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hello~~~~小白归队了，巴拉老大因为现在有了工作和男友并且已经不考G了所以....在老大的软磨硬泡威逼利诱下小白又被拖回来继续做小分队。当然小白会一样认真做好小分队，还是老样子每天10点以后语法和逻辑问题扔到群里大家一起讨论相互帮助，当然之前扔上来也可以。今天速度微短，越障讲的是社交网络是是否会给社会带了好处的讨论中，正方和反方的观点，都是摘自经纪人学家上的文章，看看老美就同一事物写的正反观点。
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College Endowments: Why Even Harvard Isn’t As Rich As You Think
It seems everyone has an opinion about what colleges and universities should do with their endowments. Use them to lower tuition! Let students attend for free! Improve facilities! Hire more professors! When the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) released its annual report on college endowments last week, the big numbers grabbed headlines — Harvard’s endowment, the nation’s largest, grew 15% to $31.7 billion. Less attention was directed to Southern Virginia University’s endowment of $574,000, which won’t provide too many scholarships at a place that costs more than $18,000 a year. I had lunch with a college president a few weeks ago whose school has an endowment of about $20 million, which may sound like a lot of money, but he was consumed with fundraising efforts just to make ends meet. So the next time you hear someone pitching an idea for what a college should do with its endowment, think about these five reasons why the reality of how college endowments work is different than the rhetoric.
Most schools don’t have them. There are 2,719 four-year colleges in the U.S. (and another 1,690 two-year colleges), according to the most recent Department of Education figures. Most higher education institutions have no endowments, says William Jarvis, managing director and head of research at the CommonFund Institute, which helps NACUBO with its endowment surveys. But as with everything else around higher education, it’s the elite schools — which tend to be the ones that have large endowments — that drive the conversation. Endowments just aren’t a big factor at most of the institutions of higher education in this country.
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Many endowments are not that big. The endowments at schools like Harvard, Yale (No. 2, with $19.3 billion) or even large endowments at some public universities like the University of Texas (No. 3, at $17.1 billion) get the attention. But of the 823 U.S. colleges and universities that responded to a NACUBO survey (which also includes Canadian schools), only 73 had endowments that topped $1 billion; 137 have less than $25 million. Of the U.S schools in the NACUBO survey, the median endowment size is $90 million. Not too shabby, but at the standard expenditure rate, an endowment that size only generates about $4.5 million in spendable dollars per year. That’s a decent chunk of change, but hardly enough to eliminate student debt and rely on investment returns instead. Even Cooper Union, the famously no-tuition college in New York City (No. 126, at $607 million), is struggling financially and this fall indicated it is considering charging tuition for the first time in a century.
The recession is still taking a toll. Endowments on average earned 19% returns on their investments in the last fiscal year, according to NACUBO. Who wouldn’t like earnings like that? But they lost about the same amount in 2009. Many schools have not fully rebounded from the downturn: 47% of endowments have less than they did in 2008, according to NACUBO.
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Donors don’t always write blank checks. When your alma mater calls you and asks for a donation, it’s really hoping you’ll give to its general fund, where the use of your donation is unrestricted. Donations you give for scholarships or specific degrees, programs, or activities can only be used for those purposes. It’s the same with large donations, and large donations frequently come with donor restrictions — for instance, a specifically endowed chair for a professor or a particular area of research. Sometimes school can renegotiate with a donor to increase flexibility, such as using proceeds from an endowed chair for another purpose until a suitable hire can be found. Such revisions get complicated when the donors are no longer living. Bottom line: a lot of money in those big endowments has claims on it, including at Harvard (where, by the way, I am a member of the visiting committee at the graduate school of education.)
Endowments are not all cash. Remember the various exotic investments that helped trigger the financial meltdown? Just like other big-time investors, college endowments were attracted to private-equity deals, real estate, hedge funds, commodities and the like. NACUBO estimates that 54% of endowments are tied up in these alternative and illiquid investments.
