Tidbits on September 24, 2009
Bob Jensen
The end of Summer 2009
The foliage up
here commences with the red colors in some trees/bushes and the changing of the
hydrangeas from white to pink. Although we had a cold and wet summer, the
September days have been warmer and dryer than usual. This may delay the peak of
the foliage season that normally hits about the third week of October. Thus far
we have the bright reds but not the more prevalent yellow and orange turnings of
the leaves.
Although Erika's roses and some of our flowers are still hanging on, the days up
here are shorter with fall foliage are in the air. The historic name of our
cottage is Brayton Cottage." It was named after a man named Brayton converted
the golf club house and tennis pavilion into a summer cottage sometime after
1900. In 1973 the big hotel was torn down, the cottage was moved to where the
hotel's main dining room was demolished. You can read about the history of the
old Sunset Hill House Resort at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080824.htm
Our cottage has
the address 190 Sunset Hill Road
Mt. Lafayette before snow blankets the Kinsman Range
Foliage Network ---
http://www.foliagenetwork.com/default.php
Foliage in New Hampshire's White Mountains ---
http://www.nhliving.com/foliage/index.shtml
Fall Foliage ---
http://gonewengland.about.com/cs/fallfoliage/l/blfoliagecentrl.htm
Foliage Pictures ---
http://photo.net/travel/us/ne/foliage
Below are some pictures I took in October
2008
To the east we look out on the White Mountains of New Hampshire
Presidential, Twin, and Kinsman Ranges
By my studio the leaves eventually get knee
deep
The golf course behind our cottage in the direction of Vermont's Green Mountains
This is our back mountain road (Lafayette Road)
You don't want to drop a wheel off the edge
Trucks are not allowed on this road
And we do not use this road in the wintertime
Our good friends Lon and Nancy are building a new home on this road
This summer they added a Chinese girl and her brother (Yani and Tad) to their
family of two daughters
Below are some fun pictures that friends sent to me.
Mothering is tiring
Do you think they're too old to drive, when all they heard
was a strange noise before they reached McDonald's?
Innocence is where you're eyes are pointed
Statistics Lesson of the Week
Sta
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between September 16 and September
24, 2009
To Accompany the September 24, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090924Quotations.htm
Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Tidbits on September 24, 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
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
Great Comedy Video About What to Say to Bill Collectors
It just gets better and better as it rolls along
Clean Comedy from Tim Clue (Debt) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5bbvMR8Ee4
The above link was forwarded by
Paul Bjorklund
Alternate link when opening for George Bush Sr. --- http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Tim+Clue&search_type=&aq=f
Great video on Complexity Theory: Simplicity
(stars) versus Complexity (guppies) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEc1-p7C_U&feature=related
Complexity Theory ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory
Jeffrey Kluger ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kluger
September 17, 2009 reply from Helmi Hammami
[helmi.hammami@GMAIL.COM]
Robert, The video is great ! Also a look
at the work of the French Philosopher Edgar Morin would be of great addition
to those interested in complexity theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Morin
Helmi
Optus The Whale Song Commercial ---
http://great-ads.blogspot.com/2009/03/optus-whale-song-commercial.html
Human Physiology Animations Homepage at Connecticut College
---
http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/departments/biology/humanphysanims/
Darwin 200 ---
http://www.darwin200.org/
Scott's a little late this year, but he produced a really
great Father's Day video ---
http://www.themaniknow.com/
Road sign test ---
http://www.autoinsurance.org/road_sign/
Video: Students find wonderful ways to use an accounting book ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiAhaSQbb08
Frank Sinatra's Tribute to MySpace ---
http://americancomedynetwork.com/animation.html?bit_id=25239
Bob Jensen's threads in social networks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Frank Sinatra's Tribute to MySpace ---
http://americancomedynetwork.com/animation.html?bit_id=25239
West Coast Swing (as danced by an older couple)
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEli2rrrJwI
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
Artist's incredible paintings look just like
photograph ---
http://www.wnd.com/diversions
Museum of Contemporary Art
Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson ---
http://www.mcachicago.org/eliasson/
Darwin 200 ---
http://www.darwin200.org/
Optus The Whale Song Commercial ---
http://great-ads.blogspot.com/2009/03/optus-whale-song-commercial.html
Jacques Burkhardt and the Thayer Collection
Expedition to Brazil ---
http://library.mcz.harvard.edu/wp/?page_id=63
University of Miami Libraries: Lydia Cabrera
Papers ---
http://merrick.library.miami.edu/cubanHeritage/chc0339/
Architectural Drawings of Willis and Lillian
Leenhouts
http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/digilib/leenh/index.html
The Architecture of Jefferson County ---
http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/collections/image/jefferson_country.html
Thomas Jefferson's Library [video]
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/jeffersonslibrary/Pages/default.aspx
Beaked Whale Identification Guide ---
http://vertebrates.si.edu/mammals/beaked_whales/pages/main_menu.htm
Provenance in the World War II Era, 1933-1945 ---
http://provenance.si.edu/jsp/index.aspx
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
But sadly, the academic profession
shows a strong tendency to create stable and self-sustaining but completely
false legends of its own, and hang on to them grimly, transmitting them from
article to article and from textbook to textbook like software viruses spreading
between students' Macintoshes . . . But the lack of little things like
verisimilitude and substantiation are not enough to stop a myth. Martin tracks
the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax through successively more careless repetitions
and embroiderings in a number of popular books on language. Roger Brown's Words
and Things (1958, 234-36), attributing the example to Whorf, provides an early
example of careless popularization and perversion of the issue. His numbers
disagree with both Boas and Whorf (he says there are "three Eskimo words for
snow", apparently getting this from figure 10 in Whorf's paper; perhaps he only
looked at the pictures).'
Linguistics Hoax: Pullum-Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, 1991 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf
Forwarded by Jagdish Gangolly
University of Miami Libraries: Lydia Cabrera Papers ---
http://merrick.library.miami.edu/cubanHeritage/chc0339/
"Why
Students Don't Like Poetry," by Mark Bauerlein, Chronicle of Higher
Education's Chronicle Review, April 19, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/article/?id=1312&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
No Brief Candle: Reconceiving
Research Libraries for the 21st Century ---
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub142/pub142.pdf
Books in Depth ---
http://www.booksindepth.com/period.html
storySouth (showcases top fiction) ---
http://www.storysouth.com/
Mickle Street Review: An Electronic Journal of Whitman and American Studies
[iTunes]
http://micklestreet.rutgers.edu/index.htm
New York Review of Books ---
http://www.nybooks.com/
Electronic Literature Directory ---
http://directory.eliterature.org/
How to Publish in Top Journals ---
http://www.roie.org/how.htm
Arts and Letters Daily
---
http://aldaily.com/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The Atlantic book
reviews from the 1800s ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/classrev/crindex.htm
Digital Defoe Reviews of 18th Century Literature ---
http://www.english.ilstu.edu/digitaldefoe/features/index.shtml
From the Nature Journal of
Science
Archives of 19th Century Science (Free Online editions of Nature) ---
http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/index.html
Forwarded by Eileen on August 21, 2008
"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber..."
So begins the winner of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which
competitors write incredibly bad opening sentences to incredibly bad novels.
Read the full results here (
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/scott.rice/blfc2008.htm ).
Visit the following URL to read the rest of the article:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/blogexcerpts/1500/
Books in Depth (including downloads of
sample chapters) ---
http://www.booksindepth.com/
Magazine, Periodical and Website Book Reviews from around the World ---
http://www.booksindepth.com/period.html
Third Coast, one of the nation's premier
university-based literary magazines, is published twice annually by the
Department of English at Western Michigan University ---
http://www.wmich.edu/thirdcoast/
The Best Review
---
http://www.wooster.edu/beatstudies/reviews/default.html
Digital Humanities Journal ---
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/index.html
From Virginia Commonwealth
University
Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts ---
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/
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 September 16 and September
24, 2009
To Accompany the September 24, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090924Quotations.htm
Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
"How to Send and Receive Text Messages for Free," Gina Trampani,
Harvard Business School Blog, September 18, 2009 ---
Click Here
Even though SMS text messages are only 160
characters and cost your cellphone carrier virtually nothing to transmit,
many mobile plans charge subscribers 5 to 20 cents per message. If you're a
text message fanatic — or you have a teenager in your house — you already
know that these costs can really add up in a month.
However, using online services, you can get around
SMS overage costs. Here are a few ways to text to your heart's content
without breaking the bank.
Text via instant messenger: For years, the
popular AOL instant messenger service has offered little-known
SMS support. To text message a cellphone from AIM
(and therefore avoid the sending fee), send an IM as usual to the phone
number prefixed by a +1. For example, to text 718-555-1212, in AIM, send a
message to +17185551212. That message will arrive on the cellphone as a text
message. You can use this trick via any AIM client — be it
Meebo,
iChat on your Mac,
Digsby,
or your cellphone's IM client. Keep in mind that your
recipient does get charged to receive the message, so IM sparingly.
