Spinoff and merger examples--American Express, Ameriprise; Procter & Gamble and Gillette

If you need an example of a spinoff, American Express and Ameriprise are a current example. The spinoff was completed last Friday, and Ameriprise, formerly American Express Financial Advisers, started trading on NYSE today with the ticker AMP. Ameriprise representatives rang the opening bell at NYSE today.

The closing bell was rung by officials of Procter & Gamble, which acquired the Gillette Company today. American Express's and the Procter & Gamble and the Gillette Company's homepages are a source of all the filings that are needed for spinoffs and mergers.

MS Office Tip: Use Word Wraps and Line Breaks in Excel

One of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker, posted this handy tip for adding paragraph breaks to a long cell in Microsoft Excel.

Bloomberg information

Last Thursday I attended an open house at Bloomberg's headquarters. I attended some short information sessions on independent research and corporate governance. I received some reports and search guides that Bloomberg has prepared on these topics and subjects. If you want to see them, please let me know.

Economic Census 2002 Information

I attended a workshop on the 2002 Economic Census sponsored by the Census Bureau last Friday. I have extra copies of the handouts if you want to see them. The Powerpoint presentation is available.

Among the most important things that I learned:
The Economic Census reports are the only census reports that include both businesses with employers and businesses without paid employees. The American FactFinder, a quick link on the Census's web site, and the other reports, do not include businesses without paid employees. Businesses without paid employees number in the millions--ma and pa businesses owned by the couple, taxi drivers who rent their cabs, many used car dealers, and perhaps consultants who own their own business, etc.

The Census Bureau also had good questions for examples of limitations of the data. For example, if one is trying to determine the number of casinos, one must also search for casinos in hotels. (I didn't know that New Jersey requires a casino to be in a hotel.) Connecticut is an example of a state in which the number of receipts from casinos is suppressed to avoid identifying single businesses--Connecticut has two casinos and if you knew the receipts of one casino, you can figure the amount of the other.

Librarians' Index to the Internet revamped

As of September 30, the Librarians' Index to the Internet has been completely redesigned and renamed. It is now known as the Librarians' Internet Index.

• Old version of lii.org
• New version of lii.org
  

NYCdata at the Weissman Center

Prof. Eugene J. Sherman and the Weissman Center for International Business, have compiled a database of statistics, NYCdata, about "New York City, the capital of the modern world". The compendium covers 16 topics including population and geography, income and wages, fiscal data, international trade, housing, education, culture and business activity and headquarters. You can connect to the site at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/

Mental Measurements Yearbook

Access has been restored.

Social Explorer

Presented at the last ERAC meeting, Susan showed us a new resource, free for now, called Social Explorer.

Social Explorer is based at Queens College of the City University of New York. They provide demographic data in data maps to track visually the changes that have occurred in the United States, from 1790 to the present, from the country level ot the county level.

Point to: http://www.socialexplorer.com

Mental Measurements Yearbook

At this time there are problems accessing Mental Measurements Yearbook. I'm working on getting this fixed up and will let you know when access is restored.

Mike

Exalead: An Interesting Search Engine

After reading an interesting column by Mary Ellen Bates in EContent about Google falling behind in offering advanced tools for searching and results filtering, I tried out one of the alternative search engines she recommended: Exalead. This engine offers in one place a lot of nifty features not all found in one web search tool:

• word stemming
• phonetic search (will search for words that sound like the ones you type)
  
• proximity searching (within 16 words)
  
• clustering of results
• thumbnail images of pages in search results
• suggestions of related terms
• clickable filters for document/file types (e.g., you can winnow search results list to only PDFs, or only DOCs, or only PPTs, etc.

Here's a sample search for "death with dignity." As you can see, the list of related terms on the left side of the search results page is fairly comprehensive. The "related terms" feature alone may make this useful when trying help students brainstorm about other keywords to consider.

There's no pretending Exalead has as large an index as Google. The range of features, though, offered on Exalead's search results page (as well as on its advanced search page) make it an attractive alternative (especially considering that right now, as far as I know, it is the only engine that allows for proximity searching

Euromonitor GMID

Our access to Euromonitor has been reactivated.

