Tidbits on September 3, 2009
Bob Jensen
Another sunrise
in the White Mountains
I'm justifiably proud to have taken these
butterfly pictures
Erika calls a butterfly a Schmetterling
With our
friends from Sugar Hill Community Church
Helmut spent four years on a U-Boat during World War II
Although he's retired, he has a machine shop and can fix almost anything
mechanical
His wife, Helene, is also from Germany and serves up great German dinners
They also bring us hand-picked raspberries every week in the summer
Below you will
see five of our pastor's ten wonderful children
Here's my pet
woodchuck named Woody
On August 27,
2009 I received a nice plaque from the American Accounting Association that
reads as follows:
American Accounting
Association
Inaugural
AAA Uncommon Commons Award
Bob Jensen
For Being An Early
Adopter Of
The AAA Commons, Consistantly
Contributing Your Intellecal Insigts,
And Helping to Make
The AAA Commons A Success
Annual
Meeting 2009
New York, New York |
This means a great
deal to me and brings tears to my eyes!
The plaque was accompanied by a really nice handwritten note from the Executive
Director of the American Accounting Association, Tracey Sutherland. Behind the
scenes the award was instigated by Julie Smith David at Arizona State
university.
I mention this award
here not to personally brag but to encourage all AAA members to make more use of
the AAA Commons that just seems to get bigger and better each month that passes
by. If you are an AAA member, please give it a try daily or at least weekly ---
https://commons.aaahq.org/signin
The Commons is free to all AAA members!
Julie Smith David points out that "Fabienne
Miller also received this award, based upon her contributions to the research
communities... in that case, the communities are private, so no one may know
that Fabbiene has been using the AAA Commons to support her research efforts -
and she's been very generous to help us refine these communities to make them
even more valuable to our members."
People sent me the humor pictures below. The first one features Nancy Pelosi
after a Republican holdout.
In San Antonio the opossums were all over our back yard.
One night I found one laying in the bottom of a trash can.
It seemed dead, but eventually it dawned on me that this was an opossum.
I turned the can over and went to bed.
Sure enough the can was empty in the morning.
In Memoriam - Mary Jo Kopechne – Dead at the Age of 28 ---
http://ace.mu.nu/
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between August 27-September 3, 2009
To Accompany the September 3, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090903Quotations.htm
Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Tidbits on September 3, 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
Cool Search Engines That Are Not
Google ---
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
World Clock and World Facts ---
http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to an
opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com]
Free online 800 telephone numbers ---
http://www.tollfree.att.net/tf.html
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or
parens
Cool Search Engines That Are Not
Google ---
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Education Technology Search ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Distance Education Search ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Search for Listservs, Blogs, and Social Networks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Over 700,000 books are now available for downloading into Amazon's Kindle.
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
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 Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
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
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
Financial WMDs (Credit Derivatives) on Sixty Minutes (CBS) on
August 30, 2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5274961n&tag=contentBody;housing
I downloaded the video (5,631 Kbs) to
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/FinancialWMDs.rv
I guess FSP 157-4 wasn't quite enough to color over the poison
Roubini Says Bank Balance Sheets Are The Greatest Risk To The Rally (Video) ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/roubini-says-bank-balance-sheets-are-the-greatest-risk-to-the-rally/
The Genius of Charles Darwin (great video tutorial) ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/the-genius-of-charles-darwin/
Link forwarded by Rick Lillie
Try VideoSurf ( http://www.videosurf.com/ ) to find videos of all types on the Internet.
A Chef's Table [Real Player, iTunes] ---
http://www.whyy.org/91FM/chef/
Jeanne Robertson "Mothers vs. Teenage Daughters" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE82Gt93UYc&feature=related#watch-main-area
Jeanne Robertson "Don't send a man to the grocery store!" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YFRUSTiFUs
Italian Pepsi Commercial ---
Click Here
Video from The Economist Magazine: Greg Davies on
behavioural finance We are emotional investors The head of Behavioural Finance
at Barclays Wealth says hot-brained humans often buy and sell right when they
shouldn't ---
http://audiovideo.economist.com/?fr_story=e71885c25fada37622b1dd9e9f7600208e4ccc25&rf=bm
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Johnny Cash and The Muppets
Johnny Cash on the Muppet Show - Dirty Old Egg Sucking Dog
I
captured this as Muppet audio at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/EggSuckingDog_1.mp3
If you do a word search on YouTube for “Egg Sucking Dog” you might find the
Muppet version.
Without the Muppets ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYNK8A_bXwA
Other humor music ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm#Humor
Let's Rip It Up (Bill Haley video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrhGtXCGn6M
Amazing Grace in the Roman Coliseum ---
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1785324681?bclid=1338935106&bctid=1913313052
Marc Andre Hamelin: The Praiseworthy Pianist ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112039260
Pianist Hank Jones Plays With Vitality At 91
(Jazz) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112330985
Cotton Eye Joe (Bugs Bunny) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAltG2NrM0Y
Hollie Steel from the United Kingdom
Web outfits like
Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content
that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2
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
Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the
chemical bonds within a molecule.
Fox News: Taliban Mutilates Afghan Man for Trying to
Vote ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
It's a relief that the Taliban usually stops short of the evils of water
boarding. Hanging, torture, and mutilation are usually sufficient.
The researchers focused on a single molecule of
pentacene, which is commonly used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic
molecule is made up of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms. In the image above
the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings are clear and even the positions
of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be seen. To give some
perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across,
which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand.
Single molecule, one million times smaller than a grain of sand,
pictured for first time ---
Click Here
De Young Museum: The Harald Wagner Collection of
Teotihuacan Murals ---
http://www.famsf.org/teotihuacan/
Waterlife ---
http://waterlife.nfb.ca/
National Portrait Gallery: Thomas Paine ---
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/paine/
The Civil Rights Digital Library ---
http://crdl.usg.edu/voci/go/crdl/home/
Doris Ulmann Photograph Collection (rural South and Appalachia) ---
http://boundless.uoregon.edu/digcol/ulmann/index.html
The Civil War in America from The
Illustrated London News
http://beck.library.emory.edu/iln/index.html
American Civil War
History Site ---
http://www.factasy.com/
Tobacco Bag Stringing in North Carolina and Virginia ---
http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/tbs/index.html
NASA photograph of California fire ---
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/02/california_wildfire/
Design Observe ---
http://www.designobserver.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
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
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
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between August 27-September 3, 2009
To Accompany the September 3, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090903Quotations.htm
"FIRST LOOK: New Mac system not a dramatic upgrade," MIT
Technology Review, August 26, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/23320/?nlid=2306
SECOND LOOK: Microsoft photography is a dramatic upgrade
Should Bill Gates just claim the guy in the picture is an LA cop wearing OJ's
gloves?
A photo on the Seattle-based company's U.S. Web site
shows two men, one Asian and one black, and a white woman seated at a conference
room table. But on the Web site of Microsoft's Polish business unit, the black
man's head has been replaced with that of a white man. The color of his hand
remains unchanged.
"Microsoft apologizes for changing race in photo," MIT's Technology Review,
August 25, 2009
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/23319/?nlid=2306&a=f
"Harvard's Sad Censorship Campaign," by Jessica Peck Corry, Human
Events, August 27, 2009 ---
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33291
Poor, poor Harvard. The prestigious institution has
once again found itself in the embarrassing position of defending a push for
campus censorship. This round’s sad irony: student leaders are now the ones
trying to throw the First Amendment out the school bus window.
Financial WMDs (Credit Derivatives) on Sixty Minutes (CBS) on August 30,
2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5274961n&tag=contentBody;housing
I downloaded the video (5,631 Kbs) to
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/FinancialWMDs.rv
Steve Kroft examines the complicated financial instruments known as credit
default swaps and the central role they are playing in the unfolding economic
crisis. The interview features my hero Frank Partnoy. I don't know of
anybody who knows derivative securities contracts and frauds better than Frank
Partnoy, who once sold these derivatives in bucket shops. You can find links to
Partnoy's books and many, many quotations at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
For years I've used the term "bucket shop" in financial securities marketing
without realizing that the first bucket shops in the early 20th Century were
bought and sold only gambles on stock pricing moves, not the selling of any
financial securities. The analogy of a bucket shop would be a room full of
bookies selling bets on NFL playoff games.
See "Bucket Shop" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
I was not aware how fraudulent the credit derivatives markets had become. I
always viewed credit derivatives as an unregulated insurance market for credit
protection. But in 2007 and 2008 this market turned into a betting operation
more like a rolling crap game on Wall Street.
Of all the corporate bailouts that have taken place
over the past year, none has proved more costly or contentious than the rescue
of American International Group (AIG). Its reckless bets on subprime mortgages
threatened to bring down Wall Street and the world economy last fall until the
U.S Treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped in to save it. So far, the huge
insurance and financial services conglomerate has been given or promised $180
billion in loans, investments, financial injections and guarantees - a sum
greater than the annual cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
"Why AIG Stumbled, And Taxpayers Now Own It," CBS Sixty Minutes,
May 17, 2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/15/60minutes/main5016760.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_5016760
Jensen Comment
To add pain to misery, AIG lied to the media about the extent of bonuses granted
after receiving TARP funds.
Bob Jensen's threads on AIG are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
Simoleon Sense Reviews Janet Tavakoli’s Dear Mr. Buffett
---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/simoleon-sense-reviews-janet-tavakolis-dear-mr-buffett/
What’s The Book (Dear Mr. Buffett) About
Dear Mr. Buffett, chronicles the
agency problems, poor regulations, and participants which led to the current
financial crisis. Janet accomplishes this herculean task by capitalizing on
her experiences with derivatives, Wall St, and her relationship with Warren
Buffett. One wonders how she managed to pack so much material in such few
pages!
Unlike many books which only analyze past events,
Dear Mr. Buffett, offers proactive advice for improving financial markets.
Janet is clearly very concerned about protecting individual rights,
promoting honesty, and enhancing financial integrity. This is exactly the
kind of character we should require of our financial leaders.
Business week once called Janet the Cassandra of
Credit Derivatives. Without a doubt Janet should have been listened to. I’m
confident that from now on she will be.
Closing thoughts
Rather than a complicated book on financial
esoterica, Janet has created a simple guide to understanding the current
crisis. This book is a must read for all students of finance, economics, and
business. If you haven’t read this book, please do so.
Warning –This book is likely to infuriate you, and
that’s a good thing! Janet provides indicting evidence and citizens may be
tempted to initiate vigilante like witch trials. Please consult with your
doctor before taking this financial medication.
Continued in article
September 1, 2009 reply from Rick Lillie
[rlillie@CSUSB.EDU]
Hi Bob,
I am reading Dear Mr. Buffett, What an Investor
Learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street, by Janet Tavakoli. I am just about
finished with the book. I am thinking about giving a copy of the book to
students who perform well in my upper-level financial reporting classes.
I agree with the reviewer’s comments about
Tavakoli’s book. Her explanations are clear and concise and do not require
expertise in finance or financial derivatives in order to understand what
she (or Warren Buffet) says. She explains the underlying problems of the
financial meltdown with ease. Tavakoli does not blow you over with “finance
BS.” She does in print what Steve Kroft does in the 60 Minutes story.
Tavakoli delivers a unique perspective throughout
the book. She looks through the eyes of Warren Buffett and explains issues
as Buffett sees them, while peppering the discussion with her experience and
perspective.
The reviewer is correct. Tavakoli lets the finance
world, along with accountants, attorneys, bankers, Congress, and regulators,
have it with both barrels!
Tavakoli’s book is the highlight of my summer
reading.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie
Rick Lillie, MAS, Ed.D., CPA Assistant Professor of
Accounting Coordinator - Master of Science in Accountancy (MSA) Program
Department of Accounting and Finance College of Business and Public
Administration CSU San Bernardino 5500 University Pkwy, JB-547 San
Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Telephone Numbers: San Bernardino Campus: (909)
537-5726 Palm Desert Campus: (760) 341-2883, Ext. 78158
For technical details see the following book:
Structured Finance and Collateralized Debt Obligations: New Developments in
Cash and Synthetic Securitization (Wiley Finance) by Janet M. Tavakoli
(2008)
AIG now says it paid out more than $454 million in
bonuses to its employees for work performed in 2008. That is nearly four times
more than the company revealed in late March when asked by POLITICO to detail
its total bonus payments. At that time, AIG spokesman Nick Ashooh said the firm
paid about $120 million in 2008 bonuses to a pool of more than 6,000 employees.
The figure Ashooh offered was, in turn, substantially higher than company CEO
Edward Liddy claimed days earlier in testimony before a House Financial Services
Subcommittee. Asked how much AIG had paid in 2008 bonuses, Liddy responded: “I
think it might have been in the range of $9 million.”
