal government. Such a mechanism would
protect consumers by ensuring their ability to get loans while also
raising the level of competition.

Another way government can take a larger role, particularly in
easing the burden created by low stock-market returns, is by
introducing programs that forgive some or all college-tuition debt
in exchange for public service, something Obama promised to do on
the campaign trail. Such a move would be broadly similar to a
French program in which students at the école Normale Supérieure,
one of the world's top universities, pay no tuition (and are
actually paid a monthly stipend of €1,500) in exchange for their
agreement to spend 10 years in public service.

The crisis is also likely to spur policymakers into reforming
public pension systems like Social Security, which is expected to
be unable to provide retirees with full benefits starting in 2041.
If nothing else, the collapse of trust in the markets has probably
killed for good the Bush-era idea of privatizing Social Security.
Obama proposes to expand retirement-savings programs with
government matches and raising Social Security taxes by 2 to 4
percent for those making more than $250,000. But a rattled nation
may push the government to take an even bigger role. "Confidence
has been shattered," says William Galston, a former policy adviser
to President Bill Clinton. "It's going to take a very long time for
the average American to accept anything like the 401(k)."

This crisis-driven debate on the proper role of government is
not confined to America. At the recent World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Wen Jiabao
each took shots at U.S.-style free-market capitalism, implicitly
promoting their respective countries' brands of state-controlled
capitalism. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has more than once
spoken of the need for "free markets" but not "value-free markets,"
and last week Japan's economics minister told Parliament that the
country should create a new brand of "tenderhearted capitalism."
But none of this means a revival of socialist models with a capital
S. As British journalist Stephen Pollard recently noted, even when
Britain's Labour government decided to effectively nationalize the
banking system in October, "it did so not to replace capitalism but
to save it."

The same, in a way, could be said for the United States.
Bailouts, protectionism, talk of bank nationalization and a nearly
$1 trillion stimulus package are not a socialist conspiracy, as
some right-wing U.S. pundits and talk-show hosts insist. Even if
the U.S. banks or automakers were nationalized, it would almost
certainly be temporary, with no likelihood that the United States
would have the kinds of national champions one sees in Europe. Even
if the Obama government is the only American employer still hiring,
it will remain generally easier to hire and fire workers, and start
and close down businesses, in America's rougher form of
capitalism.

Nonetheless, it is clear that a "centrist rebalancing" is taking
place even in America, says Sunder Katwala, head of Britain's
center-left Fabian Society, and that a prolonged period of slow
growth will force the United States to become something more like
Europe. But if Obama can somehow forge a middle path that builds
upon the best of the European safety net while also encouraging the
kind of dynamism and innovation that has helped the United States
prosper, it will represent a major shift, and provide evidence that
government, pace Reagan, can actually be part of the solution.

With Tracy McNicoll in Paris

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Failing at Harvard: Ivy Cash King Tumbles

Harvard University Pays the Price for Exotic Bets

By BERNARD CONDON and NATHAN VARDI
Forbes.com

March 1, 2009—

 

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6976743

Stocks were tumbling last fall as the new school year began, but at Harvard University, it was as if the boom had never ended.

Workers were digging across the river from Harvard's Cambridge, Mass., home, the start of a grand expansion that was to eventually almost double the size of the university. Budgets were plump, and students from middle class families were getting big tuition breaks under an ambitious new financial aid program.

The lavish spending was made possible by the earnings from Harvard's $36.9 billion endowment, the world's largest. That pot was supposed to be good for $1.4 billion in annual earnings.

Behind the scenes, though, a different story was unfolding.

In a glassed-walled conference room overlooking downtown Boston, traders at Harvard Management Co., the subsidiary that invests the school's money, were fielding questions from their new boss, Jane Mendillo, about exotic financial instruments that were suddenly backfiring.

Harvard had derivatives that gave it exposure to $7.2 billion in commodities and foreign stocks. With prices of both crashing, the university was getting margin calls--demands from counterparties (among them, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs) for more collateral. Another bunch of derivatives burdened Harvard with a multibillion-dollar bet on interest rates that went against it.

