"Yup, spring is on the way. You can see
their heads now."
This Wisconsin picture was forwarded by Paula. Actually
our snow is not quite that deep this year in New Hampshire.
But we do have snow, as you can see in the
pictures below.
Erika sends her best to all of you.
News Item from Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University professor and alumnus Randy
Pausch continues to create an enduring legacy around the world. Because of your
past interest, we wanted to make sure you knew about a new “NFL Films Presents”
segment featuring Randy talking about one of his childhood dreams — playing in
the National Football League. The video (following a commercial)
is available to view online at:
http://www.nfl.com/videos?videoId=09000d5d80e22adc
Please also watch for it over the coming months on
networks such as ESPN and the NFL Network.
Jensen Comment
My tribute to Randy can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080415.htm
Coaches Graham and Gazowski
Question
Why are there so few, if any left like Coaches Graham and Gazowski?
Randy Pausch said it very well when he wrote about his tough old football
coach, Coach Graham, in Chapter Seven of The Last Lecture (Hyperion
Books, 2008, IABN 978-1-4013-2325-7).
. . . one of the assistant
coaches came over to reassure me. "Coach Graham rode you pretty hard ,
didn't he?" he said.
I could barely muster a "yeah."
"That's a good thing," the assistant told me. "When
you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means
they've given up on you."
. . .
There's a lot of talk these days about giving
children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's
something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone.
Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to
develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until
they find they can do it, and your just keep repeating the process.
When Coach Graham first got hold of me, I was this
wimpy kid with no skills, no physical strength, and no conditioning. But he
made me realize that if I work hard enough, there will be things I can do
tomorrow that I can't do today. Even now, having just turned forty-seven, I
can give you a three point stance that any NFL lineman would be proud of.
I realize that, these days, a guy like Coach Graham
might get thrown out of a youth sports league. He'd be too tough. Parents
would complain.
I remember one game when our team was playing
terribly. At halftime, in our rush for water, we almost knocked over the
water bucket. Coach Graham was livid: "Jeez! That's the most I've seen you
boys move since this game started!" We were eleven years old, just standing
there, afraid he'd pick us up one by one and break us with his bare hands.
"Water?" he barked. "You boys want water?" He lifted the bucket and dumped
all the water on the ground.
. . .
It saddens me that many kids today are so coddled.
I think back to how I felt during that halftime rant. Yes, I was thirsty.
But more than that, I felt humiliated. We had all let down Coach Graham, and
he let us know it in a way we'd never forget. He was right.
. . .
I haven't seen Coach Graham since I was a teen, but
he just keeps showing up in my head, forcing me to work harder whenever I
feel like quitting, forcing me to be better. He gave me a feedback loop for
life.
Bob Jensen's football coach would've viewed Coach Graham as a wimp. My Algona
High School coach's name was "The" Coach Tony Gazowski. Tony grew up Polish and
tough in the shadows of the steel mills in Pittsburgh. He became an
"All-Big-Ten" defensive end at the University of Iowa and never did catch on
that later in life he was a football coach and not a Marine drill instructor (he
was also a former Marine sergeant). Coach Gazowski did for me what Coach Graham
did for Randy, but Coach Gazowski sometimes went a bit too far in urging us to
play a bit rougher than the rules allowed if we thought we could get away with
it. This might be a good thing to do on a wartime battlefield, but it's not
something I recommend in athletics and most other aspects of life.
You can read more about Randy and find the link to the video of his "Last
Lecture" and commentaries that followed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080415.htm
They're prideful men. You don't get to that level
(play in the Super Bowl) unless you've been
pretty good at what you've done. In hard times the greatest motivation you want
to hear is: Tell me I can't do something, I'll show you that I can . . . "To me
sports is about mental toughness," he says. "When you take a mentally tough
individual, someone who is not gonna be deterred by getting knocked down and not
gonna be thinking they can walk on water when they have success, that's to me
someone who's tough, mentally tough. I want my kids to be able to do that
because I think it carries over in life."
Bill Cowher, former Steelers coach
and the longest-serving NFL coach of the past two decades, as quoted by Matthew
Komiski, "The Coach's Keys to the Game," The Wall Street Journal, January
31, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123336432774935501.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Quotations from Jack Lemmon (famous actor) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lemmon#Personal_quotes
- Death ends a life, not
a relationship. (Tuesdays
with Morrie)
- I won't quit until I
get run over by a truck, a producer or a critic.
- Failure seldom stops
you. What stops you is the fear of failure.
- If you think it's hard
to meet new people, try picking up the wrong golf ball.
- It's hard enough to
write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good
comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with
comedy. Which is what life is.
- Nobody deserves this
much money - certainly not an actor.
- Stay humble. Always
answer your phone - no matter who else is in the car.
- [on Marilyn Monroe]
Difficult? Yes. But she was a wonderful comedienne and
she had a charisma like no one before or since.
- [on Judy Holliday] She
was intelligent and not at all like the dumb blonds she
so often depicted. She didn't give a damn where the
camera was placed, how she was made to look, or about
being a star. She just played the scene -- acted with,
not at. She was also one of the nicest people I ever
met.
- [on Billy Wilder] I've
had directors who were marvelous at breaking scenes down
and handling people. But when you would string all the
pearls together, they wouldn't make a beautiful
necklace. But Billy is the kind of picture-maker who can
make a beautiful string of pearls. He makes the kind of
movies that are classics and last forever.
- [on Walter Matthau]
Walter is a helluva actor. The best I've ever worked
with.
Famous Actor James Whitmore died on February 6, 2009 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Whitmore
Tidbits on February 10, 2009
Bob Jensen
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
CPA
Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Bob Jensen's essay on the financial crisis bailout's aftermath and an alphabet soup of
appendices can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Essay
- Introductory Quotations
- The Bailout's Hidden, Albeit
Noble, Agenda (for added details see
Appendix Y)
- A Step Back in History
- Barney's Rubble
- 2009 Update on the Socialist
Revolution Without Increased Taxes, Debt, or Civil War
- Why Wasn't Your
Diversified Investment Portfolio Safe?
Appendix A: Impending Disaster in the U.S.
Appendix B: The Trillion Dollar Bet in 1993
Appendix C: Don't Blame Fair Value Accounting
Standards This includes a bull crap case based on an article by the former
head of the FDIC
Appendix D: The End of Investment Banking as We
Know It
Appendix E: Your Money at Work, Fixing Others’
Mistakes (includes a great NPR public radio audio module)
Appendix F: Christopher Cox Waits Until Now to
Tell Us His Horse Was Lame All Along S.E.C. Concedes Oversight Flaws Fueled
Collapse And This is the Man Who Wants Accounting Standards to Have Fewer
Rules
Appendix G: Why the $700 Billion Bailout
Proposed by Paulson, Bush, and the Guilty-Feeling Leaders in Congress Won't
Work
Appendix H: Where were the auditors? The
aftermath will leave the large auditing firms in a precarious state?
Appendix I: 1999 Quote from The New York Times
''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the
way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''
Appendix J: Will the large auditing firms
survive the 2008 banking meltdown?
Appendix K: Why not bail out everybody and
everything?
Appendix L: The trouble with crony capitalism
isn't capitalism. It's the cronies.
Appendix M: Reinventing the American Dream
Appendix N: Accounting Fraud at Fannie Mae
Appendix O: If Greenspan Caused the Subprime
Real Estate Bubble, Who Caused the Second Bubble That's About to Burst?
Appendix P: Meanwhile in the U.K., the
Government Protects Reckless Bankers
Appendix Q: Bob Jensen's Primer on Derivatives
(with great videos from CBS)
Appendix R: Accounting Standard Setters
Bending to Industry and Government Pressure to Hide the Value of Dogs
Appendix S: Fooling Some People All the Time
Appendix T: Regulations Recommendations
Appendix U: Subprime: Borne of Sleaze, Bribery,
and Lies
Appendix V: Implications for Educators,
Colleges, and Students
Appendix W: The End
Appendix: X: How Scientists Help Cause Our
Financial Crisis
Appendix Y: The Bailout's Hidden Agenda
Details
Appendix Z: What's the rush to re-inflate
the stock market?
Personal Note from Bob Jensen
On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long
and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was
generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My
wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm
Bob Jensen's blogs and various threads on many topics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
(Also scroll down to the table at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ )
Global Incident Map ---
http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
Set up free conference calls at
http://www.freeconference.com/
Also see
http://www.yackpack.com/uc/
U.S. Social Security Retirement
Benefit Calculators ---
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/estimator/
After 2017 what we would really like is a choice between our full social
security benefits or 18 Euros each month ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Free Online Tutorials in Multiple Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Chronicle of Higher Education's 2008-2009
Almanac ---
http://chronicle.com/free/almanac/2008/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on economic and social statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Tips on computer and networking
security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
If you want to help our badly injured troops, please check out
Valour-IT: Voice-Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops ---
http://www.valour-it.blogspot.com/
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Verizon Math ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCJ3Oz5JVKs&feature=related
Actually,
this is no difference here than in the mathematics of The Stimulus Act ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Academic Earth (videos of lectures and even complete courses
taught by top scholars) ---
http://academicearth.org/
Stanford Humanities Center: Events Archive ---
http://shc.stanford.edu/events/archive.htm
Rocky Mountain Online Archive ---
http://rmoa.unm.edu/
Respect a Senior Citizen ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F64xMEVsTew
Incredible Japanese Water Fountain Video ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2178681/posts
Incredible waves against French lighthouses ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7RSryuJAwE
Famous Actor James Whitmore died on February 6, 2009 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Whitmore
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Bailout Rap (link forwarded by David Albrecht)
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64g_g22iEe8
Exclusive First Listen: Helene Grimaud: Hear A
Preview Of Grimaud's New Bach Album ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99962099
Rudolf Buchbinder's Robust Beethoven ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99928050
Buddy Holly: 50 Years After The Music Died ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100161470
TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free
online music site) ---
http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) ---
http://www.slacker.com/
Gerald Trites likes this
international radio site ---
http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:
Search for a song or band and play the selection ---
http://songza.com/
Also try Jango ---
http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) ---
http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live ---
http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note U.S. Army Band recordings
---
http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp
Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials)
---
http://www.slacker.com/
Photographs and Art
Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts
and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection ---
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=1529
Rocky Mountain Online Archive ---
http://rmoa.unm.edu/
Engaging Digital Tibet ---
http://digitaltibet.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/
Incredible Japanese Water Fountain Video ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2178681/posts
The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet, 1920-1950 ---
http://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/index.php
The Tibet Album presents more than 6000 photographs spanning 30 years of
Tibet's history. These extraordinary photographs are a unique record of
people long gone and places changed beyond all recognition. They also
document the ways that British visitors encountered Tibet and Tibetans.
Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various
types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
The Online Banned Books Page (updated in 2009) ---
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html
Banned Books ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_books
ACLU Texas Project (comprehensive list of
banned books starting with Tom Sawyer)---
http://www.aclutx.org/projects/bannedbooks.php
Also see the ACLU list of 50 Banned Books ---
http://www.aclu.org/freedomwire/books/booklist.htm
Banned Books Online
---
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html
Forbidden Library of Banned Books (not all are free) ---
http://www.forbiddenlibrary.com/
25 Banned Books That
You Should Read Today ---
http://degreedirectory.org/articles/25_Banned_Books_That_You_Should_Read_Today.html
When Books Burn (from the University of Arizona) ---
Click Here
Index on Censorship ---
http://www.indexoncensorship.org/
From the American Library Association ---
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/frequentlychallengedbooks.cfm
Frequently Challenged Books
Each year, the ALA's Office for
Intellectual Freedom compiles a list of the top ten most
frequently challenged books. To ensure that we include
all challenges, we wait until the very end of the year
to compile the information. You can expect each year's
list to appear on or before February of the following
year.
The ALA Office for Intellectual
Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording
challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge
reported there are as many as four or five which go
unreported.
The most frequently challenged books of
2007 |
The most frequently challenged authors of 2007 |
How is the list of most challenged books tabulated?
|
Where
can I find more information on why a book is
banned/challenged?
| More
information on frequently challenged books, including
statistics from previous years |
The most frequently challenged books of
2007
The ALA Office for Intellectual
Freedom received a total of 420 challenges last year. A
challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint,
filed with a library or school requesting that materials
be removed because of content or appropriateness.
According to Judith F. Krug, director of the Office for
Intellectual Freedom, the number of challenges reflects
only incidents reported, and for each reported, four or
five remain unreported.
The 10 most challenged books of 2007
reflect a range of themes, and are:
- And Tango Makes Three,
by Justin Richardson/Peter
Parnell
Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality,
Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age
Group
- The Chocolate War,
by Robert Cormier
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language,
Violence
- Olive’s Ocean,
by Kevin Henkes
Reasons: Sexually Explicit and Offensive Language
- The Golden Compass,
by Philip Pullman
Reasons: Religious Viewpoint
- The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, by Mark Twain
Reasons: Racism
- The Color Purple,
by Alice Walker
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive
Language,
- TTYL,
by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language,
Unsuited to Age Group
- I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings, by Maya Angelou
Reasons: Sexually Explicit
- It’s Perfectly Normal,
by Robie Harris
Reasons: Sex Education, Sexually Explicit
- The Perks of Being A
Wallflower, by Stephen
Chbosky
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive
Language, Unsuited to Age Group
Off the list this year are two books
by author Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye and
Beloved, both challenged for sexual content and
offensive language.
The most frequently challenged authors of
2007
- Robert Cormier
- Peter Parnell and Justin
Richardson
- Mark Twain
- Toni Morrison
- Philip Pullman
- Kevin Henkes
- Lois Lowry
- Chris Crutcher
- Lauren Myracle
- Joann Sfar
How is the list of most challenged books
tabulated?
The American Library Association (ALA)
collects information from two sources: newspapers and
reports submitted by individuals, some of whom use the
Challenge Database Form. All challenges are compiled
into a database. Reports of challenges culled from
newspapers across the country are compiled in the
bimonthly Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom
(published by the ALA, $40 per year); those reports are
then compiled in the Banned Books Week Resource
Guide. Challenges reported to the ALA by
individuals are kept confidential. In these cases, ALA
will release only the title of the book being
challenged, the state and the type of institution
(school, public library). The name of the institution
and its town will not be disclosed.
Where can I find more information on why
a particular book was banned?
More information on frequently challenged
books
If the information you need is not
listed below, please feel free to contact the Office for
Intellectual Freedom at (800) 545-2433, ext. 4220, or
oif@ala.org.
New Financial Terms forwarded by my good neighbors
Subject: New Financial Terms
CEO- Chief Embezzlement Officer
CFO - Corporate Fraud Officer
BULL MARKET- A random market movement causing investors to
mistake themselves for financial geniuses.
BEAR MARKET- a 6-to-18-month period when the kids get no
allowance, the wife gets no jewelry, and the husband gets no sex.
VALUE INVESTING- The art of buying low and selling lower.
P/E RATIO- The percentage of investors wetting their pants
as the market keeps crashing.
BROKER - What my financial planner has made me.
STANDARD & POOR- Your life in a nutshell.
STOCK ANALYST- Idiot who just downgraded your stock.
STOCK SPLIT- When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your
assets equally between themselves.
MARKET CORRECTION- The day after you buy stocks.
CASH FLOW- The movement your money makes as it disappears
down the toilet.
YAHOO! - What you yell after selling it to some poor
sucker for $240 per share.
WINDOWS- What you jump out of when you're the sucker who
bought Yahoo at $240 per share.
INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR- Past year investor who's now
locked up in a nuthouse.
PROFIT - Archaic word no longer in use.
To which David Albrecht added the following:
Here's another list, from:
http://247wallst.com/2008/11/26/new-bear-market/
Below is the long list:
- "201/K": What used to be your 401/K, but cut in at least
half.
- "I.R.A.": This is the paramilitary group you want to sick on
thepeople who created the over-the-counter instruments and
financialderivatives that are making this financial mess much worse than
itshould have been.
- "IPO": The acronym that one yells when they see their
brokerage accounts or discover the balance of the 201/K. "I’m Pissed
Off!"
- "Short Squeeze": This is what you think your chair is doing
to you when you try to calculate the new balance of your investments.
- "Foreclosure": The time that the stock market stops dropping
each day.
- "Stock Broker": The value of your shares each day.
- "Discount Broker": The value of your shares of the brokerage
firm you own.
- "Bond Broker": That guy who puts up court money to get you
out of jail.
- "Market Sell-off": Daily news reports.
- "Selling Short": The notion you get every time you decide to
not go with one of your winning stock picks.
- "Dollar Cost Averaging": Sticking with a strategy that isn’t
working.
- "Market Crash": The last sound of Alec Baldwin jumping out of
the window
at the end of this SNL commercial.
- "Market Rally": A church vigil for investors praying for this
stock market selling to end.
- "Bailout": What investors have been doing for weeks and
weeks.
- "Credit Default Swap": When you trade canceled credit cards
with your friends and family.
- "Treasury Bill": $700 billion to $3 trillion that your kids
will have to pay for this mess, plus interest.
- "Over The Counter Derivative": The same stuff meth is made
with.
- “CDO”: Community Debt Onus
- "Financial Adviser": Bookie.
- "Hedge Fund": The money, jewelry, and silver coins you buried
in your back yard or stuck in a safe.
- "Analyst": Your proctologist’s trainee.
- "Risk Manager": The guy who rubber-stamped AAA ratings as the
second coming.
- "Underwriter": That creepy guy that works for the funeral
home.
- "Margin Call": What your former financial adviser keeps
calling you about.
- "Options Expiration Date": When you decide to give up on the
stock market forever.
- "Recession-Proof": That really strong and cheap booze that
everyone is drinking now; formerly called rot gut.
- "Stock Split": What you think happened with your shares when
you see the share price each week. But it didn’t split.
- "Bottom Sniffing": When bottom fishing doesn’t work.
- "52-Week Low": How you feel each new day when you get home.
- "TARP": What you sleep under after you lost your job, car,
and house.
- "Going Private": Telling your friends you are out of the
stock market but aren’t really out.
- "Private Equity": What Eliot Spitzer got in trouble over.
- "Resistance": Almost every penny price increment above the
current price.
- "Support": Tomorrow’s new resistance.
- "Gap and Crap": When the market opens up and almost
immediately sells off. That’s actually a real term used.
- "Poison Pill": What investors want to take when they see
their 201/K balance.
- "Junk Bond": Government agency investments.
- "DJIA": Down Jones Industrial Average
- "Blue Chip": The color of your skin around that broken piece
of knuckle you got slamming your first into your desk or keyboard.
- "Penny Stock": Former DJIA and S&P 500 index components that
have been kicked out of the index.
- "Reiterated Guidance": The new absolute best case scenario
for future earnings.
- "Microsoft": A Man’s libido after talking about the current
stock market.
- "Socialism": The new-age definition of Free Market Capitalism
- "Recession": A mild downturn in the economy where some
friends and neighbors become jobless.
- "Depression": A mild downturn in the economy that has now
turned horrible, and now you are jobless along with friends and
neighbors.
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The tame bird was in a cage, the free bird was in
the forest,
They met when the time came, it was a decree of fate.
The free bird cries, "O my love, let us fly to wood."
The cage bird whispers, "Come hither, let us both live in the cage."
Says the free bird, "Among bars, where is there room to spread one's wings?"
"Alas," cries the cage bird, "I should not know where to sit perched in the
sky."
Rabindranath Tagore , My Reminiscences
(Chapter 3) ---
http://www.online-literature.com/tagore-rabindranath/my-reminiscences/
Baby was so free from every tie in the land of the
tiny crescent moon.
It was not for nothing he gave up his freedom.
He knows that there is room for endless joy in mother's little corner of a
heart,
and it is sweeter far than liberty to be caught and pressed in her dear
arms.
Rabindranath Tagore , The Crescent
Moon ---
http://www.eldritchpress.org/rt/cmoon.htm
500 million Americans are losing jobs each month
. . .
Nancy Pelosi ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8hMJVXt09E
Also see
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=87978
Jensen Comment
Do you think our Speaker of the House has been seeing too many big numbers in
her Stimulus Act that passed her House of Representatives?
Maybe she was just exaggerating a mite to get public support for the $1 Trillion
pork package before the public catches onto how much is pork.
The current population of the United States (at least those that are counted) in
July 2008 was estimated to be 303,824,640.
We don't have a moment to spare, but evidently we
have $1 trillion (to spare).
Jacob Sullum, "The New Era of
Irresponsibility," Reason Magazine, February 4, 2009 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131468.html
Jensen Comment
Actually a trillion dollars is small change compared to the ultimate cost of
this stimulus package plus the bank bailout funding.
House Republicans have challenged Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D-Calif.) to release the details of the expected $500 billion proposed
omnibus appropriations legislation encompassing the nine remaining spending
bills for fiscal year 2009. Entirely separate from the $1.2 trillion Democrat
“stimulus” spending bill passed by the House last week with no Republican
support, this additional estimated half-trillion dollar omnibus spending bill
was scheduled for consideration as early as today. Pelosi removed the bill from
the legislative calendar yesterday amid Democrat fears that the actual omnibus
spending bill may help scuttle passage of the trillion-dollar “stimulus”
spending bill already in very deep trouble...
Connie Hair , "Pelosi Pulls Omnibus
Bill Rumored To Cost $500 Billion," Human Events, February 4, 2009 ---
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=30554
Jensen Comment
It really is silly to worry about how much this new Democratic Party
Congressional monopoly spends. Whatever they spend requires no new taxes or
borrowing. The U.S. has already adopted the Zimbabwe Theory of Finance (read
that just print trillions of dollars whenever they want) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Revolution
One senses in a new way the disaster that is Nancy
Pelosi. She was all right as leader of the opposition in the Bush era,
opposition being joyful and she being by nature chipper. She is tough,
experienced, and of course only two years ago she was a breakthrough figure, the
first female speaker. But her public comments are often quite mad—we're losing
500 million jobs a month; here's some fresh insight on Catholic doctrine—and in
a crisis demanding of creativity, depth and the long view, she seems more than
ever a mere ward heeler, a hack, a pol. She's not big enough for the age, is
she? She's not up to it.