Note also that the first time you send a message to a phone via AIM, the
recipient gets the choice to accept or decline your messages going forward.
If you're not an AIM user, Gmail Chat
offers a similar feature (U.S. only). In Gmail
Labs, enable the "Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat" feature. Then you can send
an SMS to any cellphone from within Gmail by just
entering the phone number as your recipient.
In both cases, if your recipient replies to your
message as usual, you'll get it via instant messenger. The bad news is that
if you don't have your instant messenger set up on your cellphone and you
walk away from the computer, you might not get it.
Text for free via Google Voice. Google's new
phone service
Google Voice is still invitation-only, but when it
opens up to the public it will take a monster-sized bite out of cellphone
carriers' SMS fee pie. Google Voice gives you a new phone number (porting
existing numbers is supposed to be coming soon) and lets you text message
from that number for free via the web site and various
mobile applications, now available for BlackBerry
and Android phones. The advantage to Google Voice's SMS service is that
unlike the IM options above, the text message you send comes from your
personal Google Voice phone number instead of AIM or Gmail Chat's special
middleman codes. You can also have your Google Voice text messages fwded to
your phone via email or SMS, so you can get replies whether or not you're at
your computer.
(Google Voice also does all sorts of other
interesting phone-related things, like voicemail transcription and rules
based on time of day, sender, and contact group — but that's a whole other
post.)
How do you reduce text messaging costs (without
paying for the unlimited plan)? Let us know in the comments.
Jensen Comment
I'm becoming a luddite. I've never sent a text message or tweeted/
Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm
Bob Jensen's education technology threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Sending Large Files and PDF Creation
Students and instructors sometimes need to send each other very large files,
including files with lots of graphics, audio, and even video (such as video
recorded using Camtasia). Email attachments are limited to relatively small
files.
Sometimes faculty and/or students are also looking for free services that
create PDF files.
"Send Large Files via Yahoo Mail: Can't get by with Yahoo's 25MB
attachment limit? Have no fear: a newly added Drop.io application effectively
raises the limit to 100MB," by Rick Broida, PC World via The
Washington Post, September 18, 2009 ---
Click Here .
Good news for Yahoo Mail users: If you've had
trouble sending large files, help is at hand. A new Drop.io application lets
you send attachments as large as 100MB.
By default, Yahoo allows attachments no larger than
25MB. That's pretty decent, but it probably won't cover a video, big batch
of photos, or the like.
Enter
Drop.io,
one of my favorite file-sharing services. When you sign into your Yahoo
account, look for Drop.io's new Attach Large Files option in the
Applications box. Give a click and follow the instructions to select your
file(s) and compose your message to go with it.
Don't worry about the clogging up your recipient's
inbox with your mammoth attachment: Drop.io doesn't send the actual file,
but rather a link to where it can be downloaded.
Drop.io is an easy to use, online collaboration and file sharing service that
provides users with a simple, real time and private way to chat and share ---
http://drop.io/about
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop.io
When possible, files that are not extremely private are best placed,
temporarily at least, on a Web server such that only the link need be
transferred. Users can then download these files files. I've had large files
that I kept on a Web server for less than 20 minutes --- just long enough for
particular persons to download the files.
Question
How can you both send large files across the Internet and convert them to PDF
format?
From the Scout Report on December 12, 2008
You Send It Express 1.7
http://www.yousendit.com/cms/standalone-app
Sending large files to colleagues and friends
around the world can be cumbersome, so it's nice to learn about YouSendIt
Express. Visitors who sign up to use the application can send up to 2GB,
convert files to the pdf format,
and also take advantage of password protection and certified delivery. This
version is compatible with computers running Windows XP, Vista, or Mac OS X
10.4.11 or higher. Additionally, it's worth noting that this is a trial
version which is offered for free for fourteen days.
December 19, 2008 reply from M Robert Bowers
[M.Robert.Bowers@WHARTON.UPENN.EDU]
Just a reminder if you want to convert files to
pdf. There is a program, cutepdf (
www.cutepdf.com )
that converts any file to pdf. If the program has a File|Print feature,
it allows you to print to cutepdf.
Bob Jensen's threads on other alternatives for transferring very large
files across the Internet ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#SendingLargeFiles
I like YouSendIt's free service.
Update on Virtual Worlds Learning and Second Life
September 15, 2009 message from Steven Hornik
[shornik@BUS.UCF.EDU]
The University of Texas is announcing a statewide
initiative in Second Life that will connect to the states' 16 campuses, with
a program "that emphasizes teaching in the areas of science/math,
international/ intercultural, and health/medical, among other areas."
from:
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/09/new-world-newsfeed.html
Official announcement here:
http://tuelearningcommunity.com/vlci/
It is referred to as the Virtual Learning Community
Initiative
My hats off to them!
Steven
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting 407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
September 16, 2009 reply from Nicole Geary
Here’s a link to a university gym class that can be
done on the Wii:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112725051
Nicole Geary
Bob Jensen's threads on Second Life and virtual learning are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
SmartPen ---
http://www.livescribe.com/smartpen/index.html
How To Pencast Demos ---
http://math247.pbworks.com/How-to-embed-a-pencast-into-a-PBWiki-page
LiveScribe Featured Files ---
http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/CommunityOverviewPage
Note the file on carbon bonding (as an illustration) ---
http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=vnVdHtpPCGdL
Watch a Pencast video of simple algebra ---
http://www.pencasts.org/blog/?p=32
Jing (but not Jing Pro) is free software for recording video from your
computer screen such as SmartPen movements with capturing of your audio
narrations --- http://www.techsmith.com/
Scroll your pointer over the left side to see product links (including Jing).
Screencast from TechSmith offers a limited amount of free space for storing
and serving up your videos to the world ---
http://www.techsmith.com/
More space requires monthly rental fees.
Grade Inflation
and Teaching Evaluations
Especially
note the grade inflation graphs at
www.Gradeinflation.com
For many
years teaching evaluations were private (often anonymous) communications between
students and teachers. When colleges commenced to share teaching evaluations
with department heads, deans, and promotion/tenure committees, grade inflation
commenced to soar. When employers commenced to refuse to even interview students
below a B+ or A- overall grade average, college students commenced to lobby
intensely for higher grades.
Especially
vulnerable are assistant professors whose careers are on the line when their
teaching evaluations are shared with promotion and tenure committees. Especially
vulnerable are all professors in colleges that share teaching evaluations with
the entire college community and/or the world. Also vulnerable are over a
million professors who are on public display at RateMyProfessor.com ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/
Sadly, many of
our "Coach Grahams and Gazowski's" of the teaching world commenced to care more
about their careers than their students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080415.htm
To obtain data on
GPA trends, click on the institution of interest. Median grades of graduates,
the 50th percentile of a graduating class, will be about 0.1 higher than the
GPAs shown here. When data sources do not indicate how GPAs were computed, this
is denoted as "method unspecified." All non-anonymous sources are stated on the
data sheets.
gradeinflation.com, Copyright 2002, Stuart Rojstaczer, www.stuartr.com, no fee
for not-for-profit use
Especially
note the grade inflation graphs at
www.Gradeinflation.com
Valen E. Johnson, a biostatistics professor at the University of Michigan and
author of "Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education" (Springer Verlag),
said the use of student ratings to evaluate teachers also inflates grades: "As
long as our evaluations depend on their opinion of us, their grades are going to
be high."
Links to several formal studies if the impact of teaching evaluations on grade
inflation ---
The investigation revealed that 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated cum
laude.
Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, "Just Say
'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check: The notion of a decline in
standards draws crusaders and skeptics," Chronicle of Higher Education,
September 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
It is also commonly said that grade inflation is by far the worst in Ivy League
schools. This isn't exactly correct, either. I discuss this issue at length in
our recently finished research paper on college grading in America. It's beyond
the scope of this web post to examine this issue except to note that while
grades are rising for all schools, the average GPA of a school has been strongly
dependent on its selectivity since the 1980s. Highly selective schools had an
average GPA of 3.43 if they were private and 3.22 if they were public as of
2006. Schools with average selectivity had a GPA of 3.11 if they were private
and 2.98 if they were public
Stuart Rojstaczer, GradeInflation.com ---
www.Gradeinflation.com
Professors
read student comments on
RateMyProfessors.com and now it's their
turn to strike back on video
Watch
their rebuttals on video ---
http://video.ratemyprofessors.com/
Note that some of these videos are chopped up into
segments, so don't assume the video is over until it's over.
It appears to me that the instructors who are willing to post video rebuttals
are probably more self assured and probably receive higher ratings by students
than many of the lower-rated professors who do not strike back. Keep in mind
that both student evaluations and instructor rebuttals at this site are
self-selecting and often the students who supply evaluations in a given course
are only a small proportion of the students in the course. Outliers well above
and below the mean of satisfaction tend to be the respondents for a give
professor.
