I am happy to disclose that I don’t own MediaRing stock and no plan to.

Their web page has an alert saying “Dubai training offices terminated” and “FAKE IAFM CERTIFICATES FROM DUBAI OR ASIA ARE FRAUDULENT AND UNAUTHORIZED”.

Anything known about IAFM Singapore operations ?

Found one more. It is one of the FTs in Singapore education scene recently spotted on Business Times page as “Singapore-based” FT group Global Indian Foundation. The CEO is “Dr MANEESH TRIPATHI: Maneesh has a PhD in Humanistic Sciences from Preston University, Wyoming U.S.” (http://www-07.ibm.com/events/nz/for...). Preston University is a Pakistan based degree mill which we read from Strait Times as one of the leading fakes.

Amazing is how can these CEO with fake PHD can deliver high profile international education and not get caught ?

How many more remaining to be pointed out ? It is such a shame and totally undeserved.

Any Expression employee can attest to that. Such a shame that it’s just an ego boost totally undeserved in the end.

Clemen in particular openly uses his PhD/Doctoral qualification to boost his credentials and recruit students for his courses.

Now that his PhD is proven to be from Preston University, a degree mill university, he should openly apologies to the public and the various media entity such as Business Times, CAN, CNBC and many others that he has been able to manipulate to give him the publicity as published widely in his website at www .freely .com

He has no shame when openly admitted that he got his PhD in 16 months. This is unprecedented and no reputable university would award such as doctoral qualification. He should get his doctoral supervisor who is presumably an expert in options trading to openly testify to his so called well earned qualification and published his thesis.

University of South Australia should be wary and rejected such doctoral students. Perhaps UniSA and/or APMI Kaplan Singapore being the local provider would comment.

Despite being exposed that his PhD is from a degree mill, he still advertise in the newspapers and in his website carrying his “Dr” title. This should be put to a stop!!!

It is time for the students (past and present) take him to task. He has cheated many students which resulted in him owning his bungalows at Sentosa Cove and elsewhere and many cars he owned as he always brag during his Seminar Previews.

Speak up fellow student. The time is now….

Honarary PhDs: I don’t think there has be any “philosophical novelty” for them to awarded these degrees. As I said, all you have to do is either be famous or donate a lot of money to the school.

Publishing journals: Thanks but no thanks. I took a first writing my honours thesis which I chose not to publish. Could have enrolled in a direct PhD straight away but refrained. Actually, come to think of it, that first paper could be one of many papers to form the thesis. Some people I know did and have since gotten their PhDs though they were realistic enough to know that they shouldn’t expect a “PhD premium” if they were coming out to the finance marketplace to get work…

Anyway, the moral of the story is, which I have always reiterated is that PhD are only needed in research and/or academia. A lot of good things have come out of research – probably more so in the hard sciences than in the social sciences/arts.

Back to the topic… a PhD is not relevant in business – so you should be most wary of people who try to use fancy titles to impress you…

I dunno about PhD in pure finance and economics, what they require and all. As to your claims on “just study a few more years and write a few more papres and get published”, I don’t think its that simple. A lot people I know drop out of PhD or fail them because they can hardly publish anything. The requirements of PhD looks deceptively, emphasis on deceptively, simple.

The difficulty of PhD are as follows:
1. The meaning of PhD is to introduce a new philosophy (not application) to way things are being done in the world today. Philosophy can translate to design theory, models and the like. Thus, having novelty + stamping your claim on it is extremely difficult. Masters and Bachelor degrees are not required to have philosophical novelty. That said, I am not sure if most honorary PhDs have introduced some form of philosophical novelty in their fields. If they have, I respect them and they deserved their PhD.

2. Writing a paper and a thesis is not as easy as it seems. Having good results does not mean writing good papers, i.e., have good positive experimental results does not mean you can publish. Publishing a journal paper requires a lot of thought and formal wording. The hardest portions to write in a journal paper are the classifications, your theory and the introduction. Especially the introduction. It’s takes a long thought and writing process to hatch a journal. It’s an even longer time for a thesis, so I hope you can respect and am aware of that. Maybe you can try writing solid journal paper to realize the difficulty of it.

In academia you do need luck to be famous, luck in finding the relevant topics + industrial funding. Usually they get famous at conferences, where it is easier to display their results.

Journals are meant for people in the community, and in the industry so it may not be of value to people outside of the community. Thats the purpose of it.

PhD does have its value, and great things can come out of it. People like Rudolf Kalman, Claude Shannon, R.A. Fisher have come up with great things for engineering and IT.

Of course some may laugh at Robert Merton, Myron Scholes and Fischer Black, who are PhD Nobel Laureates, E Derman for the introduction of Quantitative Finance with the collapse of LTCM ( in fact it’s collapse is not totally due to their mathematical models). IMHO, I think people who think this way are small, jealous, ignorant and short sighted, cos it’s only one extreme case out of many (who criticises D.E.Shaw and Citadel?). If not for these people, I dont’ think there be as big a market for derivatives and MFE programs.