Peggy Noonan, "Bracing Ourselves:
America prepares for the worst, and Republicans suddenly seem serious.," The
Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123388255500354969.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) -- one of the lead Blue Dogs
-- made a startling admission to lefty Liberadio on Sunday, suggesting the White
House quietly encouraged him to buck House leadership on the stimulus. Cooper
was one of 11 Dems to vote no -- joining every GOP House member. "Well, I
probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I actually got some quiet encouragement
from the Obama folks for what I’m doing," said Cooper, one of about 55 House
Democrats to sign a letter criticizing Speaker Nancy Pelosi for suspending
normal debate and committee rules on the $819 billion package.
Jim Thrush, "Obama staff encouraged
defiance of Pelosi," Politico, February 4, 2009 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
But we should not forget that speed was of the essence since 500 million
Americans are losing jobs every month while awaiting passage of the Stimulus
Act.
Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the TARP
Congressional Oversight Panel, saying that former Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson told the panel that assets given to banks would be returned at equal
value. The panel, however, found that the banks were overpaid by $78 billion.
Time Magazine, February 6, 2009 ---
http://www.time.com/time/quotes
Long Time WSJ Defenders of Wall Street's Outrageous Compensation Morph
Into Hypocrites
At each stage of the disaster, Mr. Black told me --
loan officers, real-estate appraisers, accountants, bond ratings agencies -- it
was pay-for-performance systems that "sent them wrong." The need for new
compensation rules is most urgent at failed banks. This is not merely because is
would make for good PR, but because lavish executive bonuses sometimes create an
incentive to hide losses, to take crazy risks, and even, according to Mr. Black,
to "loot the place through seemingly normal corporate mechanisms." This is why,
he continues, it is "essential to redesign and limit executive compensation when
regulating failed or failing banks." Our leaders may not know it yet, but this
showdown between rival populisms is in fact a battle over political legitimacy.
Is Wall Street the rightful master of our economic fate? Or should we choose a
broader form of sovereignty? Let the conservatives' hosannas turn to sneers. The
market god has failed.
Thomas Frank,
"Wall Street Bonuses Are an Outrage: The public sees a self-serving system
for what it," The Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123371071061546079.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous compensation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation
Bob Jensen's threads on the Bailout mess are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance
Consequently, though Bush hatred may weaken as the
43rd president minds his business back home in Texas, and while Obama euphoria
may fade as the 44th president is compelled to immerse himself in the daunting
ambiguities of power, our universities will continue to educate students to
believe that hatred and euphoria reflect political wisdom. Urgent though the
problem is, not even the efficient and responsible spending of a $1 trillion
stimulus package would begin to address it.
Professor Peter Berkowitz (Stanford), "Bush
Hatred and Obama Euphoria Are Two Sides of the Same Coin," The Wall Street
Journal, January 31, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123336391229335459.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
A few quick facts about Wall Street bonuses. The
pretext for the political outrage was the New York comptroller's report this
week on the aggregate data for bonuses in 2008. That "irresponsible" bonus pool
of $18 billion was for every worker in the New York financial industry, from top
dogs to secretaries. This bonus pool fell 44% in 2008, the largest percentage
decline in 30 years. The average bonus was $112,000; bonuses typically make up
most of an employee's salary on Wall Street. The comptroller estimates that this
decline will cost New York State $1 billion in lost tax revenue and New York
City $275 million. Both city and state may have to announce layoffs.
"'Idiots' Indeed," The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123336371503735447.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Jensen Comment
Although this puts our bonus contempt somewhat in a new light, it also does not
lesson opinion that John Thain and the other crooks who declared themselves
multi-million bonuses are one of the reasons that America now despises Wall
Street. Actually Thain wanted a $10 million bonus while captain of his sinking
ship (Merrill Lynch).
Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous executive compensation ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123336371503735447.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
John Alexander Thain (born May 26, 1955) was the
last chairman and chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch before its merger
with Bank of America. Thain was designated to become president of global
banking, securities, and wealth management at the newly combined company,
but he resigned on January 22, 2009. Bank of America lost
confidence in Thain after he failed to tell the bank about mounting losses at
Merrill in late 2008. The Associated Press
identified him as the best paid among the executives of the S&P 500 companies in
2007. On December 8, 2008, Thain gave up on pursuing a controversial bonus of
$10 million from the compensation committee at Merrill.[2] Thain also decided to
accelerate payments of bonus to employees at Merrill, giving out between $3
billion and $4 billion using money that appeared to come directly from the $15
billion Bank of America and Merrill Lynch had received from US government
taxpayers (via the Troubled Assets Relief Program). Thain has additionally
become infamous for spending $1.22 million in corporate funds to decorate his
office, even as he was asking the government for a bailout of his troubled
company.
Quoted from Wikipedia ***
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thain
Thain has since been fired by Bank of America and has agreed to pay for over $1
million spent redecorating his new office.
My question is how Bank of America could buy Merrill without audit verification
of mounting losses --- these should've never been a surprise to Bank of America
unless they're just plain stupid about accounting. The final settlement price at
a minimum could've been contingent on an audit of 2008 earnings.
We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes
...
Leona Helmsly (Queen of Mean) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leona_Helmsley
During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden insisted
that paying your taxes is a patriotic duty. No, scratch that. He said that
supporting a tax hike was the American thing to do. "It's time to be patriotic,"
he told America's putative tax slackers. When asked whether he might be
questioning the patriotism of people who don't want higher taxes, Biden, as is
his wont, took things to the next rhetorical level. Forget patriotism, insisted
Joe, paying higher taxes is a religious obligation. The man who gave an average
of $369 a year to charity over the previous decade fulfills his religious
obligations by cutting a tax check -- a check he's required to cut by law.|
Jonah Goldberg, "Democrats are
hypocrites when it comes to paying taxes," Los Angeles Times (say what?),
February 4, 2009 ---
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg3-2009feb03,0,49616.column
President Obama’s choice for the position of chief
White House performance officer has withdrawn from consideration for the post,
an administration official said Tuesday, after coming forward with concerns
about her tax returns. Nancy Killefer, appointed by the president last month to
a new position to scrutinize government spending, told the administration on
Monday that she intended to step down from the position at the Office of
Management and Budget. An administration official, speaking on condition of
anonymity because the announcement was not finalized, confirmed that Ms.
Killefer’s withdrawal came because of questions with her taxes. Update: In her
resignation letter to Mr. Obama, she described the problem as a tax-related
issue stemming from Washington, D.C. unemployment.
Jeff Zeleny, "Citing Tax Troubles,
an Obama Appointee Withdraws," The New York Times, February 3, 2009 ---
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/citing-tax-troubles-an-obama-appointee-withdraws/
Jensen Comment
Keith Olbermann (MSNBC) consistently licks Obama's boots and never
invites a guest on his show that might bring up uncomfortable facts. In trying
to justify the much bigger tax troubles of Tom Daschele, another Obama Appointee
strongly supported by the President in spite of Daschele's even bigger tax
avoidances. Olbermann did tried to justify all Daschele's tax troubles on an
innocent mistake of not reporting the value of a car and driver. Not once did
Olbermann mention the more serious tax avoidance issue that Daschele did not
report huge consulting fees. Failure to report consulting fees, for which Form
1099 reports must be issued, is a much less innocent tax fraud by Daschele. But
Olbermann would never mention that fraud ---
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#28985186
Daschele got
$1 million a year in consulting fees from one source with no explanation of how
Daschelle earned such an enormous fee.
I'm not certain when I've witnessed a more biased commentator than Keith
Olbermann. Even O'Reilly will debate guest with opposing viewpoints. No such
guests appear on Olbermann's show. He only preaches to the liberal choir.
Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the
IRS should enforce our laws to the letter.
Sen. Tom Daschle, Congressional
Record, May 7, 1998, p. S4507.
Back before Tom Daschle had dumped his first wife
for Miss Kansas, and before he had figured out how to pig out at the gov't/lobbyist
trough, he tried to portray himself as a man of the people, modest and frugal.
My how times have changed in the past 23 years.
youtube ^ | 2/3/2009
Jensen Comment
On February 3, 2009 Tom Daschele removed his name as a candidate for Health and
Human Services.
Obama vowed to ban lobbyists from his
administration, promising the highest ethical standards in history; he had also
pledged not to accept money from lobbyists during his presidential campaign.
Once under scrutiny, Daschle's nomination gave the lie to both. While Daschle's
business card doesn't list his title as 'lobbyist', he -- as Time Magazine notes
-- "in fact, made millions of dollars after he left government doing stuff that
looks, smells and tastes a lot like lobbying." And, as a lobbyist in all but
name, Daschle contributed $2,300 to Obama's presidential campaign in March 2007
according to FEC records and another $2,000 last October. Even if one quibbles
about the technicalities of Daschle's job title, it is hard to deny that his
wife filled that role. In 2007, Washingtonian.com named Linda Daschle the sixth
most powerful lobbyist in Washington, noting, "When her husband, former
Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, was in power, eyebrows often were
raised about Linda Daschle's success."
William Tate, "Inside Obama's
sausage factory," American Thinker, February 5, 2009 ---
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/inside_obamas_sausage_factory.html
THE single mother of octuplets born in California
last week is seeking $2m (Ł1.37m) from media interviews and commercial
sponsorship to help pay the cost of raising the children. Nadya Suleman, 33,
plans a career as a television childcare expert after it emerged last week that
she already had six children before giving birth on Monday. She now has 14 below
the age of eight. Although still confined to an LA hospital bed, she intends to
talk to two influential television hosts this week — media mogul Oprah Winfrey,
and Diane Sawyer, who presents Good Morning America.
"Octuplets’ mother wants Oprah to turn her into a $2m TV star,"
The London Times, February 1, 2009 ---
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5627531.ece
Sad, because this is likely to be Obama's last shot
at getting this economy on its feet and running by 2010. For Americans are not
as patient as they were in the 1930s, when FDR could try one idea, then another,
then another for five years, and continue to roll up massive electoral
victories. If Obama gets this one wrong, and all this pork and welfare fail to
generate real growth, his party could face a wipeout in 2010, and his
opportunity could be lost forever. Does he really want to bet the farm on the
nag Nancy Pelosi just trotted out of the House?
Patrick Buchanan, "Nancy Pelosi's
New Deal." WorldNetDaily, February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=87870
Half of the average Canadian's income is taxed mostly for health care.
This is what it buys
"'Too Old' for Hip Surgery: As we inch towards nationalized health care,
important lessons from north of the border," by Nadeem Esmail, The Wall
Street Journal, February 8, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123413701032661445.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
President Obama and Congressional
Democrats are inching the U.S. toward government-run health insurance. Last
week's expansion of Schip -- the State Children's Health Insurance Program
-- is a first step. Before proceeding further, here's a suggestion: Look at
Canada's experience.
Health-care resources are not unlimited in
any country, even rich ones like Canada and the U.S., and must be rationed
either by price or time. When individuals bear no direct responsibility for
paying for their care, as in Canada, that care is rationed by waiting.
Canadians often wait months or even years
for necessary care. For some, the status quo has become so dire that they
have turned to the courts for recourse. Several cases currently before
provincial courts provide studies in what Americans could expect from
government-run health insurance.
In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering
from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an
MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr.
McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI
scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.
Ontario's government system still refused
to provide timely treatment, offering instead a months-long wait for
surgery. In the end, Mr. McCreith returned to Buffalo and paid for surgery
that may have saved his life. He's challenging Ontario's government-run
monopoly health-insurance system, claiming it violates the right to life and
security of the person guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms.
Shona Holmes, another Ontario court
challenger, endured a similarly harrowing struggle. In March of 2005, Ms.
Holmes began losing her vision and experienced headaches, anxiety attacks,
extreme fatigue and weight gain. Despite an MRI scan showing a brain tumor,
Ms. Holmes was told she would have to wait months to see a specialist. In
June, her vision deteriorating rapidly, Ms. Holmes went to the Mayo Clinic
in Arizona, where she found that immediate surgery was required to prevent
permanent vision loss and potentially death. Again, the government system in
Ontario required more appointments and more tests along with more wait
times. Ms. Holmes returned to the Mayo Clinic and paid for her surgery.
On the other side of the country in
Alberta, Bill Murray waited in pain for more than a year to see a specialist
for his arthritic hip. The specialist recommended a "Birmingham" hip
resurfacing surgery (a state-of-the-art procedure that gives better results
than basic hip replacement) as the best medical option. But government
bureaucrats determined that Mr. Murray, who was 57, was "too old" to enjoy
the benefits of this procedure and said no. In the end, he was also denied
the opportunity to pay for the procedure himself in Alberta. He's heading to
court claiming a violation of Charter rights as well.
These constitutional challenges, along
with one launched in British Columbia last month, share a common goal: to
win Canadians the freedom to spend their own money to protect themselves
from the inadequacies of the government health-insurance system.
The cases find their footing in a landmark
ruling on Quebec health insurance in 2005. The Supreme Court of Canada found
that Canadians suffer physically and psychologically while waiting for
treatment in the public health-care system, and that the government monopoly
on essential health services imposes a risk of death and irreparable harm.
The Supreme Court ruled that Quebec's prohibition on private health
insurance violates citizen rights as guaranteed by that province's Charter
of Human Rights and Freedoms.
The experiences of these Canadians --
along with the untold stories of the 750,794 citizens waiting a median of
17.3 weeks from mandatory general-practitioner referrals to treatment in
2008 -- show how miserable things can get when government is put in charge
of managing health insurance.
In the wake of the 2005 ruling, Canada's
federal and provincial governments have tried unsuccessfully to fix the long
wait times by introducing selective benchmarks and guarantees along with
large increases in funding. The benchmarks and the guarantees aren't
ambitious: four to eight weeks for radiation therapy; 16 to 26 weeks for
cataract surgery; 26 weeks for hip and knee replacements and lower-urgency
cardiac bypass surgery.
Canada's system comes at the cost of pain
and suffering for patients who find themselves stuck on waiting lists with
nowhere to go. Americans can only hope that Barack Obama heeds the lessons
that can be learned from Canadian hardships.
Mr. Esmail, based in Calgary, is the director of Health
System Performance Studies at The Fraser Institute.
Jensen Comment
The problem with so much tax for so little health care is that Canada has
not resorted to the Zimbabwe Theory of Finance that will be used to finance
the United States Universal Health Care Plan. Why should Canadians who
currently benefit national health care have to pay something toward their
own care? Let unborn babies eventually pay the price! Who really cares if if
an MRI costs $1 million U.S. Zimbabwe-like dollars? Our great
grandchildren are not yet born. They can't today protest when it might've
counted. Let 'em wait until we're dead and it's too late for them to
protest.
The Case for Performance/Competency-Based Training and Education
One could say she has the determination ... but lacks
the drive. Driving agency estimates woman has spent more than $2,888 in exam
fees. A 68-year-old South Korean woman this week signed up to take her driving
test once again -- after failing to earn a license the first 771 times.
"Pensioner gears up for 772nd driving test," CNN, February 5,
2009 ---
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/02/05/korea.driving.license/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
Bob Jensen's Comments
The same assessment policy exists online at Western Governor's University
One unique aspect of WGU is its
dedication to competency-based assessment (administered to date by Slvan
Systems). An important article on this is entitled "Assessment Takes Center
Stage in Online Learning: Distance educators see the need to prove that they
teach effectively," by Dan Carnevale, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 13, 2001 ---
http://www.chronicle.com/free/v47/i31/31a04301.htm
The sad thing about most continuing education programs in virtually all
professions is that most of them are based on attendance rather than competency
testing.
At least one of the private inspectors was hired by
the peanut company itself, which provided the audit to customers to meet their
food safety requirements. One of the private inspectors “gave the plant an
overall superior rating,” the peanut company’s statement said. “The other rated
the plant as ‘meets or exceeds audit expectations (Acceptable-Excellent)
ratings.’ ”
Andrew Martin, "Peanut Plant Says
Audits Declared It in Top Shape," The New York Times, February 4, 2009
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/business/05peanuts.html?_r=1&ref=business
Jensen Comment
I think that private inspector's former job was that of appraising home values
for Countrywide Financial mortgage brokering. Before that he was a staff auditor
for Andersen on the Enron and WorldCom audits.
A group of 16 illegal aliens is suing an Arizona
rancher, claiming he violated their civil rights, falsely imprisoned them and
inflicted emotional distress by holding them at gunpoint on his property along
the border. The federal lawsuit against Douglas, Ariz., rancher Roger Barnett,
his wife, Barbara, and his brother, Donald, is taking place before Judge John
Roll in U.S. District Court and will run through Feb. 13. The Mexican American
Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, is representing the five female
and 11 male illegals. Al Garza, National Executive Director for Minuteman Civil
Defense Corps, attended the first...
Chelsea Schilling, "16 illegals sue
rancher who catches them on his land," WorldNetDaily, February 5, 2009
---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=87988
I think these 16 people just bought the farm, literally.
Full Lists of Madoff Clients, Brokers, Employees ---
http://www.cnbc.com/id/29027313/
Also see
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/madoffclientlist020409.pdf
The main site is at
http://www.iht.com/pdfs/business/madoff.pdf
The 13,000+ size of the client list staggers my imagination.
Why didn't they inquire about
audits?
Merrill Lynch is mentioned quite a few times among the brokers. Why don't I find
that surprising?
What's wrong if everybody now gets a 4% or lower-rate 30-year home
mortgage?
Subsidizing mortgages is an idea from the New Deal, not
the Republican playbook. Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration were
set up by liberal Democrats to encourage borrowing. Subsidizing interest rates
appealed to big-government interventionists because the expense is kept off
federal balance sheets, at least for a while. The true costs of Fannie and
Freddie were long shrouded, despite the efforts of some Republican senators.
Likewise, the full costs of subsidizing 4% mortgages will appear only over time,
as the government is put on the hook for default after default. Good Republicans
would emphasize the costs and fight against programs that vastly increase the
size of government in a misguided attempt to distort markets. Good Republicans
embrace fiscal prudence at both the public and private levels. We are in the
ruins of a housing market made worse by subsidized lending. The government has
no business egging people on to borrow as much as possible to bet on housing
prices. There is plenty of room to criticize the current stimulus plan, but
Republicans need to adopt Ronald Reagan or Dwight D. Eisenhower, not Harold
Ickes, as their intellectual role model.
Ed Glaeser, "The GOP Has a Dumb
Mortgage Idea It contradicts the ideals of Republicanism and good economics,"
The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123380033980550585.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Jensen Comment
But if we simply allow the banks to fail, only the government will absorb the
toxic mortgages and foreclosed homes that the banks unload in bankruptcy court.
The government
will end up with toxic paper one way or another, toxic paper (mortgages that
will not be repaid) that carries with it the huge costs of ownership of millions
of foreclosed homes, including property taxes, security, lawn care, pool
cleaning, heating in cold climates that freeze up pipes, casualty insurance
costs, etc. ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#HomeOwnership
Toxic investments now held by banks are like owning the Energizer Bunny --- the
cash flow drain just keeps on going and going and going while trying to sell
tens of millions of homes in a down real estate market.
Some Republicans now propose that mortgage rates be set at 4% or lower for
30-year mortgages, but this will simply jumpstart the mortgage brokering racket
(with overvalued appraisals) that got us into this mess. Also banks are not
going to make 30-year loans at such low fixed rates. Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mack, now owned by Congress, will have to buy up those new loans. Currently
Freddie and Fannie need trillions to recover from the toxic paper they already
own. If current homeowners can also refinance at such low rates we're talking
tens of trillions of dollar cost in this stupid Republican plan being pushed by
real estate brokers and home builders and especially mortgage brokers.
So how much are we talking about in the already-existing toxic paper already
held by Fannie, Freddie, and the most poisoned banks?
Estimates place these at $6 trillion, which is well over half our out-of-control
existing National Debt ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123396703401759083.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
"A Republican Fannie Mae The worst mortgage idea since Barney Frank's last
one," The Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123388493959055161.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
How's this for a bright idea to boost home
prices and goose the economy: Have two government-chartered entities exploit
Uncle Sam's low borrowing costs to subsidize mortgage rates. Lower borrowing
costs will make housing more affordable and increase demand for unsold
homes. If this sounds hauntingly familiar, that's because it is.
Think Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose
mortgage-rate subsidy helped get us into this mess.
Well, here we go again, though this time
the Republicans are offering the free lunch. Under a proposal endorsed this
week by Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, Fannie and Freddie would serve as
the conduit for 30-year mortgages with fixed 4% interest rates. This is
based on an idea that economists Glenn Hubbard and Christopher Mayer first
floated on these pages, targeting a 4.5% fixed rate. Let's just say this
proves we don't agree with everything we publish.
Because 10-year Treasury yields are
currently around 2.9%, the government could in theory borrow the money, lend
it out at 4% and make these mortgages available at minimal cost. These
mortgages would encourage buyers to buy and so stem the decline in home
prices. If they were made available to those refinancing, they could also
help people struggling to pay their mortgage bills or facing resets on
adjustable-rate loans.
That's the theory.
The problems are price-fixing, taxpayer
cost, and a misunderstanding of housing trends. True, the government would
not set the prices of the houses themselves. But by fixing the price of home
financing, the government would be nationalizing one more branch of the
housing market. The feds tried this recently with student loans, and the
result is that the private market largely collapsed. After this
all-too-predictable result, Congress did what comes naturally: It blamed
lenders who withdrew from the market for being "greedy." And it had the
government -- the taxpayer -- become the main lender to students.
If the government wanted to avoid this
fate, it could instead let banks make the loans and subsidize them for the
difference between the 4.5% rate and the market rate. But wait -- if the
government has fixed the price, there is no market rate, so there's no way
to know what a "fair" rate of subsidy is. This was one of the problems with
Congress's 2007 student-loan reform. Lenders and lawmakers had different
ideas about how to define fair compensation, so the lenders walked.
Proponents nonetheless claim this would
help consumers by lowering their mortgage payments and stopping the
house-price decline. In fact, the impact on home prices or housing demand is
likely to be small. Some supporters claim a 4.5% mortgage rate could add 12%
or more to house prices. But other estimates put the home-price boost at
closer to 1%-3%, a tiny improvement in a dismal market. Home prices in many
markets are still too high compared to long-term trends, and they are likely
to keep falling until they get back to that norm.