Some of
the links below may now be broken.
Note how
some professors give two sets of grades --- inflated grades for the transcripts
and lower grades transmitted as private information to the students (primarily
to deflate unearned student egos).
Students
get two grades from Harvey Mansfield at Harvard University
"The Truth About Harvard," by Ross Douthat, The Atlantic, March
2005 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200503/douthat
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation
He paused, flashed his grin, and went on. "Nevertheless, I have recently decided
that hewing to the older standard is fruitless when no one else does, because
all I succeed in doing is punishing students for taking classes with me.
Therefore I have decided that this semester I will issue two grades to each of
you. The first will be the grade that you actually deserve —a C for mediocre
work, a B for good work, and an A for excellence. This one will be issued to you
alone, for every paper and exam that you complete. The second grade, computed
only at semester's end, will be your, ah, ironic grade — 'ironic' in this case
being a word used to mean lying —and it will be computed on a scale that takes
as its mean the average Harvard grade, the B-plus. This higher grade will be
sent to the registrar's office, and will appear on your transcript. It will be
your public grade, you might say, and it will ensure, as I have said, that you
will not be penalized for taking a class with me." Another shark's grin. "And of
course, only you will know whether you actually deserve it."
Mansfield had been fighting this battle for years, long enough to have earned
the sobriquet "C-minus" from his students, and long enough that his frequent
complaints about waning academic standards were routinely dismissed by Harvard's
higher-ups as the out-of-touch crankiness of a conservative fogey. But the
ironic-grade announcement changed all that. Soon afterward his photo appeared on
the front page of The Boston Globe, alongside a story about the decline of
academic standards. Suddenly Harvard found itself mocked as the academic
equivalent of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above
average.
It doesn't help that Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working
smarter rather than harder. Most of my classmates were studious primarily in our
avoidance of academic work, and brilliant largely in our maneuverings to achieve
a maximal GPA in return for minimal effort.
"The
Truth About Harvard," by Ross Douthat, The Atlantic, March 2005 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200503/douthat
This may be partly true, but I think that the roots of grade inflation —and, by
extension, the overall ease and lack of seriousness in Harvard's undergraduate
academic culture —run deeper. Understanding grade inflation requires
understanding the nature of modern Harvard and of elite education in general
—particularly the ambitions of its students and professors.
The students' ambitions are those of a well-trained meritocratic elite. In the
semi-aristocracy that Harvard once was, students could accept Cs, because they
knew their prospects in life had more to do with family fortunes and connections
than with GPAs. In today's meritocracy this situation no longer obtains. Even if
you could live off your parents' wealth, the ethos of the meritocracy holds that
you shouldn't, because your worth as a person is determined not by clan or class
but by what you do and whether you succeed at it. What you do, in turn, hinges
in no small part on what is on your résumé, including your GPA.
Thus the professor is not just a disinterested pedagogue. As a dispenser of
grades he is a gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity professors
face upward pressure from students ("I can't afford a B if I want to get into
law school"); horizontal pressure from their colleagues, to which even Mansfield
gave way; downward pressure from the administration ("If you want to fail
someone, you have to be prepared for a very long, painful battle with the higher
echelons," one professor told the Crimson); and perhaps pressure from within,
from the part of them that sympathizes with students' careerism. (Academics,
after all, have ambitions of their own, and are well aware of the vicissitudes
of the marketplace.)
It doesn't help that Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working
smarter rather than harder. Most of my classmates were studious primarily in our
avoidance of academic work, and brilliant largely in our maneuverings to achieve
a maximal GPA in return for minimal effort. It was easy to see the classroom as
just another résumé-padding opportunity, a place to collect the grade (and
recommendation) necessary to get to the next station in life. If that grade
could be obtained while reading a tenth of the books on the syllabus, so much
the better.
2004
Princeton University takes a (modest) stand on grade inflation
"Deflating the easy 'A'," by Teresa Méndez, Christian Science Monitor,
May 4, 2004 ---
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0504/p12s02-legn.html
2009
Princeton achieves marked progress in curbing grade inflation
---
Click Here
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S25/35/65G93/index.xml?section=topstories
September 21, 2009 (link forwarded by David Albrecht)
Five years after its inception, Princeton's new grading policy has shown
significant progress in bringing grades in undergraduate courses under better
control.
In 2008-09, A grades (A+, A, A-) accounted for 39.7 percent of grades in
undergraduate courses across the University -- the first time that A grades have
fallen below 40 percent since the policy was approved. The results were a marked
improvement from 2002-03, when A's accounted for a high of 47.9 percent of all
grades.
Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel reported the results at the Sept. 21 faculty
meeting.
statement issued at the meeting, members of the
Faculty Committee on Grading called the 2008-09 results "a major milestone in
the implementation of the University's new grading policy."
The policy, adopted by the faculty in April 2004 to curb grade inflation across
the University, sets an institution-wide expectation for the percentage of
grades in the A range and provides clear guidelines on the meaning of letter
grades. Grades have been coming down steadily since the policy was established.
"These results confirm once again that with clear intent and concerted effort, a
university faculty can bring down the inflated grades that -- left uncontrolled
-- devalue the educational achievements of American college students," the
committee's statement said. "The Princeton faculty continues to make successful
progress in its determined effort to restore educational content and meaning to
the letter grades earned by the highest-achieving students in the United
States."
The policy sets a common grading standard for every academic department and
program, in which A's are to account for less than 35 percent of the grades for
undergraduate courses and less than 55 percent of grades for junior and senior
independent work. The standard by which the grading record of each department or
program is evaluated is the percentage of A's given over the previous three
years.
Progress has varied by division, with the social sciences and natural sciences
largely holding steady for the last four years. During that period, A grades
have ranged from 37.1 to 37.9 percent in the social sciences and from 35.1 to
35.9 percent in the natural sciences.
In the humanities and engineering, where progress has been slower, 2008-09
brought significant gains. A's accounted for 42.5 percent of grades in the
humanities last year and 40.6 percent of grades in engineering -- both down two
percentage points compared to 2007-08.
In the period from fall 2006 through spring 2009, the most recent three-year
period under the new grading policy, A's accounted for 40.1 percent of grades in
undergraduate courses, down from 47.0 percent in 2001-04, the three years before
the faculty adopted the policy. The 2006-09 results also mark continued progress
from those reported a year ago, when A's accounted for 40.4 percent of
undergraduate grades in the 2005-08 period.
In humanities departments, A's accounted for 44.1 percent of the grades in
undergraduate courses in 2006-09, down from 55.6 percent in 2001-04. In the
social sciences, there were 37.7 percent A grades in 2006-09, down from 43.3
percent in 2001-04. In the natural sciences, there were 35.6 percent A grades in
2006-09, compared to 37.2 percent in 2001-04. In engineering, the figures were
41.7 percent A's in 2006-09, down from 50.2 percent in 2001-04.
In its statement, the committee "noted the remarkable success of many
departments both in bringing their grades down and in maintaining their gains.
But it observed also that there continues to be more variation among departments
than the policy anticipates. The committee will be working closely with
departments that are still having some difficulty in controlling their grades to
devise specific strategies for turning these situations around."
Overall, the committee reiterated its "confidence in the educational benefits of
the faculty's successful effort to bring grades under better control." The
committee also noted that efforts to bring grades under control have not
hindered Princeton students in terms of finding jobs or getting into graduate
and professional schools. Detailed data about employment and postgraduate
admissions will be distributed to all faculty, undergraduates and undergraduate
parents later this month in a pamphlet titled "Grading at Princeton: Frequently
Asked Questions."
September
23, 2009 reply from Patricia Walters
[patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]
Bob:
My Alma Mater where I have a taught an adjunct course or two over the years.
NYU's Stern School's Undergraduate College also has similar guidelines for
grades and the on-line grading system gives you a warning if you go over the
recommended percentage.. A faculty member can override it, but if you did it
consistently or were over by a lot, someone will come and talk to you about it.
I don't remember off hand what the percentage cutoffs are. Initially, I didn't
like it, but really appreciated these requirements as time went on.
Pat
September
23, 2009 reply from Patricia Walters
[patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]
Bob:
At the grad school, there is another complication: reimbursement for tuition.
When employers won't reimburse for less than a B in the course, the pressure not
to give even a B- is intense. I've had students threaten me if they received
anything less than a B.
Pat
Grade
Inflation
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation
Answers as of
1996
The answers as of 1996 lie buried in the online article at
http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_old/PAW95-96/11_9596/0306note.html#story4
Are Students Getting Smarter?
Or are professors just pressured to give out more A's?