It would have been nice to have cash on hand to meet margin calls, but Harvard had next to none. That was because these supremely self-confident money managers were more than fully invested. As of June 30, they had, thanks to the fancy derivatives, a 105% long position in risky assets. The effect is akin to putting every last dollar of your portfolio to work and then borrowing another 5% to buy more stocks.

Desperate for cash, Harvard Management went to outside money managers begging for a return of money it had expected to keep parked away for a long time. It tried to sell off illiquid stakes in private equity partnerships but couldn't get a decent price. It unloaded two-thirds of a $2.9 billion stock portfolio into a falling market.

Now, in the last phase of the cash-raising panic, the university is borrowing money, much like a homeowner who takes out a second mortgage in order to pay off credit card bills. Since December, Harvard has raised $2.5 billion by selling IOUs in the bond market. Roughly a third of these Harvard bonds are tax exempt and carry interest rates of 3.2% to 5.8%. The rest are taxable, with rates of 5% to 6.5%.

It doesn't feel good to be borrowing at 6% while holding assets with negative returns. Harvard has oversize positions in emerging-market stocks and private equity partnerships, both disaster areas in the past eight months.

The one category that has done well since last June is conventional Treasury bonds, and Harvard appears to have owned little of these. As of its last public disclosure on this score, it had a modest 16% allocation to fixed income, consisting of 7% in inflation-indexed bonds, 4% in corporates and the rest in high-yield and foreign debt.

For a long while, Harvard's daring investment style was the envy of the endowment world. It made light bets in plain old stocks and bonds and went hell-for-leather into exotic and illiquid holdings: commodities, timberland, hedge funds, emerging-market equities and private equity partnerships. The risky strategy paid off with market-beating results as long as the market was going up. But risk brings pain in a market crash. Although the full extent of the damage won't be known until Harvard releases the endowment numbers for June 30, 2009, the university is already working on the assumption that the portfolio will be down 30%, or $11 billion.

The strain of market turmoil is visible in staff turnover at the management company, which axed 25% of its staff recently and is on its fifth chief in four years. Mendillo, 50, came to Harvard last July after running Wellesley's small endowment. She declines to comment. But how much blame she should get is unclear; the big bets on derivatives and exotic holdings were in place before she got there. The bad bet on interest rates--a swap in which Harvard was paying a high fixed-interest rate and collecting a low short-term rate--goes back to a mandate from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

Jack R. Meyer, 64, a revered money manager who headed Harvard's endowment until 2005, offers a few guarded comments. "The liquidity thing most concerns me--that should not have happened," he says. Though he wasn't there at the time, Meyer says Harvard Management bought the commodity and foreign stock derivatives as a way to get exposure to those asset classes while freeing up cash to put to work elsewhere. The strategy, he says, "drained liquidity" from the endowment in recent months. "Many endowments stretched too far, and I think Harvard did as well," he says.

The endowment will remain stretched. Harvard has been counting on it to fund more than a third of its $3.5 billion operating budget. Assuming the fiscal year ends with around a $24 billion endowment value, the university will be drawing down half again as high a percentage of its assets as it did in 2004, the last time the endowment was around that size.

That can't go on forever. The strain on liquidity will continue, as the private equity partnerships compel Harvard to meet billions in capital calls in future years. Why not just unload those partnerships along with the liabilities that stick to them? Because no one wants to buy them. Private equity stakes like Harvard's are selling at 40% to 60% discounts in various markets. "Endowments will be shocked at the valuations of their [private equity] portfolios," says Stewart Massey, an endowment consultant at Massey Quick. "It's going to be an absolute bloodbath."

Harvard's woes are in some ways no different from those at other universities or in the market generally (the S&P 500 is down 37% since last July 1). "A loss in these kinds of markets is inevitable," says Michael Eisenson, a former HMC staffer who now runs private equity firm Charlesbank. The average endowment is down 23% in the five months through November, according to a university trade group.