Mr. Hubbard says 4.5% mortgages could
boost homeownership back to levels last seen in 2004, at the height of the
boom. That seems unlikely. Those who have had their credit destroyed by
foreclosure are probably not the best candidates for jumping back into the
housing pool. Most of the people who would take advantage of these loans
either would have bought a home anyway, because they need one, or already
own a home and want to (but don't need to) lower their rates.
But even if this did happen, it's not
clear why it should. These days even Barney Frank agrees that homeownership
rates were artificially high at the end of the boom. Getting back to those
levels would only presage another bust. That bust would be scheduled for
shortly after this supposedly temporary program ended, assuming it ever
does. Right now, 30-year mortgage rates are hovering around 5.5%. These are
already nearly as low as they've been in a generation. Even if they only
went back up to current levels after the program ended, rates would seem
high to homeshoppers merely because they are higher than they were. So any
new demand generated now would have to be set against the depressed demand
in the future.
Any such program would also have to be
huge -- and hugely expensive. Harvard's Ed Glaeser estimated on these pages
Thursday that a $10 trillion program might cost the Treasury $135 billion or
so. But that assumes that all those mortgages are paid back in full. And
keep in mind the money would have to be borrowed -- in addition to the $3
trillion or so the Treasury will already have to borrow in the next two
years. If interest rates and thus federal borrowing costs rise to the 1990s
average for the 10-year note of 6.5%, look out.
We realize Republicans feel obliged to
have their own "stimulus" plan, and that doing something for housing scores
well in polls. We also remember when the subsidy to Fannie and Freddie was
considered costless too. Tens of billions later, the tab is still growing.
This one could be larger.
"What Is Congress Stimulating? What's most striking is how much "stimulus"
money will be spent on the government itself (and labor unions)," by Daniel
Henninger, The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123379617394050229.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Contrary to conventional Beltway wisdom,
the House Republicans' zero votes for the Obama presidency's stimulus
"package" is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the GOP's
political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties. If the GOP line
holds, the party could win back much of the goodwill it dissipated with its
big-government adventures the past eight years.
For starters, notwithstanding the new
president's high approval rating, his stimulus bill (ghost-written by Nancy
Pelosi) has been losing altitude with public opinion by the day. People are
nervous.
Then after Tim Geithner scampered through
the tax minefield and into a Cabinet seat, the Daschle tax bomb went off,
laying open for public view the world of Washington's pay-for-favors that
makes the average Wall Street banker look like Little Bo-Peep.
Conventional wisdom holds that the
Republican refuseniks shot themselves in the foot by staying off the House
stimulus package. Real wisdom holds that congressional Republicans should
consider putting distance between themselves and anything Democratic just
now. The party's crypts are opening.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee, with an apparently recession-proof cash hoard, is running radio
ads against 28 House Republicans. The theme of the ads is "Putting Families
First."
Families first? The only family standing
at the front of the stimulus pay line is the federal family. Read the bill.
Check your PC's virus program, then pull
down the nearly 700 pages of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Dive into its dank waters and what is most striking is how much "stimulus"
money is being spent on the government's own infrastructure. This bill isn't
economic stimulus. It's self-stimulus.
(All sums here include the disorienting
zeros, as in the bill.)
Title VI, Financial Services and General
Government, says that "not less than $6,000,000,000 shall be used for
construction, repair, and alteration of Federal buildings." There's enough
money there to name a building after every Member of Congress.
The Bureau of Land Management gets
$325,000,000 to spend fixing federal land, including "trail repair" and
"remediation of abandoned mines or well sites," no doubt left over from the
19th-century land rush.
The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention are getting $462,000,000 for "equipment, construction, and
renovation of facilities, including necessary repairs and improvements to
leased laboratories."
The National Institute of Standards gets
$357,000,000 for the "construction of research facilities." The Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration gets $427,000,000 for that. The country is in an
economic meltdown and the federal government is redecorating.
The FBI gets $75,000,000 for "salaries and
expenses." Inside the $6,200,000,000 Weatherization Assistance Program one
finds "expenses" of $500,000,000. How many bureaucrats does it take to
"expense" a half-billion dollars?
The current, Senate-amended version now
lists "an additional amount to be deposited in the Federal Buildings Fund,
$9,048,000,000." Of this, "not less than $6,000,000,000 shall be available
for measures necessary to convert GSA facilities to High-Performance Green
Buildings." High performance?
Sen. Tom Coburn is threatening to read the
bill on the floor of the Senate. I have a better idea: Read it on "Saturday
Night Live."
Such as the amendment to Section 2(3)(F)
of the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, which will permit
payments to guys employed to repair "recreational vessels." Under Incentives
for New Jobs, we find a credit to employ what the bill calls "disconnected
youths," defined as "not readily employable by reason of lacking a
sufficient number of basic skills."
President Obama is saying the bill will
"create or save" three million new jobs. The bad news is your new boss is
Uncle Sam.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
says, "Everybody agrees that there ought to be a stimulus package. The
question is: How big and what do we spend it on?"
Sen. McConnell should reconsider. He knows
that the Bush-GOP spending spree cost them control of Congress in 2006.
Thus, "How big?" is not the question his party's constituents (or horrified
independents) want answered. This is a chance for the GOP to climb down from
its big-government dunce chair. Until that reversal is achieved, there is no
hope for this party.
Continued in article
So our conclusion is
that the net stimulus to short-term GDP will not be zero, and will be positive,
but the stimulus is likely to be modest in magnitude. Some economists have
assumed that every $1 billion spent by the government through the stimulus
package would raise short-term GDP by $1.5 billion. Or, in economics jargon,
that the multiplier is 1.5. That seems too optimistic given the nature of the
spending programs being proposed. We believe a multiplier well below one seems
much more likely . . . In addition, although politics play an important part in
determining all government spending, political considerations are especially
important in a spending package adopted quickly while the economy is reeling,
and just after a popular president took office.
Many Democrats saw the stimulus bill as a golden opportunity to enact spending
items they've long desired. For this reason,
various components of the package are unlikely to pass any reasonably stringent
cost-benefit test ... Our own view is that the short-term stimulus from the
legislation before Congress will be smaller per dollar spent than is expected by
many others because the package tries to combine short-term stimulus with
long-term benefits to the economy. Unfortunately, short-term and long-term gains
are in considerable conflict with each other. Moreover, it is very hard to spend
wisely large sums in short periods of time. Nor can one ever forget that
spending is not free, and ultimately it has to be financed by higher taxes.
Nobel Laureate Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy,
"There's No Stimulus Free Lunch: It's hard to spend wise and spend fast,"
The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123423402552366409.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Some of the research-and-education spending in the
bill has attracted little attention. Senators barely blinked at the bill's
$3.5-billion for the National Institutes of Health, even adding $6.5-billion
more to the agency's budget during the floor debate. But a growing number of
lawmakers, most of them Republican, were questioning the $16-billion in Pell
money, saying it would do little to create jobs or spur economic growth. "It's
not a question of the merits of Pell funding. It's a question of whether it
creates jobs and qualifies as emergency spending," said Alexa Marrero, a
spokeswoman for Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, the top Republican on the House
education committee. "If it doesn't, it needs to be debated" in the annual
appropriations process instead. Some critics go so far as to say the Pell
increase would be an economic loser because it would put less money into the
pockets of taxpayers who aren't attending college.
Kelly Field, "Skeptics Say Billions for Education Won't Stimulate Economy,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i23/23a00102.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
Much of the pork that has been added to the Stimulus Bill is for very worthy
causes. The question is whether funding for these pork pies should come under
the guise of putting unemployed workers back to work very quickly as opposed to
being funded un the usual non-emergency process in Congress. Congress is
attempting to lard up the emergency legislation with funding that otherwise
might have a more difficult time in the normal process. This might be more
acceptable if the money was actually available from taxes or borrowing. It is
not available, which is why the Stimulus Bill will be heavily funded by merely
printing money like they do in Zimbabwe.
Bob Jensen's essay on the bailout and stimulus efforts are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Zimbabwe's central bank will introduce a 100
trillion Zimbabwe dollar banknote, worth about $33 on the black market, to try
to ease desperate cash shortages, state-run media said on Friday.
KyivPost, January 16, 2009 ---
http://www.kyivpost.com/world/33522
Jensen Comment
This is a direct result of raising money by simply printing it, and the U.S.
should take note since this is how our Federal government has decided to pay for
anticipated trillion-dollar budget deficits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#NationalDebt
The Zimbabwe School of Finance Comes to the U.S.
"Why 'Stimulus' Will Mean Inflation In a global downturn the Fed will have to
print money to meet our obligations," by George Melloan, The Wall Street
Journal, February 6, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123388703203755361.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
As Congress blithely ushers its trillion
dollar "stimulus" package toward law and the U.S. Treasury prepares to begin
writing checks on this vast new appropriation, it might be wise to ask a
simple question: Who's going to finance it?
That might seem like a no-brainer, which
perhaps explains why no one has bothered to ask. Treasury securities are
selling at high prices and finding buyers even though yields are low,
hovering below 3% for 10-year notes. Congress is able to assure itself that
it will finance the stimulus with cheap credit. But how long will credit be
cheap? Will it still be when the Treasury is scrounging around in the
international credit markets six months or a year from now? That seems
highly unlikely.
Let's have a look at the credit market.
Treasurys have been strong because the stock market collapse and the
mortgage-backed securities fiasco sent the whole world running for safety.
The best looking port in the storm, as usual, was U.S. Treasury paper. That
is what gave the dollar and Treasury securities the lift they now enjoy.
But that surge was a one-time event and
doesn't necessarily mean that a big new batch of Treasury securities will
find an equally strong market. Most likely it won't as the global economy
spirals downward.
For one thing, a very important cycle has
been interrupted by the crash. For years, the U.S. has run large trade
deficits with China and Japan and those two countries have invested their
surpluses mostly in U.S. Treasury securities. Their holdings are enormous:
As of Nov. 30 last year, China held $682 billion in Treasurys, a sharp rise
from $459 billion a year earlier. Japan had reduced its holdings, to $577
billion from $590 billion a year earlier, but remains a huge creditor. The
two account for almost 65% of total Treasury securities held by foreign
owners, 19% of the total U.S. national debt, and over 30% of Treasurys held
by the public.
In the lush years of the U.S. credit boom,
it was rationalized that this circular arrangement was good for all
concerned. Exports fueled China's rapid economic growth and created jobs for
its huge work force, American workers could raise their living standards by
buying cheap Chinese goods. China's dollar surplus gave the U.S. Treasury a
captive pool of investment to finance congressional deficits. It was argued,
persuasively, that China and Japan had no choice but to buy U.S. bonds if
they wanted to keep their exports to the U.S. flowing. They also would hurt
their own interests if they tried to unload Treasurys because that would
send the value of their remaining holdings down.
But what if they stopped buying bonds not
out of choice but because they were out of money? The virtuous circle so
much praised would be broken. Something like that seems to be happening now.
As the recession deepens, U.S. consumers are spending less, even on cheap
Chinese goods and certainly on Japanese cars and electronic products. Japan,
already a smaller market for U.S. debt last November, is now suffering what
some have described as "free fall" in industrial production. Its two
champions, Toyota and Sony, are faltering badly. China's growth also is
slowing, and it is plagued by rising unemployment.
American officials seem not to have
noticed this abrupt and dangerous change in global patterns of trade and
finance. The new Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, at his Senate
confirmation hearing harped on that old Treasury mantra about China
"manipulating" its currency to gain trade advantage. Vice President Joe
Biden followed up with a further lecture to the Chinese but said the U.S.
will not move "unilaterally" to keep out Chinese exports. One would hope not
"unilaterally" or any other way if the U.S. hopes to keep flogging its
Treasurys to the Chinese.
The Congressional Budget Office is
predicting the federal deficit will reach $1.2 trillion this fiscal year.
That's more than double the $455 billion deficit posted for fiscal 2008, and
some private estimates put the likely outcome even higher. That will drive
up interest costs in the federal budget even if Treasury yields stay low.
But if a drop in world market demand for Treasurys sends borrowing costs
upward, there could be a ballooning of the interest cost line in the budget
that will worsen an already frightening outlook. Credit for the rest of the
economy will become more dear as well, worsening the recession. Treasury's
Wednesday announcement that it will sell a record $67 billion in notes and
bonds next week and $493 billion in this quarter weakened Treasury prices,
revealing market sensitivity to heavy financing.
So what is the outlook? The stimulus
package is rolling through Congress like an express train packed with
goodies, so an enormous deficit seems to be a given. Entitlements will go up
instead of being brought under better control, auguring big future deficits.
Where will the Treasury find all those trillions in a depressed world
economy?
There is only one answer. The Obama
administration and Congress will call on Ben Bernanke at the Fed to demand
that he create more dollars -- lots and lots of them. The Fed already is
talking of buying longer-term Treasurys to support the market, so it will be
more of the same -- much more.
And what will be the result? Well, the
product of this sort of thing is called inflation. The Fed's outpouring of
dollar liquidity after the September crash replaced the liquidity lost by
the financial sector and has so far caused no significant uptick in consumer
prices. But the worry lies in what will happen next.
Even when the economy and the securities
markets are sluggish, the Fed's financing of big federal deficits can be
inflationary. We learned that in the late 1970s, when the Fed's deficit
financing sent the CPI up to an annual rate of almost 15%. That confounded
the Keynesian theorists who believed then, as now, that federal spending
"stimulus" would restore economic health.
Inflation is the product of the demand for
money as well as of the supply. And if the Fed finances federal deficits in
a moribund economy, it can create more money than the economy can use. The
result is "stagflation," a term coined to describe the 1970s experience. As
the global economy slows and Congress relies more on the Fed to finance a
huge deficit, there is a very real danger of a return of stagflation. I
wonder why no one in Congress or the Obama administration has thought of
that as a potential consequence of their stimulus package.
Bob Jensen's threads on why Lawrence Summers is the most dangerous man in the
world ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Revolution
For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,
He writes both that you lost and how you blew the Game.
Grantlund Rice (as revised by Bob
Jensen)
A limitless life of glory can
bloom and spend itself in a morning.
Rabindranath Tagore, "Chitra: A Play in One Act," (Vasanta) ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/5/0/2502/2502.txt
"How to Spend the Stimulus," by Michael Grunwald,
Time Magazine, February 16, 2009 ---
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1877385,00.html
Barack Obama wanted a bill
that would jump-start the economy and invest in the future. Congress has
larded it with wasteful spending and special-interest tax cuts.
But there have been more serious
critiques of the $900 billion--plus American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act--from more serious critics. The stimulus smorgasbord does include some
head scratchers, like $246 million worth of tax breaks for movie producers
to buy film and $1.4 billion for "rural waste-disposal programs." Principled
conservatives worry that it's so big, it will institutionalize Big
Government; principled liberals worry that it won't be big enough to
resuscitate a flatlined economy. And a bipartisan chorus--including Clinton
Administration budget chief Alice Rivlin and Reagan Administration economist
Martin Feldstein--has argued that the stimulus package ought to be all about
stimulus. Those people want to focus on fighting the recession, and they
don't see Pell Grants, renewable-energy subsidies, health-care technology
and Head Start as the best ways to do that. "Many of them are worthy, but we
can have that debate another day," argues conservative New York Times
columnist David Brooks.
It really does matter how the
money is spent. But actually, we had that debate in November, and Obama won.
This crisis is an ideal opportunity for him to start keeping his campaign
promises: providing tax relief and health security to ordinary Americans,
restoring our economic competitiveness and reducing our dependence on
environmentally disastrous fossil fuels, which increases the power of our
enemies. It's hard to imagine when he'll have a better opportunity. Nothing
in the historical record suggests that when Congress has more time to
deliberate--and more time to confer with special-interest lobbyists and
local-interest political advisers--it enacts fair tax policies, sustainable
energy policies, wise infrastructure policies, responsible fiscal policies
or any other policies tainted by long-term thinking or national-interest
considerations. If Obama wants to push 21st century change through Capitol
Hill, he needs to use this emergency.
Continued in article
The Washington Post says what? I can't believe it!
"If Spending Is Swift, Oversight May Suffer: Plan's Pace Could
Leave Billions Wasted," by Robert O'Harrow Jr., The Washington Post,
February 9, 2009; Page A01 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/08/AR2009020802367.html?hpid=topnews
The Obama administration's economic stimulus plan
could end up wasting billions of dollars by attempting to spend money faster
than an overburdened government acquisition system can manage and oversee
it, according to documents and interviews with contracting specialists.
The $827 billion stimulus legislation under debate
in Congress includes provisions aimed at ensuring oversight of the massive
infusion of contracts, state grants and other measures. At the urging of the
administration, those provisions call for transparency, bid competition, and
new auditing resources and oversight boards.
But under the terms of the stimulus proposals, a
depleted contracting workforce would be asked to spend more money more
rapidly than ever before, while also improving competition and oversight.
Auditors would be asked to track surges in spending on projects ranging from
bridge construction and schools to research of "green" energy and the
development of electronic health records -- a challenge made more difficult
because many contracts would be awarded by state agencies.
The stimulus plan presents a stark choice: The
government can spend unprecedented amounts of money quickly in an effort to
jump-start the economy or it can move more deliberately to thwart the cost
overruns common to federal contracts in recent years.
"You can't have both," said Eileen Norcross, a
senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center who
studied crisis spending in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "There is no
way to get around having to make a choice."
The government's mounting procurement problems can
be traced to the Clinton and Bush administrations. Both decided to rely far
more on the private sector for technology, personnel and other services,
greatly increasing the value and complexity of the contracts. At the same
time, the personnel that awarded and oversaw that work was reduced in the
1990s in efforts to downsize the government.
Since 2000, procurement spending has soared about
155 percent to almost $532 billion while the growth in the acquisition
workforce has fallen far short, rising about 10 percent.
Specialists say the raw numbers understate the
challenges facing the 29,000 federal contracting personnel in civilian
agencies across the government who will be asked to shoulder the burden of
stimulus-related contracts. That's because much of the work they do now
involves contracts for services, which are harder to issue and monitor than
simply buying pencils and chairs.
Continued in article
"General Motors to Invest $1 Billion in Brazil
Operations -- Money to Come from U.S. Rescue Program," by Russ Dallen,
Latin American Herald Tribune, February 9, 2009 ---
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?CategoryId=12396&ArticleId=320909
General Motors plans to invest $1 billion
in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its
home market, said the beleaguered car maker.
According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur,
Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that
the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government and will be used to
"complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012."
"It wouldn't be logical to withdraw the
investment from where we're growing, and our goal is to protect investments
in emerging markets," he said in a statement published by the business daily
Gazeta Mercantil.
Meanwhile, he cut the company's revenue
forecast for this year by 14% to $9.5 billion from $11 billion, as the
economic crisis began to cause rapid slowdowns in sales.
GM already announced three programs of
paid leave, and Ardila added that GM Brazil "is going to wait and see how
the market behaves in order to know what decision to take" with regard to
possible layoffs.
For Ardila, the injection in Brazil's
automobile sector of 8 billion reais ($3.51 billion) recently announced by
the federal and state governments of Sao Paulo "has already begun to revive
sales," which fell by 12% in October.
The executive said that the company will
operate a "conservative" scenario in 2009 with an estimated production of
2.6 million units, and another more "optimistic" that contemplates sales of
2.9 million.
This year sales will reach 2.85 million
vehicles, which represents a growth of 15% over last year.
While the U.S. media turns a blind eye, analysts outside
the U.S. foresee destruction of America
President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid
First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the
illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so
obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away
pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in
sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he
came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents
billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections --
which have nothing to do with kick-starting the economy and everything to do
with favouring pet Democrat causes.
Mellanie Phillips, "America
-- what have you done?" The Spectator, February 7, 2009 ---
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3332636/america-what-have-you-done.thtml
He has been appointing one
tax dodger, lobbyist and wheeler-dealer after another. After
appointing one official,Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who
had unaccountably forgotten to pay his taxes, he then watched
his designated Health Secretary Tom Daschle fall on his sword
because he too had taken a tax holiday. Daschle was furthermore
a prominent actor in the world of lobbying and
influence-peddling. Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for Director
of the CIA has also, according to the
Wall Street Journal, consulted for
prominent companies and sat on the board of a public affairs
firm that lobbies Congress. The
Weekly Standard reports
that Secretary of Labour nominee Hilda Solis was not only
involved with a private organization lobbying her fellow
legislators on a bill that she helped sponsor, but she
apparently kept her involvement secret and failed to reveal a
clear conflict of interest.
In foreign policy, Obama has started by
trashing his own country through grossly misrepresenting its
history and grovelling to America’s enemies such as Iran, which
has flicked him aside with undiluted contempt. He has
gratuitously
upset America’s ally India by
suggesting that America should muscle in and resolve the Kashmir
question.
His right hand doesn’t
seem to know what his left hand is doing. He
reportedly asked retired Marine
General Anthony Zinni to be US ambassador to Iraq, but then
abruptly withdrew the appointment without explanation after
it had been confirmed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
And the precise role he is offering Dennis Ross – special envoy
to Iran? Special adviser to Hillary? Special adviser to other
special advisers? – remains mired in confusion.
I have argued before however
that, given Obama’s radical roots in the neo-Marxist, nihilist
politics of Saul Alinsky, it is the undermining of America’s
fundamental values that is likely to be this President’s most
strategically important goal. I have also suggested that, since
this agenda is promoted through stealth politics which gull the
credulous middle-classes while destroying the ground upon which
they are standing, his second-tier appointments should be
closely scrutinised.
And here’s a humdinger.
Obama has picked a man called David Ogden to be deputy
Attorney-General. Ogden has made his legal career from
representing pornographers, trying to defeat child protection
legislation and undermining family values. As
FoxNews reported this week, he once
represented a group of library directors arguing against the
Children's Internet Protection Act, which ordered libraries and
schools receiving funding for the Internet to restrict access to
obscene sites. And on behalf of several media groups, he
successfully argued against a child pornography law that
required publishers to verify and document the age of their
models, which would have ensured these models were at least 18.
The
Family Research Council has more
examples of his contribution to upholding American and western
values. In one such case, he expressed the view that abortion
was less damaging to a woman than having children:
In sum, it is grossly
misleading to tell a woman that abortion imposes possible
detrimental psychological effects when the risks are
negligible in most cases, when the evidence shows that she
is more likely to experience feelings of relief and
happiness, and when child-birth and child-rearing or
adoption may pose concomitant (if not greater) risks or
adverse psychological effects ...