Students are getting smarter-or so it seems by the increasingly higher grades
they're receiving. Last year, undergraduates earned 8 percent more A's than they
did just seven years ago and more than twice as many as they did in 1969-70. In
1994-95, 41 percent of all grades awarded were A's and 42 percent were B's,
according to the Office of the Registrar.
Princeton didn't invent grade inflation. According to Registrar C. Anthony Broh,
it's a phenomena of private highly selective institutions. Yet at the same time
as grades are creeping up at Princeton, undergraduate grades nationwide have
been going down, according to a federal study released last October. The drop,
said Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst for the Department of
Education, is due to a 37 percent increase in the number of people attending
college.
Public colleges aren't experiencing grade inflation-a continual increase in the
average grade, explained Broh-at the same rate as highly selective institutions,
because their curricula are structured differently. Ohio State's curriculum, for
example, is designed to weed out students, said Broh.
Princeton saw grades inflate in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The percentage
of all grades that were A's jumped from 17 percent in 1969-70 to 30 percent in
1974-75. Students earned higher grades at Princeton and other institutions, in
part, because of the Vietnam War. Students whose grade-point averages dropped
too low were drafted, said Broh, "so faculty generally felt pressure" to give
high marks.
The percentages among grades remain-ed fairly constant from the late 1970s
through the early 1980s. In 1987-88, 33 percent of grades were A's. Since then,
grades have risen at about the same rate as they did during the early 1970s. The
primary reason for the jump, said Broh, is that professors feel some pressure
from students to give higher grades so they can better compete for admission to
graduate and professional schools.
Princeton's grade distribution is comparable to that of its peer institutions.
At Dartmouth the percentage of all grades that are A's rose from 33 percent in
1977-78 to 43 percent in 1993-94, according to Associate Registrar Nancy
Broadhead. At Harvard, the hybrid grade A/A- represented 22 percent of all
grades in 1966-67 and 43 percent in 1991-92, said spokeswoman Susan Green. C's
have virtually disappeared from Harvard transcripts, reported Harvard Magazine
in 1993.
Students aren't the only ones who apply subtle pressure to professors. Several
years ago, an instructor of linear algebra gave a third of the class C's, and
there was "a big uproar," said Joseph J. Kohn *56, the chairman of the
mathematics department. He received a "long letter" from a dean who suggested
that that kind of grading would discourage the students.
Ten years ago, a third of a class earning C's was normal, said Kohn. Professors
feel they're supposed to grade "efforts," not the product, he added.
Another reason for grade inflation, said Broh, is that students are taking fewer
courses Pass/D/Fail, which since 1990-91 have been limited to one per term for
each student. Therefore, students are earning more A's and B's and fewer P's.
Some observers believe that students are just smarter than they were 25 years
ago, and they're working harder. The SAT scores continue to rise, noted Broh.
Even if a professor wanted to "deflate" grades, one person can't expect to
"unilaterally try to reinvent grading," said Lee C. Mitchell, the chairman of
the English department. One professor alone would be "demonized," if he or she
tried to grade "accurately," said Clarence F. Brown, Jr., a professor of
comparative literature. "The language of grading is utterly debased," he added,
noting that real grading is relegated to letters of recommendation, a kind of
"secret grading."
Not every professor and student on campus has succumbed to grade inflation,
however. In the mind of Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science
James Wei, a C is still average. Professors in the engineering school still
regularly give grades below B's, though "students are indignant," he said.
According to Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel, the university
periodically reviews grade distribution. The administration encourages faculty
members to think carefully about grading patterns, but "we don't tell [them]
what grades to give," said Malkiel.
Harvard isn't planning on doing anything about the shift in grades, said Green.
Dartmouth, however, last year changed its grading policy. In an effort to assess
student performance more effectively, report cards and transcripts now include
not only grades, but also the median grade earned by the class and the size of
the class. The change may also affect grade inflation, but it's too soon to tell
if it has, said Broadhead.
In the end, perhaps grade inflation is inconsequential. As Kohn said, "The
important thing is what students learn, not what [grades] they get." And as Dean
of the Faculty Amy Gutmann told The Daily Princetonian, "There is no problem
[with grade inflation] as long as grades reflect the quality of work done."
Chart: The graphic is not available online
Infografic by Jeff Dionise; Source: Office of the Registrar
This chart, provided by the Office of the Registrar, shows the percentage of
grades awarded over the last 25 years. The percentage of A's and B's increased
markedly in the late 1960s and early 1970s and again since the late 1980s. The
percentage of P's (pass) dropped dramatically in the early 1970s, in part
because the Pass/D/Fail option lost favor among students for fear that those
evaluating their academic careers would think they took lighter loads, said
Registrar C. Anthony Broh. Also, the university now allows fewer courses to be
taken Pass/D/Fail. The percentage of P's peaked in 1969-70, when students went
on strike during the Vietnam War and sympathetic faculty gave them the option of
receiving either a P or a normal grade. Many students opted for P's, said Broh.
Are Students Getting Smarter?
Or are professors just pressured to give out more A's?
The real issue isn't grade inflation, said Registrar C. Anthony Broh, it's grade
"compression." Because most grades awarded are A's and B's, it's hard to
differentiate between students at the top of a course.
February
20, 2005 reply from Glen Gray
[glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]
If you are worried about grade inflations, think about this: a dean of a
well-known research university (sorry, I can’t say who) sent a memo to his
faculty suggesting that they RAISE the average GPA because grade inflation at
other institutions are putting his students at a competitive disadvantage. So,
now we may have a race to who has the highest average GPA.
February
20, 2005 reply from Roger Collins
[rcollins@CARIBOO.BC.CA]
I think the following is unlikely to fly in the continuous assessment
environment, but for seven years in the 70's/80s I taught at a UK institution
where all major exams (these accounted for around 80% of course marks and held
once per year) were double marked - once by the instructor directly responsible
for the class and once by an associate from the same department. Exam results
were also reviewed by a committee responsible for the degree, and samples sent
off to an external examiner (one of our externals was a certain David Tweedie).
This method is VERY effective at combating student pressure on instructors, but
fairly time-consuming; unless Faculty accept it (we did) as part of normal
work-load it may also become expensive....
Regards,
Roger
Roger Collins
Associate Professor UCC (soon to be TRU) School of Business
No wonder
kids take the easy way out: The era of work and sacrifice is long gone
The pressure for U.S. high schools to toughen up
is growing. But when schools respond with stiffened requirements, as many have
done by instituting senior projects, they often find that students and parents
aren't afraid to fight back.
Robert Tomsho, "When High Schools Try Getting Tough, Parents Fight Back," The
Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2005, Page A1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110782391032448413,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
In Duvall, Wash., Projects Required Months of Work -- Then Parental Protests
Kicked In
Fearing
your student evaluations, how much time and trouble should you devote to email
questions from your students?
For junior faculty members, the barrage of e-mail
has brought new tension into their work lives, some say, as they struggle with
how to respond. Their tenure prospects, they realize, may rest in part on
student evaluations of their accessibility. The stakes are different for
professors today than they were even a decade ago, said Patricia Ewick,
chairwoman of the sociology department at Clark University in Massachusetts,
explaining that "students are constantly asked to fill out evaluations of
individual faculty." Students also frequently post their own evaluations on Web
sites like
www.ratemyprofessors.com and describe their
impressions of their professors on blogs.
Jonathan D. Glater, "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About
Me," The New York Times, February 21, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/21professors.html
Bob
Jensen's threads on the dark side of education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Reed College, a selective liberal arts college in Oregon, where the average
grade-point average has remained a sobering 2.9 (on a 4.0 scale) for 19 years.
See below
Valen E. Johnson, a biostatistics professor at the University of Michigan and
author of "Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education" (Springer Verlag),
said the use of student ratings to evaluate teachers also inflates grades: "As
long as our evaluations depend on their opinion of us, their grades are going to
be high."
See below
Administrators and some faculty at some of the country's top universities have
proposed correcting for so-called grade inflation by limiting A's. It's
relatively easy to get an A at Princeton, but it's easier at Harvard.
"Is It
Grade Inflation, or Are Students Just Smarter?" by Karen W. Arenson, The New
York Times, April 18, 2004 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/weekinreview/18aren.html
MILLION dollars isn't what it used to be, and neither is an A in college.
A's - including A-pluses and A-minuses - make up about half the grades at many
elite schools, according to a recent survey by Princeton of the Ivy League and
several other leading universities.
At Princeton, where A's accounted for 47 percent of grades last year, up from 31
percent in the 1970's, administrators and some faculty have proposed correcting
for so-called grade inflation by limiting A's to 35 percent of course grades.
Not everyone is convinced there is a problem. A recent study by Clifford Adelman
of the United States Department of Education concluded that there were only
minor changes in grade distributions between the 1970's and the 1990's, even at
highly selective institutions. (A bigger change, he said, was the rise in the
number of students withdrawing from courses and repeating courses for higher
grades.)
