Education and Enron

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/9663
Excerpt:
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON THE ENRON CONTRACT WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AND THE CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Email this article

  0000-00-00

Q. What is the contract between Enron Energy, Inc. and the University of California and the California State University?

A. The contract was signed in 1998 and is due to expire on March 31, 2002. It provides for Enron, a Houston-based energy supplier and broker, to supply electricity and other services to most campuses within the two university systems at a set price. Because of the contract, the universities were able to escape the skyrocketing electricity prices that have occurred over the past several months. (For example, UC San Diego saved $12.3 million over an eight-month period between April 1, 2000 and Nov. 30, 2001under the contract.) The University of California at Riverside is not included in the contract. It has a separate contract with the City of Riverside.

Q. Why is Enron attempting to unilaterally change the contract?

A. Energy brokers such as Enron can buy a future supply of electricity at a set price (akin to a wholesale price) for resale at retail prices to Enron customers. When the price of electricity in California began to soar under deregulation, Enron realized that it could re-sell the electricity it had acquired for UC and CSU for much higher prices on the spot market, rather than sending that power to CSU and UC at the lower, contract-specified price. So it is attempting to shift the two university systems away from being "direct access" Enron customers to being Pacific Gas & Electricity (PG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE) customers. That would free up that electricity for sale at prices more advantageous to Enron.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2002-01-18/news/17526719_1_enron-values-enron-ceo-kenneth-lay-lay-and-bush
Excerpt:

Enron code of ethics may be worth a bundle

January 18, 2002|By Rob Morse

Even before Enron melted down, the company's logo was called, appropriately enough, "The Crooked E." You can find that logo all over items offered for sale by laid-off Enron employees on EBay.
You can get a blue yo-yo emblazoned with the Crooked E, a fanny pack with the logo and the slogan "Ask why" (a slogan government investigators should take to heart) or an "Enron Values" paperweight, engraved with the words "integrity" and "respect" and a statement that "ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here."

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2006/10/24/enrons-harvard-connections/
Excerpt:

Yesterday's 24 year jail sentence for former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling reminded me of a question that popped into my mind four years ago: Was Harvard University an unindicted co-conspirator in Enron's rise and fall?
I first noticed all of Enron's Harvard connections back in June 2002 while Enron was still winding down. It was then that Enron announced the resignation of Herbert S. Winokur Jr., chairman and chief executive of Capricorn Holdings Inc. of Greenwich, Connecticut, from Enron's board on which he had served since 1985. Winokur's resignation drew my attention to the many ties between Harvard and Enron.
Enron's collapse was also the inspiration for my book, Value Leadership, which highlighted eight Value Leaders, including The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS), Southwest Airlines Co. (NYSE: LUV), and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), which earn superior returns for shareholders -- growing revenues 35% faster, earning 109% higher profit margins and increasing shareholder value at five times the rate of their peers between June 1992 and June 2002 -- by following seven principles that are the antithesis of those that Skilling used to manage Enron.
How did Harvard help Enron?

http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/enron_email.html
Excerpt:

UC Berkeley Enron Email Analysis Project

Starting with the Enron Email dataset made available by MIT, SRI, and CMU, we have put together several resources:

• A set of categories developed in our ANLP (Applied Natural Processing Language Processing) course, to be used for annotating a subset of the Enron email messages.
• A subset of about 1700 labeled email messages (4.5M). These were chosen in a semi-motivated fashion (focusing on business-related emails and the California Energy Crises and on emails that occurred later in the collection, trying to avoid very personal messages, jokes, and so on). Students in the ANLP course annotated the selected messages with the category labels. Each message was labeled by two people, but no claims of consistency, comprehensiveness, nor generality are made about these labelings.
• The Enronic email visualization and clustering tool by Jeff Heer, built on his prefuse toolkit.   (1.9M jar file)
• A database representation(219 MB compressed) of the Enron email collection, built by Andrew Fiore and Jeff Heer, containing the enron email messages. This version contains many but not all of the tables used in the search tool, as well as special tables to be used with the Enronic visualization tool. Andrew did a substantial amount of processing on the contents of the database to remove duplicates, normalize names, and so on. This has been tested only on mysql.

http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/vanity%20fair/925E-000-024.html
Excerpt:

VANITY FAIR

THE ENRON WARS

If there was one thing Jan Avery knew when she joined Enron in 1993, it was numbers. But nothing added up. New evidence reveals that the seeds of Ken Lay's pattern of hiding losses went back even further-all the way to 1987.

April 2002

BY MARIE BRENNER

Photography Director: Susan White

I was at first inconceivable to Jan Avery that her position at the Enron Corporation could make her a valuable witness in the largest bankruptcy case in American history. On the morning of January 25, when former Enron vice-chairman Cliff Baxter was found dead in his Mercedes with a suicide note and a bullet wound in his head, Avery was home sifting through proxy statements and S.E.C. filings she had kept in storage. Like Baxter, she had been interviewed by lawyers and investigators who were convinced that her testimony could illuminate what had led to Enron's collapse. Shortly before his death, Baxter told colleagues that he had become a pivotal figure in the scandal, and that he stood between Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling (former C.E.O.'s of Enron) going to jail. Avery was apprehensive as well. For eight years she had consulted on the myriad complex structures that fueled the Enron delusion. "The pattern began very early," she said, "much earlier than anyone has reported. It started in the gray area of what was acceptable in accounting principles and, in my opinion, later turned into a clear case of fraud."