But Harvard was supposed to be different. In the 15 years through last June, it returned an annual 15.7% versus 9.2% for the S&P. Meyer landed at Harvard in 1990 after scoring big investment returns at the Rockefeller Foundation. In an unorthodox move for an endowment chief, Meyer built a Wall Street-like trading operation and managed most of HMC's money in-house. It looked like a giant hedge fund, and it had paychecks to match. A high-level HMC manager would make as much as $35 million in good years. Those sums triggered what became an annual Harvard tradition: first, the disclosure (compelled by tax laws applying to nonprofits) of the HMC bonuses, followed by an outcry led by the late William Strauss and a group of Harvard alumni from his class of 1969.

HMC not only became a place to make big bonuses, it was also where you could make a name for yourself and become a "crimson puppy," meaning launching your own private equity firm or hedge fund with Harvard's backing. One of the puppies, Jeffrey Larson, left in 2004 to start Sowood Capital. That pile of smart money cratered in 2007, losing $350 million for Harvard.

________________________________________

By September 2005, Meyer himself decided it was time to go. Some people say it was because of the persistent criticism about bonuses, which were reduced near the end of his tenure; others say he had run-ins with former U.S. Treasury Secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, who assumed Harvard leadership positions at the start of the decade. Meyer denies both reasons and says 16 years at Harvard was simply enough.

Meyer formed his own hedge fund, Convexity Capital, which seems to have held up well in the current market. He took with him the Harvard heads of domestic and international fixed income and both their staffs, as well as the chief risk officer, chief technology officer and chief operating officer. The survivors were demoralized. "You walked onto the trading floor, and it was just 10% full," says someone who was there at the time. "There was a sense that if you were good, you left."

Five months later, Mohamed El-Erian, now 50, took over. The son of an Egyptian diplomat, he had risen to deputy director of the International Monetary Fund before joining giant bond manager Pimco. He seemed perfect for smoothing relations between HMC and the university. Filling the hole that Meyer left was another matter.

One solution: Don't even try, just hand over all of the endowment to outside money managers. But El-Erian insisted on keeping things intact. He talked of the "structural advantages" of investing a big endowment backed by an AAA-rated university, such as allowing you to borrow at low rates when making leveraged bets. The former Pimco emerging-market superstar also believed that the developing countries offered big profits to smart investors like HMC because they had become less risky thanks to ample dollar reserves and a growing middle class.

So El-Erian upped HMC's exposure to emerging-market stocks, which rose from 6% of assets when Meyer left, to 11% two years later. He also used total return swaps to bet on developed world stocks and commodities on the cheap, freeing up money for other investments. Tapping former Stanford endowment staffer Mark Taborsky (an "important hire," El-Erian would later write in a book), El-Erian also took money from hedge funds he didn't like and redirected it to ones he thought were winners, putting hundreds of millions into funds in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

The moves looked brilliant. For the year ended June 2007, Harvard returned 23% versus 17.7% for 151 other big institutional investors (and 20.6% for the S&P 500). Fearing all markets could soon fall, El-Erian injected what he referred to as "Armageddon insurance" into HMC's portfolio for the first time by buying interest rate floors, or a wager that rates would fall, and betting, via credit default swaps, that companies could soon struggle to pay their debts.

For the following year, through June 2008, Harvard gained 8.6%, versus a 13% fall in the S&P. El-Erian's insurance accounted for much of HMC's outperformance. Hedge funds, however, were sucking up cash--HMC had increased investments in those areas to 19% from 12% a year earlier. The returns were flat. It's unclear how much of the results--good or otherwise--were El-Erian's doing. He left at the end of 2007, six months before the results came in, citing a desire to move back near his wife's family in California and return to Pimco as heir apparent to founder Bill Gross.

Since July, emerging-market shares have been a disaster, falling 50%, as measured by the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, worse than U.S. stocks. Another problem: El-Erian's insurance has been partly taken off since he left, leaving HMC vulnerable when markets plunged this fall. The total return swaps, which easily could have been terminated, were left alone. The EFG-Hermes Middle East North Africa Opportunities Fund, a hedge fund launched in September 2007 with some $200 million of HMC cash, was down 35% in 2008. El-Erian's big hire, Taborsky, left HMC in September. He's since joined El-Erian at Pimco. El-Erian and Taborsky decline to comment.