In another, co-authored brief,
he argued that it was an unconstitutional burden on 14-year old
girls seeking an abortion for their parents to be notified --
because there was no difference between adults and mid-teens in
their ability to grasp all the implications of such a decision:
There is no question that
the right to secure an abortion is fundamental. By any
objective standard, therefore, the decision to abort is one
that a reasonable person, including a reasonable adolescent,
could make. [E]mpirical studies have found few differences
between minors aged 14-18 and adults in their understanding
of information and their ability to think of options and
consequences when asked to consider treatment-related
decisions. These unvarying and highly significant findings
indicate that with respect to the capacity to understand and
reason logically, there is no qualitative or quantitative
difference between minors in mid-adolescence, i.e., about
14-15 years of age, and adults.
And how did the 44th
President react to the growing public dismay over the mess he
was making? He threw his toys out of the pram -- or perhaps that
should read, he got into the pram. For he fled the
scene of the disaster and sought the company of seven year-olds
instead. As the
Telegraph reported:
‘We were just tired of
being in the White House,’ he told a group of excited
seven-year-olds before discussing Batman and reading them a
book.
Tired of being President –
after two weeks!
America – what have you done?!
The State of Illinois has the most underfunded
public pension plans in the nation, with a funding gap that is now approaching
$50 billion. The low balances in the state's pension accounts have been made
worse by the stock market crash, which has also hit Chicago's and Cook County's
employee pension plans. Here's a look at the dire situation for the retirement
plans of state workers ranging from police to judges to university professors to
members of the Illinois General Assembly. All are counting on generous state
pensions, but may soon wake up to a brutal reality.
Terry Savage, "Battle brewing over
Illinois pensions," Chicago Sun-Times, January 24, 2009 ---
http://www.suntimes.com/business/savage/1395694,illinois-pensions-battle-retirement-012409.article
Jensen Comment
Never fear. Porkulous funding is on the way to underfunded pension funds. What's
sad is that states that were more responsible about funding pensions will get
less than those that were reckless in funding state pensions. Selective funding
for local irresponsible behavior is part and parcel to Congressional pork.
Illinois was in pension underfunding trouble even when the stock market was at
its peak.
Timothy Geithner is play an utterly stupid and dangerous
game antagonizing Asia. As a nation, we’re very nearly dead of Asia does not
roll over the massive investments it has already made in our $10+ trillion
national debt.
In 2007, 61.82% of America's public debt was held by foreign investors, most
of them Asian. So the U.S. public debt held by nonresident foreigners is equal
to about 109.39% (113.86%) of GDP.
Geitner had better learn about Hank Paulson's "Hidden Agenda" in the banking
bailout ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#HiddenAgendaDetails
I can't believe the liberal-magazine source of this article criticizing
the Obama team: Would you believe the The Nation?
Will liberals attack Obama himself on this one?
"Will Geithner and Summers Destroy the US Economy?" by Christopher
Hayes, The Nation, February 4, 2009 ---
Click Here
That's more or less
what the usually understated
Yves Smith says today about
the preview of the Obama TARP plan, "Team Obama is
taking the cowardly approach of distributing the costs
among the most disenfranchised group in the process,
namely the taxpayer, when there far more obvious and
logical groups to take the hits."
It's not just Smith. I
got an email from a good friend at a hedge fund last
week. He's a *very* moderate guy, and he had this to
say:
The one thing that I
disagree on is that for all the talk of making Tarp
II diff from Tarp I, I don't really see it
happening. An aggregator bank still just takes bad
assets from a bank in exchange for capital. If you
pay market, the banks will be insolvent, so they
won't participate. If you pay above market, you're
basically just injecting capital in to the banks,
which is what they did in Tarp I. Why are they
scared of nationalizing? Citi is an insolvent bank -
wipe the equity, take the company, remove the bad
assets, put the remaining good company back in to
the public markets, repeat for the next insolvent
bank. If they try to let a Citi (or maybe evan a
BofA) earn their way out of this we will end up with
huge parts of the banking system in zombie mode, a
la Japan. That would be very bad and will only
prolong the pain.
This is the where the
rubber of necessity hits the road of The New Politics.
In order to save the American economy, it's increasingly
clear we need to kill off some banks. In words of one
former Wall Streeter, play "good bank, bad bank." But
playing "bad bank" means taking on Wall Street's
power in a concerted way. This is not a question of
technical merits of policy, it's a matter of taking on
entrenched power. Unless the Obama WH can find it within
itself to do it, we may all be very, very screwed.
Jensen Comment
But if we simply allow the banks to fail, only the
government will absorb the toxic mortgages and
foreclosed homes that the banks unload in bankruptcy
court.
The
government will end up with toxic paper one way or
another, toxic paper (mortgages that will not be repaid)
that carries with it the huge costs of ownership of
millions of foreclosed homes, including property taxes,
security, lawn care, pool cleaning, heating in cold
climates that freeze up pipes, casualty insurance costs,
etc. ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#HomeOwnership
Toxic investments now held by banks are like owning the
Energizer Bunny --- the cash flow drain just keeps on
going and going and going while trying to sell tens of
millions of homes in a down real estate market.
Some
Republicans now propose that mortgage rates be set at 4%
or lower for 30-year mortgages, but this will simply
jumpstart the mortgage brokering racket (with overvalued
appraisals) that got us into this mess. Also banks are
not going to make 30-year loans at such low fixed rates.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack, now owned by Congress, will
have to buy up those new loans. Currently Freddie and
Fannie need trillions to recover from the toxic paper
they already own. If current homeowners can also
refinance at such low rates we're talking tens of
trillions of cost in this stupid Republican plan being
pushed by real estate brokers and home builders and
especially mortgage brokers.
So how much
are we talking about in the already-existing toxic paper
already held by Fannie, Freddie, and the most poisoned
banks?
Estimates place these at $6 trillion, which is well over
half our out-of-control existing National Debt ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123396703401759083.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Bob Jensen calls Obama's head economic advisor, Lawrence Summers, "The
Most Dangerous Man in the World" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Revolution
Now I believe what Adolph Hitler did during
Holocaust was absolutely correct. He should have done this more extensively to
eliminate the total Jewish population from the world.
Mohammad Asaf Ud Dowlah in a recent
television program, From Shoaib Dhaka, January 30, 2009
Jensen Comment
It would be hard to find more hate in the world than wanting to exterminate over
13 million people from all parts of the world ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew
In comparison
there are over 1.3 billion Muslims in the world who worship the same God as
the Jews worship., and most of Muslims do not want to murder anybody in defiance
of their God.
Hell arrives in England; Is Canada next?
Other than in the Jewish press, such incidents are barely being reported. Last
week, for example, there was virtually no coverage of the violent demonstration
organised by the Stop the War coalition which prevented the deputy commander of
Israel’s Gaza operation from speaking at London’s Jewish student centre, Hillel
House, when a crowd of about 60-80 students attempted to storm the building. One
of the most troubling developments is the way in which the universities have
become an extension of the Middle East conflict, with a simulacrum of the
aggression, intimidation and violence from which Israel is under attack by the
Arabs being directed at Jewish students on British campuses, who now routinely
run a gauntlet of intimidation and abuse from Arab and Muslim students. But even
more worryingly, some universities are spinelessly choosing to give in to such
bullying.
Melanie Phillips, "The jihad against
Britain's Jews," The Spectator, February 6, 2009 ---
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3329296/the-jihad-against-britain
I saw lies. The world is already trying to
fault Israel, telling everyone that civilians died, and Israelis murdered. But I
was there. My feet were on the ground and I saw the truth. I saw that warnings
were given, I saw the enemy that fought us. I saw the twelve year olds with
missiles and RPGs strapped to their backs. I saw that it was with sadness and
great anger Israeli troops recognized the need to fire on people who crossed the
red line, the danger zone which meant they saw us, and knew where we were. Old
people mined with bombs, children armed with detonators, tunnels that opened in
the ground to swallow our soldiers. I watched my commanders passing out all of
our food to the children who were taken prisoner. I received the commands
"closed to fire on the right" if our intelligence had reported civilians in the
area. I watched us, more often then not, taking cover when supposed civilian
positions fired on us from “the right”. Yet the world thinks it can bend the
truth. We were not allowed to fire on schools. We were told not to loot. We
watched in anger as our bombs, so as not to fall on large civilian centers, fell
on our own troops, so that we could tell the world we were attempting to scare
the enemy while limiting civilian losses. Yet they won't say that in the press.
Joshua Eastman, "How I Survived
Gaza," Shabot Shalom, January 28, 2009 ---
http://www.ou.org/shabbat_shalom/article/how_i_survived_gaza/
A U.N. aid agency accused Hamas policemen on
Wednesday of seizing hundreds of food parcels and thousands of blankets it had
planned to distribute to 500 families in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza
Strip.
"U.N. agency says Hamas seized Gaza aid," Rueters, February 4,
2009 ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSL4273371._CH_.2400
Also see
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304681684&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Jensen Comment
Brave Hama fighters who hid out deep underground throughout the Israeli invasion
are hungry and cold.
A clerical error led the UN to falsely accuse Israel
of shelling one of its Gaza schools in the Jabalya refugee camp during Operation
Cast Lead, the international organization admitted
this week. The site hit by an IDF mortar shell near
a UN school in Gaza. For close to a month, the UN accused the Israel of hitting
the educational compound ran by its Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees, which was sheltering more than 1,300...
"UN: IDF did not shell UNRWA school," Jerusalem Post,
February 5, 2009 ---
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304687916&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Jensen Comment
Neither The New York Times nor The Nation Magazine saw fit to
report this admission of error in their previous reports of the shelling.
Saudi authorities on Monday issued a list of 85
individuals living abroad, who it said had been drawn to "deviant" ideologies, a
reference to Al-Qa'ida. The list included six (now
raised to eleven) former detainees released from the
Guantanamo Bay detention center, the Saudi newspaper Saudi Gazette reported.
"Saudi Arabia Lists 85 Wanted Terrorists," AllHeadlineNews,
February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7013935315
Jensen Comment
Did you ever wonder why this wasn't mentioned by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC or
printed by The New York Times in their want for Gitmo prisoners to be freed.
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, became the
first world leader yesterday to condemn Pope Benedict XVI over his
rehabilitation of an ultra-conservative British bishop who denies that Jews died
in the Nazi Holocaust. Ms Merkel called on the German Pope to reject publicly
the views of Bishop Richard Williamson, who has denied that six million Jews
were gassed in Nazi concentration camps. In a highly unusual rebuke to the Pope
she said that she did not believe there had been “sufficient” clarification.
Richard Owen, "Angela Merkel rebukes
Pope in Holocaust row," London Times, February 4, 2009 ---
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5653201.ece
Bill Moyers holds himself out to be a moral arbiteur,
based in large part on his commitment to Christian principles. Cardinal Renato
Martino is a prince of the Catholic church and President of the Council for
Justice and Peace. Former President Jimmy Carter preaches peace, based on the
teachings of Jesus. Yet when it comes to the conflict between Israel and Hamas,
all three are morally blind. In a widely watched television assessment of the
recent conflict in Gaza, here is what Moyers said: "By killing indiscriminately
the elderly, kids, entire families, by destroying schools and hospitals, Israel
did exactly what terrorists do…" (emphasis added) Of course he also included the
obligatory hedge that: "Every nation has the right to defend its people." . . .
Bill Moyers ended a letter to the New York Times in which he defended his moral
equivalency statement by saying that to be indifferent to suffering is "to be as
blind as Sampson in Gaza." No, Mr. Moyers, to be indifferent to the crucial
difference between what terrorists do, namely try to kill as many civilians as
possible from behind human shields, and what democracies such as Israel and the
United States do, namely try to stop terrorists from killing with the minimum
possible injury to civilians, is truly to be "eyeless in Gaza."
Alan M. Dershowitz, Harvard Law
School
Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002
genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of
man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit
political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an
embarrassing relic of a bygone era. But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the
language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our
society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of
offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has
lost its gift to be disgusted by evil. I believe it all started with
well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror
decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine
that propels acts of terrorism -- the ideological license to elevate one's
grievances above the norms of civilized society -- was wished away in favor of
seemingly more manageable "tactical" considerations.
"Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil: When will our
luminaries stop making excuses for terror," by Judea Pearl, The Wall Street
Journal, February 2, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123362422088941893.html
This week marks the seventh anniversary of the
murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife
Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged
after his tragedy?
The answer does not come easily. Danny was an
optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a
realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.
Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by
his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his
abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would
be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his
murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of
his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic
jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in
European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas,
Hezbollah and other heroes of "the resistance." Or that another kidnapped
young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with
no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his
kidnappers deserve international recognition.
No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in
2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the
history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to
transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human
sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.
But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the
language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of
our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear
of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it
has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.
I believe it all started with well-meaning
analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided
that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that
propels acts of terrorism -- the ideological license to elevate one's
grievances above the norms of civilized society -- was wished away in favor
of seemingly more manageable "tactical" considerations.
This mentality of surrender then worked its way
through politicians like the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. In
July 2005 he told Sky News that suicide bombing is almost man's second
nature. "In an unfair balance, that's what people use," explained Mr.
Livingstone.
But the clearest endorsement of terror as a
legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President
Jimmy Carter. In his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Mr. Carter
appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. "It is imperative that the
general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear
that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when
international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are
accepted by Israel." Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer
taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices.
Mr. Carter's logic has become the dominant paradigm
in rationalizing terror. When asked what Israel should do to stop Hamas's
rockets aimed at innocent civilians, the Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad,
did not hesitate for a moment in her response: "They should end the
occupation." In other words, terror must earn a dividend before it is
stopped.
The media have played a major role in handing
terrorism this victory of acceptability. Qatari-based Al Jazeera television,
for example, is still providing Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi hours of free air
time each week to spew his hateful interpretation of the Koran, authorize
suicide bombing, and call for jihad against Jews and Americans.
Then came the August 2008 birthday of Samir Kuntar,
the unrepentant killer who, in 1979, smashed the head of a four-year-old
Israeli girl with his rifle after killing her father before her eyes. Al
Jazeera elevated Kuntar to heroic heights with orchestras, fireworks and
sword dances, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society's role
model. No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose Al Jazeera efforts
to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al Jazeera's management
continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs.
Some American pundits and TV anchors didn't seem
much different from Al Jazeera in their analysis of the recent war in Gaza.
Bill Moyers was quick to lend Hamas legitimacy as a "resistance" movement,
together with honorary membership in PBS's imaginary "cycle of violence." In
his Jan. 9 TV show, Mr. Moyers explained to his viewers that "each [side]
greases the cycle of violence, as one man's terrorism becomes another's
resistance to oppression." He then stated -- without blushing -- that for
readers of the Hebrew Bible "God-soaked violence became genetically coded."
The "cycle of violence" platitude allows analysts to empower terror with the
guise of reciprocity, and, amazingly, indict terror's victims for violence
as immutable as DNA.
When we ask ourselves what it is about the American
psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas -- the charter of
which would offend every neuron in our brains -- to become tolerated in
public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way
they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.
At my own university, UCLA, a symposium last week
on human rights turned into a Hamas recruitment rally by a clever academic
gimmick. The director of the Center for Near East Studies carefully selected
only Israel bashers for the panel, each of whom concluded that the Jewish
state is the greatest criminal in human history.
The primary purpose of the event was evident the
morning after, when unsuspecting, uninvolved students read an article in the
campus newspaper titled, "Scholars say: Israel is in violation of human
rights in Gaza," to which the good name of the University of California was
attached. This is where Hamas scored its main triumph -- another inch of
academic respectability, another inroad into Western minds.
Danny's picture is hanging just in front of me, his
warm smile as reassuring as ever. But I find it hard to look him straight in
the eyes and say: You did not die in vain.
Mr. Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of
the Daniel Pearl Foundation, founded in memory of his son to promote
cross-cultural understanding.
Recovery Rebate Credit for
Your 2008 Stimulus Payment ---
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=177937,00.html
This may apply especially to folks receiving social
security benefits (like your parents) and low-wage
workers (like your children).
Most taxpayers who received the
economic stimulus payment last year will not qualify
for the recovery rebate credit on their 2008 federal
income tax return. However, some individuals who did
not get the economic stimulus payment, and a smaller
number of those who did, may be eligible for the
recovery rebate credit. If you didn't get an
economic stimulus payment in 2008, you may be
eligible to receive the recovery rebate credit in
2009.
To determine if you are eligible
for the recovery rebate credit you will need to know
how much your 2008 economic stimulus payment was.
Our online tool,
How Much Was My Stimulus Payment?, can get you
the answer right away.
Visit the
Recovery Rebate Credit Information Center for
details.
If You Didn't File for a Stimulus
Payment
If you didn't file for an economic
stimulus payment in 2008 because you weren't sure
you were eligible, you may be able to file for a
payment in 2009. Find out more if you:
|
|
Bob Jensen's tax helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
This Lawyer Can Really be a Drag
Yorba Linda attorney Neil B. Fineman will soon have
enough women's apparel to be able to open a dress store. It seems that Fineman,
40, brought a class action by which he forced Windsor Fashions to stop
committing routine violations of the Song-Beverly Credit Card Act. The class was
comprised of all customers who, between Nov. 29, 2006—one year before the action
was filed—and Nov. 18, 2008 (when the class was preliminarily certified)
“purchased merchandise from Defendant’s stores in the State of California, used
a credit card to make the purchase(s), and whose address, E mail address or
telephone number was requested and recorded by a Windsor Fashions employee.”
Collecting “personal identification information” from credit card customers is
proscribed by Civil Code §1747.08(a)(2). Under a settlement, arrived at with the
assistance of a mediator, it was agreed that Fineman was entitled to a $125,000
fee for his legal services. However, customers who were subjected to the
proscribed practice won’t receive any cash under the accord...only a $10 gift
card. In an order signed Friday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brett Klein
likewise provided that Fineman will be paid off in the form of such cards:
“12,500 ten-dollar Windsor Fashions gift cards.”
Roger M. Grace, Metropolitan-News Service, January 21, 2009 ---
http://www.metnews.com/articles/2009/perspectives012109.htm
How the Internet Began (Humor) ---
http://home.comcast.net/~singingman7777/Beginning.htm
Link forwarded by Barry Rice
Of course this is fiction. In 1974 the Internet was really conceived in Al’s
Reply Pleases Army NET (ARPANET)
For students of history we have the following links:
Computing History Timeline ---
http://trillian.randomstuff.org.uk/~stephen/history/timeline.html
Also see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing
American University Computer History Museum --- http://www.computinghistorymuseum.org/
The Apple (Computer) Museum --- http://www.theapplemuseum.com/
A History of Microsoft Windows (slide show from Wired News) ---
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/pcs/multimedia/2007/01/wiredphotos31
Oldcomputers.com --- http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
Laid Off Employees Turning to Cybercrime
In what appears to be a growing trend, displaced
employees are turning to cybercrime using their corporate data access to steal,
exploit and damage information networks, and may have cost businesses as much as
$1 trillion globally according to a new study from McAfee and Purdue
University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and
Security Although insiders have always posed a threat to information security,
the report warns that the global recession is putting vital information at
greater risk than ever before. The report, Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital
Information was released last week at the World Economic Forum and suggests that
the economic downturn is increasing the security risk for corporations with 42
percent of respondents reporting that displaced workers were the biggest threat
to sensitive information on the network.
Lidija Davis, "Laid Off Employees
Turning to Cybercrime," ReadWriteWeb, February 1, 2009 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/laid_off_employees_turning_to.php
Recall This Tidbit
"Ex-Fannie Mae worker charged with planting computer virus," by
Freeman Klopott, Washington Examiner, January 29, 2009 ---
http://www.dcexaminer.com/local/012909-Ex-Fannie_Mae_worker_charged_with_planting_computer_virus.html
FBI: Don’t be Fooled by Work-at-Home Scams
The FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center
(IC3) continue to receive numerous complaints from individuals who have fallen
victim to work-at-home scams and remind consumers to be vigilant when seeking
employment online. These work-at-home schemes are designed by criminals to gain
the trust of job seekers in order to take advantage of working relationships to
further illegal activity. Most victims do not even realize they are engaging in
criminal behavior until it is too late. In many of the reported scams, victims
are often hired to “process payments,” “transfer funds,” or “reship products.”
However, these scams exploit unwitting employees by having them cash fraudulent
checks, transfer illegally obtained funds for the criminals, or receive stolen
merchandise and ship it to the criminals. Other scams entice victims to sign up
to be a “mystery shopper,” receiving fraudulent checks with instructions to cash
the checks and wire the funds to “test” a company’s services. Victims are told
they will be compensated with a portion of the merchandise or funds.
Free Republic, February 4, 2009 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2178604/posts
"Amazon’s New Kindle Is Faster, Smarter, Thinner," by Brad Stone and
Motoko Rich, The New York Times, February 9, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/technology/personaltech/10kindle.html?ref=business
Escalating its efforts to dominate the fledgling
industry for electronic books, Amazon introduced a new version of its
electronic book reader today, dubbed Kindle 2.
Amazon said the upgraded device has seven times the
memory as the original version, allows faster page-turns and has a crisper,
though still black-and-white, display. The Kindle 2 also features a new
design with round keys and a short, joystick-like controller — a departure
from the design aspects of the previous version, which some buyers had
criticized as awkward. The new device will ship on Feb. 24. Amazon did not
change the price for the device, which remains $359.
Though the improvements to the Kindle are only
incremental, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, defined some
ambitious goals for the device. “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in
any language, all available in less than 60 seconds,” he said at a news
conference in New York.
Amazon introduced several new features for the
Kindle. A new text-to-speech function allows readers to switch between
reading words on the device and having the words read to them by a
computerized voice. That technology was provided by Nuance, a
speech-recognition company based in Burlington, Mass.
Amazon is also allowing Kindle owners to transfer
texts between their Kindle and other mobile devices. Amazon said it is
working on making digital texts available for other gadgets (such as mobile
phones), though it did not specify which ones.
One competitive threat Amazon is facing in its
effort to dominate the world of e-books is from Google, which has scanned in
some seven million books, many of them out of print. Google has also struck
deals with publishers and authors to split the proceeds from the online
sales of those texts.
Google recently said it would soon begin selling
these books for reading on mobile devices like Apple’s iPhone and phones
running Google’s Android operating system.
