Social Software in Libraries

Sent to Blogroller (Yale).

Sterling Library: 75th Anniversary

Read about and sign up for events honoring the 75th Anniversary of the Sterling Memorial Library. See my review of McCollough's and Walker's talks on my Yale blog posting.

Categories: SML

Yale Multimedia Archive

Egyptian Revival Period

Egyptian Revival Period Grave Markers, Obelisk, Pyramid, etc. Genealogy, History, Family History, American South.

David Swenson on Personal Finance

Reviewed in Yale Alumni Magazine July/August 2005 by Marc Gunther '73, author of Faith and Fortune: The Quiet Revolution to Reform American Business, and a senior writer at Fortune magazine.

Swenson's guide for individual investors is called Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment, and is published by the Free Press.

During Swenson's 20-years as chief investment officer at Yale, the endowment has risen from $1.3 billion 1985 to $14 billion today. His unique contribution is valued at $7.8 billion, namely, "the difference between the value of Yale's endowment today ... and waht its value would be had the money grown at an average rate of return for all college and university endowments." (p. 28). Moreover, measured against performance at other major research universities, Yale still comes out $4 billion ahead. Net investment retuns have averaged 16.1% per year (cf. Harvard at 14.9%).

Swenson is apalled at what he sees in the mutual fund industry, where investors are cherged large fees despite fact the fund returns typically fall below market average. He also directs his ire toward CEOs like Jack Welch who manage to obtain oversize perks and retirement benefits, and government officials who promote the privatization of Social Security.

For his part, Swenson has also been accused of amoral investing. GESO activist Ben Begleiter is reported to have commented: "they're doing a fabulous job of making money, but what are the social and environmental costs?", as the Unions have attacked his willingness to back (through a hedge fund), for example, in an environmentally dangerous water extraction scheme from the San Luis Valley of Colorodo.

Swenson was paid $1 million in 2002-2003, far less than his private sector counterparts (though he's still the University's highest paid employee). Harvard investment directors earn 15 to 20 times as much. Hedge fund managers can earn as much as $100 million in a good year. He became Yale's endowment manager at age 31, after working 6 years in corporate finance. "it wasn't the right place for me," he's quoted as saying, "because the end result is that peple are tyring to make lots of money for themselves. That just doesn't suit me."

Yale WebMail beta

From Chuck: "IMPv4 is based on the PHP scripting language, which historically has been perceived as providing scant support for unicode implementations. PHP is getting better about this though, and the minimum version required for use with IMPv4 is PHP 4.3.0. The latter is probably what Yale is depending on using now, but there is a later release of PHP, 5.0, which could also be used with IMPv4 and would (I think) offer better unicode support. In any case, all the horde products are completely open source, so there's nothing stopping us (except putting in the dev time) to customize it."

SAC-Interop

Index to SAC Interop files.

FranklinCovey Compass Journal

Looks like too many pages (224?), but closest thing to a refill in their catalog: FranklinCovey > Shopping > Compass Wire Bound Journal

Koha (Open Source ILS)

See entry in Yale blog.

Code Converter v3

Excellent tool from Gary Smith, OCLC Software Architect. He writes:"This page helps you convert between Unicode character numbers, characters, UTF-8 and UTF-16 code units in hex, and Numeric Character References (hex and decimal). Type or paste text in any of the boxes (separate hex values with spaces) and hit Tab or click outside the box (not return). The answers will appear in all the other boxes. You can then cut & paste the results into documents."

Long-term Care Insurance (Yale plan)

Yale is publicizing a group-rate RetirementGuard >insurance plan from Allianz, to preserve assets in the event one needs to obtain long-term medical care