Alfie Kohn, author of the coming book "More Essays on Standards, Grading and
Other Follies" (Beacon Press), says rising grades "don't in itself prove that
grade inflation exists.''
"It's necessary to show - and, to the best of my knowledge, it has never been
shown - that those higher grades are undeserved,'' he said.
Is it possible that the A students deserve their A's?
Getting into colleges like Princeton is far more difficult than it used to be.
And increasing numbers of students are being bred like racehorses to breeze
through standardized tests and to write essays combining Albert Einstein's
brilliance with Mother Teresa's compassion.
Partly to impress admissions officers, students are loading up on Advanced
Placement courses. The College Board said the number taking 10 or more such
courses in high school is more than 10 times what it was a decade ago. And
classes aimed at helping them do better on the SAT exams are booming.
"Back in 1977, when I graduated from high school, it had to be less than 25,000
students nationally who spent more than $100 on preparing for the SAT," said
John Katzman, founder and chief executive of The Princeton Review, which tutors
about 60,000 students a year for the SAT's. "It was the C students who prepped,
not the A students," he added. "Now it's got to be circa 200,000 or 250,000
students who are going to spend more than $400 to prepare for the SAT."
But Wayne Camara, vice president of research at the College Board, said that
while students are increasingly well prepared, "that in no way accounts for the
shift in grades we are seeing.''
"Grades are not like temperatures or weights,'' he said. "What constitutes an A
or a B has changed, both in high school and in college."
He said teachers are aware of how competitive the academic world has become and
try to help students by giving better grades. "If you graduated from college in
the 1950's and you wanted to go to law school or a graduate program, you could,"
Dr. Camara said. "Today it is very difficult. You are not going to be able to
graduate from Harvard or Princeton with a 2.8 grade point average and get into
Georgetown Law."
In addition, one recent Princeton graduate who works in investment banking and
has participated in recruiting meetings cautioned in a letter to The Daily
Princetonian that hiring practices can be superficial, and that grade-point
averages are one of the first items scrutinized on a résumé.
Stuart Rojstaczer, a geology professor at Duke who runs the Web site
www.Gradeinflation.com, says that higher grades are the result of a culture
where the student-consumer is king. "We don't want to offend students or
parents," he said. "They are customers and the customer is always right."
Valen E. Johnson, a biostatistics professor at the University of Michigan and
author of "Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education" (Springer Verlag),
said the use of student ratings to evaluate teachers also inflates grades: "As
long as our evaluations depend on their opinion of us, their grades are going to
be high."
Even if the Princeton plan is approved, Professor Johnson, who unsuccessfully
tried to lower grades at Duke University a few years ago, cautioned that reform
is difficult. "It is not in the interest of the majority to reform the system,"
he said. "Assigning grades, particularly low grades, is tough, and it requires
more work, since low grades have to be backed up with evidence of poor
performance."
But Princeton and others may take some comfort from Reed College, a selective
liberal arts college in Oregon, where the average grade-point average has
remained a sobering 2.9 (on a 4.0 scale) for 19 years.
The college says it ranks third among all colleges and universities in the
proportion of students who go on for Ph.D.s, and has produced more than 50
Fulbright Scholars and 31 Rhodes scholars.
Still, Colin S. Diver, Reed's president, says graduate schools worried about
their rankings are becoming less willing to take students with lower grades
because they make the graduate schools appear less selective.
"If they admit someone with a 3.0 from Reed who is in the upper half of the
class, that counts against them, even if it is a terrific student," Mr. Diver
said. "I keep saying to my colleagues here that we can hold ourselves out of the
market for only so long."
September
18, 2009 reply from Richard Pettway <richard.pettway@cba.ufl.edu>
Hi Bob,
A comment about GPA inflation. Clearly, the facts are the facts. However, I am
interested in whether there has been a corresponding increase in GMAT grades in
enter MBA programs. The question is do higher GPA scores result in higher GMAT
scores? Clearly, there is great pressure on instructors to raise GPAs, but I did
not think that there was any effective pressure to raise GMAT scores. Thus, if
GMAT scores also increased during the same time period, perhaps the students
have been better, justifying the increased GPA scores. In those conditions,
there would not be any grade inflation. Thus, I think it is an empirical issue.
What are the facts of the trend in GMAT scores?
Cheers,
Dick
September
18, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Dick,
You raise
a good question, although if anything the SAT and ACT scores have declined in
periods of highest grade inflation. Keep in mind that the SAT scoring changed in
2001 when a writing component was added ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Since
quality of K-12 schools gone downhill, I don't think better preparation for
college accounts for the grade inflation. I'm more inclined to blame grade
inflation on other things, especially when teaching evaluations began to
directly impact job performance evaluations, promotion, and tenure decisions.
Bob Jensen
September
18, 2009 reply from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
Bob,
Interesting and provocative post.
I've heard you say, for years, that student evaluations of teaching are the
primary factor in collegiate grade inflation.
I've had a pretty human reaction to your statement. I claim that SET's have had
no impact on my grade assignments, but undoubtedly have impacted the grade
assignments of all my colleagues. Of course, on those rare sober moments I'll
admit to myself that your point applies even to me. I assign higher grades in
part because of SET. Without AECM I would never have reached this point of
self-realization.
These days, there is a trend to publish the results of these SET. I think it
will have an explosive impact on an instructor's course GPA. I fear being at an
institution where one summary number for a professor's teaching is published.
And I have a history of receiving fairly high SET scores, averaging 90-95% of
maximum.
I'm pretty sure I do my best job possible in helping my students learn. I've
adopted the learner-centered approach in improve student learning efficacy of
accounting content. I'm convinced that the learner-centered approach is a better
approach (than teacher-centered) for a content-dominated course. I also use Dee
Fink's taxonomy as a guide for my efforts in holistic education. So, I think I
put in a solid, conscientious effort that is effective in helping students
learn. Students have verified this in the teaching awards they send my way.
I think, though, the trend for publishing SET results for each professor will
end up with another race to the bottom, a death spiral if you will. It is one
thing for my SET results to be transmitted to the P&T committee, and the merit
committee. Not everyone will see it and immediately be able to make a comparison
of my score with those of my colleagues. However, if everyone's score is
published and anyone can make that comparison, then I'll start competing to make
sure that I have the highest SET results. And I know how to compete. I'll do
everything possible to influence student responses on the SEC, even to the
detriment of the other proven things I do that result in increased student
learning. Because a high teacher rating from an SET does not necessarily equate
to high student learning. [Hint: taking cookies to the class period where SETs
are filled out has a great, great impact on the SET]
You also pose the question of "are students getting smarter?" This is
interesting, because many faculty think that students are actually getting
dumber. Certainly it is perceived by faculty that students are less well
prepared for business courses in college. If smart/dumb characteristics are
related to native intellectual ability, then I just don't see how the human
being is evolving into a more stupid creature. Besides, it takes several
generations to gauge the evolutionary impact on a specie's gene pool. 25 years
is not enough to prove "de-evolution" of humans.
David Albrecht
Concordia College
Moorhead MN
Why
teaching evaluations are, in my viewpoint, the number one cause of grade
inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Grade
Inflation Versus Teaching Evaluations ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation
The Ketz
Solution to Grade Inflation
"Sue the
University!" by: J. Edward Ketz, SmartPros, September 2009 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x67598.xml
She graduated from the college last April with a bachelor of business
administration degree, majoring in information technology. Trina finished with a
“solid” attendance record and a grade point average of 2.7. She applied to every
potential job placement available through the college’s placement services, but
to no avail. Because she cannot get a job, she is suing the college for tuition
costs ($70,000) plus compensation for the stress due to her inability to land a
job ($2,000).
News agencies that have reported on this event uniformly point out that the case
is meritless because colleges do not promise a job to their students. Instead,
they promise an education. These reporters and pundits, however, miss the
significance of the lawsuit. When universities offer an education to their
students, what are they really offering and what do they deliver? And how can
you tell whether the university has actually provided an education to the
student?
We used to say institutions of higher learning supplied higher levels of
knowledge; but with the knowledge explosion in the last 100 years or so, nobody
today comprehends much of the total human knowledge that we collectively have.
Besides, anybody can log on to the web and presumably find knowledge. Whether
the individual knows what to do with it is another matter.
And Bill Gates is one example that it is possible to gain knowledge without a
college degree. Of course, one might quickly add that for every success story
such as Gates’, there are hundreds of uneducated people who are unemployed or
working for minimum wages.
For some time universities have been asserting that an education is a process by
which the university teaches students to think. Academia teaches “critical
thinking”, communication skills, global awareness, and diversity training.
Bypassing any thoughts about whether this is what higher learning should be
about, I want to focus on assessment. When a student graduates, how does he or
she (or parents) grasp whether the mission has been accomplished? Did they
receive value commensurate with the costs?