Emon Javers, "AIG bonuses four times
higher than reported," Politico, May 5, 2009 ---
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22134.html
Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the current economic crisis are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
For credit derivative problems see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
Also see "Credit Derivatives" under the C-Terms at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133glosf.htm#C-Terms
Bob Jensen's free tutorials and videos on how to account for derivatives
under FAS 133 and IAS 39 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm
I doubled up laughing at this headline. I don't know whether it was
intentional or not.
DePaul U. J-Schoolers Study Breaking Tweets
The university is offering
what is apparently the first college journalism class devoted entirely to the
Twitter windbreaking platform.
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/J-Schoolers-at-DePaul-U-Study/7904/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads (down wind) on breaking
Tweets ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed: Some
say that Twitter may be as important to real-time search as YouTube is to
video," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, March 11, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22272/?nlid=1848&a=f
When Twitter was
introduced in late 2006, asking users to post a
140-word answer to the question "What are you doing?," many criticized the
results as nothing more than a collection of trivial thoughts and inane
ramblings. Fast-forward three years, and the number of Twitter users has
grown to millions, while the content of the many posts--better known as
"tweets"--has shifted from banal to informative.
Twitter users now
cover breaking news,
posting links to reports, blog posts, and images. Twitter's search box also
reveals what people think of the latest new gadget or movie, letting
visitors eavesdrop on often spirited conversations and some insightful
opinions.
Earlier this week, on The Charlie Rose Show,
Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was asked directly whether Google might be
interested in acquiring Twitter. He responded, somewhat coyly, that his
company was "unlikely to buy anything right now."
Nonetheless, as Twitter grows in size and
substance, it's becoming clear that it offers a unique feed of real-time
conversation and sentiment.
Danny Sullivan,
editor of the blog
Search Engine Land,
compares this to the unique real-time feed of new video content offered by
YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, and says that Twitter could help
improve real-time search. Notably, says Sullivan, this is something that
Google
isn't particularly good at. Even by scouring news
sites, Google simply can't match the speed and relevancy of social sites
like Digg and Twitter, he says.
Twitter's ability to capture the latest fad is
evident from its "trends" feature, which reveals the most talked about
topics among Twitterers. At the time this article was written, Twitter users
were discussing topics including National Napping Day, DST (daylight savings
time), and the new movie Watchmen. A quick search also reveals that
five people within the past half hour have posted tweets about last
weekend's Saturday Night Live skit called "The Rock Obama." The
most recent tweet includes a link to the video and was posted just three
minutes ago.
Bruce Croft, a professor of computer science at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says that Twitter search could
perhaps help make news alerts more relevant. "If you could search or track
large numbers of conversations, then there would be the possibility of
developing alerts when something starts happening," he says. "And, of
course, it's yet another opportunity to do massive data mining on people's
activities to learn even more about what they are doing and when they are
doing it."
Continued in article
March 12, 2009 reply from Steven Hornik
I use Twitter in my Financial
Accounting class. I have an account set up just for that course:
http://twitter.com/acg2021 I use it for sending
out extra credit questions randomly throughout the week so that they receive
about 1 tweet per chapter. Here is an example of the latest tweet I sent
out:
In a period of rising inventory costs, Gross Profit will be __
(higher/lower) under LIFO because COGS are __ (H/L) than under FIFO.
In the tweet I tell the students when they must get the answer to me and I
award extra points for the first n responses. I find the students really
enjoy this and it forces them to keep up the material or bring their
textbooks with them wherever they go! The concept behind it is to have
students thinking about accounting all the time!
Hope this is helpful,
Steven
PS I also have a regular twitter account:
http://twitter.com/shornik if you wish to follow
me. I'm not sure my tweets will be as exciting as Roger's broken and now
healed toe but feel free to follow.
_____________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
August 18, 2009 reply from Steven Hornik
[shornik@BUS.UCF.EDU]
I recently created a wikipage for the CTLA workshop
I did at the AAA in NYC. Its short and sweet (I think) so if anyone is
looking for more info about twitter (terminology, links to applications, a
few use cases) feel free to check it out at:
http://reallyengagingaccounting.wikispaces.com/Twitter
Dr. Steven Hornik University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting 407-823-5739 Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
Yahoo ID: shornik
Interesting Blog on Twitter ---
http://glinner.posterous.com/the-conversation-23
The Hot, Hot Electronic Book Market
"Discovery E-Book Filing Raises Eyebrows: Md. Firm Mum on Patent
Application," Mike Musgrove, The Washington Post, August 29, 2009 ---
Click Here
Is Discovery Communications gearing up for a jump
into the suddenly hot e-book space? A filing made public this week by the
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office raises that possibility.
According to the filing, the Silver Spring-based
media company applied in February for a patent on a product it describes as
an "electronic book having electronic commerce features."
The company did not respond to a call Friday
seeking comment on the matter.
Whatever Discovery's plans are, the electronic book
market is shaping up to be this year's most sought-after space by consumer
electronics makers. In the wake of considerable buzz for Amazon's Kindle,
consumer electronics giant Sony has been aggressively courting the market,
with a $200 version of its electronic reader announced this month and set
for a release any day now. What's more, the tech industry abounds with
rumors about a new tablet-shaped computer possibly on the way from Apple, a
product that many think will incorporate some e-book features.
Discovery, by comparison, surprised the tech world
earlier this year when it filed a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming that the
online retailer's popular Kindle product infringes on an electronic book
patent held by the media company, which is better known for its cable
offerings such as the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. Amazon has since
countersued Discovery, claiming that the cable TV company is infringing on
some of its own e-commerce patents.
Discovery had not -- and still has not -- made many
public statements about moving into the consumer electronics arena. But
according to the company's patent application, the device would be able to
play audio and video files. While other e-readers currently on the market
can play audio files, they typically don't play video clips.
Discovery's filing describes the device as being
shaped like a paperback book and containing "a novel combination of new
technology involving the television, cable, telephone and computer
industries."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
Wal-Mart attempts to follow Amazon's early lead on online selling
"Wal-Mart to sell goods from other vendors on Web," MIT's Technology Review,
August 31, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/23340/?nlid=2316&a=f
Jensen Comment
Living up here in the boonies I use this Amazon service weekly. It makes
searching for products (e.g., rice bran at my age) much easier and more
convenient. It is much safer to only have my credit card on file with one vendor
(Amazon) rather than have it on file with many stranger vendors on the Web. And
lastly, and most important, if an outside vendor does not deliver then Amazon
guarantees a refund.
I've only had one problem with an outside vendor --- Silk Flowers sent my
recent order to North Carolina by mistake. I was having trouble getting Silk
Flowers to respond, so I complained to Amazon to make the Silk Flowers company
jump. Within an hour I had a phone call from Silk Flowers asking "how high?"
By the way, we knew our order went to North Carolina because the woman (a
stranger) who received our order by mistake took the time and trouble to look up
our phone number, phone us, and explain that she'd received our order. Bless
her!
After such good luck with Amazon, I will probably extend my online shopping
to Wal-Mart.
By the way, I have a credit card that's only to be used for online shopping.
On purpose, I have a very low credit limit on this card (I think $2,500).
Amazon frequently sends me $25 gift certificates. These
make me happy.
The 3-2 Five Year College Degree Duo Gaining Steam
Mr. Taylor is not the only prophet of radical
curricular change who has recently found an audience. Robert M. Zemsky, chairman
of the University of Pennsylvania's Learning Alliance for Higher Education, has
been promoting a three-year baccalaureate, which in his vision would often be
coupled with a specialized one- or two-year master's degree. (That model is
becoming standard in the European Union.) Like Mr. Taylor, Mr. Zemsky would like
to see more courses of study that are built around specific problems, rather
than the traditional disciplines.
David Glenn and Karin Fischer, "The Canon of College Majors
Persists Amid Calls for Change," Chronicle of Higher Education, September
1, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Amid-Calls-for-Change-College/48206/
Jensen Comment
This would shut out many students from careers. For example, a C-Average
accounting, business, and finance now acquires enough credits in a career
discipline to possibly get a job, but has no chance at graduate school if GMAT
or GRE scores are also low. In the 3-2 model, there are not enough credits to
have a shot at a career in accounting, finance, or business.
This is one of the reasons most states require 150-credits to sit for the CPA
exam without explicitly requiring a masters degree. This practice was first
started in Florida to give accounting majors a shot at the CPA examination when
they either could not or did not earn a masters degree.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Countries and Culture in Behavioral Finance," by Meir Statman ---
http://www.scu.edu/business/finance/research/upload/Countries-and-cultures-in-BF.pdf
Behavioral finance has made important contributions
to the field of investing by focusing on the cognitive and emotional aspects
of the investment decision-making process. Although it is tempting to say
that people are the same everywhere, the collective set of common
experiences that people of the same culture share will influence their
cognitive and emotional approach to investing. In this article, the author
discusses the many cultural differences that may influence investor behavior
and how these differences may influence the recommendations of a financial
advisor.
Bob Jensen's threads on Behavioral and Cultural Economics and Finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Behavioral
Here’s an example of where an outstanding teacher combines onsite teaching
with online tools masterfully.
Jim Mahar clued me in about this link.
Question
How can you build both a reputation for being the best teacher in your college
and the hardest teacher in your college?
Answer
It's elementary Watson --- It's all a matter of deduction!
"Garven Receives Teaching Award from American Risk and Insurance
Association," Baylor University, August 29, 2009 ---
http://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=60350
Award recognizes finance professor's integrated
teaching methods, accessibility outside office hours
The American Risk and Insurance Association (ARIA)
has named Baylor University's Dr. James Garven the recipient of its
Excellence in Teaching award.
Garven, a professor of finance and insurance at
Baylor's
Hankamer School of
Business, holds The Frank S. Groner Memorial
Chair of Finance and also serves as Risk Management and Insurance (RMI)
Program director at Baylor. ARIA is the premier international academic
association for research in risk management and insurance.
"What sets Dr. Garven apart is his unique teaching
methods and genuine care and concern for his students," said Katie Emler, a
2009 Baylor graduate who earned her BBA in risk management and insurance.
"Rumors had circulated about Garven being the hardest professor in the
business school, and others that Garven's class was the best class offered
at Baylor. Both of these rumors proved to be true," she said.
Garven, who teaches at both the graduate and
undergraduate level, uses a pedagogical
approach oriented toward building deductive problem solving skills that
are based upon principles of finance, economic and statistics.
"In spite of all that risk management insurance and
finance have in common," he said, "only recently have attempts been made in
scholarship and pedagogy to synthesize the two fields."
Garven integrates information technologies such
as the Web, blogging, e-mail, social media and instant messaging to provide
his students access to course materials and research at their convenience.
It also means he's highly accessible and
responsive when students want to ask a question or discuss an issue with him
outside of typical office hours.
Another former student, Rakesh Arora, MBA '08,
described Garven as "excellent, dedicated and approachable... His discussion
bridged the gap between the practical application and academic theory."
ARIA initiated the Excellence in Teaching Award in
2007. This award recognizes excellence in risk management and insurance
teaching. Applicants have a distinguished record of excellent teaching
throughout their academic career. This award is a non-monetary award and is
awarded only in years when an exceptional candidate is identified.
About Baylor Business
Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business
holds to a visionary standard of excellence whereby integrity stands
shoulder to shoulder with analytic and strategic strengths to build leaders,
not simply careers. In addition to state-of-the-art skill development in the
functional areas of business -- accounting, finance, marketing, information
technology, management and others -- students develop ethics skills that
yield credibility and true leadership potential in today's organizations.
The most likely source of the review-overload
problem is that the reviewer pool has become too
constricted. Editors are relying too much on the
same set of reviewers. I'm guessing that many of the other 10,499 potential
reviewers in the ASA are never asked to pitch in. Another segment simply refuses
to review—burned out, tired of wasting time, or just plain selfish, their
critical contribution to the discipline is lost.
"The Peer-Review System is Broken," by Daniel J. Myers, Chronicle of
Higher Education's The Chronicle Review, September 4, 2009 , Page B4 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Peer-Review-System-Is-B/48187/
I fear writing this essay. I fear it because I'm
sure that some journal editor out there is going to see my name and think,
"Oh yeah, Dan Myers. We haven't asked him for a review in a while. He'd be
perfect for that paper on X." Please, no, I beg you, a thousand times, no.
In the past month, I have been asked to review not
one (which would be reasonable), or two (understandable), or three
(excessive), four, five, six, or even seven manuscripts for publication, but
indeed, a total of eight! While I confess to no small amount of pride in
becoming what must be my discipline's pre-eminent arbiter of scholarly
quality and its gatekeeper supreme, I really must object. It's getting
impossible to produce any of my own work because I'm spending so much time
assessing others'. And so far I'm only tallying journal manuscripts. On top
of that, I have tenure and promotion cases, grant proposals, book
manuscripts and prospectuses, and the everyday work of reading student
papers and dissertation drafts (tasks for which I'm actually drawing
salary).
Is this rate of review requests really necessary?