By the time Jane Mendillo walked into HMC's offices in July 2008, she figured some changes needed to be made. A former consultant who worked for years at HMC under Meyer, Mendillo got the HMC gig partly as a result of Meyer's recommendation. She had spent the last six years running the $1.6 billion Wellesley College endowment, which was completely outsourced to external managers. Her detractors say that she was ill prepared for Harvard's liquidity crisis and slow to take cognizance of the swap exposure. But they concede that the crisis came fast on the heels of her arrival.

Mendillo did move quickly to deal with the private equity portfolio. One of her first moves at HMC, which she initiated before the markets started to fall in earnest, was to sell between $1 billion to $1.5 billion of Harvard's private equity assets in one of the biggest such sales ever attempted. The high bids on such assets have recently been 60 cents on the dollar, says Cogent Capital, an investment bank that advised Harvard on the sale. Cogent says the big discounts are due to "unrealistic pricing levels at which funds continued to hold their investments" and "fantasy valuations."

Defenders of Harvard's portfolio argue the secondary market is discounting private equity stakes too much. The market is made up of a dozen secondary funds with at most $15 billion available, says Bryon Sheets, a partner at San Francisco secondary firm Paul Capital. That makes it a buyer's market, given the slew of desperate banks, pension funds and endowments looking to unload assets to meet obligations. So what are Harvard's private equity stakes worth? Most private equity investors like Harvard have been waiting for their money managers to finish marking down their assets following a brutal 2008. It is a slow process that lags the public markets by as much as 180 days, says William Frieske, a performance consultant at Northern Trust, which administers endowment accounts.

But one clue to what may be coming can be found in Harvard's own portfolio. It owns units of Conversus Capital, a publicly traded vehicle that holds slices of 210 private equity funds. Conversus has cut its net asset value by 21% since last summer to make a "best estimate." Yet stock investors think things are a lot worse. Conversus shares have fallen 67% since June 30 and are trading at a 62% discount to the net asset value. The Conversus stock drop translates into a potential $168 million loss for Harvard, which, as of Jan. 31, was still listed as a "strategic investor."

Conversus is run by Robert Long, a former Bank of America exec who went to Boston and got $250 million from El-Erian to help him set up the firm and buy $1.9 billion of Bank of America's private equity assets. Harvard also owns a piece of Garnett & Helfrich Capital, a $350 million fund opened in 2004. Garnett has purchased six companies but, five years later, is yet to realize any returns. The value of one of those investments, software maker Ingres, has been reduced by its minority owner to nothing "as a result of reported losses." Then there is Tallwood Venture II, a $180 million fund raised in 2002 to invest in semiconductors. It has hardly exited any of its portfolio companies, according to Thomson Reuters and SEC filings.

The fact that a fifth of HMC's portfolio is in private-equity-like investments makes it vulnerable to the kind of problems HMC faced this fall. HMC has made $11 billion of capital commitments to investment partnerships through 2018, says Moody's. HMC used to make good on those commitments with income generated by the existing private equity portfolio. "Endowments are afraid capital calls will come quickly and far ahead of any liquidity from private equity funds," says Colin McGrady, managing director at Cogent Partners.

Watching all of this, the group of 10 Harvard alumni from the class of 1969 feel vindicated. "The events of the last year show that the whole procedure of rewarding people so handsomely based on increases on paper value of the endowment was deeply flawed," says a spokesman for the group, which recently sent a letter to the Harvard president suggesting HMC staffers return $21 million of their latest bonuses. "Even now, we don't really know how well it has done in the last 10 years."

 

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When will the end of the world end?



This week opened with an apocalyptic bang, as the Dow Jones
Industrial Average hit an intraday low of 7105.94 -- the index's
lowest level since Oct. 28, 1997. It rose Tuesday, then fell again
Wednesday. In response, pundits everywhere went picking through
their tea leaves one shred at a time, looking for the definitive
sign that Armageddon is over, so we can all go back to making money
again.



What history shows, however, is that the road to recovery from a
catastrophic bear market can be distressingly long.



Friday, finance professor Elroy Dimson of London Business School
will publish his periodic update of long-term investment returns,
which is eagerly awaited each year among the propeller-heads of the
investing world. Along with his colleagues Paul Marsh and Mike
Staunton, Prof. Dimson compiles vast amounts of reliable data on 17
stock markets around the world all the way back to 1900.