Our society is quite utilitarian, and that philosophy began to pervade
universities when Congress democratized college education after World War II
with the GI bill. Education at universities was once for the elite, but now it
exists for the masses. By necessity, universities have had to water down the
content of courses because the average person, by definition, is unable to
accomplish what the elite can do.
The irony, as many have stated, is grade inflation for the masses, especially
when contrasted with grades that existed a century ago. The interesting point is
that universities do not have the will to change this aspect of the system. They
prefer to have satisfied “customers” and parents and governments—and the tuition
dollars.
One simple scheme to improve the grading system is to require faculty to rank
order the students and resolve ties with the median of the tied scores. Any
faculty member who assigns all A’s ranks all of the students in the 50th
percentile. A faculty member who gives 60% A’s and 40% B’s assigns the first
group to the 70th percentile and members of the latter group to the 20th
percentile. But, this improvement will never be implemented because universities
don’t really want to fix this problem.
The utilitarian worldview raises its head at various points, and one concerns
the value of education. While many analysts dismiss Thompson’s lawsuit because
her college did not promise her a job, it would prove interesting to take a poll
of students and parents across the land. My hunch is that enough people would
side with Trina to make university administrators uncomfortable.
After all, how can you tell whether somebody has achieved a sufficiently
proficient level of critical thinking? How can you assess one’s ability to
communicate or his or her ability to grasp global issues or be sensitive to
diversity? Of course, we professors claim to have the professional judgment to
answer these questions, but what we do is a black box to outsiders, if not to
ourselves.
In a lot of ways trying to answer these questions isn’t much different from
debating the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead. I hypothesize that
most Americans would escape the subjectivity of these issues by saying the acid
test for these concerns is the ability to get a job. Perhaps not immediately, as
a liberal arts education is often deemed a useful foundation for a professional
education, such as law, but eventually one needs some sort of employment to say
that the education has succeeded.
Accounting education is no different. On the one hand, we would like graduates
to demonstrate critical thinking, ethical decision making, and be aware of
international business issues. On the other hand, graduates need skills for the
marketplace. And not just skills to obtain a job, but skills and attitudes and a
work ethic to advance and contribute to the firm and to society.
As I reflect on Trina Thompson’s lawsuit, I wonder how many more students will
sue their alma maters. And, if a judge allows the suit to proceed, I wonder
whether jury members will sympathize with the colleges or with the unemployed
graduates. There is more at stake here than merely the discontent of one
unemployed former student.
Jensen
Comment
Below is my August 17, 2009 on the Trina Thompson lawsuit. ABC News asserted
that Monroe College in overzealous recruiting practices made "promises" beyond
what is normal more traditional colleges and universities. If she wins this
lawsuit it need not make most other learning institutions worry.
A New York City woman who says she can't find a
job is suing the college where she earned a bachelor's degree. Trina Thompson
filed a lawsuit last week against Monroe College in Bronx Supreme Court. The
27-year-old is seeking the $70,000 she spent on tuition. Thompson says she's
been unable to find gainful employment since she received her information
technology degree in April.
"Jobless NYC woman sues college for $70K in tuition," Yahoo News, August
2, 2009 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090803/ap_on_fe_st/us_odd_jobless_grad_sues
Jensen Comment
ABC News added some added some revelations about deceptive promises being made
to student prospects and tuition rip offs. There may be circumstances that make
this lawsuit different from most situations for college graduates in general.
The Importance of Paying Attention for Longer Periods of Time
Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed
that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to
have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T.
scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying
attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could
wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and
ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
"Don’t! The secret of self-control," by Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, May
18, 2009 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer
Jim Mahar clued me into this link.
In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a
four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the
Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was
little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was
asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows,
cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s
now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of
corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But
they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she
could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait
while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when
he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away
he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would
forfeit the second. Then he left the room.
Although Carolyn has no direct memory of the
experiment, and the scientists would not release any information about the
subjects, she strongly suspects that she was able to delay gratification.
“I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. “If you give me
a challenge or a task, then I’m going to find a way to do it, even if it
means not eating my favorite food.” Her mother, Karen Sortino, is still more
certain: “Even as a young kid, Carolyn was very patient. I’m sure she would
have waited.” But her brother Craig, who also took part in the experiment,
displayed less fortitude. Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers
the torment of trying to wait. “At a certain point, it must have occurred to
me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all
the candy.” According to Craig, he was also tested with little plastic
toys—he could have a second one if he held out—and he broke into the desk,
where he figured there would be additional toys. “I took everything I
could,” he says. “I cleaned them out. After that, I noticed the teachers
encouraged me to not go into the experiment room anymore.”
Footage of these experiments, which were conducted
over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification
for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn
around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or
tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny
stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully
around the room to make sure that nobody can see him. Then he picks up an
Oreo, delicately twists it apart, and licks off the white cream filling
before returning the cookie to the tray, a satisfied look on his face.
Most of the children were like Craig. They
struggled to resist the treat and held out for an average of less than three
minutes. “A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,” Walter Mischel, the
Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers.
“They didn’t even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly
at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later.” About
thirty per cent of the children, however, were like Carolyn. They
successfully delayed gratification until the researcher returned, some
fifteen minutes later. These kids wrestled with temptation but found a way
to resist.
The initial goal of the experiment was to identify
the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while
others simply surrendered. After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies
in the early seventies, Mischel moved on to other areas of personality
research. “There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to
eat marshmallows.”
But occasionally Mischel would ask his three
daughters, all of whom attended the Bing, about their friends from nursery
school. “It was really just idle dinnertime conversation,” he says. “I’d ask
them, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Eric? How are they doing in school?’ ” Mischel
began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as
teen-agers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow. He asked
his daughters to assess their friends academically on a scale of zero to
five. Comparing these ratings with the original data set, he saw a
correlation. “That’s when I realized I had to do this seriously,” he says.
Starting in 1981, Mischel sent out a questionnaire to all the reachable
parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the six hundred and fifty-three
subjects who had participated in the marshmallow task, who were by then in
high school. He asked about every trait he could think of, from their
capacity to plan and think ahead to their ability to “cope well with
problems” and get along with their peers. He also requested their S.A.T.
scores.
Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he
noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed
more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They
got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had
trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships.
The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on
average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could
wait only thirty seconds.
Carolyn Weisz is a textbook example of a high
delayer. She attended Stanford as an undergraduate, and got her Ph.D. in
social psychology at Princeton. She’s now an associate psychology professor
at the University of Puget Sound. Craig, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles and
has spent his career doing “all kinds of things” in the entertainment
industry, mostly in production. He’s currently helping to write and produce
a film. “Sure, I wish I had been a more patient person,” Craig says.
“Looking back, there are definitely moments when it would have helped me
make better career choices and stuff.”
Mischel and his colleagues continued to track the
subjects into their late thirties—Ozlem Ayduk, an assistant professor of
psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, found that
low-delaying adults have a significantly higher body-mass index and are more
likely to have had problems with drugs—but it was frustrating to have to
rely on self-reports. “There’s often a gap between what people are willing
to tell you and how they behave in the real world,” he explains. And so,
last year, Mischel, who is now a professor at Columbia, and a team of
collaborators began asking the original Bing subjects to travel to Stanford
for a few days of experiments in an fMRI machine. Carolyn says she will be
participating in the scanning experiments later this summer; Craig completed
a survey several years ago, but has yet to be invited to Palo Alto. The
scientists are hoping to identify the particular brain regions that allow
some people to delay gratification and control their temper. They’re also
conducting a variety of genetic tests, as they search for the hereditary
characteristics that influence the ability to wait for a second marshmallow.
If Mischel and his team succeed, they will have
outlined the neural circuitry of self-control. For decades, psychologists
have focussed on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it
comes to predicting success in life. Mischel argues that intelligence is
largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to
do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t
will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than
that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for
them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t
control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”
Walter Mischel is a slight, elegant man with a
shaved head and a face of deep creases. He talks with a Brooklyn bluster and
he tends to act out his sentences, so that when he describes the marshmallow
task he takes on the body language of an impatient four-year-old. “If you
want to know why some kids can wait and others can’t, then you’ve got to
think like they think,” Mischel says.
Mischel was born in Vienna, in 1930. His father was
a modestly successful businessman with a fondness for café society and
Esperanto, while his mother spent many of her days lying on the couch with
an ice pack on her forehead, trying to soothe her frail nerves. The family
considered itself fully assimilated, but after the Nazi annexation of
Austria, in 1938, Mischel remembers being taunted in school by the Hitler
Youth and watching as his father, hobbled by childhood polio, was forced to
limp through the streets in his pajamas. A few weeks after the takeover,
while the family was burning evidence of their Jewish ancestry in the
fireplace, Walter found a long-forgotten certificate of U.S. citizenship
issued to his maternal grandfather decades earlier, thus saving his family.