This style of endowment investing was pioneered by Yale’s David Swenson and subsequently became known as the “Harvard-Yale” model. A few years ago, when the downturn began, the endowments of those two schools — and all the others that had followed their example — got hammered. Back then, everyone wanted to be like Harvard and Yale — and got their wish. When Ken Redd, NACUBO’s director of research and policy analysis, asked endowment leaders what they’re most worried about now, they said another fiscal crisis that could trigger a shortage of cash. In that way, these endowments are just like many Americans, over-extended with big dreams and not enough cash on hand.
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Facebook Governance Already a Concern For Giant CA Pension Fund
Well, that was fast. Less than one week after Facebook announced plans to go public, one powerful investing group — the giant California state teachers pension fund — is already voicing concern about the company’s management structure, which founder Mark Zuckerberg dominates. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which has a $145 billion portfolio and owns Facebook shares through its private equity managers, plans to send Facebook a letter outlining its concerns, according to Bloomberg.
Since Facebook’s early days, Zuckerberg has methodically consolidated iron-clad control over the company. The 27-year-old founder owns about 28% of the company outright, but through proxy arrangements with two major investors, DST Global and Accel Partners, he will control a majority of the company’s voting shares. That will allow him to single-handedly decide any matters that go before a shareholder vote, including the election of board directors and merger decisions. Zuckerberg even has the right to appoint his own successor.
That structure has already prompted worry from corporate governance experts, including Charles Elson, director of John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “I find it very troubling,” Elson told Reuters. “The whole tone to me was contrary to where governance has been moving, and the lessons that we have learned.”
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The California teachers pension fund, known as CalSTRS, is one of the most powerful players in the U.S. financial markets. It’s one of the largest pensions funds in the world — and the largest U.S. teachers retirement system — and manages money for over 850,000 members. It also has a long history of shareholder activism and has been a prominent voice for improving U.S. corporate governance. CalSTRS own Facebook shares through its private equity managers and plans to purchase more once Facebook goes public, according to Janice Hester-Amey, a portfolio manager in CalSTRS Corporate Governance unit.
“No matter how brilliant you are, when you come to the public market — not that we want to ever tell Zuckerberg or anyone like him how to run his company — there should be some protection especially for long-term, patient money like CalSTRS,” Hester-Amey told Reuters.
Zuckerberg’s effort to consolidate control over Facebook was quite understandable. But now that Facebook intends to sell shares to the investing public, he can expect growing scrutiny over the company’s management structure. CalSTRS’ expression of concern won’t be the last.
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Social networking
This house believes that society benefits when we share personal information online.
The proposer's opening remarks
We are sharing for good reason—not because we are insane, exhibitionistic, or drunk. We are sharing because, at last, we can, and we find benefit in it. Sharing is a social and generous act: it connects us, it establishes and improves relationships, it builds trust, it disarms strangers and stigmas, it fosters the wisdom of the crowd, it enables collaboration, and it empowers us to find, form and act as publics of our own making.
For individuals, sharing is a choice; that is the essence of privacy. Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, told me that before the net, we had "privacy through obscurity". We had little chance to be public because we had little access to the tools of publicness: the press, the stage, the broadcast tower (their proprietors were last century's 1%). Today, we have the opportunity to create, share and connect, and 845m people choose to do so on Facebook alone. Mr Zuckerberg says he is not changing their nature; he is enabling it.
I shared my prostate cancer—and, thus, my malfunctioning penis—online. Nothing bad came of this, only good: information, support from friends (who could not have known had I not been public) and the opportunity to inspire other men to be tested. Let me emphasise: that was my choice; no one should be forced to publicise their life.
But imagine if we did feel free to share our health data. Think of the correlations and possibly causes and cures we could find. Why don't we? We fear losing insurance (though insurers already demand our data) or jobs (that is a matter of discrimination to handle legislatively).
Most of all, we fear stigma—though in this day and age why should anyone be ashamed of being sick? In the tension between secrecy and openness, these are the kinds of benefits we should be considering, balancing them with the risks as we adapt society's norms to new realities and new opportunities.
Our institutions should share for different reasons. The wise company is opening up to build direct relationships with customers, to inoculate itself against the dreaded viral meme, and even to collaborate on the creation of products (see Local Motors' cars, designed with customers).
