UO E-clips, Aug. 29

Financial advisers vs. academia (Business Canadian): Do investors need financial advisers? Not according to some university professors and other researchers. Financial advisers say they have the expertise to guide investors to better results and can keep them from making mistakes such as under-diversifying, chasing hot funds/stocks, and selling out at the bottom of a bear market. However, empirical studies carried out by academics find otherwise. Let's take a look at three. 1. In their study, "Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Brokers in the Mutual Fund Industry," Daniel Bergstresser (Harvard Business School), John Chalmers (University of Oregon), and Peter Tufano (Harvard Business School) analyze a database of U.S. mutual funds from 1996 to 2004. Their objective was to compare the performance of investors who bought funds through broker-dealers to investors who purchased funds directly.

Scientists rebut finding of 'Hobbit' bones (United Press International): A U.S. anthropologist is rebutting claims that fossilized bones found in the Micronesian islands were those of Hobbitlike little people. University of Oregon Assistant Professor of anthropology Greg Nelson and colleagues from the Australian National University and North Carolina State University are refuting the conclusions of Professor Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and colleagues from Rutgers and Duke Universities. They concluded skeletal fragments found in caves on the island nation of Palau were the remains of small-bodied humans who might suffered from insular dwarfism on the islands 1,000 to 3,000 years ago.