Naturally, the report this year focuses on bear markets. The
results shocked even me, and I don't startle easily. Consider this:
Prof. Dimson estimates that we'll have to wait nine more years
before the Dow average, including dividends, has a 50% chance of
hitting its 2007 highs.



The report also challenges the conventional wisdom that a run of
bad results in the past must be followed by good returns in the
future. Following the worst years, stocks outperformed cash over
the next five years by an annual average of 7.1 percentage points.
But after the best years, stocks outperformed by 6.8 percentage
points annually -- a statistical dead heat. 'If you were trying to
find a rule buried in this as to what investors should do to make
money,' says Prof. Dimson, 'it's kind of hopeless.'



The report hammers home another uncomfortable truth. The belief
that stocks become virtually riskless if you just hold onto them
long enough -- popularized a decade ago in books like Jeremy
Siegel's 'Stocks for the Long Run' and James Glassman and Kevin
Hassett's 'Dow 36,000' -- has been shattered by reality. No matter
how long your investing horizon may be, the risk of owning risky
assets can never go to zero.



Since 1900, there have been four global bear markets in which
stocks have fallen by at least 40%, adjusted for inflation. Two
have occurred in the past nine years alone. Stocks are risky not
merely because their returns are variable, but because they can
wipe you out at various points along the way. That's the price you
must pay -- often at the worst possible time, and never with a
moment's notice -- for the hope of higher returns in the end. That
hope is real and valid. It is also uncertain.



'More people are realizing that equities are still risky even over
long horizons,' Prof. Dimson says. 'So I think some of the reasons
that people were willing to pay a high price for risky securities
have been curtailed.' It may be a long time before investors are
again willing to value stocks at much higher than the long-term
average of 15 times earnings.



That's important. Expectations can be a major factor in stock
valuations for years; you don't always get what you foresee. In
1900, for example, many investors were in a triumphal mood, buoyed
by the trend toward peace and prosperity. But over the next five
decades, all hell broke loose, and global stock markets returned an
annual average of just 3.5% after inflation. In 1950, Cold War
pessimism was the order of the day, and many doubted whether
humanity itself would survive the years to come. But progress
prevailed; global stock markets gained 9% a year, adjusted for
inflation, over the next five decades.



The mood today is probably closer to the pessimism of 1950 than to
the optimism of 1900, which is itself a hopeful sign for the longer
term.



Nor are Prof. Dimson's findings quite as discouraging as they sound
at first. If there's an even chance that the Dow will nearly double
in nine years, that implies a total return of 7.1% per year, which
isn't exactly chicken feed.



Since 1900, U.S. stocks have averaged a 6% annual return after
inflation. If you knew nothing else -- and none of us do -- then
that should be your forecast of the return on U.S. stocks over the
long term. That's measured in decades. In the short run, as just
about every investor now realizes, anything can happen.



So now is the time to give your entire portfolio a liquidity test.
By 'entire portfolio,' I mean not just your stocks, bonds and
mutual funds, but all your assets and liabilities. Do you have
enough cash to support yourself (and your family) for six to 12
months if you lose your job? Can you comfortably cover any big
expenses (tuition, a house down payment, a wedding) that must be
paid in the next few years? Do illiquid assets like real estate or
a private business constitute less than half your wealth?



If your answer to any of those questions is no, then you should
think twice before sinking more money into stocks. That was true,
by the way, even before the bear market.



If, however, you aren't yet retired and can answer yes to each of
those questions, you should have no hesitation about staying in
stocks. In fact, you should buy more -- especially if your job
security isn't contingent on the health of the stock market. Say,
you're a tenured teacher, a member of the clergy, a prison
administrator, a funeral director or an Internal Revenue Service
agent.



As Prof. Dimson puts it, 'If your children will have a wedding in
the near future and you absolutely must pay for it, keep your money
risk-free. But if you want the chance of giving them a wonderful
wedding instead of just feeding a few guests, then you should take
the risk of investing in equities.'