Well, let's take a look at my discipline, sociology. The American
Sociological Association claims to have some 14,000 members. Let's suppose
that my past month's review rate is the accepted standard. Furthermore,
imagine that only 75 percent (10,500) of ASA members are deemed acceptable
reviewers. With those numbers, the association membership could generate
more than one million reviews per year! Even if we cut the review rate to
four per month, we'd still be able to produce 500,000 reviews per year.
Let's take that thought experiment one step
further. Suppose a typical manuscript could claw its way through two rounds
of reviews in a year (pretty speedy by today's standards), receiving three
reviews on each round. Those 500,000 reviews could therefore handle almost
84,000 manuscripts each year, or six papers for every member of the ASA.
Prolific as we are, sociologists don't produce an average of six papers a
year, nor do we need a half-million journal-manuscript reviews to conduct
our business each year.
Now if I were an isolated case, you could simply
dismiss me as a crank and suggest that I learn to say no. Or if sociology
were unique in its reviewing practices, you could just tell us to get our
house in order. But I know from talking to colleagues in my own department,
in other departments, and in other disciplines that I'm not all that
isolated. I have many comrades (not "in arms" yet, but it is coming) who are
experiencing an unbearable overload of review duties. And that is not the
only problem with the review system.
Editors complain about frequent refusals from
potential referees, low quality and brevity of reviews, lack of engagement
with the papers' arguments and evidence, and the ever-increasing time it
takes referees to produce their reports. Authors, especially graduate
students and pretenure faculty members, also worry about the increased
length of the review process and consider compromising on where their
manuscript is published in hopes of getting another line on their CV before
hitting the job market or submitting their tenure packets.
What are the sources of these problems? First, some
journal editors are asking for too many reviews of each paper. Is it really
necessary to have three, four, or five reviews to make a decision? Second,
journal editors are far too reluctant to "reject without review." Many seem
to reason that if a paper is submitted, it deserves to be reviewed. I
disagree. By agreeing to review papers that have no chance of being
published in the journal, editors are hobbling their journal's ability to
give feedback where it really counts. Journals are not social-service
agencies required to provide feedback to every poor soul with a half-baked
idea. There are many ways to get feedback on one's work without submitting
it to the premier journal in one's field. Every review wasted on an unworthy
paper means fewer available for the papers that really need careful
attention. Likewise, editors may be giving too many "revise and resubmit"
decisions. It's nice to give authors a second chance, but the way most
review processes unfold, issuing the R&R doubles the amount of review effort
necessary for that paper. The paper ought to have more than just a chance—it
ought to have an awfully good chance if we're going to double the amount of
work that other people are putting into it.
Editors aren't the only ones creating the problem,
of course. Authors too often submit papers to journals that are beyond their
reach. Then, after the papers are rejected, the authors blindly submit them
to other journals, having paid little or no attention to the critiques
generated in the first submission. Reviewers write unengaged, useless
reviews, requiring editors to get more reviews before making a decision.
That produces an overload on other reviewers, who skim papers and write
hasty reviews, or take forever to get to their eighth review request of the
month.
The most likely source of the review-overload
problem is that the reviewer pool has become too constricted. Editors are
relying too much on the same set of reviewers. I'm guessing that many of the
other 10,499 potential reviewers in the ASA are never asked to pitch in.
Another segment simply refuses to review—burned out, tired of wasting time,
or just plain selfish, their critical contribution to the discipline is
lost.
Continued in article
Rankings of academic accounting journals ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#JournalRankings
"Textbooks for the Disabled," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed,
August 28, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/28/access
The Association of American Publishers and the
University of Georgia this week unveiled an electronic database aimed at
making it easier for blind, dyslexic and otherwise impaired college students
to get specialized textbooks in time for classes.
The database, called
AccessText,,
is designed to centralize the process by which
electronic versions of textbooks are requested by colleges and supplied by
publishers. Experts say it will allow disabled students to get their
textbooks more efficiently, help colleges save money and avoid lawsuits, and
protect publishers’ copyrights.
For students whose disabilities prevent them from
using traditional texts, the normally straightforward task of acquiring
books for their courses can be tedious and frustrating. Federal law requires
that colleges and universities provide disabled students equal access to
educational materials, but this is often easier said than done. College
officials have to track down and contact the publisher of every textbook
that each of its disabled students buys and request an electronic copy. If
such a copy exists -- the likelihood shrinks the older the book and the
smaller the publisher -- college officials still have to convert the file to
a format that can be read by whatever reading aid the student uses. If not,
the college has to wait, sometimes weeks, to obtain permission to scan the
book and create its own electronic version.
Once a college has an electronic copy, converting
to a readable format can be another complex process, says Sean Keegan,
associate director of assistive technology at Stanford University. Math and
science texts often arrive as scanned pages, and cannot always be easily
read by the character-recognition software the university uses to turn them
into standard electronic files, Keegan says. “That can take a longer amount
of time to process that material internally and turn it around and give that
to the student efficiently,” he says.
Meanwhile, delays in the process can make it
impossible for disabled students to prepare for and participate in classes.
“Students need to have a book in time so they can do the assigned reading
and study for tests and papers,” says Gaeir Dietrich, interim director of
high-tech training for the California Community Colleges system. “So if the
book doesn’t come until the term has been in session for three or four
weeks, that puts that student very far behind.” Some students have sued
colleges over such delays, she says.
AccessText aims to mitigate these woes by
streamlining the request and delivery process, says Ed McCoyd, executive
director for accessibility affairs at AAP.
“There’s a lot of transactional friction taking
place currently,” says McCoyd. “What AccessText is trying to do is take some
of that out of the transaction by having parties agree to streamlined rules
up front.”
Having colleges submit requests using the
AccessText portal should eliminate the need for the publishers to require
endless paperwork with each request to protect its copyrights, McCoyd says.
Under the system, the copyright protection agreements can be handled once,
during registration, and the requester’s bona fides can be verified by a
log-in.
Currently, colleges that get tired of waiting for
publishers to process the paperwork and procure an electronic copy of a text
sometimes just scan a text themselves to try to satisfy the needs of
disabled students in a timely fashion, says Dietrich.
AccessText is also set up to eliminate the need for
different colleges to convert the same text to a readable format once it is
acquired. Currently “numerous schools could be doing the exact same thing,
converting the same text,” says Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for
higher education at the publishers' association. Under the new system, “if
one school has already spent the time and the money to convert a file to a
format, they could advise the AccessText network, which could then make the
info available that it was still available in that format, and that school
could share it with another school” -- thereby sparing those colleges the
time and resources it would have used to convert the file themselves, he
says.
Eight major publishing houses paid a total of just
under $1 million to develop the AccessText network and maintain it through
its beta phase, which will end next July. From then on, it will sustain
itself by billing member colleges between $375 and $500 annually, depending
on size.
Dietrich notes that community colleges might not
benefit from the AccessText network as much as other institutions, since “we
have a lot more vocational classes and basic-skills classes, and a lot of
those books don’t come through those big publishers, they come through
specialized publishers,” she says. “It doesn’t solve that part of the
problem for us.”
The network includes 92 percent of all college
textbook publishers and is recruiting even more, according to AAP officials.
Bob Jensen's threads on technology aids for handicapped learners are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
Are students headed for the Facebook exits?
"Reports of Facebook's Death ... Exaggerated?" by Jeff Young, Chronicle of
Higher Education, August 28, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Reports-of-Facebooks-Death/7856/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Is the Facebook party breaking up? We still hear
that plenty of students and professors are addicted to the social-networking
site, but a
New York Times Magazine article out today
says that even though overall numbers on the site are up, a vocal group is
heading for the exits.
"I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like
it's kids getting tired of a new toy," one writer told the Times in
the very anecdotal account.
An article earlier this month in The Guardian took
note of the trend as well, arguing that the "cool cyberkids" are starting to
abandon Facebook because too many old fogies have showed up on the social
network.
Some professors have been part of the recent group
leaving Facebook. Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New
Media at George Mason University, left Facebook earlier this year and talked
about it on his podcast,
Digital Campus.
Will students' interest in Facebook fade this year?
Will professors lose interest? Or are reports of the site's demise greatly
exaggerted?
Bob Jensen's threads on social networking are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Jensen's Helpers for Case Writers
August 28, 2009 message from Patricia Walters
[patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]
Here's an apropos question given recent threads.
What do you believe are the best resources
available for learning how to write a good accounting case?
Are there any online resources?
(I should have checked Bob's website first!)
Pat
August 28, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Pat,
Becoming a case writer might entail a career shift in your “case.”
The number one thing that leads to great cases is access to information
inside a corporation or not-for-profit organization. It’s here where the
most prestigious universities with powerful alumni (e.g., Harvard, Wharton,
Stanford, etc. have a valuable edge). The rest of us have to do the best we
can.
Of course the prestigious schools also have professional case writing
experts who work alongside faculty, such that professors who really want to
write successful cases also have an edge when being on the faculty of
prestigious universities like Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford.
Having said this, there are countless cases that emerge from Cactus Gulch
Colleges of this world. Much depends upon the dedication to case writing and
case writing organizations ECCH ---
http://www.ecch.com/
My hero in this regard in Marilyn Taylor who got me involved in a number of
NACRA teaching workshops (my job was only to make presentations on education
technology). Marilyn is a management professor (University of Missouri in Kansas City) who has
been very active in the North American Case Research Association. Among
other things NACRA meets to critique each others’ cases, and critique they
do. This can lead to much better case writing if you’ve got a tough skin for
constructive criticism.
The NACRA home page is at
http://www.nacra.net/nacra/
Most really active faculty in NACRA have made a career choice to concentrate
writing efforts on cases. As a result they are great writers who seldom
appear in TAR, JAR, or JAE. But they do get their case published and enjoy
each others’ company.
NACRA reminds me of the annual poet critiquing conference that meets for a
couple of weeks every summer down the road from where I live --- in the
Robert Frost farmhouse museum. See my photograph and commentary on this way
of learning to write poetry ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070905.htm
The top case writers from Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton are not likely to
be active in NACRA, Active people in NACRA are more apt to come from Babson,
Bentley, Northeastern, and state universities like South Carolina.
Over the last four years
in my capacity as the Associate Editor of the Case Research Journal I
have reviewed numerous cases. Many of them had considerable potential but
were poorly developed. This is unfortunate because even though there is no
standard formula for writing effective cases there are certain guidelines
which I believe consistently lead to better cases. Therefore, at the request
of the North American Case Research Association, the purpose of this paper
is to discuss some of the guidelines I use when reviewing cases. I will
organize my discussion around the four criteria the Case Research Journal
uses for evaluating cases: (1) case focus, (2) case data, (3) case
organization, and (4) writing style.
"WRITING A PUBLISHABLE CASE: SOME GUIDELINES," by James J.
Chrisman ---
http://www.wacra.org/Writing%20a%20Publishable%20Case%20-%20Some%20Guidelines.pdf
Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M.
Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of
More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.
"What Will They Learn?" by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, August
26, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/08/26/what_will_they_learn
When parents plunk down $20, $30, $40 and maybe $50
thousand this fall for a year's worth of college room, board and tuition, it
might be relevant to ask: What will their children learn in return? The
American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) ask that question in their
recently released publication, "What Will They Learn: A Report on the
General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation's Leading Colleges and
Universities."
ACTA conducted research to see whether 100 major
institutions require seven key subjects: English composition, literature,
foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and
science. What ACTA found was found was alarming, reporting that "Even as our
students need broad-based skills and knowledge to succeed in the global
marketplace, our colleges and universities are failing to deliver. Topics
like U.S. government or history, literature, mathematics, and economics have
become mere options on far too many campuses. Not surprisingly, students are
graduating with great gaps in their knowledge -- and employers are
noticing."
The National Center for Education Statistics
reports that only 31 percent of college graduates can read and understand a
complex book. Employers complain that graduates of colleges lack the writing
and analytical skills necessary to succeed in the workplace. A 2006 survey
conducted by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families,
the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource
Management found that only 24 percent of employers thought graduates of
four-year colleges were "excellently prepared" for entry-level positions.
College seniors perennially fail tests of their civic and historical
knowledge.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni graded
the 100 surveyed colleges and universities on their general education
requirements. Forty-two institutions received a "D" or an "F" for requiring
two or fewer subjects. Twenty-five of them received an "F" for requiring one
or no subjects. No institution required all seven. Five institutions
received an "A" for requiring six general education subjects. They were
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Texas A&M, University
of Arkansas (Fayetteville), United States Military Academy (West Point) and
University of Texas at Austin. Twenty institutions received a "C" for
requiring three subjects and 33 received a "B" for requiring four or five
subjects. ACTA maintains a website keeping the tally at
Whatwilltheylearn.com.
ACTA says that "paying a lot doesn't get you a
lot." Generally, the higher the tuition, the less likely there are rigorous
general education requirements. Average tuition and fees at the 11 schools
that require no subjects is $37,700; however, average tuition at the five
schools that require six subjects is $5,400. Average tuition fees at the top
national universities and liberal arts colleges are $35,000 (average grade
is "F").
