Ford Is Pushing Buyout Offers to Its Workers

From the New York Times:

WOODHAVEN, Mich. — The Ford Motor Company is applying the hard sell these days — piling on incentives, doling out marketing DVDs and brochures, and making offers it hopes are too good to pass up.

But Ford’s big new push is not to sell cars. Instead, it is trying to sign up thousands of workers to take buyouts, partly by convincing them that their brightest future lies outside the company that long offered middle-class wages for blue-collar jobs.

So, Ford is pitching a buffet of buyout packages that are easily among the richest ever offered to factory workers, including one-time cash payments of $140,000 or college tuition plans for an entire family.

 For the entire article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/business/26ford.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Question of the Week

“How can I read the Wall Street Journal online?”

You can read the daily Wall Street Journal online through a database called Factiva, which is a product of the Dow Jones company.   When you select Factiva you should come right up into the daily news section, and the Wall Street Journal is the top publication.   Navigate through the various sections using the drop down box under the publication name.  You can also access other issues from the last couple of weeks.   Scroll down and you will find that the New York Times and the Washington Post and several weekly magazines are in here as well.

Organizing Your References

Many faculty and student researchers use EndNote (available from IUware Online) to search online bibliographic databases, organize their references, images and PDFs in any language, and create bibliographies and figure lists instantly. See our page on learning and using EndNote for more information.

You can also use EndNote Web to manage your references. Sign up for a free account at https://www.myendnoteweb.com  if your are on campus or http://bert.lib.indiana.edu:2048/login?url=http://www.myendnoteweb.com if you are off campus.

For users of Firefox, there is an add on that can be used with the browser, Zotero. Visit the Zotero web site for more information.

Remember that Business/SPEA Information Commons staff can provide individual, class, or group instruction for any of these tools. UITS also offers STEP Workshops on using EndNote. Visit their web site for the current schedule.

Standard & Poor’s 500 Index Returns

Here’s a quick way to find monthly and annual S & P 500 return data:

 http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_500/2,3,2,2,0,0,0,0,0,5,12,0,0,0,0,0.html 

 Data can be downloaded into spreadsheets or as pdf files.  

Question of the Week

What are the companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average?

There are 30 companies in the Dow and they change from time to time.  To see the current list of Dow components, link here to the Dow Jones Web site and you will see a table of Dow indexes.  In the right hand column, click on “Components” and a spreadsheet of the current 30 companies will open.  You can also see an interesting timeline of the Dow components under “Dow Jones Industrial Average Historical Component Lists.” 

This list won’t be current for long!  Dow Jones has recently announced two changes to the Dow components to take place on February 19, 2008.  Bank of America Corp. and Chevron Corp. are being added.  Altria and Honeywell are being removed.

The Smartest Cities In America

From Forbes.com: 

Some people are drawn to settling in or traveling to a particular locale because of its eternally warm weather, others find themselves moving around due to family matters or work-related necessities. But what if you’re looking to surround yourself with academic excellence in a haven for intellectual stimulation and scholarly achievement? In that case, it’s not the sun you’re pursuing, but the smarts.

Forbes.com has ranked America’s metros and discovered exactly which cities are the union’s brightest bulbs.

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/02/07/solutions-education-smartcities-oped-cx_apa_0207smartcities.html 

Journal Impact Factor

How do I find the impact factor for a magazine or a journal? 

Use the Web of Knowledge database.

http://www.libraries.iub.edu/scripts/countResources.php?resourceId=203 

Click the additional resources tab and then select “journal citation reports”.  Select either the science or social science edition, and then search for a particular journal by title or category.

Microsoft’s war plan

(Fortune Magazine) — When Jerry Yang answered the phone on a rainy Silicon Valley Thursday night in January and heard the hoarse voice of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer on the other end, it was simply the last in a string of disappointments the Yahoo co-founder has confronted over the past two years.

Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) had already tried to buy Yahoo a year before — presumably for billions of dollars more than the $44.6 billion bid Ballmer told Yang about on Jan. 31.

For more….http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/03/magazines/fortune/yahoo.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008020406

Detailed Consumer Demographics available on SimplyMap

SimplyMap, a web-based mapping and reporting application, offers demographic, business and marketing data. One data provider is MediaMark Research, Inc. (MRI) which produces current estimates of usage and consumption (propensity) for thousands of very specific and detailed products, including actual brand data.  About 3,000 MRI categories are prepared by EASI ® (Easy Analytic Software, Inc) annually with updated Block Group demographic estimates to show results (propensity to buy, expenditures, etc.) within a state. One can map data for a specific region, compare data across multiple regions, or even export a map for Powerpoint or Word. SimplyMap is much more simple after watching the training video in the top right corner of the database.

http://www.libraries.iub.edu/scripts/countResources.php?resourceId=3677490

Give Your Students Tools to Succeed

If your course includes assignments that require students to use library and other information resources, we can help make sure they succeed.

Staff are available to talk to your class about the effective use of library resources for course assignments. A presentation can be structured as a demonstration and discussion in your classroom or as a hands-on workshop in a computer cluster, depending on the size of your class. Presentations are customized to focus on the resources that will be most useful for specific assignments. In addition, we can cover effective search strategies, evaluating resources, and citation formats. Class pages that link to recommended resources for specific assignments can be created and used with a presentation or in lieu of a presentation if there is not sufficient class time. 

Remember that links to library resources can also be added to courses in Oncourse (http://iubusref.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/create-reading-lists-in-oncourse/).

If you would like to request in-class instruction and/or a class page for your course, contact Steven Sowell (sowell@indiana.edu) or Nels Gunderson (gunderso@indiana.edu).