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1419/
Excerpt:

Comments

Efficient Capital Markets, Corporate Disclosure and Enron, 89 Cornell Law Review 394 (2004)

Abstract

The market capitalization of Enron Corporation declined by $63 billion in the one-year period between January 2001 and January 2002. In practical terms, this means that someone who invested in Enron, Inc. for a comfortable retirement "nest egg" in 2001-say 3000 shares worth about $250,000-would barely have enough money to buy a major home appliance a scant year later. Ironically, Enron's shares were thought prior to January 2001 to experience relatively low volatility. The collapse of Enron dealt a stunning blow, not only to people's wallets and a once-formidable U.S. corporation, but also to a number of conventional theories and core beliefs within the legal academy. The theories and beliefs challenged by the Enron debacle include the following: (1) the U.S. corporate governance system is the best in the world; (2) the U.S. system of corporate disclosure,is the best in the world; and (3) the U.S. capital markets, particularly the markets for large corporations such as those listed on the prestigious New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), are highly efficient. Following a brief corporate history of Enron, Parts I, II, III, and IV of this· Article discuss, in turn, what remains of each of these conventional academic theories in the wake of Enron's collapse.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.157.9546
Excerpt:

Abstract:

substantial data set of the company’s internal corporate emails. This work presents a genetic algorithm (GA) approach to social network analysis (SNA) using the Enron corpus. Three SNA metrics, degree, density, and proximity prestige, were applied to the detection of networks of high activity and presence of important actors with respect to email transactions. Quantitative analysis revealed that density and proximity prestige captured networks of high activity more so than degree. Subsequent qualitative analysis reveals that there are trade-offs in the selection of SNA metrics. Examination of the discovered social networks revealed that density and proximity prestige isolated networks involving key actors to a greater extent than degree. In particular, density picked out interesting patterns in terms of email volume, while proximity prestige better isolated key actors at Enron. The roles of the particular actors picked out by the networks as reasons for their prominence are also discussed. E I.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.65.7515
Excerpt:

Abstract:

There has been little prior work on Named Entity Recognition for ”informal ” documents like email. We present two methods for improving performance of person name recognizers for email: emailspecific structural features and a recallenhancing method which exploits name repetition across multiple documents. 1

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.157.9546
Excerpt:

Abstract:

substantial data set of the company’s internal corporate emails. This work presents a genetic algorithm (GA) approach to social network analysis (SNA) using the Enron corpus. Three SNA metrics, degree, density, and proximity prestige, were applied to the detection of networks of high activity and presence of important actors with respect to email transactions. Quantitative analysis revealed that density and proximity prestige captured networks of high activity more so than degree. Subsequent qualitative analysis reveals that there are trade-offs in the selection of SNA metrics. Examination of the discovered social networks revealed that density and proximity prestige isolated networks involving key actors to a greater extent than degree. In particular, density picked out interesting patterns in terms of email volume, while proximity prestige better isolated key actors at Enron. The roles of the particular actors picked out by the networks as reasons for their prominence are also discussed. E I.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.66.7530
Excerpt:

Abstract:

Blogs are a new form of internet phenomenon and a vast everincreasing information resource. Mining blog files for information is a very new research direction in data mining. We propose to include the title, body, and comments of the blog pages in clustering datasets from blog documents. In particular, we argue that the author/reader comments of the blog pages may have more discriminating effect in clustering blog documents. We constructed a word-page matrix by downloading blog pages from a well-known website and experimented a k-means clustering algorithm with different weights assigned to the title, body, and comment parts. Our experimental results show that assigning a larger weight value to the blog comments helps the k-means algorithm produce better clustering solutions. The experimental results confirm our hypothesis that the author/reader comments of the blog files are very useful in discriminating blog files.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.161.9519
Excerpt:

Abstract:

We introduce a theory of scan statistics on graphs and apply the ideas to the problem of anomaly detection in a time series of Enron email graphs.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.80.3032
Excerpt:

Abstract:

Although information visualization (infovis) technologies have proven indispensable tools for making sense of complex data, wide-spread deployment has yet to take hold, as successful infovis applications are often difficult to author and require domain-specific customization. To address these issues, we have created prefuse, a software framework for creating dynamic visualizations of both structured and unstructured data. prefuse provides theoretically-motivated abstractions for the design of a wide range of visualization applications, enabling programmers to string together desired components quickly to create and customize working visualizations. To evaluate prefuse we have built both existing and novel visualizations testing the toolkit's flexibility and performance, and have run usability studies and usage surveys finding that programmers find the toolkit usable and effective.