Dishonest and manipulative college administrators
might try to rebut the report saying, "We have general education
requirements." At one major state university, students may choose from over
100 different classes to meet a history requirement. At other colleges,
students may satisfy general education requirements with courses such as
"Introduction to Popular TV and Movies" and "Science of Stuff." Still other
colleges allow the study of "Bob Dylan" to meet a literature requirement and
"Floral Art" to meet a natural science requirement.
ACTA's report concludes by saying that a coherent
core reflects, in the words of federal judge Jose Cabranes, "a series of
choices -- the choice of the lasting over the ephemeral; the meritorious
over the meretricious; the thought-provoking over the merely
self-affirming." A general education curriculum, when done well, is one that
helps students "ensure that their studies -- and their lives -- are
well-directed."
ACTA says that a recent study reports that 89
percent of institutions surveyed said they were in the process of modifying
or assessing their programs. What these and other institutions need is for
boards of trustees, parents and alumni to provide the necessary incentive to
administrators and there's little more effective in opening the closed minds
of administrators than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.
Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John
M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of
More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.
Our Compassless Colleges: What are students really not learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz
Ga. Jury Awards $450K to Student Whistle Blower
A state jury in Georgia on Thursday awarded $450,000 to
a former student at Appalachian Technical College who was expelled after she
complained to administrators there about the performance of an instructor, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reported. According to the newspaper's account,
Sara Castle told officials at the college that an instructor in the nursing
program in which she was enrolled repeatedly dismissed students from class
early, making it impossible for them to complete their required clinical
training. The instructor was fired, but Castle herself was soon expelled, and
she sued. The jury awarded her $400,000 in punitive damages and $50,000 for
emotional duress, the newspaper said. Georgia's attorney general represented the
technical college, and a spokesman said the state disagreed with the verdict and
would consider its options.
Inside Higher Ed, August 28, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/28/qt#206796
Money Market Funds Are Not as Risk Free as Bank Accounts
What very few people are talking about, however, is
a more radical solution to the moral hazard question raised by money market
funds. Maybe the right approach now is to acknowledge the truth. Money market
funds are not, in fact, turbocharged bank accounts. They are investment
vehicles. However “safe” the securities they invest in, they contain an element
of risk. Indeed, the very reason they yield more than savings accounts is that
they are riskier. That’s how investing works. So maybe, in this post-Reserve
Fund world, it’s time for the industry — and investors — to stop pretending that
money funds are risk-free. As it turns out, there is a pretty simple way to do
this. As it also turns out, the money market fund industry is dead-set against
it.
Joe Nocera, "It’s Time to Admit That Money Funds Involve Risk," The New York
Times, August 28, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/business/29nocera.html?_r=2
Why Active Investing is a Negative Sum Game
William F. Sharpe has a great article in the
January/February 1991 issue of The Financial Analysts Journal (Vol. 47, No.1,
pages 7-9). The title is "The Arithmetic of Active Management." It should be
required reading for academics and investment professionals alike . . . Active
management is always a zero sum game, before fees, expenses, and trading costs,
regardless of market conditions. If there are active winners, they win at the
expense of active losers. And active management is always a negative sum game
after costs. This is an algebraic condition, not a hypothesis. We call it
equilibrium accounting. Moreover, our research on individual mutual funds says
that it's impossible to identify true winners on a reliable basis, even if one
ignores the costs that active funds impose on investors. Funds that seem to be
winners, based on past returns, were probably lucky rather than smart. After
costs, that is in terms of returns to investors, there is no game to play; there
is no evidence of managers with enough information to cover costs, other than on
a purely chance basis. And there is no evidence that this depends on market
conditions. If you are interested, see our paper
Mutual Fund Performance.
Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, Q&A ---
http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/qa/
Bob Jensen's investment helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
"Madoff Inquiry Was Fumbled by S.E.C., Report Says," by David Stout, The
New York Times, September 2, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/business/03madoff.html?_r=1&hp
In a damning report on the S.E.C.’s performance,
the agency’s inspector general, H. David Kotz, said numerous “red flags” had
been missed by the agency, including some warnings sounded by journalists,
well before Mr. Madoff’s
Ponzi scheme imploded in 2008.
Mr. Kotz concluded that, “despite numerous credible
and detailed complaints,” the S.E.C. never properly investigated Mr. Madoff
“and never took the necessary, but basic, steps to determine if Madoff was
operating a Ponzi scheme.”
“Had these efforts been made with appropriate
follow-up at any time beginning in June of 1992 until December 2008, the
S.E.C. could have uncovered the Ponzi scheme well before Madoff confessed,”
the report concluded.
That Mr. Madoff’s scheme, estimated to have fleeced
as much as $65 billion from investors who ranged from the famous to
middle-class people who entrusted him with their life savings, was not
caught earlier was not because of his cleverness, the report said. Rather,
it was because the S.E.C. fumbled three agency exams and two investigations
because of inexperience, incompetence and lack of internal communications.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
I must be psychic, because I've been saying this all along ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
So has Amy Dunbar ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm
"The Medium is Not the Message," by Jonathan Kaplan, Inside Higher Ed,
August 11, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/08/11/kaplan
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Introduction
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education
released a report that looked at 12 years' worth of education studies, and
found that online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face
instruction.
The study, "An Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A
Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," stated that “students
who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average,
than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face
instruction.”
Except for one article,
on this Web site,
you probably didn’t hear about it -- and neither did anyone else.
But imagine for a moment that the report came to the opposite conclusion.
I’m sure that if the U.S. Department of Education had published a report
showing that students in online learning environments performed worse,
there would have been a major outcry in higher education with calls to shut
down distance-learning programs and close virtual campuses.
I believe the reason that the recent study elicited so little commentary is
due to the fact that it flies in the face of the biases held by some across
the higher education landscape. Yet this study confirms what those of us
working in distance education have witnessed for years: Good teaching helps
students achieve, and good teaching comes in many forms.
We know that online learning requires devout attention on the part of both
the professor and the student -- and a collaboration between the two -- in a
different way from that of a face-to-face classroom. These critical aspects
of online education are worth particular mention:
- Greater student engagement: In an
online classroom, there is no back row and nowhere for students to hide.
Every student participates in class.
- Increased faculty attention: In most
online classes, the faculty’s role is focused on mentoring students and
fostering discussion. Interestingly, many faculty members choose to
teach online because they want more student interaction.
- Constant access: The Internet is open
24/7, so students can share ideas and “sit in class” whenever they have
time or when an idea strikes -- whether it be the dead of night or
during lunch. Online learning occurs on the student’s time, making it
more accessible, convenient, and attainable.
At Walden University, where
I am president, we have been holding ourselves accountable for years, as
have many other online universities, regarding assessment. All universities
must ensure that students are meeting program outcomes and learning what
they need for their jobs. To that end, universities should be better able to
demonstrate -- quantitatively and qualitatively -- the employability and
success of their students and graduates.
Recently, we examined the
successes of Walden graduates who are teachers in the Tacoma, Wash., public
school system, and found that students in Walden teachers’ classes tested
with higher literacy rates than did students taught by teachers who earned
their master’s from other universities. There could be many reasons for
this, but, especially in light of the U.S. Department of Education study, it
seems that online learning has contributed meaningfully to their becoming
better teachers.
In higher education, there
is still too much debate about how we are delivering content: Is it online
education, face-to-face teaching, or hybrid instruction? It’s time for us to
stop categorizing higher education by the medium of delivery and start
focusing on its impact and outcomes.
Recently, President Obama remarked, “I think there’s a possibility that
online education can provide, especially for people who are already in the
workforce and want to retrain, the chance to upgrade their skills without
having to quit their job.” As the U.S. Department of Education study
concluded, online education can do that and much more.
But Kaplan above ignores some of the dark side aspects of distance education and
education technology in general ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
The biggest hurdle, in my opinion, is that if distance education is done
correctly with intensive online communications, instructors soon become burned
out. In an effort to avoid burn out, much of the learning effectiveness is lost.
Hence the distance education paradox.
Jerry Trites in Nova Scotia forwarded the link below:
"Online learning boosts student performance," by Don Tapscott, Grownup
Digital, August 20, 2009 ---
http://www.grownupdigital.com/index.php/2009/08/online-learning-boosts-student-performance/
The U.S. Department of Education has just released
a report comparing traditional face-to-face classroom instruction to
learning supplemented or completely replaced by online learning. The
conclusion: “Students who took all or part of their class online performed
better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional
face-to-face instruction.”
The most effective teaching method blended
face-to-face learning with online learning. The study notes that this
blended learning often includes additional learning time because students
can proceed at their own pace and lets them repeat material they find
difficult.
The 93-page report, entitled an Evaluation of
Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of
Online Learning Studies, was conducted by SRI International. Researchers
looked at more than a thousand studies conducted between 1996 to 2008.
Analysts then screened these studies to find those that (a) contrasted an
online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes,
(c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information
to calculate an effect size.
Most of the comparative studies were done in
colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, including
medical training, higher education and corporate training. The researchers
said they were surprised to find so few rigorous studies of K-12 students,
so the report urges caution when applying the results to younger students.
Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an
educational psychologist at SRI International, was quoted on the New York
Times’ website that “The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating
that online learning today is not just better than nothing - it actually
tends to be better than conventional instruction.”
The story notes that until fairly recently, online
education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line
correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based
video, instant messaging and collaboration tools. The study was limited to
research of Web-based instruction (i.e., eliminating studies of video- and
audio-based telecourses or stand-alone, computer-based instruction).
The real promise of online education is providing
learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is
possible in classrooms. In Grown Up Digital, I describe this as
“student-focused” learning as opposed to traditional “teacher-focused”
broadcast techniques with the teacher in front of a large class. The story
correctly notes that online learning enables more “learning by doing,” which
many students find more engaging and useful.
The moral of the story: Students would be better
served with much of the curriculum being online. And to repeat what I said
in the book, this does not mean a diminished role for teachers. Their time
would be freed up to give extremely valuable one-on-one teaching.
August 28, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
One of the most successful distance education programs in the world, in
my viewpoint, is the masters degree program headquartered in Vancouver
called the Chartered Accountancy School of Business ---
http://www.casb.com/
If you live in Western Canada, you obtain your
CA designation by enrolling in the CA School of Business. The CASB
program is flexible, combining the successful completion of a series of
online modules with a three-year term of professional experience. Find
out more about our program.
Some years back I was one of the outside reviewers brought in to examine
CASB. I was impressed by the quality of this degree program and the tough
standards of the program.
CASB is one of the few competency-based graduate programs in the world.
By competency-based I mean that instructors have inputs in designing
examinations for all students in the program, but at the same time, have no
input in grading individual students. There can be no instructor-option
subjective factors when assigning grades, which means no changes in grade
for effort and interpersonal relationships.
The success of the CASB program, however, is a bit biased as is the
success of the ADEPT Masters of Engineering distance education program in
Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Firstly, students admitted to
these programs were top undergraduate students majoring in very difficult
concentrations. Secondly, in the case of the CASB, the students are all
employed full time in Chartered Accountancy firms and are under heavy
pressure to do well at all stages of the three year program.
Students do meet face-to-face on some weekends (monthly?) for some live
classes --- case studies and examinations..
One other competency-based distance education program that has been
booming in recent years is Western Governors University in the U.S. ---
http://www.wgu.edu/
Most other distance education programs allow instructors more latitude in
assigning grades.
Bob Jensen
The one thing to keep in mind is that there is no one pedagogy that is best
in all circumstances. And our best students are probably going to get A grades
under any pedagogy ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AssessmentIssues
The failing of distance education lies more in the instructors than the
students. If done well, distance education tends to burn out instructors and
takes an extraordinary amount of time relative to teaching onsite. If done
poorly, the culprit is most likely the tendency to assign part-time or otherwise
non-tenured instructors to the distance education courses. At the other extreme
we have the dregs of the tenured faculty assigned to the distance education
division.
The really bright spots in distance education are the times when the
practicing professionals who are really good at their craft take on a distance
education course either as a public service or as an experiment to see how they
like teaching. The University of Phoenix has been good at attracting some top
professionals.
The
Chronicle of Higher Education
has extensively studied performance of distance education
One such study was conducted by senior editor Blumenstyk
The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more
than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about
the economics of for-profit education,
the ways that online institutions
market themselves, and the demise
of
the 50-percent rule. About the
only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online
university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has
completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University
of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade --
in a podcast with Paul Fain, a
Chronicle reporter.
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) ---
http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/
·
All course materials (including textbooks) online; No additional
textbooks to purchase
·
$1,600 fee for the course and materials
·
Woman instructor with respectable academic credentials and
professional experience in course content
·
Instructor had good communications with students and between
students
·
Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in course, most of
whom were mature with full-time day jobs
·
30% of grade from team projects
·
Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were not fully
utilized by Goldie
·
Goldie earned a 92 (A-)
·
She gave a positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take
other courses if she had the time
·
She considered the course to have a
heavy workload
I don't usually post advertisements to my Web page unless I think they fit into
the context of recent discussion
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Through its online
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expertise.