Implicitly addressing the threat posed by Google,
Mr. Bezos said that Amazon knows better than other companies what
book-buyers wants and stressed Amazon’s digital catalog of 230,000 newer
books and best-sellers.
“We have tens of millions of customers who buy
books from us every day and we know what they want to read,” he said. “And
we are making sure to prioritize those items.”
Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, the
world’s largest publisher of consumer books and a unit of Bertelsmann of
Germany, said the company was working with Amazon and other e-book makers to
digitize its so-called backlist of older titles. When asked in an interview
after the news conference if he was concerned about the effects of Amazon’s
dominance in the e-book market, Mr. Dohle paused and laughed.
“It is not up to us to talk about Amazon’s
competition,” he said. “I don’t think that any kind of defensive business
strategy will succeed. We want to grow our business in all channels and one
of the fastest growing customers is Amazon in all areas.”
“We see the Kindle and we see e-books as a real
opportunity because we think that it will not cannibalize the physical part
of the business and it will also generate and create new readers of books,”
Mr. Dohle said.
For features and pictures see
http://www.pcworld.com/article/159173/amazon_unveils_kindle_2.html
$359 at Amazon ---
Click Here
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
The New Culture of Cheating
Question
What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure?
"It’s Culture, Not Morality: What if everything you learned about
fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure?" by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/03/myword
What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to
failure?Computer software, threats on the syllabus, pledges of zero
tolerance, honor
codes — what if all the popular strategies don’t much matter? And what if
all of that anger you feel — as you catch students clearly submitting work
they didn’t write — is clouding your judgment and making it more difficult
to promote academic integrity?
These are
some of the questions raised in
My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture,
in which Susan D. Blum, an
anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, considers
why students so frequently violate norms that seem clear and
just to their professors. The book, about to appear from
Cornell University Press, is sure to be controversial
because it challenges the strategies used by colleges and
professors nationwide. In many ways, Blum is arguing that
the current approach of higher education to plagiarism is a
shock and awe strategy — dazzle students with technology and
make them afraid, very afraid, of what could happen to them.
But since there
isn’t a Guantanamo Bay large enough for the population that
plagiarizes, Blum wants higher education to embrace more of
a hearts and minds strategy in which academics consider why
their students turn in papers as they do, and the logic
behind those choices.
The
book arrives at a time that many professors continue to
voice frustration over plagiarism. Academic blogs are full
of stories about attempting to deal with copying. Services
such as
Turnitin have grown in popularity
to the extent that it is processing more than 130,000 papers
a day, while
Blackboard has added plagiarism
detection features to its course management systems. At the
same time, however, particularly in the world of college
composition, there has been
some backlash against the law
enforcement approach, with professors saying that they fear
they are missing a chance to teach students about how to
write through too much emphasis on fear of detection.
Those who
want to understand the ideas in the book may want to note
the title; it’s no coincidence that Blum wrote about college
“culture,” and not “ethics” or “morality.” And while she did
use “plagiarism” in the title, she faults colleges and
professors for failing to distinguish between buying a paper
to submit as your own, submitting a paper containing
passages from many authors without appropriate credit, and
simply failing to learn how to cite materials. Treating
these violations of academic norms the same way is part of
the problem, she writes.
If you find
yourself thinking that Blum is advocating surrender, that’s
not correct. Her book doesn’t advocate waving a white flag,
but a new kind of campaign against plagiarism. And in an
interview, Blum said that she includes warnings against
plagiarism on her syllabuses, has devoted time trying to
track down evidence against a student she was convinced had
copied work, and has felt anger and betrayal at students who
turned in work that wasn’t original.
“That’s how
I felt when I first started looking into this topic,” she
said. “I was really hurt when I felt students didn’t show
respect for the assignment. I felt a tension between really
liking my students as individuals and that they didn’t take
academic work as seriously as I wanted them to.... I felt it
was a battle. It was ‘How can I make them care?’ “
Blum’s book
is based on her research on the way colleges try to prevent
plagiarism and the way students view college, knowledge and
the writing process. Many of the ideas come from the 234
undergraduates at Notre Dame who participated in in-depth
interviews. The students were given confidentiality and the
procedures for the interviews were approved by Notre Dame’s
institutional review board. While Blum makes clear where she
did her research, she calls the institution “Saints U.” in
the text, with the goal of having readers focus less on
Notre Dame and more on higher education generally.
While the
book doesn’t claim that Notre Dame students are broadly
representative of those in higher education, she suggests
that these students do give an accurate portrayal of
attitudes at competitive, residential colleges. Blum
originally planned a similar study at a less competitive
college, but didn’t have time to finish it. She said she
thinks there may be some differences in attitudes, as part
of the dynamic at elite institutions is a student
expectation about earning A’s and succeeding in everything —
an expectation that she said may not be present elsewhere.
In terms of
explaining student culture, Blum uses many of the student
interviews to show how education has become to many students
more an issue of credentialing and getting ahead than of any
more idealistic love of learning. She quotes one student who
admits that he sounds “awful,” in describing decidedly
unintellectual reasons for going to college and excelling
there. “I think that knowledge is important to me, and to
feel like I’m ahead of the game in a sense is important to
me. And to move on the next step, whatever it is .. is also
important.”
Students
looking for the “next step” may not care as much as they
should about actual learning, Blum suggests.
Then there
is the student concept — or lack thereof — of intellectual
property. She notes the way students routinely ignore
messages from colleges and threats of legal action to share
music online, in violation of business standards of
copyright. As with plagiarism, she notes, the student
generation has embraced an entirely different concept of
ownership, and students who would never shoplift feel no
hesitation about downloading music they haven’t purchased.
And she
notes how much students love to quote from pop culture or
other sources — feeling pride in working into conversation
quotes they never invented — in a way previous generations
wouldn’t have done.
“Student
norms contrast with official norms not just because of this
proliferation of quoting without attribution, but because
students question the very possibility of originality. They
often reveal profound insights into the nature of creation
and demonstrate a considered acceptance of sharing and
collaboration,” Blum writes. At the same time, she notes,
students are less likely than previous generation to
distinguish between formal and informal writing (think of
the importance, to students, of instant messages). And rules
about attribution are seen as silly.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Using Foucault to Deconstruct Rankings of Colleges and Universities
The Foucault work Discipline & Punish: The Birth of
the Prison provides the sociological framework for the analysis. The book
explores the power of scrutiny and surveillance to pressure people who might not
otherwise conform to do so and to seek ways to make the system work to their
advantage. Law schools are an ideal subset of higher education to use for
applying these theories to college rankings, the authors write, because the
leaders of legal education spoke out against rankings when they started and the
law school world is relatively small, making it possible for U.S. News or others
to rank all players. The paper mixes the theory of Foucault with information
gathered by the authors in interviews with law school deans and other
administrators at 75 law schools, discussions with dozens of prospective law
students, and analysis of 15 years of law school admissions data.
Scott Chaschik, Inside Higher Ed, February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/03/rankings
Jensen Comment
I think my former doctoral student, Ed Arrington, is probably the leading
scholar of Foucault in the accounting academy. He spent several years in Europe
studying the philosophy of Foucault ---
http://web.uncg.edu/bae/directory/profile.php?username=cearring
Ed's interest in Foucault came long after he completed his doctorate. I even
have to look up how to spell Michel (not Michael) Foucault whenever I need to
write the name down ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
February 3, 2009 reply from Paul Williams
[Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Bob,
Ed is more a Jacque Derrida (deconstructionist/literary theorist) than a
Foucauldian (history) (it is Michel). Of course, to American accounting
academics, with some exceptions, it's all the same -- indecipherable,
European clap-trap (we already know how the world works and we've got
thousands of regression equations to prove it, so why complicate it by
reading obtuse European intellectuals). The Foucauldians in accounting that
have written most extensively are Peter Miller, Richard Macve, Ted O'Leary,
and Keith Hoskins. The classic Foucauldian piece inspired by Discipline and
Punish (inspired by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon design for prisons, i.e.,
continual surveillance) is Miller and O'Leary's "Constructing the Governable
Person" that appeared in AOS in (I believe) 1988.
Bob Jensen's threads on the advantages and disadvantages of rankings are
at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
The Market God Failed
What happened to the Theory (Law?) of Portfolio Diversification for Investment
Safety?
Your investment broker, pension fund manager, and your finance/economics
professor claimed that the safe investment strategy was to diversify your
portfolio between bonds and stocks, between securities in diverse industries,
between real estate and securities, etc. Some advocated investing in highly
diverse derivative funds like the S&P Index Fund. The securities portfolio
diversification theory (law?) was mathematically formulated in Nobel Prize
winning legendary works of Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller, Jack Treynor, William
Sharpe, John Lintner and Jan Mossin ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Asset_Pricing_Model
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar
"Opportunities in a High Correlation World," by Geof Considine, Seeking Alpha,
February 4, 2009 ---
http://seekingalpha.com/article/118177-opportunities-in-a-high-correlation-world?source=front_page_editors_picks
One of the most striking features of 2008 was the
fact that correlations between most asset classes went up substantially:
everything declined at the same time.
One of the principal motivations behind diversifying is that all of your
holdings will not decline at the same time. Declines in one class will be
buffered by gains in another—or at least lesser losses in others. This
effect has not provided much buffer in 2008.
There are only three correlations in this matrix
(not pictured here) that did not increase between 2007
and 2008—and those are marked in red. The increase in correlations is
substantial: every asset class was sold off at the same time, albeit in
varying degrees.
The upswing in correlations reduces the value of
strategic asset allocation, because benefits of diversification decline as
correlations increase. The “diversification premium” is diminished. Almost
any given asset allocation will look riskier if correlations are higher. On
the other hand, the increase in correlations signal that the market is
treating enormous swathes of the investment landscape as less differentiated
than they really are—and this provides a substantial opportunity.
How might investors deal with this environment? I
see three major areas that have high potential.
1. Tactical asset allocation
At the same time that correlations have gone up,
prices (obviously) have come down dramatically. The stocks of many firms are
very cheap right now. The tactical side of investing (when you buy) is more
important because the strategic side of investing (asset allocation) is at a
low point. As Warren Buffett has famously suggested: be greedy when others
are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. I have personally never seen
an environment in which investors are more uniformly scared than recent
months.
In August of 2007, shortly before the start of the
massive bear market, I showed that there had historically been a strong
negative correlation between returns on major asset classes and market
volatility. This means that market returns are low when volatility goes up,
and vice versa. I also discussed the wide range of evidence suggesting that
market risk was due for a substantial increase. This observation turned out
to be quite prescient. Today, market risk is high and trending downwards—and
this also has implications for returns. Declining volatility has
historically been a positive sign for a range of asset classes.
I am inclined to agree with Jeremy Grantham that
“high quality” stocks will deliver outsized returns over the coming years.
My analysis suggests that the market has become fairly indiscriminate in
separating the high quality from the low quality—and this shows up in the
increase in correlations. Many investors treated almost every asset class as
equally risky—so high quality stocks are available at really good prices.
The challenge of tactical strategies is that they
require more active management. A position that looks attractive today may
not look attractive in several months. Tactical strategies allow investors
to take advantage of opportunities that may be fleeting. Similarly, the
risks associated with an investment can change quickly.
2. Exploit the excessive risk aversion in the
market
The higher correlations we have seen are a
manifestation of excessive risk aversion: investors are trying to get out of
every asset class as fast as they can. Excessive risk aversion can be judged
by the prices at which options are trading—and a conservative way to exploit
this is to sell options. When investors are risk averse, options prices will
be high (and vice versa). Back in November of 2008, I wrote an article in
which I discussed how to judge relative mis-pricing. As one example, I cited
January 2010 call options on JNJ with a strike price of $65 that were
selling at $5.50. My analysis suggested that these options were selling at
too high a price. Today, these options are selling at $3.10. Selling options
as part of a coherent strategy makes sense for the investor or advisor who
understands how to value options.
3. Looking Beyond Index Investing
I have written quite a bit about the merits of
investing in a portfolio of carefully selected individual stocks rather than
buying into market cap weighted indexes. As correlations between the major
indexes have risen, the way to exploit low correlations appears to be via a
judicious combination of individual stocks. An article titled Have
Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? [pdf file] (Campbell et al, 2001)
shows that correlations between individual securities have experienced a
long-term secular decline. This decline should allow for increased
diversification benefits between individual securities.
Further, Fama and French (The Capital Asset Pricing
Model: Theory and Evidence, 2004) [pdf file] showed that portfolios of
low-Beta stocks have historically delivered consistently higher returns than
the CAPM theory suggests (see Figure 2 in that article). Stocks with low
correlations to one another also tend to be low Beta, and Fama and French’s
results suggest that you can obtain more return with less risk than the
market portfolio by building a portfolio out of low-Beta stocks. A challenge
in this type of approach is to manage volatility associated with individual
stocks—but this is not an insurmountable task. I have discussed this
conceptual strategy previously.
The Long View
I fully expect that correlations will settle back
down to historical levels, thereby providing a higher benefit to strategic
asset allocation once again. The current low prices and the high implied
volatilities of many stocks (as reflected in options prices) provide the
ability for selective investors to lay the groundwork for a substantial
boost in portfolio performance. Strategic Asset Allocation is a key part of
long-term planning, but tactical opportunities appear to dominate the near
term. The high correlations (which reduce the value of SAA for the time
being) increase the potential for finding indiscriminate pricing of risk.
When good companies are treated by the market as though they are just as
risky as bad companies, there is an opportunity to pick up the good ones at
low prices and/or short volatility on the good ones (by selling covered
calls, for example). Further, even though correlations between indexes have
increased considerably for the time being, it is still possible to find
groups of stocks that exhibit low correlations to one another—thereby
providing increased diversification benefits.
Jensen Comment
This once again demonstrates the difference between the physical sciences and
the social sciences. Correlations in the physical sciences may have long-term,
albeit sometimes not infinite, permanence to a point where the word "law" often
becomes an acceptable noun. In realms other than the physical sciences, the term
"law" should always be written ink that is more easily erased.
The basic problem in terms of 2008 was that securities and real estate
markets themselves broke down. Causes are complex, although the most significant
cause was probably that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mack, and various Wall Street
investment banks and other large banks purchased (probably knowingly) many
millions of fraudulent mortgages brokered on every Main Street of every town in
the U.S. --- millions of mortgages that had little or no chance of repayment and
loan amounts well in excess of collateral value, thereby negating recovery of
loan balances in foreclosure proceedings. This, along with the re-packaging
(securitization) of such investments comprise what is now called poisonous
investments that threaten the survival of the firms that hold them (other than
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack that will survive because they're now owned by the
Zimbabwe-like U.S. Congress that turned to printing pork money it needs rather
than tax or borrow).
The smart move now, in early 2009, would be for Congress to buy the largest
poisoned banks in the U.S. (nationalization) at eBay prices, but Congress will
most likely absorb the trillions in bad debts and allow the crooks (oops I
meant to say bank executives) that caused the problem to draw a measly $500,000
per year plus millions in new restricted stock awards in their revived,
debt-free, banks.
Beneath those obvious surface causes was a combination of Congressional
efforts to extend home ownership to poor people (read that Barney's ACORN) and
greedy bankers on Wall Street and Main Street who cared more about their
personal compensation than their fiduciary responsibilities to their companies
and the public.
Long Time Wall Street Journal Defenders of Wall Street's Outrageous Compensation Morph
Into Hypocrites
At each stage of the disaster, Mr. Black told me --
loan officers, real-estate appraisers, accountants, bond ratings agencies --
it was pay-for-performance systems that "sent them wrong."
The need for new compensation rules is most urgent at
failed banks. This is not merely because is would make for good PR, but
because lavish executive bonuses sometimes create an incentive to hide
losses, to take crazy risks, and even, according to Mr. Black, to "loot the
place through seemingly normal corporate mechanisms." This is why, he
continues, it is "essential to redesign and limit executive compensation
when regulating failed or failing banks." Our leaders may not know it yet,
but this showdown between rival populisms is in fact a battle over political
legitimacy. Is Wall Street the rightful master of our economic fate? Or
should we choose a broader form of sovereignty? Let the conservatives'
hosannas turn to sneers.
The market god has failed.
Thomas Frank, "Wall Street Bonuses Are an Outrage: The public
sees a self-serving system for what it," The Wall Street Journal,
February 4, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123371071061546079.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous compensation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation
Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance
Bob Jensen's threads on the Bailout and Stimulus Act Mess are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory.htm
Question
What's a WikiDashboard?
"Who's Messing with Wikipedia? The back-and-forth behind controversial
entries could help reveal their true value." by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology
Review, February 6, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22076/?nlid=1757&a=f
Despite warnings from many high-school teachers and
college professors,
Wikipedia
is one of the most-visited websites in the world (not
to mention the biggest encyclopedia ever created). But even as Wikipedia's
popularity has grown, so has the debate over its trustworthiness. One of the
most serious concerns remains the fact that its articles are written and
edited by a hidden army of people with unknown interests and biases.
Ed Chi,
a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the
Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool,
called
WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the
normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia's most controversial pages
in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might
be.
Wikipedia already has procedures in place designed
to alert readers to potential problems with an entry. For example, one of
Wikipedia's volunteer editors can review an article and tag it as
"controversial" or warn that it "needs sources." But in practice, Chi says,
relatively few articles actually receive these tags. WikiDashboard instead
offers a snapshot of the edits and re-edits, as well as the arguments and
counterarguments that went into building each of Wikipedia's many million
pages.
The researchers began by investigating pages
already tagged as "controversial" on Wikipedia: they found that these pages
were far more likely to have been edited and re-edited repeatedly. Based on
this observation, they developed WikiDashboard, a website that serves up
Wikipedia entries but adds a chart to the top of each page revealing its
recent edit history.
WikiDashboard shows which users have contributed
most edits to a page, what percentage of the edits each person is
responsible for, and when editors have been most active. A WikiDashboard
user can explore further by clicking on a particular editor's name to see,
for example, how involved he or she has been with other articles. Chi says
that the goal is to show the social interaction going on around the entry.
For instance, the chart should make it clear when a single user has been
dominating a page, or when a flurry of activity has exploded around a
particularly contentious article. The timeline on the chart can also show
how long a page has been neglected.
Encyclopaedia Britannica to let readers edit content: Too little too
late
Encyclopaedia Britannica, the authoritative reference
book first published in 1768, is to let readers edit its entries, it said
Friday, as it battles to keep pace with Internet resources like Wikipedia. From
next week, visitors to the publication's website, Britannica.com, will be able
to submit proposed changes to editors, who will check them and make alterations
if they think they are appropriate. Users whose suggestions are accepted will
then be credited on the site, the firm said in a statement. Gorge Cauz,
president of the US-based firm, insisted that the publication was not trying to
be a wiki -- a collection of web pages which allows users to edit content --
like Wikipedia . . . But some technology commentators say the step is a doomed
attempt to preserve Britannica's subscription-based business model in the face
of the challenge from Wikipedia, which is free. The Times reported that while
Britannica.com attracts 1.5 million visitors per day, Wikipedia attracts roughly
six million.
PhysOrg, January 23, 2009 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news151938162.html
Jensen Comment
Whereas full text is available on Wikipedia for fee, Encyclopeaedia Britannica
only provides full text to paid subscribers. Subscriptions are about $70 per
year and a complete bound set is $2,000. Britannica is more reliable for
accuracy on topics covered, but Wikipedia overwhelms Britannica in terms of
millions upon millions of more topics covered. A scholarly approach might be to
first look up a topic in Wikipedia and then try to authenticate it in
Britannica, but this will only work for topics covered in Britannica. Also
Wikipedia has millions upon millions of "discussion" commentaries that vastly
widen the perspectives covered on many topics.
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm
Question
How can you locate students who fail to show up for class, children who seem to
have disappeared, and untrustworthy husbands?
"Do you know where your kid is? Check Google's maps," MIT's Technology
Review, February 5, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/22072/?nlid=1752&a=f
With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc.
hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches
for information on the Internet.
The new software released Wednesday will enable
people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share
their whereabouts with family and friends.
The feature, dubbed "Latitude," expands upon a
tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own
location on a Google map with the press of a button.
"This adds a social flavor to Google maps and
makes it more fun," said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.
It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google
is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually
turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access
to the service.
Google also is promising not to retain any
information about its users' movements. Only the last location picked up by
the tracking service will be stored on Google's computers, Lee said.
The software plots a user's location -- marked
by a personal picture on Google's map -- by relying on cell phone towers,
global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location.
The system can follow people's travels in the United States and 26 other
countries.
It's left up to each user to decide who can
monitor their location.
The social mapping approach is similar to a
service already offered by Loopt Inc., a 3-year-old company located near
Google's Mountain View headquarters.
Loopt's service is compatible with more than 100
types of mobile phones.
To start out, Google Latitude will work on
Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and devices running on Symbian software
or Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile. It will also operate on some T-Mobile
phones running on Google's Android software and eventually will work on
Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iTouch.
To widen the software's appeal, Google is
offering a version that can be installed on personal computers as well.
The PC access is designed for people who don't
have a mobile phone but still may want to keep tabs on their children or
someone else special, Lee said. People using the PC version can also be
watched if they are connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi.
Google can plot a person's location within a few
yards if it's using GPS, or might be off by several miles if it's relying on
transmission from cell phone towers. People who don't want to be precise
about their whereabouts can choose to display just the city instead of a
specific neighborhood.
There are no current plans to sell any
advertising alongside Google's tracking service, although analysts believe
knowing a person's location eventually will unleash new marketing
opportunities. Google has been investing heavily in the mobile market during
the past two years in an attempt to make its services more useful to people
when they're away from their office or home computers.
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm
A New (free) Famous Professor Lecture Video Site: But Is it Legal?
The free videos are at
http://www.academicearth.org/
Note that it is not a dot-com site.
"New For-Profit Web Site Repackages Free Lecture Videos From Colleges," by
Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3591&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A new company
called
Academic
Earth offers free online videos of
lectures from some of the world’s most renowned scholars
teaching at leading universities. The company has simply grabbed
the videos off the universities’ own Web sites and plans to
offer tools to students who want to talk about the content —
along with a chance to grade the quality of the lectures.
