Four (or Five) Easy Lessons From Enron

AEA Session : Lessons from Enron Accounting in Partnerships

Learning from ENRON.

By now, nearly everyone in the academic world will have heard of ENRON and other similar scandals that are shaking the financial sector. Some clever bookkeeping manoeuvres put a needed gloss on the company’s accounts that helped to boost their stocks to new heights. But when examined critically, a rather different financial situation emerged, which was followed by a sharp dive in ENRON’s share ...

Four Lessons from Traditional MDEs

While many researchers are interested in developing and designing technologies for multiple-display environments (MDEs), a core problem remains: we do not fully understand the role these display technologies can play in real-world activities. Our approach has been to study traditional MDEs (i.e. offices and laboratory environments) to understand both the tasks supported by traditional displays,...

Twenty-Five Lessons from Computational Neuromodulation

Neural processing faces three rather different, and perniciously tied, communication problems. First, computation is radically distributed, yet point-to-point interconnections are limited. Second, the bulk of these connections are semantically uniform, lacking differentiation at their targets that could tag particular sorts of information. Third, the brain's structure is relatively fixed, and y...

Giant Chloroviruses: Five Easy Questions

Chloroviruses are large, icosahedral, dsDNA-containing viruses that replicate in certain unicellular, chlorella-like green algae [1,2]. They exist in freshwater throughout the world with titers as high as thousands of plaque-forming units (PFU) per ml of indigenous water although titers are typically 1–100 PFU/ml. Titers fluctuate during the year with the highest titers typically occurring in t...