Government must learn to share its work and knowledge with its citizens. It must become open by default and secret by necessity (and there are necessary secrets in relation to security, diplomacy, criminal investigations and citizens' privacy). Today, government is instead secret by default and open by force (that of the journalist or the leaker).
If WikiLeaks has taught us nothing else, it is that no secret is safe and that too much government information has been classified as secret (consider the role of leaks in the Tunisian uprising and the subsequent Arab spring).
Openness is proving to be profoundly disruptive. When we share what we pay for goods, we ruin price opacity and retailers' margins. When we share our frustration with government, we can start revolutions. This is why institutions—news, media, corporate, government, academic—often resist the draw of openness and fear its impact. And that is why we are seeing a sudden rise in efforts to regulate our greatest tool of publicness, the net, under the guises of piracy, privacy, security and decency.
Too much of the conversation about sharing today revolves around risks—risks to privacy (which does need protection, and it has many new protectors) and risks to intellectual property (though media companies need to learn that controlling scarcity will become an increasingly difficult business model to execute). We also need to have a discussion about the benefits of sharing and the tools that enable it, so we can protect their potential.
The opposition's opening remarks
In "On Liberty", still the wisest guide for building a good society, John Stuart Mill asked: "what has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary, portion of mankind?" His answer rests on what he calls Europe's "remarkable diversity of character and culture" which, Mr Mill said, has enabled innovative individuals to be free from the "yoke" of public opinion.
But today, in our hyper-connected world of Facebook and Twitter, where we are sharing increasingly copious amounts of personal data with each other online, we are forgetting Mr Mill's warning against the oppressive yoke of public opinion.
Our new ideological orthodoxies are those of openness and radical transparency, values we are told that are good for society because they bring us together. They allows us to express what Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, writing in The Economist, describes as our "authentic identity". Finally we will be free to express who we really are, Ms Sandberg says. Finally, we can tell the truth about ourselves, about our habits, our tastes, our opinions. And this, she promises, will bring "the world closer together".
Unfortunately, Ms Sandberg is all too correct. Technology is indeed bringing the world closer and closer together, so close, in fact, that "I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did. Indeed, the internet is being transformed into Mark Zuckerberg’s adolescent fantasy—a brightly lit dorm room in which we become so intimately familiar with each other’s tastes, movements, views and histories that the narrative of our entire lives can be condensed onto a little screen with a single click.
In today's Web 3.0 world of real identities generating massive amounts of data, we are all living in the full digital glare of public opinion. In this world of Facebook's Timeline and Open Graph, of millions and millions of daily tweets, Google+ circles and LinkedIn updates, "publicness" (to borrow a word from my friend Jeff Jarvis) replaces privacy as the core condition of life in our digital age.
For many ideologists of openness, this new publicness is an unabashedly good thing. "And, yes, this shift to authenticity will take getting used to and will elicit cries about lost privacy," Ms Sandberg thus argues.
But those cries are real and they are not only a defence not only of individual freedom but also of social value. What society is gaining from this real-time confessional spectacle of our authentic identities is far outweighed by what it is losing. Our new collectivist danger is the stultifying conventionality of the online echo chamber. "Men are not sheep", Mr Mill reminded us in "On Liberty". But in our Web 3.0 world, as we share our identities so publicly with everyone else, standing out from the crowd, raising one's voice against collective conventionality, is becoming increasingly difficult.
Mr Mill was right. Diversity of culture rests on us being able to withdraw from society, to stand apart, to be private from public opinion. Privacy, solitude and the space to develop the mystery of personality; these are the real agencies of societal progress. Thesocial power of the introvert is now well known. And as 21st-century society increasingly migrates to the internet, we need to learn how to remain ourselves, or how to build a social network that promotes quiet, that offers a safe retreat for unconventional individuals.
"The transparency is too good to be true … What lies behind this falsely transparent world?" asks Jean Baudrillard. Behind today's digital transparency, I am afraid, lies a society splintered and weakened by today's narcissistic online spectacle. Secrecy and mystery are the most efficacious societal glues. Saying nothing might be the most social value of all.
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发表于 2012-2-9 22:46:17
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