Richard Ludlow, the
company’s CEO and founder, said in an
interview today that it is allowed to republish the videos
because they were released by the universities under Creative
Commons licenses. Those licenses allow outside entities, even
for-profit ones, to reuse the materials, provided that those
entities do not use the materials for commercial purposes. Mr.
Ludlow says that his company will not place any advertising on
Web pages that contain university videos, though he hopes to
expand the site in the future to include sections where videos
from other sources are shown with advertising.
“Our business
model is that we’re not going to make a dime off of any of the
Creative Commons materials — we’re very respectful of the
licenses,” said Mr. Ludlow. “As we integrate commercial content,
then on those pages we’ll be offering commercials.”
The Academic
Earth site notes that it features lectures from Harvard,
Princeton, Stanford, and Yale Universities, as well as the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of
California at Berkeley. The company has no connection to the
universities, however. Mr. Ludlow does plan to meet this week
with officials from MIT to talk about
its plans.
How do the
universities feel about the company republishing their lectures?
“I haven’t
looked at his example enough to give you a definite answer,”
said Steve Carson, external relations director for
MIT’s Opencourseware project, which
publishes free materials from the institute’s courses, including
complete videos from some 30 courses. “It might be OK—as long as
the use adheres to the terms and conditions on our site, we
encourage the material to be redistributed for educational
purposes.” He said the company was “doing the right thing” by
reaching out to MIT and meeting with
university officials about the company’s services.
“Our focus is on
being a content distributor,” said Mr. Carson. “They’re putting
interactive services around it — it could be very complementary
to what we’re doing.”
Gila Reinstein,
a spokesperson for Yale, said, “It’s not OK to do anything for
profit with the materials.” She said that she had not heard of
Academic Earth but that she would check with the university’s
lawyers about the site. “If it’s nonprofit, we’re thrilled,” she
said. “If it’s meant to be something else, we probably will not
be happy.”
Mr. Ludlow
points out that some of the colleges and universities use more
open Creative Commons licenses than others.
MIT and Yale allow “derivative use” of their content,
meaning that the company can cut the lectures into various
sections, based on topics, he said. Berkeley does not allow such
derivative use, nor does Stanford for some of its courses, he
added.
So far the
site’s main service, other than bringing together lectures from
various universities, is to let visitors rate the lectures,
giving them a letter grade from A to F. When the company first
posted the lectures to its site a few months ago, the grades
were all set to a default of B. Some quickly moved to A-plus
grades, while one Harvard lecture got an F-plus.
|
The above article is followed by an interesting list of comments:
Stanford YouTube channel debuts ---
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/june18/youtube-061808.html
The university has drawn from departments and
programs across campus and uploaded videos of classes, faculty interviews,
panel discussions, seminars and other events in order to showcase the
breadth and caliber of academic offerings at Stanford. By launching a
channel on YouTube—the leading online video community that allows people to
discover, watch and share originally created videos—the university is
building upon its efforts to provide online access to free educational
content for the Stanford community and greater public.
Stanford's Offerings on YouTube (turn you speakers on before clicking)
---
http://www.youtube.com/stanford
Academic Earth (videos of lectures and even complete courses taught by top
scholars) ---
http://academicearth.org/
Other universities (notably UC Berkeley) beat Stanford to YouTube. You can
find the links to many of them by scrolling down my summary of open-sharing
lecture videos and course materials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
A Major Project of the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching
How to educate students of business and maintain strong liberal arts components
---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/programs/index.asp?key=1862
Business,
Entrepreneurship and Liberal Learning (BELL)
The
BELL project is a three-year effort to
determine how educators can help ensure that
undergraduate students who major in business
and other professional fields also gain the
benefits of a strong liberal arts education.
The BELL project was developed in response
to the fact that increasing numbers of
undergraduates are majoring in professional
fields, particularly business, and
disproportionate numbers of those students
are the first in their families to go to
college. Unless the central goals of a
liberal arts education are integrated with
their educational experiences in
professional disciplines, these students
will be deprived of a broad education that
prepares them for leadership in their work,
and they will not gain the intellectual,
moral, and civic learning they need to be
responsible individuals and members of their
communities.
Leaders in business as well as higher
education have long stressed the importance
of the key goals of a liberal arts
education. The central problem that will be
addressed is that on most college campuses
students majoring in professional fields are
required to take a few courses from scores
of offerings in the humanities, the social
sciences, and the natural sciences, but no
effort is made to integrate the aims of the
liberal arts with the aims of professional
education.
The project will investigate promising
approaches to achieving this integration in
many different kinds of colleges and
universities around the country. It builds
on prior Carnegie Foundation work, including
studies of
professional
preparation in higher education,
of
ethical and social
responsibility as educational goals,
and of
integrative learning in undergraduate
education.
In addition to
Carnegie, current funders include the
Teagle Foundation,
the
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
and the
Skoll Foundation. |
|
|
|
Jensen Comment
Much of the difference between education and training is the inclusion of a
broad-based humanities and science modules in an education. The tried and
true approach is to require a core of required and elective courses taught by
departments in humanities and sciences. Actually this is the approach
traditionally tried, but it is not always true among students seeking easy outs
for their humanities and science requirements. For example, Cornell University
conducted a massive study on how students tend to choose courses and instructors
--- Scroll down at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation
Under an Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) grant the University
of North Texas (which has a strong humanities division) experimented with the
joint teaching of courses having accounting and humanities instructors with the
goal of integrating humanities into accountancy topics. I don't know how
successful this was in terms of particular courses or particular joint teaching
faculty, but students wanting to learn accounting tended to avoid the jointly
taught courses in favor of more traditional accountancy courses.
You can read more about the UNT's experiments in this regard in the following
AAA Accounting Education Series publications listed at
http://aaahq.org/market/display.cfm?catID=7
Stanford Humanities Center: Events Archive ---
http://shc.stanford.edu/events/archive.htm
"An English professor takes the GRE and questions its value," by MICHAEL
BÉRUBÉ, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, February 6,
2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i22/22b00501.htm?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
This article convinced me that I would not want to take the GRE at any age.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Some Thoughts on Facebook for Parents
The
researcher, BJ Fogg, director of Stanford University’s Persuasive
Technology Lab, announced this week a free, noncredit course he
plans to teach at the university called “Facebook for Parents.” He
has teamed up with his sister, Linda Fogg Phillips, who has eight
children of her own, to teach the course. You have to get to the
university to take the course because the sessions will not be
broadcast online. The instructors have built
a Web site
with their top five tips for parents concerning Facebook. They also
offer an online newsletter that promises future guidance. “With
Facebook’s massive growth, parents really need to be on board with
it,” said Mr. Fogg in an interview this week. He said the goal of
the course is to “help parents understand what Facebook is” so they
feel comfortable enough to try it themselves.
Jeffrey R. Young,
"Stanford U. Researcher Teaches Noncredit 'Facebook for Parents'
Course," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3585&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
|
Once again that Website is at
http://facebookforparents.org/
"The Flaws of Facebook," by Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed,
February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/03/golub
An acquisitions editor of a major university press
was nice enough to buy me a cup of coffee and a brioche and listen patiently
as I pitched him my book manuscript during a recent meeting of my
professional association. Things went well enough until, at the end of our
meeting, he surprised me. On our way out of the café, he turned to me and
asked “are you on Facebook?” “I am,” I replied, nonplussed, “but I, uh,
don’t really check it very often.” “Well I do,” he said, tone heavy in
significance, “so friend me.”
My dislike of Facebook is not based on ignorance or
a knee-jerk academic ludism. I understand exactly what Facebook is – it’s an
Internet replacement service that combines e-mail, instant messaging, photo
sharing, social networking, mailing lists, asynchronous gaming, and personal
Web hosting all in one. Crucially, it allows differing degrees of privacy,
so you can blog safely about the antics of your adorable cat or the
incredible evil of your department chair without either of them finding out
unless you add them to your friends list. What bothers me about Facebook —
the dilemma highlighted by my encounter with the editor — is the particular
problem it presents for academics, whose professional career and personal
goings-on are all rolled up together into one big life of the mind.
Teaching is an intensely public activity in a very
simple way: You spend hours and hours having people stare at you. Over time
this simple three-shows-a-week schedule blossoms into something infinitely
weirder. It does not take long for professors to find themselves walking
around a campus filled with half-remembered faces from previous classes —
faces worn by people who remember you perfectly well. If you teach at a
large state university, like I do, it does not take long before random
waiters and pharmacists start mentioning how much they did (or didn’t) enjoy
that survey class you taught. There are even apocryphal stories in Papua New
Guinea — the country that I study — about a man who more or less taught
every social science class at the country’s university during the late 70s.
He spent the rest of his life never having to stand in line or fill out a
form because he had trained the vast majority of the nation’s civil
servants, who all remembered him fondly.
The public created by your teaching is much larger
than just the students in your class. Whether we lament or rejoice in the
purportedly poor state of teacher evaluation, it does happen. Those forms
our students fill out have strange afterlives and become the source of
evaluation by deans and whispering among the senior faculty. The Internet
unleashes these evaluations as well, allowing our classroom antics to be
shared on Ratemyprofessor.com.
So is Facebook a dream come true for academics — a
private social networking site where professors can finally let down there
hair because you control your audience, in the way that the average “I hate
the world” anonymous adjunct blog cannot? I would say No. In the physical
world professors uneasily navigate the uneasy blurring of their public and
private lives, but Facebook doesn’t allow for blurring — you are either
friends or not. This extremely “ungranular” system forces you to choose
between two roles, private and public, that the actual, uncoded world allows
us to leave ambiguous.
Which of the following people would you friend on
Facebook? A friend from graduate school? Probably — Facebook is, for better
or worse, a great way to take the Old Boys Club online. A fellow faculty
member? If you get along with them, why not? Your graduate students? Hmmm...
well I suppose some people have that sort of relationship with their
graduate students. Your undergraduates? I’ve drawn a line in the sand and
said no to that one.
I think these cases are actually pretty easy —
categories like colleague and student are well-defined, as is the
distinction between a “purely” formal relationship and the intimate
friendships that grow up around it. I’m sure that many of the people reading
this got to be where they were today because a professor in our lives went
beyond the call of duty to become a friend and mentor. Facebook makes
handling the formal and the informal tricky, but in all of these examples a
lot of work has already been done for it because the relationships in
question can all be neatly divided into “formal” and “informal” registers.
What Facebook makes particularly uncomfortable are
relationships in which friendship and professionalism are not clear and
brightly bounded, but are tied to real political economic stakes. As a young
professor on the path to tenure, for instance, acquisitions editors have a
certain ominous power over me that compels me to friend them on Facebook
(and I did friend him, by the way) and might even include small favors up to
and including shining their shoes if the end of the deal includes an advance
contract. On the other hand, as someone with a tenure track job, I am also
in a position of diffuse power over people like adjuncts and lecturers, who
I get along well with in my department, but who do not come to faculty
meetings in which we discuss the budget (read: their pay).
The more widely you friend people on Facebook — and
it is a slippery slope — the more and more your Facebook page becomes a
professional Web replacement on Friendster’s slick Internet replacement Web
site. It becomes less and less a “private” space and more and more a place
to show a public face to a very wide audience. In forcing you to craft a
public persona, it raises uncomfortable issues of power and inequality and
lurk under the surface of our actual world interactions — which is probably
a good thing.
Continued in article
Videos
CBS Sixty Minute Module on Facebook ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cEySyEnxvU
Some Sobering Thoughts ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMWz3G_gPhU
Learn About Facebook (in a pretty good song) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpaxaxEWMSA
Facebook Fever ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHi-ZcvFV_0
Facebook Anthem ---
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Facebook&aq=f
Bob Jensen's threads on tools and tricks of the trade in education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"FBI releases pics of low-level suspects in $9m ATM scam," by John
Leyden, The Register, February 6, 2009 ---
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/06/atm_hack_scam/
The FBI has
released pictures of two suspects linked to a
multi-million dollar ATM heist.
The man and
a woman are thought to be street-level accomplices in a
global cash machine heist the netted $9m from 130 ATM
machines in 49 cities around the globe in a co-ordinated
attack that lasted just hours. Investigators reckon the
gang used data stolen from RBS WorldPay to create
counterfeit payroll cards. These bogus cards were
subsequently used to withdraw money from machines across
the US as well as Montreal, Moscow, and Hong Kong on the
night of 8 November 2008.
Around 100 payroll debit cards — which some firms use to
pay wages - were used in the heist but cybercriminals
were able to exploit weaknesses in the system to
withdraw many times the nominal limit on each card,
Fox News
reports.
RBS WorldPay
admitted
in late December that the records of 1.5 million people
had been exposed in a hacking attack investigators are
linked to the ATM raids.
The FBI pictures show images of a man and a woman
withdrawing money from a bank branch in Matteson and a
Walgreens in Calumet City, Illinois, the Chicago
Tribune
reports.
Jensen Comment
Sounds to me like another crime committed by Madoff's friends (read that
Bernie's Boys) in the Russian Mafia.
Some Thoughts About Library Reading Furniture
That is, of
course, a wild exaggeration. The
Henry
Madden Library at California State University-Fresno
does need a bunch of tables and chairs—nearly $8-million worth—but
the new facility is set to open on February 19 anyway. After all, it
does have online services and books and staff to help faculty and
students find things.
Josh Fischman, "Who Needs Library Furniture Anyway? Not Fresno
State," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2009 ---
|
Jensen Comment
A lot of newlyweds had the same problem in their first new house. They still
became parents, most likely by making use of the floors. Moral of story,
students can still learn from books even if they sit on the floor to read them.
Some Thoughts on Course Reading Materials
It would be unusual for campus computer labs to provide unlimited free
copying since colleges discovered the uncontrolled costs of providing free
services for computer printing and photocopying. Trinity University students had
account numbers that they could charge in computer labs and dorms. Trinity
University’s library installed a Kinko’s store in the library itself which makes
it cheaper for students and academic departments to do a lot of their volume
reproduction. Each academic department received its own Kinkos account. I used
the Kinkos library store quite often, especially for color copies.
Since this was a Kinkos store, it was also possible for faculty to do
personal jobs like Christmas letters with colored pictures. Those I paid for by
check.
I provided some of my high-volume handouts either on my Web server or my
Drive J LAN drive on the campus network. Faculty without their own LAN drives
generally can use Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, or whatever service their campus
provides for course files. Then students can choose to either print or view
items on line. For example, it’s not usually necessary to print homework
solutions after due dates since students can simply compare their answers with
online answer keys and fill in parts where they went wrong. My students
generally limited their printing of the thousands of pages of material that I
made available for my courses.
I had one diligent and risk-averse student who printed over 2,000 pages since
I usually gave open-book and open-note exams. But this was of little help to her
since it was almost impossible to quickly find what she wanted in so much
stacked hard copy. Most students used their heads and their hand-written crib
notes that they could very quickly search. Several students brought prayer
books.
Eventually I allowed students to only use textbooks and hand-written notes
during examinations. They had to certify that they wrote the notes themselves,
and I did peruse the notes they intended to use during examinations (my courses
had less than 20 students as a rule). Often there were portions of examinations
that required use of computers. Wireless networks created all sorts of risks for
cheating such as communicating via email. Therefore, my examinations had a Part
1 portion without computers that had to be turned in before students got to Part
2 for which they used computers. Each student got a unique Part 2 examination
(usually problems with different numbers) to discourage sending answers (e.g.,
Excel or MS Access file attachments) to friends. I was probably being paranoid
since most, but certainly not all, of my graduate students had too much
integrity to cheat during examinations.
Once again a diligent and risk-averse student emerged who hand-wrote over 700
pages of notes for a final examination. I wonder when she slept --- maybe during
my lectures. Sigh!
Note that copyrighted materials (even those with blanket permissions) should
hide behind passwords. For example, the AAA provides blanket permission for an
instructor to distribute (hard copy or online) of selected journal articles to
enrolled students. However, this blanket permission does not apply to making the
material available to the public on a Web server. Hence, such material should be
password controlled such as password control on Moodle or a campus LAN drive or
an the old-fashioned library-reserve desk.
By the way, in order to attract students to visit the library more often,
Trinity University installed a Starbucks-like coffee and snack bistro where
students could charge their campus meal service cards for coffee and snacks.
This became an enormously popular reading area which ironically sat in the same
place as a seldom-used reading area prior to installing the bistro. In the
bistro area, the library actively advertises special library features such as
new book exhibits, new book acquisitions, and other exhibits. Of course the
library also has computer labs such that there are all sorts of attractions
drawing students to the library daily.
If I were designing a campus, I think I would house the student union and
library all in one building and even line the dining area rooms with reading
materials such as new book acquisitions and current textbooks of active courses
on campus each semester. Of course those books would have to have electronic
implants so they could not easily slip out of the building.
"Blackboard 9.0," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed,
January 27, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/27/blackboard
Blackboard
Inc., the giant among course management system (CMS)
providers, today unveils Release 9.0 of Blackboard Learn.
Blackboard bills the newest iteration as more open and
flexible — allowing colleges to use the platform “as an open
foundation for whatever complementary technologies they need
to support their approach to teaching and learning.”
And the new
release will feature expanded Web 2.0 and “social learning”
tools, such as blogs and journals, enhanced notification
capabilities (i.e., “Your paper is due in four hours” – or
four days), and a redesigned, customizable user interface.
“It would
definitely be an immediate, apparent change when you log
into the system,” said Jessica Finnefrock, Blackboard’s
senior vice president for product development.
Among
the changes that will be most immediately noticeable to
students and professors, aside from the redesigned, Web 2.0
interface, are the new notifications. “Probably one of the
No. 1 things I heard from students is, ‘We need to more
clearly manage the things that are due,’ ” said Finnefrock.
She explained that the notifications for pending assignments
will be visible as “dashboards” on the Blackboard site, and
students can also elect to receive reminders via e-mail and,
yes, Facebook (Blackboard
launched a Facebook application last May).
“In these focus groups, sometimes students will say, ‘I’ll
log onto Blackboard and when I log in I realize my
assignment was due that day. Can’t Blackboard send me
something?’ ”
Students can
choose when (how far in advance) and for what they’d like to
receive alerts. Finnefrock said the company plans to
continue expanding its notification capabilities in the
future to include things like text messages and iPhone
applications.
The
newest version also features the
SafeAssign plagiarism detection software
bundled in, as opposed to it being
available as an add-on. And it includes integrations to
allow open-source course management systems — such as
Sakai and
Moodle, to which colleges have
increasingly been gravitating — to be accessed within
Blackboard.
While
Blackboard prices change from year to year, a spokesman said
that the new release has no bearing on the price structure.
Colleges holding Blackboard licenses can upgrade to the 9.0
version at no extra cost; Finnefrock said she expects many
institutions will pilot the new version this spring and
summer and fully launch it come fall.
Blackboard
declined to release the full list of universities that have
been doing Beta testing for confidentiality reasons, but
recommended three institutions that are now in the piloting
or co-production phase. Two could be reached; both officials
described only minor problems, and general satisfaction with
the updated software.
Donna Wicks,
senior system administrator for Blackboard at Kettering
University, in Michigan, said that, in addition to the
notification systems, she’s particularly impressed by the
new look and ability to customize the site. “Not that the
old Blackboard is terrible, but it looks out of date. This
new version, it’s just, it’s a cleaner look.… I’ve been able
to do more with our log-in page. I’ve really customized it.
I don’t feel like I’m at a Blackboard site when I go to the
page. I feel like it’s a Kettering page that’s been built.”
Lonnie
Harvel, vice president of educational technology at Georgia
Gwinnett College, said he was particularly pleased by the
“mashup” quality of the new release — in other words, the
ability to import other systems into Blackboard (and export,
too). “The interface is more of a robust, portaling
environment that is allowing us to bring more services from
outside the Blackboard toolset into that environment,” he
said. For instance, “with the new environment, I can simply
connect it to my campus announcement system.... It’s all a
matter of being able to weave the different information
sources together in one place.”
Moving
forward, Harvel said Blackboard has the daunting task of
keeping two very different constituencies happy — long-time
Blackboard users and clients of its old competitor WebCT,
which
Blackboard bought in 2005.
Individuals could be religious in their original
preferences, said Harvel (who described himself as an
agnostic in that debate). “I think that will probably be one
of the biggest challenges that Blackboard has to struggle
with, bringing these two platforms together.... They’re
going to be dealing with two different sets of
expectations.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on Blackboard are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Blackboard.htm
The Secret Lives Of Philosophers
"Are Philosophers Really Lovers Of Wisdom?" Simoleon Sense,
February 2, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/are-philosophers-really-lovers-of-wisdom/
I’ve
always been interested in becoming an academic
philosopher. My interest is so profound that I even
majored as one during undergrad, only to quickly switch
to Psychology & Neuroscience. Here’s an article brought
to my attention by a friend and philosopher.
Click
Here To Read About The Secret Lives Of Philosphers
Article Introduction (Via Philosopher’s Net)
Although
academics will hardly raise an eyebrow about this “open
secret”, it comes as a surprise to many others to learn
that many philosophers, in fact an increasing number by
my lights, are little devoted to the love of wisdom. In
only a merely “academic” way do they aspire to
intellectual virtue. Even less often do they exhibit
qualities of moral excellence. On the contrary, many
philosophers, or what pass as philosophers, are, sadly,
better described as petty social climbers, meretricious
snobs, and acquisitive consumerists.
I blush
a bit now to confess that part of what drove me into
philosophy in the first place was the naive conviction
that among those who call themselves lovers of wisdom I
would find something different in kind from the
repugnant and shallow brutalism of the worlds of
finance, business, and the law to which I had suffered
some exposure in Ronald Reagan’s America.
Article Excerpts (Via Philsopher’s Net)
“Instead, I’ve found that the secret lives of
philosophers are more often than not pre-occupied with
status and acquisition.”
“Like
debutantes at the ball, philosophers now often spend
much of their time dropping names, gossiping, promoting
their connections, hawking their publications, passing
out business cards and polishing their self-promotional
web sites.”
“Attitudes toward material consumption are not, I’m
afraid much better. Philosophers seem to pepper their
conversations more and more with remarks about the perks
or bonuses they receive – how much money they have
available for travel, what sort of computer allowances,
how big their research grants are.”
“All of
this suggests a philosophical culture that imitates the
business world not only in its emphasis on product
(publication) but also in its adopting the criteria and
trappings of professional success characteristic of
commercial life.