A September 2, 2008 email message from AccountingWEB.com
[emailbulletin@mail.accountingweb.com]
There is strong empirical support for online learning,
especially the enlightening SCALE experiments at the University of Illinois ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
August 11, 2009 reply from Steve Markoff
[smarkoff@KIMSTARR.ORG]
Bob:
I've always believed that the
role of the teacher is one of FACILITATOR. My role in the classroom is
making it EASIER for information to move from one place to another - from
point A to point B. This could be from textbook to student, it could be
from the outside world to the student, from another student to the student,
from the student him or herself to that same student AND from teacher to
student (me to them). In defining the word 'teaching', I think many people
overemphasize the last transition that I mentioned, thinking that the
primary movement of information is from them(the teacher) to the students.
In fact, it constitutes a minority of total facilitated information flow in
a college classroom. I think this misunderstanding leads many to
underestimate the value of other sources in the education process other than
themselves. Online content is just one of many alternative sources.
Unfortunately, online formats do
allow certain professors to hide behind the electronic cloak and
politely excuse themselves from the equation, which greatly hurts the
student. Also, online formats can be fertile ground for professors who lack
not only the desire to 'teach' but the ability and thus become mere
administrators versus teachers.
steve
Hi John and Pat and Others,
I would not say that out loud to Amy Dunbar or Denny Beresford that they’re
easy graders ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm
I would not say that out loud to the graduates of two principles of
accounting weed out courses year after year at Brigham Young
University where classes meet on relatively rare occasion for inspiration
about accountancy but not technical learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Try to tell the graduates of Stanford University’s ADEPT Masters of
Electrical Engineering program that they had an easier time of it because
the entire program was online.
There’s an interesting article entitled how researchers misconstrue
causality:
Like elaborately plumed birds … we preen and strut and display our
t-values.” That was Edward Leamer’s uncharitable description of his
profession in 1983.
“Cause and Effect: Instrumental variable help to isolate causal
relationships, but they can be taken too far,” The Economist, August
15-21, 20098 Page 68.
It is often the case that distance education courses are taught by
non-tenured instructors, and non-tenured instructors may be easier with
respect to grading than tenured faculty because they are even more in need
of strong teaching evaluations --- so as to not lose their jobs. The problem
may have nothing whatsoever to do with online versus onsite education ---
ergo misconstrued causality.
I think it’s very rewarding to look at grading in formal studies
using the same full-time faculty teaching sections of online versus onsite
students. By formal study, I mean using the same instructors, the same
materials, and essentially the same examinations. The major five-year,
multimillion dollar study that first caught my eye was the SCALE experiments
on the campus of the University of Illinois where 30 courses from various
disciplines were examined over a five year experiment.
Yes the SCALE experiments showed that some students got higher grades
online, notably B students who became A students and C students who became A
students. The online pedagogy tended to have no effect on D and F students
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
Listen to Dan Stone’s audio about the SCALE Experiments ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm
But keep in mind that in the SCALE experiments, the same instructor of a
course was grading both the online and onsite sections of the same course.
The reason was not likely to be that online sections were easier. The SCALE
experiments collected a lot of data pointing to more intense communications
with instructors and more efficient use of student’s time that is often
wasted in going to classes.
The students in the experiment were full time on campus students, such that
the confounding problems of having adult part-time students was not a factor
in the SCALE experiments of online, asynchronous learning.
A Statement About Why the SCALE Experiments Were Funded
ALN = Asynchronous Learning
We are particularly interested in new
outcomes that may be possible through ALN. Asynchronous computer networks
have the potential to
improve contact with faculty,
perhaps making self-paced learning a realizable goal for some off- and
on-campus students. For example, a motivated student could progress more
rapidly toward a degree. Students who are motivated but find they cannot
keep up the pace, may be able to slow down and take longer to complete a
degree, and not just drop out in frustration. So we are interested in what
impact ALN will have on outcomes such as time-to-degree and student
retention. There are many opportunities where ALN may contribute to another
outcome: lowering the cost of education, e.g., by naturally introducing new
values for old measures such as student-faculty ratios. A different kind of
outcome for learners who are juggling work and family responsibilities,
would be to be able to earn a degree or certification at home. This latter
is a special focus for us.
Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation's Program in
Learning Outside the Classroom at
http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/
Another study that I love to point to was funded by the Chronicle of
Higher Education. Read about when one of the Chronicle’s senior
editors took a Governmental Accounting Course at the University of Phoenix
during which the instructor of the course had not idea that Goldie
Blumenstyk
was assessing how difficult or how easy the course was for students in
general. I think Goldie’s audio report of her experience is still available
from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Goldie came away from the
course exhausted.
The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered
distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's
written stories about
the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions
market themselves, and the demise of
the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed,
was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally
took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and
nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales
from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade --
in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) ---
http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/
· All course
materials (including textbooks) online; No additional textbooks to purchase
· $1,600 fee for the
course and materials
· Woman instructor
with respectable academic credentials and experience in course content
· Instructor had
good communications with students and between students
· Total of 14 quite
dedicated online students in course, most of whom were mature with full-time
day jobs
· 30% of grade from
team projects
· Many unassigned
online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized by Goldie
· Goldie earned a 92
(A-)
· She gave a
positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take other courses if she
had the time
·
She considered the course to have a heavy workload
"U. of Phoenix Reports on Its Students' Academic
Achievement," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education,
June 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3115n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released November 13,
2006, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering
provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of
engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers
---
http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/index.cfm
"The Engaged E-Learner," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed,
November 13, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/13/nsse
August 27, 2009 reply from Patricia Walters
[patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]
This email actually has a lot of related but
seemingly unrelated questions. Thanks in advance.
Anyone know what type of compensation schools like
the University of Phoenix offer to their instructors?
Is this compensation similar to adjunct
compensation at most regular Universities?
My assumption is that full-time faculty
compensation is comparable regardless of whether they teach on- or "off-"
line but I could be mistaken.
Anyone know what the normal course load would be
for an on-line instructor? (Amy?) Is is comparable to their colleagues in
off-line classrooms?
As someone who spends much of her "free" time
learning her avocations in workshops and off-line classes (even though
youtube has good knitting videos), this is a whole new world for me.
The closest I've come to on-line teaching is
collaborative review sessions for my exec students. I decided that these
"in-between" calls and on-line sessions were essential if I was going to
keep them on track during the month between in person classes. These
sessions were actually more work for me than calling them into the classroom
because all of the "lecture slides" had to be prepared "in good form" in
advance.
Pat
August 27, 2009 message from Amy Dunbar
[Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
Hi Pat,
I can respond to a couple of your questions:
>My assumption is that full-time faculty
compensation is comparable regardless of whether they teach on- or "off-"
line but I could be mistaken.
>Anyone know what the normal course load
would be for an on-line instructor? (Amy?) Is is comparable to their
colleagues in off-line classrooms?
I teach four sections of ACCT 5571, Taxation
for Business Entities. Three sections are in the summer and have between 85
and 105 students total. We cap sections at 35 students. I teach one
section in the fall, and occasionally I have an overload for a FTF PhD
seminar. Our offload courses are paid at the same rate whether they are
online of FTF.
I just finished reading a couple archive
articles on online teaching from the Chronicle of Higher Education, one
write who hated online teaching and another who loved it. I am one who
loves online teaching, but I miss being the “sage on the stage” on
occasion. But that’s because of my wants, not because I think it is a more
effective way to teach. There are ways to overcome every obstacle the
negative article described, with perhaps time being the toughest one to
handle. I have noticed, however, over the years that students use AIM, my
chat tool of choice, to contact me less often, but instead work with other
students online more often. Perhaps my materials are becoming better over
time, so there is less confusion. I created my own online text with links
to spreadsheets, videos, and self-tests incorporated in the modules. In
addition, I create new homework sets every semester because I know my old
ones are out there in cyberspace. I do not charge any textbook fee because
my modules are personal, incorporating pictures of grandchildren on
occasion, and certainly humor here and there. I really enjoy playing with
technology, so teaching online gives me a chance to explore new ways of
providing learning tools.
Perhaps the biggest advantage we have at UConn
is that we have TAs for our MSA courses. My TA was one of my top students,
and he applied to become my TA after he earned his MSA. He handles one of
the 3 scheduled nights of office hours, works on the homework sets (either
he writes them and I review them or vice versa), and he grades the three
Excel projects after I run them through a grading macro. I generally go
online at various times besides the scheduled office hours, which run from 7
to 10 three nights a week, with the deal that if anyone is online needing
help we stay online to help. Thursdays are my toughest days because I am
frequently on until 11 or 11:30. I also log on AIM when students set up a
time they want to meet.
My students meet at least once a week in a
group chat session, and they post the chats on the group boards (or forums
as some instructors call them).. The most time consuming thing that I do is
read the chats which sometimes go on for several hours, depending on how
lengthy the homework quizzes are. I create a summary of the week, using
snippets of chat that made me laugh, cry, or go omg. I do not use the
student names, but as the semester goes on they try to figure out what will
get captured in the summary of the week. I also can figure out where
students are having trouble when more than one group is struggling with an
issue, and I can respond by revising the content module. I also have boards
that are dedicated to the content modules, the homework (quizzes), projects,
and exams. I praise students who find errors or confusing wording. The
course is very interactive. At the end of the semester, I feel the same
pangs of loss that I felt when my FTF classes ended. In many ways, I know
my online students better and many stay in touch.
That was way more than you wanted to know, but
I get carried away when I talk about online teaching. And now I am going
back to my vacation. Today is the last day in an awesome week at Bar Harbor
Maine in Acadia and Bristol Rhode Island in Colt State Park.
Amy
UConn
September 1, 2009 message from Hossein Nouri
[hnouri@TCNJ.EDU]
I am wondering how those teaching on-line courses
give recommendation letters. Is only academic performance evaluated in the
recommendation? i.e., is it possible to evaluate a student on team work,
character, etc. when on-line teaching is used?
Hossein Nouri
September 2 reply from Bob Jensen
Outstanding distance education teachers are more about how much you got
inside the head of a student rather than knowing what they look like. Great
distance education teachers like Amy Dunbar will tell you that online is
often the best way to get inside a student's head ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm This is
especially so with her instant messaging (IM or AIM) messaging with
students.
There are many important variables that affect our ability to recommend
students or former students on some basis other than grades on projects,
examinations, and courses. Firstly, there is the issue of class size. I
think Harvard Law School and Business School live classes often have over 90
students. I don't think I would be able to get to know each student very
well. I suspect I would have to search for records to remember where every
student is from, each student's undergraduate major, each student's writing
ability, each student's self confidence, etc.
Harvard's distance education courses are sometimes much smaller where I
might be able to get inside a student's head much better. This is especially
the case for shy students or some handicapped students like hearing impaired
students.
One important variable in recommending a student is speaking skill. Live
classes, especially case courses, make it possible to know more about each
student's speaking skill in classes of under 30 students. How much air time
do each of 90 students get in a 90-minute case discussion class? Remember
that the instructor probably takes up a third or more of the time asking
questions and making comments.
Another factor in a letter of recommendation is recall of a student's
writing ability. I suspect that in distance education courses with lots of
instructor-student communications, that the distance education courses have
an edge on this one.
Another factor in a letter of recommendation is the student's team
skills. Chat rooms and online team projects sometimes have an edge here
because it is easier for the student to monitor communications between team
members. And there can be more of a long-term record if such written
communications are archived for years.
One last point is that, unless a professor has been really close with a
student and writes pages for letters of recommendation, I'm not sure what
letters of recommendation are really worth. This is the era of litigation.
Many (most?) professors will not write negative letters of recommendation
about any student or colleague. I wouldn’t.
Having said that, I taught live courses most of my career with very small
graduate classes (usually less than 25 students). Virtually all students who
feared a negative letter never asked me to write a letter of recommendation.
Hence, I only had to write positive letters, and I usually tried to play to
the strengths of the student that I'd learned onsite and online. On
occasion, I wrote very long supportive letters, especially for my former
students who, after working in practice, were seeking admission to doctoral
programs.
I honestly think I could've written the same recommendation letters had I
known the students only online. One exception might've been the issue of
speaking skills. But if the student was a lousy speaker I probably would’ve
not mentioned it in a recommendation letter in any case.
Bob Jensen
Post Script
I recently wrote several
letters of recommendation for somebody on the AECM that I’ve never met
face-to-face.
Of course I had that
person’s resume and an archive of all that person’s messaging on the AECM. I
also sneaked a bit and went to RateMyProfessor where I found many good
student evaluations (even though I realize that submissions to
RateMyProfessor are haphazard and self-selecting).