The family settled in Brooklyn, where Mischel’s
parents opened up a five-and-dime. Mischel attended New York University,
studying poetry under Delmore Schwartz and Allen Tate, and taking studio-art
classes with Philip Guston. He also became fascinated by psychoanalysis and
new measures of personality, such as the Rorschach test. “At the time, it
seemed like a mental X-ray machine,” he says. “You could solve a person by
showing them a picture.” Although he was pressured to join his uncle’s
umbrella business, he ended up pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at
Ohio State.
But Mischel noticed that academic theories had
limited application, and he was struck by the futility of most personality
science. He still flinches at the naïveté of graduate students who based
their diagnoses on a battery of meaningless tests. In 1955, Mischel was
offered an opportunity to study the “spirit possession” ceremonies of the
Orisha faith in Trinidad, and he leapt at the chance. Although his research
was supposed to involve the use of Rorschach tests to explore the
connections between the unconscious and the behavior of people when
possessed, Mischel soon grew interested in a different project. He lived in
a part of the island that was evenly split between people of East Indian and
of African descent; he noticed that each group defined the other in broad
stereotypes. “The East Indians would describe the Africans as impulsive
hedonists, who were always living for the moment and never thought about the
future,” he says. “The Africans, meanwhile, would say that the East Indians
didn’t know how to live and would stuff money in their mattress and never
enjoy themselves.”
Mischel took young children from both ethnic groups
and offered them a simple choice: they could have a miniature chocolate bar
right away or, if they waited a few days, they could get a much bigger
chocolate bar. Mischel’s results failed to justify the stereotypes—other
variables, such as whether or not the children lived with their father,
turned out to be much more important—but they did get him interested in the
question of delayed gratification. Why did some children wait and not
others? What made waiting possible? Unlike the broad traits supposedly
assessed by personality tests, self-control struck Mischel as potentially
measurable.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think this entire article has a lot to do with metacognition and the
importance of self-learning because it is often easier to pay attention when
learning on your own.
Bob Jensen's threads on learning memory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
"Attention Must Be Paid," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, November 26,
2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/11/26/mclemee
Actually looking at the e-mail would no doubt have
informed me that it was a matter of paying a modest fee to some enterprising
soul, probably in the Cayman Islands. Instead, I deleted this message on the
basis of the subject line alone, along with a dozen other such
communications. Meanwhile, my eyeballs were unwittingly drawn to a video
loop of a woman screaming in terror – horrified at high credit card interest
rates, which she could reduce via a company that advertises with my e-mail
provider.
Then my cell phone emitted a short burst of music,
announcing that someone had just left a text message.
All par for the course, of course. (At least I
wasn’t driving.) The demands on our attention have now become a matter for
professional expertise: An organization for specialists, the
Information
Overload Research Group, was formally incorporated
as a nonprofit this summer and held its first conference in August. A
substantial
technical literature
on interruption now exists. And one
recent consideration of the world economic crisis
suggests it has been exacerbated by all the data now sloshing around the
globe: “We have far too much information today and that impedes our
decision-making abilities and throttles our ability to resolve crises.”
The weak link in the information age seems to be
our human hard-wiring. So one gathers from
The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory
(Oxford University Press) by Torkel Klingberg, who is
a professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the Stockholm Brain
Institute. A review of recent research on how attention and memory actually
function within our gray matter, it is a work of scientific popularization
rather than a handbook on how to minimize the cognitive drain of
distraction.
But there may be some advantage to knowing how the
systems in our heads actually operate – and it is Klingberg’s contention
that, in spite of everything, those systems may actually benefit from the
sometimes excessive demands our environments now place on our capacity to
process the data flux. The human brain itself has not changed much in either
anatomy or volume over the past 40,000 years. So at one level it seems
natural that we should experience a cognitive bottleneck in handling the
masses of information being hurled at us daily.
To simplify Klingberg’s already pared-down
analysis, we can distinguish between two
kinds of attention. One is controlled
attention: the directed effort to apply one’s concentration to a particular
task. The other is stimulus-driven attention, which is an involuntary
response to something happening in the environment. (You can tune out the
conversations going on around you in a restaurant. But if a waiter drops a
tray full of dishes, it is going to impose itself on your awareness.)
But it’s not as if these forms of attention are –
as it may seem – different manifestations of the same state of
consciousness: researchers have found from tests that the controlled and
stimulus-driven attention “seem fairly independent of one another,” says
Klingberg, which may mean “that there are different parts of the brain, or
different brain processes” involved in them.
Likewise, there is a distinction between the kind
of memory that allows you to recall an event from five years ago and a set
of information connected with a problem you are trying to solve. Your
recollections of yesteryear are part of long-term memory, which can be
mysteriously capacious. By contrast, there are definite limitations on how
much task-oriented data can be held in your “working memory.” (Evidently
there are grounds for debate among researchers over whether or not this is
the same as “short-term memory,” but we’ll just stick to Klingberg’s
preferred usage.)
As with the forms of attention, the distinction
between long-term and working memory corresponds to different processes
within the brain, occurring within different parts of its geography. But
there is evidence that (as you might expect) working memory and controlled
attention are closely related. People who score lower on tests for the
ability to retain information in their working memory tend to have more
difficulty in focusing attention on a complex task. “It might not come as
too much of a surprise,” says Klingberg, “to find that working memory
capacity correlates highly with reading comprehension.”
Klingberg reports that a two-year study in his lab
showed that it was possible to increase working-memory capacity: “children
who had done a certain type of computerized memory task, such as remembering
positions in a four-by-four grid and clicking a mouse button, improved at
other, noncomputerized types of working memory too.... We had shown that the
systems are not static and that the limits of working memory capacity can be
stretched.”
Further study suggested that this improvement also
corresponded to increased problem-solving skills. Our brains may still have
many of the same fundamental limitations as the Cro-Magnon model, but there
is also some degree of plasticity in how we can use and develop it.
Which brings us to Klingberg’s most surprising and
even counterintuitive suggestion. Multitasking often threatens to overload
the working memory. But at the same time, it’s clear that we can actually
manage it, at least to some degree – reading a newspaper while walking on a
treadmill, for example, and occasionally glancing up at the TV screen to see
what’s breaking on CNN.
“There is, fortunately, no research suggesting that
exposure to mentally more demanding or challenging situations impairs our
powers of concentration,” writes Klingberg. “Indeed, there is much that
points to the contrary: it is in situations that push the boundaries of our
abilities that we train our brains the most.”
But even if our basic ability to process
information is increasing, a growing “discrepancy between demand and
capacity” may account for the common sense of losing focus.
“You are very possibly 10 percent better at talking
on the phone while erasing spam today than you were three years ago. On the
other hand, the number of e-mails you receive per day has probably shot up
about 200 percent. There is, therefore, no contradiction between the feeling
that your abilities are inadequate and the improvement of those abilities.”
Well, that is some comfort – if not much. It’s been
said that the scarcest resource in an information society is not information
but attention. Klingberg’s book, interesting as it is, does not leave the
reader with any way around that. In any case, a great deal of the
“information” (such as my Ph.D. offer this morning) turns out to be noise,
rather than anything meaningful. It’s necessary to pay just enough attention
to decide not to pay any more attention – a kind of catch-22.
Which is why it sometimes feels like one’s brain is
being nibbled by carnivorous gnats. It would be good if Dr. Klingberg and
his colleagues would apply themselves to finding a salve. Or better yet, a
repellent.
Jensen Comment
I think this entire article has a lot to do with metacognition and the
importance of self-learning because it is often easier to pay attention when
learning on your own.
Bob Jensen's threads on learning memory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Question
What is hyperbolic discounting?
"Psychology of poverty and temptation," by Chris Blattman, September 2009 ---
http://chrisblattman.com/2009/09/15/psychology-of-poverty-and-temptation/
Some people are impulsive and impatient; they
prefer a dollar or a donut today far more than a dollar or a donut tomorrow,
so much so that they’re willing to give up shocking amounts of dollars and
donuts tomorrow for just one today. This is one reason, some say, that we
see such high interest rates for short-term borrowing, from New York to
Calcutta.
Some people are not only impulsive and impatient,
but inconsistently so. they care a lot about a dollar today versus tomorrow,
but could care less between getting a dollar either 10 or 11 days from now.
Economists call this ‘hyperbolic discounting’.
Both behaviors–impatience and time inconsistency–could be a source of
persistent poverty.
Or not. Abhijit Banerjee
presented
a new paper here yesterday, written with MIT
colleague Sendhil Mullainathan. They look at a number of seemingly unusual
behaviors by the very poor–from exorbitant rates of short-term borrowing to
the low take-up of small, high-return investments. Impatience cannot explain
the patterns, they say. The impatience approach also requires the poor think
differently than the rest of the population.