Conclusions (Via Philosopher’s Net)
“One
implication of this little secret is that professional
philosophers have become less and less egalitarian in
their view of education.”
“Finding
philosophers devoted principally to the love of wisdom
and to sharing it broadly has become, as Spinoza said of
all excellent things, as difficult as it is rare.”
Click Here To Read About The Secret Lives Of Philosphers
The following are included in Bob Jensen's listing of free online videos and
tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Gateway to Philosophy ---
http://www.bu.edu/paideia/index.html
Teach Philosopy 101 ---
http://www.teachphilosophy101.org/
This site presents strategies and
resources for faculty members and
graduate assistants who are teaching
Introduction to Philosophy courses; it also includes material of
interest to college faculty generally. The
mission of TΦ101 is to provide free,
user-friendly resources to the academic community. All of the
materials are provided on an
open source license. You may also
print as many copies as you wish (please
print in landscape). TΦ101 carries no advertising. I am deeply
indebted to
Villanova University for all of the
support that has made this project possible.
John Immerwahr, Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University
Ask Philosophers ---
http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/
This site puts the talents and knowledge
of philosophers at the service of the general public. Send in a
question that you think might be related to philosophy and we
will do our best to respond to it. To date, there have been 1375
questions posted and 1834 responses.
Philosophy Talk (Audio) ---
http://www.philosophytalk.org/
February 4, 2009 reply from Paul Williams
[Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Like debutantes at the ball, philosophers now often
spend much of their time dropping names, gossiping, promoting their
connections, hawking their publications, passing out business cards and
polishing their self-promotional web sites. Attitudes toward material
consumption are not, I'm afraid much better. Philosophers seem to pepper
their conversations more and more with remarks about the perks or bonuses
they receive “ how much money they have available for travel, what sort of
computer allowances, how big their research grants are."
Ah, sounds like an AAA annual meeting.
Paul Williams
paul_williams@ncsu.edu
(919)515-4436
February 4, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Paul,
Maybe the best philosophy like art, literature, and
music is generated by starving philosophers, artists, writers, and
composers.
There's just not enough starvation when all of them
have tenure, carry business cards, and are given funds for travel and
research.
Bob Jensen
Hi Again
Paul,
Bacon
would’ve approved that you’ve never been accused of being meek.
As long
as we’re taking on philosophers at the moment, today one of my favorite
writers, Scott McLemee writes as follows in “The Mind on Fire,” Inside
Higher Ed, February 4, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/04/mclemee
Begin Quote
For Robert D. Richardson – the author of, among other things,
William James: In the Maelstrom of
American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which won
the Bancroft Prize for 2007 – one such landmark passages appears in
“The American Scholar.”
There, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “Meek young men grow up in
libraries believing it their duty to accept the views that Cicero,
Locke, and Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon
were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.”
In First We Read, Then We Write:
Emerson on the Creative Process (to be published in March
by
University of Iowa Press), Richardson says the line “still jolts
me every time I run into it.” I think I know what he means, but the
quality and intensity of the jolt varies over time. Reading “The
American Scholar” as a meek young man, I just found it irritating –
as if Emerson were translating the anti-intellectualism of my small
town into something more refined and elegant, if scarcely less
blockheaded.
This was a naive reading of a remarkable and (at times) very weird
essay. “The American Scholar” is actually something like a Yankee
anticipation of Nietzsche’s
“On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” – with the added
strangeness that, when Emerson gets around to pointing out a
prototype of the new-model American scholar, the example he gives is
...
Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th century Swedish polymath. Who, when
not writing huge works on the natural sciences, spent his time
talking to angels and devils and the inhabitants of other planets.
WTF?
Rereading Emerson a couple of decades beyond adolescence, I saw that
the target of his scorn was meekness — not bookishness, as such. He
was in any case not so genteel as he first appeared. There was a
wild streak. There were depths beneath the oracular sentences that
made him a kind of cultural revolutionary. You are not necessarily
prepared to detect this when reading Emerson as a teenager. Like Bob
Dylan says, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that
now.”
Richardson’s award-winning
Emerson: The Mind on Fire
(University of California Press, 1996) retraced his subject’s
voracious and encyclopedic reading regimen, which seems to have been
tinged with the urgency of addiction. That book was intellectual
biography. The new one, which is far shorter, is something else
again — a synthesis of all the moments when Emerson muses over his
own process, a distillation of his ethos as a reader and
(especially) as writer.
“A good head cannot read amiss,” says Emerson. “In every book he
finds passages which seem confidences or asides, hidden from all
else, and unmistakeably meant for his ear.” Full attention and
active engagement are always, by Emerson’s lights, present-minded:
“I read [something] until it is pertinent to me and mine, to nature
and to the hour that now passes. A good scholar will find
Aristophanes and Hafiz and Rabelais full of American History.”
Not being prone to foolish consistency, Emerson also maintains that
some academic works are incapable of coming to life themselves, let
alone revitalizing anyone else. “A vast number of books are written
in quiet imitation of the old civil, ecclesiastical, and literary
history,” he says. (One may quietly updates this by thinking of
comparable 21st century tomes.) “Of these we need take no account.
They are written by the dead to be read by the dead.”
By contrast, meaningful writing is an effort “to drop every dead
word.” Emerson rules out any effort to rub pieces of jargon together
in hopes they will generate sparks. “Scholars are found to make very
shabby sentences out of the weakest words because of exclusive
attention to the word,” he notes. You don’t say.
The struggle to connect with living currents of thought and meaning
should begin with a notebook — the place to cultivate, as Emerson
puts it, “the habit of rendering account to yourself of yourself in
some rigorous manner and at more certain intervals than mere
conversation.” The important thing is to keep at it: “There is no
way to learn to write except by writing.”
This may sound like generic advice, and to some degree it is. But
from long years of scholarly attention to the daily progress of the
essayist’s labors, Richardson hears the anxious undercurrents in
Emerson’s reflections on writing. “There is a strangely appealing
air of desperation, finality, of terminal urgency,” he writes, “to
many of Emerson’s observations.... In every admonition we hear his
willingness to confront his own failures; indeed, he never seems
more than a few inches from total calamity. He urges us to try
anything – strategies, tricks, makeshifts. And he always seems to be
speaking not only of the nuts and bolts of writing, but of the grain
and sinew of his – and our – determination.”
When necessary, Richardson points out, Emerson would “just sit down
and start writing – anything – to see whether something would
happen. He was quick to spot the same trick in others. ‘I have
read,’ he noted, ‘that [Richard Brinsley] Sheridan made a good deal
of experimental writing with a view to take what might fall, if any
wit should transpire in all the waste of pages.”
Kenneth Burke once described Emerson’s prose as a “happiness pill” –
that being a common enough assessment, though there is more to the
sage than his role as dispenser of transcendental Prozac. It makes
some difference to know that the pharmacist also had to heal
himself. He cannot have been free from all of the worldly desires
felt by lesser writers. The same wishes mean the same frustrations.
The challenge is to keep faith with the rest of one’s reasons for
writing – the motivations that break through the rubble.
End
Quote
Continued in article
"'No Frills' Campus in New Hampshire Saves Students Tens
of Thousands of Dollars," by Andrew Mytelka, Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 3, 2009 ---
Click Here
Two weeks ago, Pennsylvania’s State Board of Education drew
attention for proposing to create a
“no frills” four-year college that would
offer a cut-rate bachelor’s degree by focusing on instruction and
skipping amenities, like sports teams and posh dorms, that run up
tuition bills. For pointers on how to bring about such a
stripped-down college, the board might look to the satellite campus
of Southern New Hampshire University in Salem, N.H.
As described in today’s
Boston Globe, the campus, for first-
and second-year students, is housed in a “nondescript suburban
office park” off an Interstate highway. The university’s full
curriculum of introductory courses is available to students, who pay
40 percent of what their counterparts on the main campus shell out.
After two years at Salem, they can move to
the main campus. They may miss the residential experience of being
underclass students, but they also save tens of thousands of
dollars. To some observers, this sounds like what for-profit and
community colleges have been doing for years. To many of the
students, it’s the only way they could afford to go to college in a
recession. |
Jensen Comment
This is controversial since book learning today is as effective or more
effective online. Interactive communications between faculty-students and
students-students are generally more intense in online courses.
This begs the question of what students gain from onsite versus online
education. In modern times, the answer lies mostly in the value of social
interactions and maturation that accompany face-to-face learning, living, and
playing.
There are also questions about how much a library is a "frill." Given that
students use the library stacks less and less vis-a-vis networked databases,
perhaps students who use libraries today are seeking the "frills" of
face-to-face encounters and quiet places to read and study. Given that quiet
places to read and study are available in places other than a library, perhaps
the main "frill" of a library has become social interaction.
In any case, I'm not convinced that the no-frills education in Salem is the
way to go given the power of online education for learning. The power of onsite
learning lies in the "frills" of libraries, dorm living, athletic fields,
gymnasiums, team spirit, and the benefits of fraternal life. Parents like to
send their children to college because college life serves as a cushion between
sheltered home living and the mean streets (like Wall Street and job life on any
Main Street).
I might add that the no-frills college is in Salem, New Hampshire and not
Salem, Mass. where the witches roamed.
Bob Jensen's threads to these and related matters are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
February 4, 2009 reply from Barbara Scofield
[barbarawscofield@GMAIL.COM]
So would you recommend a "no frills" college to
non-traditional students who are balancing work and kids and getting their
degrees later in life? Many of these students aren't as comfortable in the
online world and don't need more social interactions and college life
experiences. I wonder what the demographic profile is at a "no frills"
school?
For many years UT Permian Basin would have fit the
definition of a "no frills" school. Now it has dorms and sports teams and an
inviting library and it has grown 50% filling with the less mature, more
easily distracted 18 to 20 year olds, and the faculty has had to adapt to
the new lower maturity levels and developmental needs.
Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA
Professor of Accounting
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
4901 E. University Dr.
Odessa, TX 79762 432-552-2183 (Office)
BarbaraWScofield@gmail.com
February 4, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Barbara,
You should know that I’m a strong believer in online education for
non-traditional (usually older) students who are more mature and perhaps
have less need for the socialization “frills” of onsite education. Of course
I do realize that not all courses are alike in this sense, and there are
obviously some courses where onsite learning is probably superior,
especially when faculty give more time and attention to onsite versus online
course delivery.
I also realize that many laboratory courses are best administered in
onsite labs, which would also leads me to question the quality of the onsite
labs on the “no frills” campuses like the strip mall campus in Salem, NH.
I guess I always envision online learning in its ideal delivery form ala
Amy Dunbar. This I must admit may be unrealistic since many online courses
are delivered by less enthused and less dedicated online instructors.
However, we also have many lousy onsite instructors as well.
I do think that most of the onsite courses at the “no frills” site in
Salem, NH can be administered as effectively or more effectively as online
courses.
Ceteris paribus, I firmly believe that the onsite education is primarily
advantageous for the socialization comparative advantages where the “frills”
are very important, although obviously the cost-benefit of frills vary with
each frill.
That being said, this does not necessarily justify building one more
frill-filled campus like UT Permian Basin. I suspect in that particular
instance I would’ve rather seen the money go toward building the best online
university in Texas rather than adding another bricks and mortar campus to
the many onsite campuses already available in Texas. But I am aware that the
Texas Railroad Commission that controls the Texas oil money going to campus
buildings was influenced by the fact that a lot of the oil flows from the
Permian Basin and maybe should be returned somewhat to the wells from which
it flows.
Such is the nature of geographical politics. Since the Permain Basin does
not serve large numbers of commuting students in such a rural location, I
question whether this would be a good site for serving older students in
less need of socialization frills. If a no-frills campus is to be built, it
seems better to locate it in Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, where some of
the branch campuses are now mostly no-frills. For example, the downtown
branch of UTSA in San Antonio is an old city jail where there aren't many
frills.
Bob Jensen
Help Save the Fireflies
February 3, 2009 message from Ben Pfeiffer
[ben@distance-education.org]
I wanted to point out a new site that might be of interest to your
visitors. It’s about the disappearance of fireflies in the US and abroad.
Due to a variety of factors is appears their populations have dropped
significantly from development and light pollution.
http://www.firefly.org/
Thanks,
Ben
Thanks Ben!
How to Help
Fireflies are disappearing all over the world, and it’s believed to be because
of human encroachment on habitat and increased light pollution from development
and traffic. But there are a few things you can do to help fireflies make a
comeback in your area ---
http://www.firefly.org/how-you-can-help.html
None of these steps have been proven to work,
mainly because scientists have only been studying firefly populations for a
few years and data is still inconclusive. But signs point to human
development, light pollution and toxic chemicals as likely culprits behind
the dwindling of firefly populations. Follow these steps, and with luck your
yard will once again sparkle on summer nights.
Turn off outside lights at night. Fireflies use
their flashing lights to signal each other, attract mates and warn of
danger. While the science is still preliminary, it’s likely that human light
pollution can disrupt their flashes—making it harder for fireflies to find
mates and breed. This leads to fewer fireflies mating and smaller numbers in
subsequent generations. You can make your yard a haven for fireflies by
turning off exterior and garden lights, and drawing your blinds at night so
that interior light doesn’t brighten your yard too much.
Let logs and litter accumulate. Some species of
firefly larvae grow up in rotten logs and the litter that accumulates
beneath the forest canopy. To encourage their growth, plant some trees on
your property. If you have trees in your yard, consider leaving some natural
litter around them to give firefly larvae a place to grow.
Create water features in your landscape. Most
species of fireflies have one thing in common: they thrive around standing
water and marshy areas. Ponds, streams and rivers can all provide good
habitats for fireflies, but even a small depression full of water can cause
them to congregate. Build a small pond or divert a small stream to run
through your property, and it’s more likely you’ll see fireflies at night.
Chemically treated swimming pools aren’t a good substitute; fireflies are
believed to eat the smaller insects, grubs and snails that thrive in natural
ponds and streams, and these don’t live in chlorinated environments.
Avoid use of pesticides. It’s likely that chemical
pesticides and weed killers may also have a negative effect on firefly
populations. Fireflies and their larvae may come into contact with other
insects that have been poisoned, or they may ingest the poisons from plants
that have been sprayed. Avoid using pesticides on your lawn and you may
boost firefly populations.
Use natural fertilizers. While no conclusive
studies have been done, it’s possible that chemical fertilizers may have a
harmful effect on firefly populations as well—especially since many harmful
chemicals in pesticides are also found in chemical fertilizers. Using
natural fertilizers may make your yard a more healthy place for fireflies.
Don’t over-mow your lawn. Fireflies mainly stay on
the ground during the day, and frequent mowing may disturb local firefly
populations. While you may feel that you need to keep your lawn mowed for
aesthetic purposes, consider incorporating some areas of long grasses into
your landscaping. Fireflies prefer to live in long grasses, and doing this
may boost their population in your yard.
Talk to your neighbors. If you live in a suburban
area in close proximity to others, what you do in your own yard will
help—but you can create even more habitat for fireflies by enlisting your
neighbors in your efforts. Tell your neighbors about your concern over
dwindling firefly populations and what they can do to help. If you convince
even one or two people on your street, you could help increase firefly
habitat in your area even more.
Fireflies are disappearing all over the world. But
there are a few things you could do to help—and every little bit counts.
Allow some room for wildness on your property—low-hanging trees, forest
litter, and long grasses all create welcoming environments for fireflies.
Ponds and streams are crucial to firefly populations, and you can further
encourage their numbers by reducing the amount of light in your yard at
night and by cutting back on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Follow
these tips, and it’s possible you could see a resurgence of fireflies in
your area.
Jensen Comment
Fortunately up here in the mountains we have less light pollution, and our
woods are littered with dead logs following bad wind storms over the past two
years. I clean the sticks off my lawn but leave most of the fallen wood alone in
my woods. I think a lot of creatures depend on the dead wood. I do probably mow
the front lawn too short. But I let the back lawn get more shaggy. And my lawn
is so huge that I leave the fertilizing to birds overhead and night critters
that roam while I sleep.
Next summer I will now be more on the lookout for fireflies.
January 30, 2009 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
PRINCIPLES FOR EXCELLENCE IN ONLINE TEACHING
For teaching online "[i]t is not sufficient to be a
content expert. Nor is it sufficient to be 'tech-savvy.' It is not even
sufficient to be an excellent traditional classroom teacher. Because the
online world is a categorically different environment[,] a particular blend
of skills and knowledge is necessary if success is to be found in this
domain."
Authors Jim Henry and Jeff Meadows, University of
Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, draw upon their own online teaching experience
and that of others in the field to compile a list of principles to guide new
online instructors and course developers. Some of their principles include:
Technology is a vehicle, not a destination.
Great online courses are defined by teaching, not
technology.
A great web interface will not save a poor course;
but a poor web interface will destroy a potentially great course.
Excellence comes from ongoing assessment and
refinement.
The paper, "Absolutely Riveting Online Course: Nine
Principles for Excellence in Web-Based Teaching" (CANADIAN JOURNAL OF
LEARNING AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 34, no. 1, Winter 2008), is available at
http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/179/177
The Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology
[ISSN: 1499-6685], published by the Canadian Network for Innovation in
Education, is a peer-reviewed journal that welcomes papers on all aspects of
educational technology and learning. For more information, contact CNIE/RCIE,
260 Dalhousie Street, Suite 204, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1N 7E4; email:
cjlt@ucalgary.ca ; Web:
http://www.cjlt.ca/
......................................................................
TEACHING IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
"In the past two years, over 300 colleges and
universities have claimed virtual land in Second Life and in other virtual
environments in an attempt to enhance content delivery, raise institutional
profiles, and explore new frontiers in education." The latest issue of
INNOVATE (vol. 5, no. 2, December 2008/January 2009) explores how virtual
environments provide opportunities and challenges for educators and their
institutions. Papers include:
"Hacking Say and Reviving ELIZA: Lessons from
Virtual Environments" By Rochelle Mazar and Jason Nolan
http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=547
"Using Second Life with Learning-Disabled Students
in Higher Education" By Stephanie McKinney, et al.
http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=573
"Knowledge-Driven Design of Virtual Patient
Simulations" By Victor Vergara, et al.
http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=579
The entire issue is available at
http://innovateonline.info/
Registration is required to access the complete articles; registration is
free.
Innovate: Journal of Online Education [ISSN
1552-3233], an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, is published
bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova
Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of
information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic,
commercial, and governmental settings. For more information, contact James
L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief; email:
innovate@nova.edu ;
Web:
http://innovateonline.info/
Bob Jensen's threads on teaching in virtual environments are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
......................................................................
RECOMMENDED READING
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been
recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly
interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published
by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu
for possible inclusion in this column.
REMIX: MAKING ART AND COMMERCE THRIVE IN THE HYBRID
ECONOMY By Lawrence Lessig New York: Penguin Group, 2008 ISBN 9781594201721
"For more than a decade, we've been waging a war on
our kids in the name of the 20th Century's model of 'copyright law.' In
this, the last of his books about copyright, Lawrence Lessig maps both a way
back to the 19th century, and to the promise of the 21st. Our past teaches
us about the value in 'remix.' We need to relearn the lesson. The present
teaches us about the potential in a new 'hybrid economy' -- one where
commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies. That future will
benefit both commerce and community. If the lawyers could get out of the
way, it could be a future we could celebrate."
An interview podcast with Lessig discussing his new
book is available from the journal FIRST MONDAY at
http://www.firstmondaypodcast.org/audio/lessig_final.mp3
A transcript of the podcast is also available at
http://www.firstmondaypodcast.org/transcript_nov08.htm
......................................................................
From The Scout Report on January 23, 2009
TinEye Reverse Image Search 0.4 ---
http://tineye.com/login
TinEye is essentially a reverse image search engine
that allows users to submit images in order to find out where it came from,
how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find
higher resolution versions. The site includes a FAQ area and a demonstration
video. Visitors will need to sign and create a password, and afterwards they
will be able to use the search engine. This version is compatible with
computers running all operating systems.
Mailplane 2.0.1 ---
http://mailplaneapp.com/
Mac users who are looking to integrate Gmail into
their daily routine will find Mailplane to be quite useful. This application
integrates Gmail into the Mailplane application in order to allow users to
send optimized photos, send screenshots instantly, and also drag and drop
files and folders. This version is compatible with computers running Mac OS
10.4 and newer, and can be used for thirty days for no charge.
Hollywood and the movie-going public learn this year's Razzie nominations
'Guru' finds love at Razzies
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117998858.html?categoryId=13&cs=1
Myers 'Guru' up for year's worst
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/21/razzie.awards/
Spirit-Bashing Trailer Spearheads 'Worst Movie' Campaign
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2009/01/spirit-bashing.html
A Brief History of The Razzies
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1872798,00.html
The Razzies
http://www.razzies.com/
Village Voice: 100 Best Films
http://www.filmsite.org/villvoice.html
Tool: Taxable-Equivalent Yield Calculator » ---
Click Here
Bob Jensen's threads on investment calculators ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#080512Calculators
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Academic Earth (videos of lectures and even complete courses taught by top
scholars)
Digital Research Tools ---
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/
Stanford Humanities Center: Events Archive ---
http://shc.stanford.edu/events/archive.htm
Independent Lens: Please Vote For Me (Inside a Chinese Classroom) ---
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/pleasevoteforme/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
'Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools for Young Learners," by Chris Riedel, T.H.E.
Journal, February 2009 ---
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/23898_1
Gail
Lovely is adamant about the nature and potential of
Web-based learning tools. "Web 2.0 is about trust," she said
at a recent talk. "It's about sharing and collaborating."
And, she insisted, it's about putting the power to learn and
create in the hands of the students.
Technology needs to trickle up, she said, not down. We need
to give the most powerful tools to the most vulnerable
populations because they are the ones who need it. "Young
learners, non-readers," she continued, "need high-speed
access, they need animation and graphics and sound. And
that's the truth."
According to Lovely, and education
technology consultant and speaker at the FETC 2009
conference in Orlando, FL in January, it was the recognition
of those needs that led her to develop a "top
10 list" of go-to technology tools
to help inspire young students and empower under-funded
teachers. "The important thing to remember here," she said,
"is that this isn't about simply providing you with 10
links. It's much more important to ask, 'What are you going
to do with these things? How are you going to use these
tools?' That's why we're here," she said. "So I can show you
not only what's out there but also how other educators are
using these resources to teach their students right now."