In my letters of
recommendation, however, I made it very clear that I’d never met this person
face-to-face.
Having said this, I would
never have recommended this person if I also did not have important private
email messaging that let me know more about this person than anybody else on
the AECM and enough messaging to know that this person has become a close
friend.
This is an example of getting into someone’s head from afar.
September 2, 2009 message from Amy Dunbar
[Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
Harry and Hossein,
I write reference letters regarding personal
characteristics based on my interaction with students and their
student/student interaction in AIM chat sessions and discussion board
postings. For example, enthusiasm and leadership skills come through
clearly. On occasion, I am so impressed with a student, I tell him/her I
would be happy to write a reference letter in the future if needed. As Bob
noted, if there are skills, such as public speaking, that I do not observe,
I do not evaluate those skills.
Bob, thanks for all your kudos, but I have no doubt
there are many online educators who would leave me in their dust. I attended
a faculty gathering at UConn yesterday that made me realize once again that
many educators are incorporating technology into their classes with great
success. The faculty who impress me are the program directors, like Andy
Rosman, our MSA director, and Bruce Lubich at Maryland, who have the vision
for how to design online programs. I simply deliver a class along with many
other faculty. And as in FTF classes, the most important characteristic, imo,
is simply to care about your students.
Amy Dunbar
UConn
Online education is now part of "fabric" of public universities, a new
study finds. But teaching on the Web is a lot of work, and professors are not
happy about lack of support from administrators.
"Going For Distance," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, August
31, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/31/survey
Online education is no
longer a peripheral phenomenon at public universities, but many academic
administrators are still treating it that way.
So says
a comprehensive study released today by the
Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) and the Sloan
National Commission on Online Learning, which gathered survey responses from
more than 10,700 faculty members and 231 interviews with administrators,
professors, and students at APLU institutions.
“I think it’s a call to
action,” said Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts and
chair of the Sloan online learning commission. “The leadership of
universities has been trying to understand exactly how [online education]
fits into their strategic plans, and what this shows is that faculty are
ahead of the institutions in these online goals.”
According to the study, professors are open to
teaching online courses (defined in the study as courses where at least 80
percent of the course is administered on the Web), but do not believe they
are receiving adequate support from their bosses. On the whole, respondents
to the faculty survey rated public universities “below average” in seven of
eight categories related to online education, including support for online
course development and delivery, protection of intellectual property,
incentives for developing and delivering online courses, and consideration
of online teaching activity in promotion and tenure decisions.
Still, more than a third of the faculty respondents
had developed and taught an online course.
“The urban legend out there was that many faculty
out there don’t want to participate” in online education, said Wilson.
“Contrary to popular myths, faculty at all ages and levels are
participating.”
Indeed, neither seniority nor tenure status held a
significant bearing on whether a professor had ever developed or taught an
online course. At the time the survey was administered, there were more
professors with at least 20 years’ experience teaching an online course than
professors with five years’ experience or less.
This despite the fact that developing and teaching
a course online is more taxing than doing the same in a classroom --
according to the survey respondents, teaching online isn’t easy. “Faculty
who get involved in online teaching have to be more reflective about their
teaching,” Wilson said. Professors need to organize lecture notes and other
materials with more care. They get more feedback from students. It’s more
apparent when a student is falling behind and needs special attention.
Almost two-thirds of the faculty said it takes more
effort to teach a course online than in a classroom, while 85 percent said
more effort is required to develop one. While younger professors seem to
have an easier time teaching online than older ones, more than half of
respondents from the youngest faculty group agreed it was more
time-consuming. Nearly 70 percent of all professors cited the extra effort
necessary to develop Web courses as a crucial barrier to teaching online.
So if teaching an online course is a ton of work
and support from administrators is lacking, why bother doing it? Most
professors said they are motivated by their students’ need for flexible
access to course materials, and a belief that the Web allows them to reach
certain types of student more effectively.
“As a faculty member, when you’re teaching online,
suddenly you have to be teaching 24/7,” said Samuel Smith, president
emeritus of Washington State University. “…It’s more difficult, but the
students get more contact.”
Given the extra work, more than 60 percent of
faculty see inadequate compensation as a barrier to the further development
of online courses. “If these rates of participation among faculty are going
to continue to grow, institutions will have do a better job acknowledging
the additional time and effort on the part of the faculty member,” said Jeff
Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and the study’s lead
researcher. For some, that might mean that their online work should figure
into tenure and promotion decisions. For others, “acknowledgment” might
equate to some extra cash in their paycheck.
This is not a new request -- nor is the fact that
it takes longer to develop and administer a college course online a new
revelation. The American Federation of Teachers report on guidelines for
good practice in distance education acknowledges that it takes “anywhere
from 66 to 500 percent longer” to prepare an online course than a
face-to-face one, and “additional compensation should be provided to faculty
to meet the extensive time commitments of distance education.” The report
noted that only half of the faculty it surveyed reported receiving extra
compensation. That was in 2000.
The authors of today's APLU study conclude by
recommending that public universities not only institute policies that
“acknowledge and recognize” professors’ online education efforts, but also
work develop “mechanisms that effectively incorporate online learning into
the fabric and missions of the institutions.”
“It’s now a factual statement that online learning
is woven into the fabric of higher education,” Wilson said. “It has grown
faster over the last six years than any other sector of higher education …
and it will keep growing.”
Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Dream on and think twice if you really win the lottery
I want younger women, faster horses, and older whiskey
Erika wants give it all to our children
Must be a gender difference thing
"How to Lose $3 Million in Six Years," by Mike Krumboltz, Buzz on Yahoo,
September 1, 2009 ---
http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/92967?fp=1
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar
Stop us if this sounds familiar: A very lucky
person wins the lottery and expects life to change for the better, but
instead, things go horribly wrong. It's a story as old as the hills, but
each time it happens, it causes a huge commotion in Search. The latest
"victim" of sudden wealth is a young woman from the U.K. who won millions of
bucks several years ago, only to lose the vast majority of it shortly
thereafter.
Callie Rogers was just 16 when she won a whopping
$3 million in the lottery. Six years later, she reports that she blew untold
sums on drugs, partying, exotic cars, and breast implants. A staggering
$730,000 went to designer clothes alone, Ms. Rogers explains in an
article from AOL.
Says Rogers: "I honestly wish I'd never won the
lottery money — and knowing what I know now I should have just given it all
back to them." She's currently left with around $32,000.
In these trying economic times, Ms. Rogers will
likely find little sympathy. Still, it's worth noting that she's hardly the
first big winner who wished she'd never bought a ticket. There is such a
thing as the
lottery curse: As mentioned in a
previous
Buzz Log, there are numerous cases of lotto
winners getting divorced due to stress and losing everything from poor
investments. A few have even died at the hands of greedy relatives. A
2007
article from ABC will fill you in on a few more
examples.
Knowing she's not the first jackpot winner to
suffer hardship won't make her life any easier. But perhaps Ms. Rogers can
take some comfort from the fact that there are others out there with eerily
similar stories: They won big then lost big, and often wish they'd never
even played.
"Lottery winners: The myth and reality," by H. Roy Kaplan, Journal of
Gambling Studies, September 1987 ---
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p04l3m80361q5782/
This paper is based on a study of 576 lottery
winners from 12 states. Respondents to a mailed questionnaire included
winners of sums ranging from $50,000 to millions. The data indicate that
popular myths and stereotypes about winners were inaccurate. Specifically,
winners came from various education and employment backgrounds and they were
clustered in the higher income categories than the general population
indicating that lotteries might not be as regressive as popularly believed.
Winners were older than the general population and more often male (60
versus 40%). There was significant association between the amount a person
won and his or her work behavior. Individuals with psychologically and
financially rewarding jobs continued working regardless of the amount they
won, while people who worked in low paying semi-skilled and unskilled jobs
were far more likely to quit the labor force. Contrary to popular beliefs,
winners did not engage in lavish spending sprees and instead gave large
amounts of their winnings to their children and their churches. The most
common expenditures were for houses, automobiles and trips. It was found
that overall, winners were well-adjusterd, secure and generally happy from
the experience.
This study was funded by a grant from the Institute for Socioeconomic
Studies in White Plains, New York.
Jensen Comment
In reality, I would get a bigger and better computer, Erika would spend a bit on
the house and gardens, and we'd give the rest away (not all of it necessarily to
our children, although we do love and admire our children). A lot depends upon
how much we actually win net of taxes.
The share I give away would be to charities for younger women, faster horses,
and older whiskey.
Question
What would Socrates say about our computerized and networked world?
"Empathy in the Virtual World," by G. Anthony Gorry, Chronicle of
Higher Education, August 31, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Empathy-in-the-Virtual-World/48180/
We live increasingly "on the screen," deeply
engaged with the patterns of light and energy upon which so much of modern
life depends. At work we turn our backs to our coworkers, immersing
ourselves in the flood of information engendered by countless computers. At
the end of the workday, computers tag along with us in cellphones and music
players. Still others, embedded in video displays, wait at home. They are
all parts of an enormous electronic web woven on wires or only air. We
marvel at what we can do with this technology. We turn less attention,
however, to what the technology may be doing to us.
Recall Plato's allegory of the cave, in which
Socrates tells of prisoners who are rigidly chained in a cave, facing a wall
with a fire burning brightly behind them. Between the fire and the
prisoners, people carry vessels, statues of animals made of wood and stone,
and other things back and forth on a walkway. Held fast, the prisoners see
only shadows on the wall and hear only echoes of the voices behind them.
Mistaking these for reality, the prisoners vie with one another to name the
shadowy shapes, and they judge one another by their facility for quickly
recognizing the images.
A sorry scene, we say—a pale imitation of what life
should be, a cruel punishment. We do not need philosophers or scientists to
tell us that without social interaction, we would not be human. But what has
the prisoners' plight to do with us? We are not in chains. We have many
face-to-face engagements with others. And the centuries between that cave
and the present have seen monumental developments in human consciousness:
the emergence of language and imagination, and the invention of tools of
communication that have enabled rhapsodes, scribes, and novelists to thrust
us into lives real and invented. Today digital technology extends that
reach, making possible ever-beguiling fabrications for entertainment and
escape. It has put us at the gate of a magical garden crowded with many
others who, from the flickers on a screen, clamor for our attention and
concern.
If Socrates could wander the halls of our
workplaces or visit our homes, he would be amazed by the advance of our
multimedia computers over the primitive technology of his cave with its
statues and firelight. Technology, however, never bestows its bounty freely,
and Socrates might make us a bit uncomfortable with questions about the role
that machines play in modern life: Do they bind us in subtle ways? Are they
drawing us into such intimacy that life on the screen will soon replace the
face-to-face community as the primary setting for social interaction? If so,
at what cost?
I fear that we will pay for our entry into the
magical garden of cyberspace with a loss of empathy—that our devotion to
ephemeral images will diminish our readiness to care for those around us. We
might hope, of course, for an increase in understanding, tolerance, and
perhaps even empathy as technology makes more permeable the boundaries that
presently divide communities and nations. Such benefits would surely be a
boon to our troubled world. But as technology exposes us to the pain and
suffering of so many others, it might also numb our emotions, distance us
from our fellow humans, and attenuate our empathetic responses to their
misfortunes. In our life on the screen, we might know more and more about
others and care less and less about them.
What is the source of our feelings for others—the
"pity for the sorrowful, anguish for the miserable, joy for the successful"
that Adam Smith called fellow feeling? Perhaps it is simply in our nature to
respond emotionally to those around us. Indeed, our emotional responses
arise swiftly and unbidden, particularly in the presence of those bearing
the weight of injury, loss, fear, or despair. We might, therefore, expect
our natural sympathy and compassion to be impervious to corrosion by modern
life. Yet for every heartwarming account of compassion, aid, and sacrifice,
the daily news offers a story of indifference, hatred, or abuse that
illuminates a second aspect of our nature: a willingness to advance our
individual interests at others' expense.
Evolutionary theory and neuroscience both seem to
confirm the view of those who attribute humans' compassionate acts to strict
social controls —including laws, mores, teachings, and taboos—that alone
keep our brutish self-interest in check. If that is so, then changes in the
way we interact, and particularly the loss of those social controls, could
undermine our caring for one another. Natural selection shaped the brains
and behavior of our primate forebears to serve both self and others. By
grouping, they could better meet environmental challenges and promote their
reproductive success. Individuals still cared most for their own prospects
and those of their kin, but increasing social integration demanded care for
the interests of the community. Natural selection, therefore, favored
primates that could sense the intentions and needs of others of their kind.
In time, they became sensitive to the emotions and behavior of others. Our
ancestors responded instinctively to body language—not only gross actions,
but the twitch of an eye, tremor of a hand, tensing of a leg, and the
dilation of a pupil, all subtle indicators of the intent of the brain within
the body observed. Thus primates could forge alliances, exchange favors,
achieve status, and even deceive. Those who were particularly skilled in
"working the crowd" gained added advantages for themselves and their
offspring. Because of those advantages, primate sociability became a
powerful adjunct to a fierce focus on self.
