Catching Up, Part I--The SOBIE Conference

Sorry for the long absence since last post--while at the eleventh Society of Business, Industry and Economics (SOBIE) Conference my dwelling had no Internet access. The conference itself has grown to include about 120 speakers from about 30 universities from about 15 states with topics including accounting, economics, taxation, logistics, management, ethics and marketing. I co-presented two papers with fellow APSU teacher Lesley Davidson (my wife Pam provided sufficient assistance with the ethics paper where she would have been a co-author had she wished)--one on continuing education for accounting ethics (we recommended four hours every two years but no special state-specific requirement) and an IFRS convergence paper (we recommended slowing down the process to allow the U. S. to learn from Canada's 2011 adoption to either tweak actual adoption as needed or even bail and stay with present GAAP if Canada's experience goes poorly enough). Among other paper topics that I attended included a paper on accounting disclosures by fellow APSU faculty Pennye Brown and Neil Dortch, a paper on betting on baseball by Taylor Stevenson (I presented papers with him at SOBIE the two previous years) and a paper on international aspects of transfer pricing. I enjoyed meeting Sam Cappel at the conference; I taught with him at Chattananooga 15-20 years ago and I got to introduce Lesley to James Hasselback of business faculty directory fame. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I again failed to find the annual SOBIE volleyball game.

Otherwise while in Florida: we had plenty of seafood (my wife came and did a shrimp boil plus we went to several fried seafood meals), we saw porpoises and a sunset on the beach, I got a minor sunburn from a midday walk on Wednesday and the weather was pleasant (highs in the 70s, low in the 50s, no rain until heading back towards Tennessee on Saturday night).