10.
Kerpoof
Kerpoof is a site that provides a
variety of creative tools for animation, drawing, and movie
creation. Users can choose from a range of preset characters
and environmental options, or they can create their own. The
site offers drag-and-drop simplicity coupled with advanced
animation and editing capabilities that, according to
Lovely, open the platform up to a range of curricular
applications.
9.
Voki
No. 9 on the list is Voki, a text to
speech generator that, according to Lovely, has a lot of
very interesting applications. "This is more than just
something cute that can be embedded in a Web site," she
said, referring to the animated figure being projected on
the screen. "What if the Voki was reading a list of spelling
words? What if it was speaking another language? What if I
had a Web site that had a Voki embedded to tell my kids what
was going on so that the one's that couldn't read could hear
it? What if kids used Voki to say something important?"
The site offers a high level of
customization ranging from the overall look
of the Voki to the sound of its voice. But,
Lovely warned, "as with all tools, there has
to be a task and a deadline." Let them play
with it once, she said, and then have them
get to work.
8.
Create-A-Graph
"This may be an odd
choice for the list," Lovely conceded as she
revealed her No. 8 pick, "because, in some
ways, it's not really Web 2.0. It's not
quite as collaborative as some of these
other tools. But if you want to cut to the
chase and teach kids about creating graphs
and reading data, this is a great tool."
Create-A-Graph is a Web-based tool aimed at
giving students an accessible way to learn
graphing fundamentals. The tool is easy and
flexible, according to Lovely, and allows
them to learn important concepts using their
own information.
7.
Yack Pack
Coming in at No. 7 on
Lovely's list was "Yack Pack," an
Internet-based voice communication tool that
works a lot like voicemail for the Web.
Users define a "pack"--a group of
individuals they want to communicate
with--and then record messages for the
group, an individual, or even a subset
within the group using a standard computer
microphone. When members of the pack log in,
they can listen and respond to the messages.
Using Yack Pack Live--a component of Yack
Pack--users have the added ability of
broadcasting their messages in real time
using a small widget that can be embedded in
a website. Uses of the platform, said
Lovely, include multi-class collaboration,
or even parent-teacher communications.
6.
Animoto
Animoto is an
automated presentation generator that
focuses on using images to communicate a
message. "This tool is great for class
collaboration," said Lovely, and it is
easier than using PowerPoint.
Two versions of the platform are currently
available: a paid version for general public
use and a free education version offering
unlimited use for teachers and students.
5.
Skype
This tool, according
to Lovely, not only has the potential to
improve class participation and
collaboration, but it can also help cut
costs by providing free voice and video
calling to other Skype users worldwide. Some
uses of the platform include multi-class and
cross-district collaboration, professional
development, and virtual field trips.
4.
Glogster
While referred to as
an "interactive poster," Glogster--Lovely's
No. 4 pick--is, in effect, a personal Web
page complete with embedded media links,
sound, and video capabilities. Students can
work with Glogster individually or as a
group to create presentations, share
information, and interact with their peers.
Lovely stressed the importance of signing up
for the "EDU" version, which prevents other
users from viewing class-specific "Glogs."
3.
Voicethread
Coming in at No. 3,
Voicethread is audiovisual tool that gives
users the ability to upload images or video
files and then add audio or text comments.
"The power of this," said Lovely, "is in the
commenting."
2. Blogs
Nearing the top of the
list, the versatility of blogs, said Lovely,
is what makes them so valuable. Blogs
provide opportunities to reach out to a
range of community stakeholders including
administrators, other teachers and students,
parents, and the community at large. "Blogs
have the power to give kids an authentic
audience," she said. "It gives them a
voice."
1. Wikis
Lovely rounded out her top 10 with
Wikis and Wiki platforms, citing these as the most powerful
of the Web 2.0 tools. "Wikis," she said, "are even more
versatile than blogs. You can do anything with a Wiki," from
embedding all kinds of content to promoting collaboration to
creating an entire community all on a single platform. "In
fact," she said, pointing to her presentation slides on the
giant screen behind her, "You've been looking at a wiki this
whole time during our discussion."
Note the excellent tutorial course at
http://newmediaocw.wordpress.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on listservs and blogs are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Academic Earth (videos of lectures and even complete courses taught by top
scholars)
RAND: Health Compare (health policy options research) ---
http://www.randcompare.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on free online science,
engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
National Institutes of Health: History of Medicine
---
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/
Includes books, reports, pictures, videos, etc.
Center for Aging Services Technologies ---
http://www.agingtech.org
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation tutorials in
medicine, medical insurance, healthcare administration ---
http://www.rwjf.org/
Walter Reed Army Institute of Research ---
http://wrair-www.army.mil/
Digital Research Tools ---
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/
Social Science and Economics Tutorials
Academic Earth (videos of lectures and even complete courses taught by top
scholars)
National Journal Magazine ---
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/
Governing.com (a magazine for state and local government) ---
http://www.governing.com/
RAND: Health Compare (health policy options research) ---
http://www.randcompare.org/
National Institutes of Health: History of Medicine
(England) ---
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/
Includes books, reports, pictures, videos, etc.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation tutorials in
medicine, medical insurance, healthcare administration ---
http://www.rwjf.org/
Center for Aging Services Technologies ---
http://www.agingtech.org
American Social History ---
http://www.dlfaquifer.org/home
Virginia Emigrants to Liberia ---
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia/index.php?page=Virginia Emigrants To
Liberia
Digital Research Tools ---
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Academic Earth (videos of lectures and even complete courses taught by top
scholars)
Digital Research Tools ---
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math and Statistics Tutorials
Academic Earth (videos of lectures and even complete courses
taught by top scholars)
Digital Research Tools ---
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/
Center for the Teaching of Statistics ---
http://cts.stat.ucla.edu/
Survey and Questionnaire Tutorial ---
http://www.statpac.com/surveys/
Future Accountant (statistics and probability tutorials) ---
http://www.futureaccountant.com/probability/
Exploring Data (Statistics Tutorials) ---
http://exploringdata.cqu.edu.au/
Statistics: Cast Your Vote! ---
http://www.learner.org/interactives/statistics/index.html
More or Less (economics and statistics tutorials) ---
http://www.open2.net/moreorless/
From Dartmouth College
Chance News ---
http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/index.php/Main_Page
Tutorial on Statistics (focus is on learning exercises and how to view media
reports critically)
Probability Tutorials ---
http://www.probability.net/
Statistical Guide to Poker
"A Physicist's Guide to Texas Hold 'Em,"
PhysOrg, April
4, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news94907470.html
AuditNet provides resources for statistical sampling at
http://www.auditnet.org/sampling.htm
Journal of Statistics Education ---
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/
Statistics Education Research Journal ---
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/publications.php?show=serj
Teaching Statistics ---
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/publications.php?show=serj
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Academic Earth (videos of lectures and even complete courses taught by top
scholars)
Stanford Humanities Center: Events Archive ---
http://shc.stanford.edu/events/archive.htm
Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace
Wood Brock Collection ---
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=1529
Rocky Mountain Online Archive ---
http://rmoa.unm.edu/
Virginia Emigrants to Liberia ---
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia/index.php?page=Virginia Emigrants To
Liberia
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads ---
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm
Engaging Digital Tibet ---
http://digitaltibet.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/
The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet, 1920-1950 ---
http://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/index.php
The Tibet Album presents more than 6000 photographs spanning 30 years of
Tibet's history. These extraordinary photographs are a unique record of
people long gone and places changed beyond all recognition. They also
document the ways that British visitors encountered Tibet and Tibetans.
New Jersey Historical Maps ---
http://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/MAPS.html
How the Internet Began (Humor) ---
http://home.comcast.net/~singingman7777/Beginning.htm
Link forwarded by Barry Rice
Computing History Timeline ---
http://trillian.randomstuff.org.uk/~stephen/history/timeline.html
Also see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing
American University Computer History Museum --- http://www.computinghistorymuseum.org/
The Apple (Computer) Museum --- http://www.theapplemuseum.com/
A History of Microsoft Windows (slide show from Wired News) ---
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/pcs/multimedia/2007/01/wiredphotos31
Oldcomputers.com --- http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
Penis Growth Linked to Weight Loss
Whereas women tend to put on weight in buttocks and thighs, men tend to
get those telltale beer bellies. On February 5, 2009 while watching Good
Morning America, my wife learned that a man's height should be twice his
belt size. For example, a man with a 40-inch waste should be six feet plus
eight inches tall.
The incentive for a man to lose weight is that his penis grows an inch
for each 25 pounds of weight loss. At least it seems to grow that much
because he can see more of it after significant weight loss.
"Medical Mystery: : The Baby Who Wouldn't Grow Docs Are Baffled by
14-Month-Old Baby Who Weighs Only as Much as a Newborn," ABC News
Medical Unit, February 4, 2009 ---
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/story?id=6797798&page=1
More ABC News health items ---
http://abcnews.go.com/health
Question
How can you continue taking
statin drugs
for cholesterol control and still drink grapefruit juice?
"Edible Mushrooms Absorb Drug-Altering Chemicals From Grapefruit Juice,"
by Daniel J. DeNoon, WebMD, February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20090203/mushrooms-cut-grapefruit-drug-effect
Edible mushrooms counteract the
medication-altering effects of grapefruit juice, USDA researchers
report.
Aside from being tasty, grapefruit juice is
pretty darn good for you. It's full of antioxidants and other
beneficial compounds. There's some evidence it may even help protect
against cancer and heart disease.
But there's a downside to grapefruit juice.
It carries a class of compounds that inhibit the liver enzymes your
body needs to eliminate many widely used medications. This
grapefruit/drug interaction increases the risk of drug side effects.
Recently, USDA researcher Kyung Myung, PhD,
and colleagues found that an inedible fungus somehow absorbs the
compounds responsible for the grapefruit/drug interaction.
Now Myung's team has found that an edible
mushroom -- Morchella esculenta, better known as the yellow morel --
does the same thing. And, to a slightly lesser extent, so do other
edible fungi. So far, the list includes an oyster mushroom variant,
red yeast, and even the common button mushroom.
The USDA researchers macerated the
mushrooms and killed them by heating them to 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
Then they vacuum-filtered the mushroom mash and mixed them with
either fresh grapefruit juice or grapefruit juice made from
concentrate.
At the highest concentration tested --
about two-thirds of a tablespoon of yellow morel mushroom per 1.7
ounces of juice -- most of the target compounds were removed from
grapefruit juice. Lesser effects were seen with the other fungi.
Separate experiments showed that mushrooms
didn't remove all of the unwanted compounds from grapefruit juice.
The treated juice still had more interactions with liver enzymes
than orange juice. But the treated juice was only about half as
active as untreated grapefruit juice.
However, Myung and colleagues did not
report on how the grapefruit juice tasted after they (presumably)
strained off the mushroom mash.
Jensen Comment
For most people this will probably be more trouble and expense than it's
worth, although in the future juice manufacturers may begin to sell treated
grapefruit juice. Not a whole lot can be done for fresh grapefruit itself.
"The 7 Things You Should Know About Hormones," by Melinda Beck, The
Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123362356236541855.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal
A muddle of misinformation keeps clouding the
debate over hormone-replacement therapy for women.
Last week, millions of women tuned into "The Oprah
Winfrey Show" to hear actress Suzanne Somers sympathize with women suffering
from what she called "The Seven Dwarfs of Menopause: Itchy, Bitchy, Sleepy,
Sweaty, Bloated, Forgetful and All Dried Up." As she's done in her
best-selling books, Ms. Somers, age 62, credited a custom-made blend of
"bio-identical" hormones with maintaining her youthful zest and told viewers
that the hormone debate boils down to a choice between "restoration versus
deterioration."
There was little discussion of potential risks of
HRT. The compounding pharmacies that make up such custom blends of hormones
without oversight by the Food and Drug Administration often claim their
products are so natural that they confer the benefits of hormone replacement
(from restoring sleep, mood, memory and sexiness to protecting against
osteoporosis) without the risks.
Millions of women abandoned menopause hormones
after the big Women's Health Initiative trial was halted early in 2002 amid
signs that they increased the risk of heart attack and stroke. A growing
number of experts now believe that the women in the WHI -- average age 63 --
do not reflect the typical women entering menopause, and that the same risks
may not apply to younger women.
Even so, women seeking safer alternatives have
turned to "bio-identicals" -- a trend that worries mainstream medical
groups. "Women who were afraid after the WHI, as were their doctors, are
going to alternative approaches that have little or no scientific
information behind them," says Margaret Weirman, a professor of medicine at
the University of Colorado Denver and a spokeswoman for the Endocrine
Society, a professional organization devoted to hormone research. "These
women may be putting themselves at much higher levels of risk."
Amid all the confusion, here are seven things women
should know about the HRT debate now:
1) 'Bio-identical' hormones are available in
FDA-approved forms.
Though many experts dismiss "bio-identical" as a
meaningless term, proponents use it to mean hormones with the same molecular
structure as those that women's bodies make. The main one lost at menopause
is estradiol, which affects functions throughout the female body, from skin
to bones, hearts and brains. Chemically equivalent estradiol is available in
many FDA-approved pills, patches, creams and gels from traditional drug
companies, generally made from the exact same plant sources that compounding
pharmacies use. What's more, the FDA-approved varieties are covered by
insurance, unlike compounded blends that can cost hundreds of dollars a
month.
A growing number of doctors prescribe these
estradiol-based products instead of Premarin, the estrogen made from horse
urine that was used in the WHI. Many also prefer natural progesterone,
available in FDA-approved Prometrium, to the synthetic form that was used in
the WHI. But there is little evidence comparing one HRT variety against
another.
2) Hormones from compounding pharmacies aren't
safer than conventional HRT.
Compounded drugs don't carry warnings or list side
effects on their labels, but that's because they are not made under FDA
scrutiny. In fact, they can vary greatly in strength and potency and little
is known about how they release active ingredients over time. "We don't know
if it comes out in peaks and valleys or continuously," says Dr. Weirman.
"Some people may be getting very high doses, and some people may be getting
very little or none."
The International Academy of Compounding
Pharmacists contends that its members perform a valuable service in making
drugs and strengths that aren't commercially available, that they are
providing women with freedom of choice in health-care decisions and that
much of the criticism is coming from groups funded by makers of traditional
HRT.
3) Don't trust saliva tests.
Some compounding pharmacies use saliva tests to
monitor women's hormone levels and develop custom blends. But many experts
say such tests (which can cost hundreds of dollars) are unreliable and lack
uniform standards.
Blood tests are more accurate -- but monitoring how
women feel is just as key. Many doctors believe that HRT should be used
mainly to treat actual symptoms such as hot flashes, mood swings, sleep
problems, foggy thinking and other symptoms, rather than arbitrary blood
levels since individual ranges vary widely. FDA-approved estradiol products
are available in a wide variety of strengths that can be tapered as a
woman's symptoms change.
4) There's a critical window of time for starting
HRT.
There's a growing consensus that the risks and
benefits are different for younger and older women, and that for women who
start HRT shortly after menopause, the benefits may outweigh the risks.
Women in the WHI who were 20 years past menopause had a 71% higher risk of
heart attack on estrogen and progesterone than those taking placebos, but
women closer to menopause had an 11% lower risk of heart problems. One
theory is that estrogen helps keep healthy blood vessels supple, but make
atherosclerosis worse once it has set in.
Similarly, HRT seems to help preserve thinking
ability when started just after menopause, but it may hasten the progression
of pre-existing memory problems when started later in life, writes JoAnn E.
Manson, a Harvard Medical School professor who was a lead investigator on
both the WHI and the long-running Nurses' Health Study, in her new book,
"Hot Flashes, Hormones and Your Health."
HRT was associated with a lower risk of fractures
and colorectal cancer regardless of age. The WHI did not assess whether HRT
improved quality-of-life issues such as mood, sleep and hot flashes. Women
experiencing such symptoms were excluded from the study on the grounds that
immediate effects might prompt some to guess whether they were in the
control or placebo group.
5) The increased risk of breast cancer appears
related to progesterone rather than estrogen.
Women taking both estrogen and progesterone in the
WHI had eight more cases of breast cancer per 10,000 than the control group;
women taking estrogen alone had six fewer cases. Women who still have a
uterus need some progesterone to guard against uterine cancer, but many
doctors now try to give the lowest dose possible to prevent a build-up of
uterine lining.
6) Estrogen applied to the skin, in patch, cream
or gel form, may have a lower risk of blood clots and strokes than in pill
form.
A large study in France published in the Lancet
found that women taking estrogen in pill form were three times as likely to
develop blood clots than non-users, while women using the estradiol patch
had no increased risk. But more study is needed to determine this
conclusively.
7) Stay tuned.
Several of these new theories are being tested in
another trial called KEEPS (for Kronos Early Estrogen Prevention Study) that
is comparing 720 newly menopausal women on oral Premarin, an estrogen patch
or placebo. Investigators will monitor their arteries, as well as
quality-of-life aspects like mood, fatigue, sleep, bone health and
cognition.
In the meantime, women entering menopause should
discuss all the risks and benefits with their doctors, as well as their
symptoms, health and family history, and make an individual, informed
decision.
RAND: Health Compare (health policy options research) ---
http://www.randcompare.org/
An Alleged Harvard Test for Alzheimer's
I did not verify that this is an urban legend, but I have my suspicions since
folks at Harvard do not use common words like "fart."
Whatever this is, I do not recommend it as poetry.
Forwarded by Niki
The following was developed as a mental age assessment by the School of
Psychiatry at Harvard University . Take your time and see if you can read each
line aloud without a mistake. The average person over 50 years of age cannot do
it!
1. This is this cat.
2. This is is cat.
3. This is how cat.
4. This is to cat.
5. This is keep cat.
6. This is an cat.
7. This is old cat.
8. This is fart cat.
9. This is busy cat
10. This is for cat.
11. This is forty cat.
12. This is seconds cat.
Now go back and read the third word in each line from the top down and I bet
cha' you cannot resist passing it on.
Forwarded by Paula
F16 vs C-130: THERE IS WISDOM HERE!
A C-130 was lumbering along when a cocky F-16 flashed by. The jet jockey
decided to show off.
The fighter jock told the C-130 pilot, 'watch this!' and promptly Went
into a barrel roll followed by a steep climb. He then finished With a sonic
boom as he broke the sound barrier. The F-16 pilot Asked the C-130 pilot
what he thought of that?
The C-130 pilot said, 'That was impressive, but watch this!' The C-130
droned along for about 5 minutes and then the C-130 Pilot came back on and
said: 'What did you think of that?' Puzzled, the F-16 pilot asked,
'What the
heck did you do?' The C-130 pilot chuckled. 'I stood up, stretched my legs,
walked To the back, went to the bathroom, then got a cup of coffee and a
Cinnamon bun.'
When you are young & foolish - speed & flash may seem a good thing !!!
When you get older & smarter - comfort & dull is not such a bad thing !!!
Us old folks understand this one.
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Three Finance Blogs
Jim Mahar's FinanceProfessor Blog ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
FinancialRounds Blog ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Karen Alpert's FinancialMusings (Australia) ---
http://financemusings.blogspot.com/
Some Accounting Blogs
Paul Pacter's IAS Plus (International
Accounting) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
International Association of Accountants News ---
http://www.aia.org.uk/
AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries ---
http://www.accountingeducation.com/
Gerald Trites'eBusiness and
XBRL Blogs ---
http://www.zorba.ca/
AccountingWeb ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/
SmartPros ---
http://www.smartpros.com/
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Shared Open Courseware
(OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing
Universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Free Textbooks and Cases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Mathematics and Statistics Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
Free Science and Medicine Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Free Social Science and Philosophy Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Free Education Discipline Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Teaching Materials (especially
video) from PBS
Teacher Source: Arts and
Literature ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm
Teacher Source: Health & Fitness
---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/health.htm
Teacher Source: Math ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math.htm
Teacher Source: Science ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/sci_tech.htm
Teacher Source: PreK2 ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/prek2.htm
Teacher Source: Library Media ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/library.htm
Free Education and
Research Videos from Harvard University ---
http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp
VYOM eBooks Directory ---
http://www.vyomebooks.com/
From Princeton Online
The Incredible Art Department ---
http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/
Online Mathematics Textbooks ---
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html
National Library of Virtual Manipulatives ---
http://enlvm.usu.edu/ma/nav/doc/intro.jsp
Moodle ---
http://moodle.org/
The word moodle is an acronym for "modular
object-oriented dynamic learning environment", which is quite a mouthful.
The Scout Report stated the following about Moodle 1.7. It is a
tremendously helpful opens-source e-learning platform. With Moodle,
educators can create a wide range of online courses with features that
include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and surveys. On the
Moodle website, visitors can also learn about other features and read about
recent updates to the program. This application is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer or Mac OS X and newer.
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accountancy Discussion ListServs:
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a
ListServ (usually for free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc
Roles of a ListServ ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
|
CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation
Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu
— R. Davis Feb 2, 06:34 PM
— Ron Heasley Feb 2, 06:50 PM
— Richard Ludlow Feb 2, 06:55 PM
— K. Thacker Feb 2, 07:09 PM
Also, since the videos are being used solely for educational purposes, doesn’t that completely fall in line with the goals of the educational institutions?
— Joseph Dooley Feb 2, 07:16 PM
— Aaron Feb 2, 07:22 PM
The simple format and centralized approach is particularly important in that it makes the material far more accessible for the vast majority of people who do not know that it exists on university sites.
In essence, by trying to appeal to a broad audience, the site has the potential to deliver really crucial educational content to people who wouldn’t be able to access it otherwise.
Rather than needing to search around multiple university websites to find the content that I’m looking for, I can go to Academic Earth and get all the material in one place, easily searchable, etc.
I think it’s a pretty damn cool project.
— Jerry G. Feb 2, 07:35 PM
I appreciate what the founders are trying to do, but they really need to work on that before they can expect instructors and institutions to seriously consider using their service.
— Jacob Richards Feb 2, 07:35 PM
— Kory Feb 2, 11:04 PM
— VS Feb 2, 11:30 PM
From the look at this beta site, it appears that Mr. Ludlow has the potential to bring the OCW movement to a much larger mainstream audience.
— G. Wilson Feb 2, 11:39 PM