Genetic adaptations to the demands of that long-ago
time still influence our culture, and ancient emotional centers in our
brains affect many of our social interactions. But the emergence of
imagination set us on the path to what J.K. Rowling characterized as
understanding without having experienced, to thinking ourselves into other
people's minds and places. One hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad noted that
there is a permanently enduring part of our being "which is not dependent on
wisdom … which is a gift and not an acquisition." The artist speaks to that
part of us, for through it, "one may perchance attain to such clearness of
sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or
mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of
unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in
joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all
mankind to the visible world."
For hundreds of years, novels have engaged our
empathetic faculties with the lives of imagined others. We learn to read
through practice, shaping our brains to accommodate the linearity and fixity
of text. Literacy repays that effort by introducing us to a multitude of
fictional others whose lives can entertain and edify us. Today, as our
brains acclimate to digital technology, a computer screen is increasingly
our window to the world. Technology crowds our lives with others'
experiences, each claiming a bit of our attention and concern. Some readers
of novels say that by introducing us to fictional others, stories make us
more sensitive to the feelings of real people. With its jumble of streaming
video, elaborate games, social networks, news reports, fiction, and gossip,
cyberspace could coax us to greater regard for the unfortunate and
oppressed. The widespread grief that followed the death of Princess Diana is
a vivid example of the power of technology's Muses to extend the reach of
another's mythical life into our own. As digital technology increases its
hold on our imaginations, perhaps it will do what novels are said to do:
make us a more compassionate, "nicer" species.
Hesiod observed that the Muses have the power to
make false things seem true. That, of course, is how they sustain fiction.
Today's technology offers new ways to engage our imaginations. Movies,
television advertising, and pictures in magazines depict tantalizing, unreal
worlds that offer us, if we will suspend our disbelief, what Sontag called
"knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of
wisdom." Even when we know that what we see cannot be, the falsity of our
experience may not reduce our empathetic response, which is more automatic
than considered. Our brains, seeking stimulation rather than knowledge, may
find more engagement in a montage of simulated joys and agonies than in the
lives of real people and events.
In the movie theater, for example, watching the
Titanic slowly sink, we suffer with its desperate passengers and fear for
their fate. We know the images we see are an amalgamation of the real and
artificial. But our brains care little about the way technology weds fact
and fiction; we care about the experience, not analysis, and for a few
minutes, the sinking is real.
Of course, artists have drawn us into imaginative
worlds for thousands of years. But when their performances were finished,
their books read, or their movies seen, we returned to our everyday
lives—and to our friends and neighbors. Now digital technology is erasing
the boundary between the magic and the mundane. Computers give us not only a
diversion or a lesson, but a fantastic life in which we can indulge our
interests with the click of a link, where we can be any place at any time,
where we can be who we want to be.
Technology is replacing the traditional social
structures of the face-to-face community with more-fluid electronic arenas
for gossip, preening, and posturing. Facebook and MySpace members "strut
their stuff" with embellished self-descriptions and accumulations of
"friends" from far and wide. Those affectations would mean little if we were
not so sensitive to trappings of rank, so irresistibly drawn to judge and
categorize others. Repeated encounters with those who present themselves as
a blend of the actual and the fantasized alter our expectations of
trustworthiness and reciprocity. Absent the accountability of face-to-face
interaction, there seems little need to adhere to social conventions of the
past. Users are free to invent themselves without regard for the concerns or
needs of others.
John Updike said the Internet is chewing up books,
casting fragments adrift on an electronic flood. We might say the same of
lives; technology is cutting out pieces and offering them isolated from
their natural context. Just as a dismembered novel loses accountability and
intimacy, so too does a person who appears only in fragments. Other people's
experiences are reduced to grist for the mill of our emotions, where our
inclinations, histories, prejudices, and aesthetic preferences grind them to
our liking. With technology as a remote control, we can tune in the
emotional stimulation we crave and tune out what we find unpleasant or
disturbing. As we shuttle from e-mail to hyperlinks to phone calls, we may
find little time or inclination to uncover real suffering in the chaotic mix
of the actual and the invented.
A century ago, in "The Machine Stops," E.M. Forster
envisioned a time when a powerful Machine would mediate all experience. His
Machine had woven an electronic garment that "had seemed heavenly at first."
Over time, however, technology had imprisoned humanity in an electronic cave
where the body had become "white pap, the home of ideas as colorless, last
sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars." The sudden failure
of the Machine doomed its dependents, who knew no other life but that on the
screen.
Continued in article
We are indeed getting smarter. Further, it
has been suggested that the data deluge now available via the Internet makes the
scientific method obsolete and reduces enormously our dependence on models
versus the real, measurable world.
"Yes, the Web Is Changing Your Brain," by Kim Solez,
Internet Evolution, March 12, 2009 ---
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=567&doc_id=173469&
Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of education technologies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Maybe
Pat Doherty should resign from the BU faculty and enroll as a clever student
There may be a new standard in luxury residence halls
in Boston,
The Boston Globe reported. A new high-rise
at Boston University features magnificent views of the city and the Charles
River. Amenities, which the Globe said leave parents stunned, include large
private bathrooms, walk-in closets, and full-length mirrors.
Jensen Comment
I wonder if some enterprising student will sublet a dorm room for $3,000 a month
(cheap for high rise views in Boston) to a non-student, rent a cheap loft, and
apply the rent money toward BU tuition. And you know what? I'll just bet that
647 students thought of that before me!
"On Its Third Try, Microsoft Finally Gets the Video Editor Right," by
Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post, August 30, 2009 ---
Click Here
Microsoft has a sometimes-undeserved reputation for
needing three tries to get a product right, but in the case of Windows Movie
Maker that description seems fair.
Movie Maker began life as a largely ignored part of
Windows Millennium Edition and wasn't much better when XP arrived -- it
couldn't even burn a DVD of your footage, instead limiting you to a
proprietary, soon-abandoned multimedia disc format. Its Windows Vista
incarnation added DVD output but offered little help with publishing videos
online.
But Microsoft's new Windows Live Movie Maker (
http://download.live.com/moviemaker ) represents a genuine advance. The
barely changed name understates how little this program -- a free download
for Windows Vista and its upcoming replacement, Windows 7, but not Windows
XP -- shares with older Movie Maker releases. It leaves out some features of
its predecessors, incorporates a rewritten interface and adds a far more
useful set of video-sharing options.
It also has a few bugs -- but they're nothing
Microsoft can't fix in a maintenance release or three.
Live Movie Maker's installation experience,
unfortunately, ranks among them. Getting this program requires downloading a
Windows Live Installer setup utility that comes preset to install
Microsoft's entire suite of Live software -- nine applications on a Vista
laptop. Unless you opt out, installing Movie Maker will also switch your
browser's search engine to Microsoft's Bing (a decent alternative to Google)
and change its home page to MSN.com ( a decent way to remember how bad
"portal sites" looked in 1999).
Movie Maker's installer didn't remove an old
version of the program on that Vista laptop, but at least nobody will
confuse the two. Where the prior release employs a conventional
menu-and-toolbar interface, Live Movie Maker adopts the "ribbon" style of
Microsoft's Office 2007, in which one large toolbar reveals different
functions as you select tabs -- Home, Animations, Visual Effects and so on
-- at the top of the window.
Many Office 2007 users say they hate the ribbon,
but here it seems to work, presenting the program's features in manageable
subsets.
Live Movie Maker can open video clips and photos
already saved on your computer, or you can use Windows Live Photo Galley --
installed alongside Live Movie Maker even if you select only the video
editor -- to import them from a camera or camcorder.
Microsoft advertises that in Windows 7, you will
also be able to grab video from a Flip camcorder or an iPhone, but I had no
problem pulling in clips from a Flip UltraHD and an iPhone 3GS in Vista. Yet
on a computer running an almost-final version of 7, I couldn't play footage
from either device, apparently because of a conflict with a Pinnacle digital
TV program.
Live Movie Maker presents these clips as a series
of thumbnails of varying length. You can flip any of them 90 degrees
(helpful if you held a digital camera on its side when recording video),
easily split or trim them, and rearrange their order before adding title
screens, captions, closing credits and any of dozens of Hollywood-style
transitions. If you're assembling a slideshow, you can apply fancy visual
treatments and Ken Burns-style panning effects to your photos. And you can
pick out a soundtrack, then have the program adjust the movie's duration to
match the music's play time.
If you're in a hurry, you can just pick a song and
click the AutoMovie button to have Live Movie Maker do the rest of the work
for you.
But unlike older Movie Maker releases, this version
doesn't record voice-over narrations. And unlike such non-free video editors
as Apple's iMovie, it can't sharpen a grainy shot or stabilize a jittery
clip.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's video helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm
Athletics creates a more vibrant environment,” said
Terry Mohajir, associate athletics director. “There’s been a great deal of
research on that.
As quoted by Paul D. Thacker, "If They Build It ...," Inside Higher Ed,
November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/stadium
Journal of Issues in Collegiate Athletics ---
http://csri-jiia.org/
Athletics Versus Academics: Is it possible to be great in both?
Jensen Comment
It's still really exceptional to be great in both, and it's becoming harder to
become great in one and satisfactory in the other. The sad thing is that at K-12
levels, top athletes are often getting the changing message that without decent
grades they probably will not be given an opportunity for making a name for
themselves in collegiate athletics. Chances of making it in professional
athletics without college are nearly zero except in rare, very rare, exceptions.
Hence, K-12 athletes should be made to realize early on that grades are
increasingly crucial for athletes. And so many failures in life can be
attributed to good athletes who wash out of college admissions or college
graduation.
The conference won't say how many athletes it has
denied eligibility, but the increased scrutiny has made a difference, says Todd
Diacon, executive director for academic assessment for the University of
Tennessee system, and the faculty athletics representative on the Knoxville
campus. "People have just backed off recruiting certain players," he says,
"because they know they'd never get them past a review."
"A Powerful League Piles Up Its Advantages," by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of
Higher Education, August 31, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Rise-of-the-SEC/48197/
On a quiet block in this sleepy Southern town sits
an ordinary office building that, but for a few football helmets visible
along a row of office windows, gives little hint of being the center of the
college-sports universe.
But thanks to a $3-billion television agreement
that kicks in with the start of the college football season this week, that
is exactly what the Southeastern Conference, headquartered here, has become.
The 15-year deal with CBS and ESPN, the richest in
the history of college sports, guarantees each of the league's 12 athletics
departments an average of nearly $17-million a year, the equivalent of a
major bowl payout. Add that to the tens of millions in guaranteed
sponsorship revenue that SEC teams already generate, and ticket sales and
private donations that, for many of the conference's programs, have seen
little falloff during the economic slump, and it's no wonder this league
seems to be separating from the pack among major conferences.
Even before the new TV contract, the Southeastern
Conference was virtually minting money. Home to six of the country's 15
largest athletics budgets, and many of the highest-paid coaches, SEC teams
increased their spending on sports by 36 percent over a recent four-year
period, according to U.S. Education Department data.
Over the past decade, the SEC has been the rabbit
in the race to build the nicest facilities, scored more top-20 finishes than
any other conference in sports it plays, and smashed fund-raising records,
giving it a leg up over other leagues in recruiting the best coaches and
most talented players. (And for anyone who wants to dispute the conference's
dominance, feel free to take up the case on one of dozens of blogs and Web
sites where rabid SEC fans hang out.)
Not that the league is without detractors. The
SEC's swagger—if it was a nation, conference officials like to say, its
former and current athletes' Olympic medals would have placed it fourth in
last summer's Beijing Games—has led critics to decry it as little more than
a breeding ground for professional athletes. While its academic record is
improving, the SEC still trails its peer conferences in several key
measures.
And the league's heightened spending on a select
group of sports—its departments sponsor an average of 20 sports, far fewer
than many other universities do—has raised concerns that, to stay in the
race, programs in competing conferences may have to streamline their own
offerings.
"The SEC has been the catalyst for an escalation of
spending in a select number of sports that I think ultimately is going to
break the current model of Division I athletics," says Amy P. Perko,
executive director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics,
referring to the broad-based programs that many departments support.
The only way other conferences will be able to keep
up, she and others fear, is by ramping up their spending on football and
basketball and reducing opportunities in other sports. But with an average
of one SEC athletics event scheduled to be televised nationally every day of
the year for the next decade and a half, even that might not be enough.
Recent Success Many factors have contributed to the
league's rise to power, including the South's fast population growth, the
lack of professional sports in most of the states where SEC teams play, and
the conference's well-timed winning streak.
The SEC has a long history of success, but this may
be its golden age. Last year the Southeastern Conference won national
championships in five sports, and finished as runners-up in six others.