Abraham Lincoln liked to tell the story of a king who ordered his
wise men to come up with a single sentence that would never be
false. Their solution, which Lincoln called both 'chastening' and
'consoling,' covered all possible contingencies: 'And this, too, shall pass
away.'



My dad, no slouch in the wisdom department, once shared with me his
version of the way to encompass all possible futures: 'Hope for the best, but expect the
worst.' Those, it seems to me, are good watchwords for
investors, regardless of whether or not the end of the world has
ended.

Hello~~~Mina~~~~

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网赚综述（转）

Hello everyone!!!!! i finnaly survive from my HOMEWORK!!!!!!!!! (sorry for writing in English again....) Phew~ Many homework need to do, many Tuition need to go, many subject need to go........ Haiz...... who ask me are very very very lazy at last year?!?!??!?! My Tuition fees is very HIGH!!!!!!

Physics Tuition : MYR 70 (RMB140+-)

Chemistry Tuition : MYR 70 (RMB 140+-)

English Tuition : MYR 100 (RMB 200+-)

Additional Mathematic Tuition : MYR 70 (RMB 140+-)

Mathematics Tuition : MYR 70 (RMB 140+-)

Piano Tuition : MYR 180 (RMB 360+-)

Ah!!!!!!!! Many Tuition that not yet started again!!!! just like Malay Tuition & blah blah blah....... So sad TT TT Who ask me does not study last year!??!??!?! (是你自己不要读书的)= =|||

P/S : Using translator is very very very very very mendoksei... so i prefer don't use lor......

是你自己不要读书的 = is you myself don't read book = =||| using translator must use this kind of sentence(?) because usually the translator is translate directly....

mono'stalks

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Henry James 08:13:52

working?



Mono 08:13:53

I am away now, but will contact you later.

Mono 10:43:22

Just finished.

Henry James 10:43:30

hehe



Mono 10:43:31

I am away now, but will contact you later.

Henry James 10:43:34

good



Henry James 10:43:46

paper finished?



Mono 10:44:42

Nah, my job.

Henry James 10:45:07

job? sales of the video games?



Mono 10:48:25

Yes sir.

Henry James 10:49:13

can the earnings support ur daily expenditures of college?



Mono 10:49:51

It could, but I have kind parents that pay for my college. So I
just put it away for saving and paying off other things, like my
car.

Henry James 10:50:49

is ur college far away from ur home?



Mono 10:51:07

Nope, a local community college.

Henry James 10:51:26

that would be very convenient



Henry James 10:53:54

will American parents care for children life long as chinese
parents do?



Mono 10:54:26

I am unsure...how long do they care for their young over
there?

Henry James 10:54:44

nearly life long



Henry James 10:55:25

they support children till they finished their colllege. and if the
children need money, their parents will continue their support if
they can



Mono 10:55:38

Depends on the family....my family, we will.

Henry James 10:55:51

i c



Henry James 10:57:10

their is a popular saying that , american parents will take care of
their children till 18. and after that, the child must depend on
himself.



Henry James 10:57:56

is that what is happening there?



Mono 11:00:48

I'll be right back, but my friend, yes that is what happend to him,
but then my other friend, has a giving mother, however, he has
earned a scholarship to school..I'll explain more when I get
back.

Henry James 11:01:40

cu later



Mono 13:14:48

However, many people that go to a local community college like mine
are either people who are looking to save money with cheap tuition
and to live at home, or forigners who are also looking for a cheap
over-all solution, while still being in America. This how ever is
one of the few factors that is adding to the idea of children
staying with their parents, long after the age of 20, because they
do not have that college aspect playing in.

Mono 13:18:03

For example, you will find that many people who do not recieve a
college education will get a job and continue living at home, until
that job, or another job, pays them enough money to move out. The
job it self will still keep that individual close to home.

Mono 13:25:01

As for individual support though, as long as it is a family with no
complications (like fights) in its past, you will find that members
will turn to a family member's support should they can't continue
to live in their own home. This support isn't limited to just the
parents, but can come from them. As the parents get older, some
just live it out by themselves, some move to a retirement home, and
other families will take their parents in and watch them. Sometimes
the children (and even the parents in cases) see this as an
inconvience, and do not wish for it to happen, so the parents
living with their children tends to be a last resort for most, but
isn't uncommon.