TRIAL -- IMF International Financial Statistics

We have a trial to the IMF International Financial Statistics:
The IFS database contains approximately 32,000 time series covering more than 200 countries and areas and includes all series appearing on the IFS Country Pages; exchange rate series for all Fund member countries, plus Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles; major Fund accounts series; and most other world, area, and country series from the IFS World Tables.

You will need a password to get in.

Guest Logins

Now that we've got a tool we can use for creating guest logins for non-Baruch library patrons (see Arthur's post on the blog for details), I've added a button on the browser toolbar for both of the PCs at the front of the reference desk. The button is labeled "Guest Logins." Clicking it will take you to the page that allows us to set up temporary logins for both the wireless network and for the public PCs that require login.

New database: Audit Analytics

Requested by the accounting dept., we now have access to Audit Analytics, a database which provides detailed audit information on over 1,500 accounting firms and 20,000 publicly registered companies. Users can create reports by auditor, fees, location, industry and more.

We have one concurrent user.

However each user must have their own individual password. To receive a password, please email Tom Hardy at thardy@ivesinc.com. On the main page, you will be asked to log-in using your email address and the password (on the left side of the screen).

Thanks to Saad, there is a page explaining this after users try to connect to the database from the information resources page.
You can get to that page from: http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/info_resources/audit.htm

Income, Poverty, Health Insurance in US, 2004 Census

Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2004 (pdf)

http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p60-229.pdf

August 2005 demographic profile of the real median household income of US residents, along with material on the nation's official poverty rate and those persons without health insurance coverage. Notes that the nation's official poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent in 2003 to 12.7 percent in 2004. Also notes that the number of persons without health insurance coverage increased by approximately 800,000 to 45.8 million. Details such crucial research questions as how the Bureau measures income and poverty. Scout Report 9.9.05

New databases:

3 new databases:

• IEEE/CSLPe :
  New database, for computer scientists and other interested...
  Access to 22 periodicals published by IEEE and more than 1,500 conference publications in full-text, searchable formats.
  http://remote.baruch.cuny.edu:2048/login?url=http://www.computer.org/publications/dlib/

Coming to us with Sociological Abstracts, we also have access to:

• Physical Education Index:
  These abstracts feature a wide variety of content, ranging from physical education curricula, to sports medicine, to dance. Other coverage includes sport law, kinesiology, motor learning, recreation, standardized fitness tests, sports equipment, business and marketing, coaching and training, and sport sociology/psychology.
  Physical Education Index

• Applied Social Science Index and Abstracts (ASSIA):
  ASSIA indexes and abstracts cover health, social services, psychology, sociology, economy, politics, race relations and education. It is updated monthly.
  ASSIA: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts

Printing from Baruch laptops

Students who have borrowed one of the library's laptops can now use them to send print jobs to the student printers. Students connected to the wireless network using their own laptops, however, cannot send print jobs to the student printers.

Graphing calculators all loaned out

All the graphing calculators have been loaned out for the fall semester. There is one available for 2-hour loan (from the reserve window).

Blackboard Problem-- and temporary solution

New students are having problems creating their Blackboard accounts. (They enter their information but CUNY Portal/Blackboard does not confirm the account; or they get blank pages when trying to enter Blackborad).

The Help Desk said that they can get around this ONLY by getting to Blackboard the following way:
1. From the Baruch homepage, choose "Blackboard" from the drop down menu under the "Computing" tab
2. Click on the link that says "Login directly to Blackboard (for registered users only)" --- even though they are not registered yet.
3. Under the sign-in boxes on the Login page, you will see "If you do not have a valid active CUNY Portal username and password, please go here". Click on "here", which is a link.
4. This leads to the "Validate CUNY Affiliation" page. They will need to type in their last name, SSN, and DOB.

They should get into Blackboard after these 4 steps. The Help Desk thinks this problem will be around for another week or two.

Guest Accounts for Internet Access

The college is testing its new guest password generator for network access accounts. The accounts are valid until 11:59 p.m. on the day following their creation. Any full-time member of the library staff may log into the application through the link below. Please feel free to provide an account to anyone who needs to use the Internet. The fact that someone has been admitted into the library demonstrates eligibility. We will announce the availability of guest accounts in the library, on our web site, etc. after we have tested the application and based on our experience, decided how to systematically dispense the accounts as a service. Please keep in mind that this is a test version of the application, so you may encounter bugs that you should report through the comments/suggestions form on the library's web site.

https://bdam.baruch.local