Three straight national titles in football, and two of the past four NCAA
championships in men's basketball, have given the SEC a Forrest Gump-like
presence on the biggest stages.
The victories were piling up just as the league was
renegotiating its media-rights package. Most people figured the SEC would
blaze its own path, following the Big Ten Conference in creating a
television network. But ESPN was hungry to hold on to SEC football, which it
says some 77 million people watched last season.
When the league's commissioner, Michael L. Slive,
one of the shrewdest negotiators in sports, laid out his list of demands, he
was surprised when the powerful cable network came back with everything he
wanted, and more. Last summer, just before the economy headed into free
fall, ESPN agreed to pay the league $2.25-billion to broadcast its games.
With a few strokes of the pen, the Southeastern Conference became America's
Conference.
"There is no downside to this deal," Mr. Slive told
The Chronicle in July, during the league's preseason media gathering here.
Instead of fronting start-up costs for a separate network, bickering with
cable companies over distribution, and trying to sell advertising spots on
its own, league officials can kick back in their La-Z-Boys and click between
one of several ESPN networks that will televise an unheard-of number of
games. During the first four days of this season alone, ESPN and its sister
channels will broadcast seven SEC showdowns. ESPN also picked up the rights
to syndicated league games, such as Tennessee-Western Kentucky, a David and
Goliath match-up that, until now, would have never aired outside the region.
But in a world where the SEC rules the airwaves, games like that will now be
broadcast from coast to coast.
SEC universities hope the exposure will help them
attract students who might otherwise not have considered their institutions.
One thing is for sure: The league's additional reach is something that
highly recruited athletes have already noticed.
"I felt the SEC was the strongest conference, and
where I could get the most publicity," says Brent Benedict, a Florida
football standout who committed to the University of Georgia in June. "We're
going to be on TV the most, and that's part of what my decision came down
to."
A Damaged Reputation Until recently, such big
television deals might not have been possible. While the league was
well-known for its winning ways, it was also notorious for skirting the
rules. Since the NCAA began keeping records, in 1953, Southeastern
Conference teams have committed 49 major infractions, more than any league
except the Big 12 Conference.
When Mr. Slive took over as commissioner, in 2002,
nine SEC programs were either on NCAA probation or being investigated for
purported violations, league officials say.
"You don't do yourself a lot of good if you're
successful because you're cutting corners," says Gene A. Marsh, a professor
of law at the University of Alabama, who served on the NCAA's Division I
Committee on Infractions from 1999 to 2008. "People think less of you."
Mr. Slive, a lawyer who in the 1990s co-founded a
private practice to help athletics departments stay off NCAA probation,
pushed hard for the SEC to clean up its act. His goal was to have every
program in the clear within five years, and he established a committee to
put an end to the infighting that had led many SEC programs to rat out their
rivals whenever they thought they had crossed the line.
"In our league the crucible of competition is so
intense and hot, there is sometimes a tendency for people to be happy if
somebody else gets hurt," Mr. Slive says. "What I try to sell to people is
that we are inexorably tied to one another, and our success helps all of us,
and the failure of one of us—even if you think it makes you better—makes you
worse."
Although some SEC football coaches have yet to get
that message—within months of being hired last year, Lane Kiffin,
Tennessee's coach, had (incorrectly) accused Urban Meyer, Florida's coach,
of violating recruiting rules—the finger-pointing seems to have calmed down,
and the major violations have slowed.
Mr. Slive has helped change the recruiting culture,
too, acting as an impartial judge in reviewing controversial
initial-eligibility cases. With the blessing of the league's chancellors and
presidents, he established a process for evaluating recruits whose academic
backgrounds raise red flags. If he doesn't like what he sees, he has the
power to rule a prospective player ineligible.
The conference won't say how many athletes it has
denied eligibility, but the increased scrutiny has made a difference, says
Todd Diacon, executive director for academic assessment for the University
of Tennessee system, and the faculty athletics representative on the
Knoxville campus.
"People have just backed off recruiting certain
players," he says, "because they know they'd never get them past a review."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on collegiate athletics controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
"An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes': Theorem: Bayes' Theorem
for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction," by
Eliezer S., Yudkowsky, August 2009 ---
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
Your friends and colleagues are talking about
something called "Bayes' Theorem" or "Bayes' Rule", or something called
Bayesian reasoning. They sound really enthusiastic about it, too, so you
google and find a webpage about Bayes' Theorem and...
It's this equation. That's all. Just one equation.
The page you found gives a definition of it, but it doesn't say what it is,
or why it's useful, or why your friends would be interested in it. It looks
like this random statistics thing.
So you came here. Maybe you don't understand what
the equation says. Maybe you understand it in theory, but every time you try
to apply it in practice you get mixed up trying to remember the difference
between p(a|x) and p(x|a), and whether p(a)*p(x|a) belongs in the numerator
or the denominator. Maybe you see the theorem, and you understand the
theorem, and you can use the theorem, but you can't understand why your
friends and/or research colleagues seem to think it's the secret of the
universe. Maybe your friends are all wearing Bayes' Theorem T-shirts, and
you're feeling left out. Maybe you're a girl looking for a boyfriend, but
the boy you're interested in refuses to date anyone who "isn't Bayesian".
What matters is that Bayes is cool, and if you don't know Bayes, you aren't
cool.
Why does a mathematical concept generate this
strange enthusiasm in its students? What is the so-called Bayesian
Revolution now sweeping through the sciences, which claims to subsume even
the experimental method itself as a special case? What is the secret that
the adherents of Bayes know? What is the light that they have seen?
Soon you will know. Soon you will be one of us.
While there are a few existing online explanations
of Bayes' Theorem, my experience with trying to introduce people to Bayesian
reasoning is that the existing online explanations are too abstract.
Bayesian reasoning is very counterintuitive. People do not employ Bayesian
reasoning intuitively, find it very difficult to learn Bayesian reasoning
when tutored, and rapidly forget Bayesian methods once the tutoring is over.
This holds equally true for novice students and highly trained professionals
in a field. Bayesian reasoning is apparently one of those things which, like
quantum mechanics or the Wason Selection Test, is inherently difficult for
humans to grasp with our built-in mental faculties.
Or so they claim. Here you will find an attempt to
offer an intuitive explanation of Bayesian reasoning - an excruciatingly
gentle introduction that invokes all the human ways of grasping numbers,
from natural frequencies to spatial visualization. The intent is to convey,
not abstract rules for manipulating numbers, but what the numbers mean, and
why the rules are what they are (and cannot possibly be anything else). When
you are finished reading this page, you will see Bayesian problems in your
dreams.
And let's begin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's a story problem about a situation that
doctors often encounter:
1% of women at age forty who participate in routine
screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get
positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get
positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography
in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast
cancer?
What do you think the answer is? If you haven't
encountered this kind of problem before, please take a moment to come up
with your own answer before continuing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next, suppose I told you that most doctors get the
same wrong answer on this problem - usually, only around 15% of doctors get
it right. ("Really? 15%? Is that a real number, or an urban legend based on
an Internet poll?" It's a real number. See Casscells, Schoenberger, and
Grayboys 1978; Eddy 1982; Gigerenzer and Hoffrage 1995; and many other
studies. It's a surprising result which is easy to replicate, so it's been
extensively replicated.)
Do you want to think about your answer again?
Here's a Javascript calculator if you need one. This calculator has the
usual precedence rules; multiplication before addition and so on. If you're
not sure, I suggest using parentheses.
Continued in article
From the Scout Report on August 28, 2009
PC
Wizard 2009 1.90 ---
http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php
With so many free options for system utilities, it can be hard to separate
the wheat from the chaff. PC Wizard 2009 1.90 is a most worthy option, and
visitors can use the program to not only detect hardware performance, but it
will also look at hard disk performance, and display a graph to note how
various elements in a given category perform. This version is compatible
with computers running Windows 95 and newer.
VoxOx 2.0.4
For
people looking to bring together their various forms of online
communications in one place, the VoxOx application may be a useful tool. The
VoxOx application can be used to chat with colleagues and friends around the
world, link up email accounts, and also make mobile-to-mobile calls.
Visitors
can also use the program to share files up to 100MB and also use create
specialized phone lists and also record phone calls. VoxOx brings together
almost all of the key communication channels including voice, video, Instant
Messaging (IM), text, social media, e-mail, and content sharing, into a
single interface. This version is compatible with computers running Windows
95 and newer and Mac OSX and newer.
Several weeks before a planned shift of the right of way, some Samoans
continue to air their grievances Shifting the Right of Way to the Left
Leaves Some Samoans Feeling Wronged
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125086852452149513.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Bus drivers threaten to set fleet alight
http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au/breaking-news-world/bus-drivers-threaten-to-set-fleet-alight-20090825-ex8n.html
Samoa drive switch campaign sabotaged
http://www.rnzi.com/pages/news.php?op=read&id=48605
CIA The World Factbook: Western Samoa
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ws.html
Government of Samoa
http://www.govt.ws/
A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa
http://books.google.com/books?id=pLE-emXC0dgC&ots=SNrRpudW84&dq=samoa&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Link forwarded by Rick Lillie
Try VideoSurf (
http://www.videosurf.com/ ) to find videos of all types on the Internet.
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
The Genius of Charles Darwin (great video tutorial) ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/the-genius-of-charles-darwin/
Darwin’s evolving thoughts and private communications on the boundaries of
science and religion ---
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/index.php
The
Complete Work of Charles Darwin ---
http://darwin-online.org.uk/
BioEd Online: Genes, Health and Society ---
http://www.bioedonline.org/courses/
Waterlife ---
http://waterlife.nfb.ca/
Food Timeline ---
http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html
A Chef's Table [Real Player, iTunes] ---
http://www.whyy.org/91FM/chef/
Design Observe ---
http://www.designobserver.com/
The researchers focused on a single molecule of
pentacene, which is commonly used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic
molecule is made up of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms. In the image above
the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings are clear and even the positions
of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be seen. To give some
perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across,
which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand.
Single molecule, one million times smaller than a grain of sand,
pictured for first time ---
Click Here
Bob Jensen's threads on free online science,
engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Social Science and Economics Tutorials
Video from The Economist Magazine: Greg Davies on behavioural
finance We are emotional investors The head of Behavioural Finance at Barclays
Wealth says hot-brained humans often buy and sell right when they shouldn't ---
http://audiovideo.economist.com/?fr_story=e71885c25fada37622b1dd9e9f7600208e4ccc25&rf=bm
U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security ---
http://www.bis.doc.gov/
Beyond Steel: An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture ---
http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/beyondsteel/
Oregon Multicultural Archives Digital Collection
http://digitalcollections.library.oregonstate.edu/cdm4/client/cultural/index.html
Design Observe ---
http://www.designobserver.com/
Design Build Network (architecture) ---
http://www.designbuild-network.com/
Multimedia from Stanford University
(engineering, architecture)
R. Buckminster Fuller Digital Collection ---
http://collections.stanford.edu/bucky/bin/page?forward=home
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
The Robbins Collection: School of Law, University of California at Berkeley
---
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/library/robbins/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
De Young Museum: The Harald Wagner Collection of Teotihuacan Murals ---
http://www.famsf.org/teotihuacan/
The Civil War in America from The Illustrated London News ---
http://beck.library.emory.edu/iln/index.html
American Civil War
History Site ---
http://www.factasy.com/
Tobacco Bag Stringing in North Carolina and Virginia ---
http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/tbs/index.html
The Robbins Collection: School of Law, University of California at Berkeley
---
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/library/robbins/
Beyond Steel: An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture ---
http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/beyondsteel/
Oregon Multicultural Archives Digital Collection
http://digitalcollections.library.oregonstate.edu/cdm4/client/cultural/index.html
National Portrait Gallery: Thomas Paine ---
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/paine/
The Rochambeau Map Collection ---
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/rochambeau-maps/index.html
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
Music Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
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/
August 27,
2009
August 28,
2009
August 31,
2009
September 1,
2009
September 2,
2009
If Pres. Obama’s mom had named him
Al, he would have been Al Obama.
Ed Scribner
Jeanne Robertson "Mothers vs. Teenage Daughters" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE82Gt93UYc&feature=related#watch-main-area
Jeanne Robertson "Don't send a man to the grocery store!"
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YFRUSTiFUs
Ole and Lena ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_and_Lena
Funny commercial for the L.A. County Fair ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmn38FqWlBk
Forwarded by Dick and Cec
I would never trade my amazing friends, my wonderful life, and my loving
family for less gray hair or a flatter belly. As I've aged, I've become kinder
to myself, and less critical of myself. I've become my own friend. I don't chide
myself for eating that extra cookie, or for not making my bed, or for buying
that silly cement gecko that I didn't need, but looks so avante garde on my
patio. I am entitled to a treat, to be messy, to be extravagant.
I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they
understood the great freedom that comes with aging.
Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until 4 AM
and sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the
60 & 70's, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love ... I will.
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
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
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