Mono 13:12:26

Alright, so yeah, it is pretty different with families and how they
deal with the aging of their children. For the most part it is
generally accepted that when a children turns 18, they are old
enough to live on their own. The process of going off to College at
this age also supports the independent spirit of the
individual.

ArtCenterCollegeofDesign

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Art center --职业设计的殿堂

推荐度： 4.0/5.0  适合职业发展

名称：Art Center College of Design

学校网站：http://www.artcenter.edu

地点：Pasadena，CA, 加州洛杉矶地区的帕萨迪纳

环境：郊区

建立时间：1930年

性质：私利

校园：Hillside Campus 和 South Campus

排名：工业设计本科研究生均排名第一排名者：DesignIntelligence,

人数：本科1,485  研究生 146

学位： BFA  MA 
MFA

教授：407人  
16%全职

Student/faculty ratio: 12 :1

学生教师比例：12:1

国际学生：16% 来自28个国家和地区

中国学生：本科3+  研究生5+

申请费:70

录取率：本科 71%

奖学金：国际学生可申请几千到1万美元的奖学金

招生联系地址：

Admission

Art Center College of Design

1700 Lida Street

Pasadena, CA 91103-1999

Phone: 626-396-2373

Fax: 626-795-0578

email: admissions@artcenter.edu

学费：

2007 本科

$13,855 Tuition, 每学期

$200 Universal Access Fee, 每学期

2007 研究生

$14,644 Tuition, 每学期

$200 Universal Access Fee, 每学期

2008 本科

$14,672 Tuition, 每学期

$235 Universal Access Fee, 每学期

2008 研究生

$15,508 Tuition, 每学期

$235 Universal Access Fee每学期

设备：专业精良，例如200多台的苹果工作站，30多台的SGI/NT
320工作站，CAID，KODAX XL 7700,RFS 2035, 840 AV工作站等。

专业设置：

本科

广告 Advertising

环境设计Environmental Design

电影 Film

现代艺术 Fine Art Media

平面设计 Graphic Design

插画 Illustration

摄影 Photography + Imaging

产品设计 Product Design

交通工具设计 Transportation Design

研究生：

电影 Film

现代艺术 Art

工业设计 Industrial Design

媒体设计 Media Design

艺术理论和评论 Criticism + Theory

著名校友：

· Chris Bangle: 宝马首席设计

· Yves Behar: Fuseproject 建立者

· Andrew D. Bernstein: NBA官方摄影师

· Gordon Buehrig: 汽车设计师

· Michael Bay: 电影导演

· Ryan Church: 概念艺术家

· Teddy Lo: 香港 LED 艺术家

· Frank Nuovo: 诺基亚首席设计师

· David Townsend: 摩托罗拉MobileME设计主管

学校简介：

Art
Center（有翻译为艺术中心学院）是一所依托现代设计为基础的和艺术设计行业紧密相关的艺术学院，建立于1930年，离洛杉矶城区非常近。拥有两个校园，Hillside校园坐落在帕萨迪纳山上，可以俯瞰注明的玫瑰碗体育场并且和世界著名大学加州理工学院（Caltech），Occidental
college只有10英里之遥。这三所学校之间也有很密切的社区学术交流以及学生活动联系。建立于1930年的Art
Center致力于培养以视觉艺术为职业的工作者以及艺术家。学校和世界很多大型的企业有着密切的合作，而这些企业也是学生学习期间研究和项目制作的主要赞助者，这些企业和品牌包括ADOBE，耐克，环球电影公司，现代，索尼，诺基亚以及奥迪等。学生有非常便利的条件在上学期间就可以接触这些未来可能的雇主和客户。学校也经常邀请著名的艺术家和专业人士来校讲座并与学生交流。Art
Center在世界范围内有很大的知名度，原因是这所学校培养了很多著名的工业设计师，而最擅长的则是交通工具设计，包括宝马，奥迪，现代等多款经典车型设计均出自该学校毕业生之手。同样出名的还有电影专业，包括著名的好莱坞导演迈克尔贝（珍珠港变形金刚），扎克
斯内德（300
僵尸的黎明）。其他著名的专业还包括插画，摄影，广告设计，平面设计和娱乐设计。比较著名的包括大量的平面广告设计以及加勒比海盗等商业作品的插画设计。作为一所职业学校，Art
Center一直在努力让自己的学生与行业紧密的接触并且培养学生的技能使之在以后更好地进入行业工作。而且此学校也是第一所被联合国指定附属为NGO
Non-Governmental Organization的设计学院。

作为一个著名的现代艺术学院，Art
Center的大部分学生来源于那些已经受过艺术教育和致力于应用艺术的群体。所以本科新生的平均年龄达到了23岁。事实上很多的学生已经拥有大学本科学位后才来这所学校重新读本科学位。学校校内无宿舍，学生均居住在校外。

学校评论：

Art
center无需置疑是世界范围内的著名艺术设计学院，大量的校友成为行业内最成功的设计师，艺术家和职业人士。学校非常注重这也教育，如果你还没确定以后做非常专业的工作，那最好不要考虑该学校。反之，你有很好的艺术背景和创作能力，那么这所学校是你通向成功的最好选择之一。虽然学校相对大部分艺术学院规模略小，但是这并不影响该学校的学术水平和业界知名度。反倒这种小的规模给你提供了更好的学习和工作环境。如果你想成为一个广告设计师，室内环境设计师，又或者是商业电影导演，汽车设计师，产品设计师以及插画师，那么Art
Center为你提供了非常职业和相关的教育，并且让你有机会实习和世界上最著名的企业合作。毕业后对于大部分学生来说也可以非常容易的找到一份设计工作。但是学校不好的一面是你必须在校外居住而且需要购买交通工具去上学。其次如果你很重视的是艺术本身，而不是将整个职业生涯贡献给行业，应该考虑更“艺术”的学校。

建议：

由于最近两年国内工业设计的学生越来越多，这所学校已经成为了大部分中国学生的首选，但是就笔者所知，该学校2007年破纪录的录取了3人以上的工业设计研究生，但显然学校的规模无法招收大量的该专业中国学生。但是相对已经工作和拥有本科学位的学生不妨考虑申请本科，本科提供更专业的教育包括产品设计和交通工具设计，而研究生多少比较侧重理论和战略以及思维培训。对于一些视觉传达和新媒体的学生，不妨考虑该学校的插画，摄影和平面设计专业。考虑到录取人数和笔者长期的观察以及调查，并不适合所有的学生申请。当然该学校并不要求之前的经验和专业符合，比如2007年工业设计研究生录取的一名来自中国西南地区的学生本科时学的是物理。但是对于此所竞争激烈的学校每年录取大陆的研究生人数不会超过20人。如果选择本科相对会好很多。

Art Center Grad ID Term1 课程简介

1. visualisation,
教基本的形体和光影关系，从立方体，圆柱体，圆锥体到复杂的组合体，具有ACCD特色的严谨科学画法

2.visualisation CG, 把visualisation的东西在PS里画出来

3.3Ddevelopment, 学solidworks，和后面的模型课相互配合，认识产品结构

4.Material&Method,模型课，Term 1
是熟悉学校的加工设备和木头的加工，内容有木板打磨，胡椒罐～～

5.Visual Form,
平面设计，这个平面很有意思，前两周学的是Figure&Ground和Proportion(找建筑，绘画和产品，中黄金分割的应用)，第三周的作业是设计邮票，一张大邮票被分成四张小邮票，这上面的图案看大的很完整，看小的也各有主题，邮票只是个载体，主要是研究，图案的分割与统一，第四周，色彩理论～～


6.Studio, 做project，这学期的课题是给美国的baby
boomer设计医疗产品或者系统，前三周是大方向的探索，小组作业，往后就是个人做，核心课程，但目前的感觉是还不够成熟，大家在strategy
design的口号下，有点找不到方向了～～

7.Sparks&Connection
，研究archetype，分析产品开发中三大部分的要素和相互关系，前三周是分析广义的archetype，很多是在文学，电影中的应用,往后是三部分分开分析，分别做单独的map和presentation，期末总结，这个每星期的任务挺重，两周一张的map劳民伤财啊～