Another view: we’re all impulsive and impatient in
the same way, but over a narrow range of goods that are quickly and cheaply
satisfied. If you’re poor, these temptations are a big fraction of your
income. If you’re even somewhat wealthy, they are not. Temptations are
declining in income.
The paper runs through half a dozen perplexing
patterns of behavior, and shows that these simple assumptions can explain a
great deal.
This approach has a great deal in common with
hyperbolic discounting, but is empirically distinct (and has very different
policy implications). Parsing out and testing these subtleties strikes me as
one of the most important frontiers in the study of poverty. Declining
temptation, if true, could explain all sorts of odd behaviors. With more
than a few Uganda and Liberia surveys on the horizon, I’m now scheming ways
to test whether it’s true.
It’s a difficult paper, especially for
those uninitiated in micro-economic theory. Even if that sounds like you:
the subtle points are worth the slog.
For an intro to the
subfield, see Senthil’s essay,
Development economics through the lens of psychology.
Another great resource is Stefano Dellavigna’s recent
JEL article on
evidence from the field. Both are ungated.
Great Comedy Video About What to Say to Bill Collectors
It just gets better and better as it rolls along
Clean Comedy from Tim Clue (Debt) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5bbvMR8Ee4
The above link was forwarded by
Paul Bjorklund
Alternate link when opening for George Bush Sr. --- http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Tim+Clue&search_type=&aq=f
Bob Jensen's helpers in personal finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
How to avoid losing your money to fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
Behavioral and Cultural Economics and Finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Behavioral
78% of former NFL players have gone
bankrupt or are under financial
stress because of joblessness or divorce.
Championship Rings in pawn shops, IRS vaults, Ponzi schemer stashes offshore, or
in the clutches of ex-wives
What on earth did athletes learn in college?
Pros seem especially susceptible to Ponzi schemes. Some recent examples ---
Click Here
10 Ways Sports Stars (multi-millionaires) Go From Riches To Rags," by
Lawrence Delevingne, Business Insider, September 18, 2009 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-ways-sports-stars-destroy-their-finances-2009-9
Sports
Illustrated article this year showed
how shockingly common financial ruin is:
- By the time they have been retired for two
years, 78% of former NFL players have gone
bankrupt
or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.
- Within five years of retirement, an estimated
60% of former NBA players are broke.
- Numerous retired MLB players have been
similarly ruined.
If that's not bad enough, the
recession
has made things even worse. Too much money in real estate; investments in
Ponzi schemes; and poor financial advising have been exposed with the down
economy.
A sign
of the times? More former stars are
selling their championship rings for money than ever.
"It's amazing that I heard the recession was over,"
says Timothy Robins, owner of
Championshiprings.net,
who buys bling from current and former pros and has
seen a 36% increase in sales during the past year. "I'm getting more calls
from players than ever. They're having a really hard time."
While just about everyone has
lost
money over the past year, athletes
tend to make particularly bad financial decisions, and it's not just
reckless spending.
How they lose their wealth ---
Click Here
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-ways-sports-stars-destroy-their-finances-2009-9#put-cash-in-a-ponzi-scheme-1
The 10 ways sports pros blow their cash >>
Jensen Comment
The same goes for many, many movie stars like Debbie Reynolds who, very late in
their lives, are "willing to work for food."
The boots in Hollywood's Boot Hill are not stuffed with savings.
Bob Jensen's helpers in personal finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
How to avoid losing your money to fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
Behavioral and Cultural Economics and Finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Behavioral
"Video: The New Geography of Innovation," Simoleon Sense,
September 18, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-new-geography-of-innovation/
What does it take for innovation to occur? Master
“nudger” and business professor talks about the process of innovation.
Introduction (Via Fora.Tv)
Dubbed “Mr. Creativity” and “a serial innovator” by
The Economist, Dr. John Kao describes his job as “instigator of new things.”
This talk is part of the Momentum 2009 Leadership Conference hosted by
Tides.
Speaker Background (Via Fora.Tv)
John Kao - Dubbed “Mr. Creativity” and “a serial
innovator” by The Economist, Dr. John Kao describes his job as
“instigator of new things.” He is considered a leading authority on the
subjects of innovation, organizational transformation, and digital media. He
is author of Innovation Nation, and Jamming: The Art and
Discipline of Business Creativity, a BusinessWeek best-seller
that has been published in a dozen languages. In addition, he is the founder
of Kao & Company, which advises top tier Fortune 500 business leaders as
well as government leaders around the world. He has specialized in
instructing organizations in the methods for making innovation happen.
As a professor, he taught a popular course on
innovation at the Harvard Business School, and held faculty appointments at
the MIT Media Lab, Yale College, and the US Naval Postgraduate School. He
has started several companies, in areas as diverse as biotech and innovation
management. He is also a Tony-nominated executive producer of theater and
film, including sex, lies and videotape, and he is an accomplished
jazz musician.
Bob Jensen's threads on tricks and tools of the trade are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of accountancy doctoral programs are
at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Test Drive Running a University
Virtual Learning Games/Simulations for Understanding the Complexities of
Managing a University
This is a very serious virtual learning project funded, in large measure, by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
"Virtual University (a free download) ---
http://www.virtual-u.org/
With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on
April 15-16 the Education Arcade, The Comparative Media Studies Program at
M.I.T., The Virtual U Project, and The Serious Games Initiative will host a
two-day workshop at M.I.T titled “Game Simulations for Educational
Leadership & Visualization: Virtual U and Beyond”. This event is designed to
look at the past, present, and future of games about education and
educational life.
Virtual U is designed to
foster better understanding of management practices in American colleges and
universities.
It provides students, teachers, and parents the unique opportunity to step
into the decision-making shoes of a university president. Players are
responsible for establishing and monitoring all the major components of an
institution, including everything from faculty salaries to campus parking.
As players move around the Virtual U campus, they gather information needed
to make decisions such as decreasing faculty teaching time or increasing
athletic scholarships. However, as in a real college or university, the
complexity and potential effects of each decision must be carefully
considered. And the Virtual U Board of Trustees is monitoring every move.
Virtual U models the attitudes and behaviors of the academic community in
five major areas of higher education management:
- Spending and income decisions such as
operating budget, new hires, incoming donations, and management
of the endowment;
- Faculty, course, and student
scheduling issues;
- Admissions standards, university
prestige, and student enrollment;
- Student housing, classrooms, and all
other facilities; and
- Performance indicators.
|
Virtual U players select an institution type and
strive for continuous improvement by setting, monitoring, and modifying a
variety of institutional parameters and policies. Players are challenged to
manage and improve their institution of higher education through techniques
such as resource allocation, minority enrollment policies, and policies for
promoting faculty, among others. Players watch the results of their
decisions unfold in real- time. A letter of review from Virtual U's board is
sent every "year," informing players of their progress.
Jensen Comment
Click on "Team" to be impressed with credentials of the development team,
including William F. Massey, the long-time President of Stanford University.
Virtual University may be downloaded free and/or ordered in a box set of
disks.
One potential application is in not-for-profit accountancy classes where
students can learn how to prepare and analyze financial reports for decision
making.
There are all sorts of applications for advanced managerial accountancy
classes as well.
Bob Jensen's threads on virtual learning and simulations ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
Higher Education Controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Forwarded by Paula
24 THINGS ABOUT TO BECOME EXTINCT IN AMERICA (this list is dated 2007)
24. Yellow Pages This year will be pivotal for the global Yellow Pages
industry. Much like newspapers, print Yellow Pages will continue to bleed
dollars to their various digital counterparts, from Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs),
to local search engines and combination search/listing services like Reach
Local and Yodle Factors like an acceleration of the print 'fade rate' and
the looming recession will contribute to the onslaught. One research firm
predicts the falloff in usage of newspapers and print Yellow Pages could
even reach 10% this year -- much higher than the 2%-3% fade rate seen in
past years.
23. Classified Ads The Internet has made so many things obsolete that
newspaper classified ads might sound like just another trivial item on a
long list. But this is one of those harbingers of the future that could
signal the end of civilization as we know it. The argument is that if
newspaper classifieds are replaced by free online listings at sites like
Craigslist.org and Google Base, then newspapers are not far behind them.
22. Movie Rental Stores While Netflix is looking up at the moment,
Blockbuster keeps closing store locations by the hundreds. It still has
about 6,000 left across the world, but those keep dwindling and the stock is
down considerably in 2008, especially since the company gave up a quest of
Circuit City . Movie Gallery, which owned the Hollywood Video brand, closed
up shop earlier this year. Countless small video chains and mom-and-pop
stores have given up the ghost already.
21. Dial-up Internet Access Dial-up connections have fallen from 40% in
2001 to 10% in 2008. The combination of an infrastructure to accommodate
affordable high speed Internet connections and the disappearing home phone
have all but pounded the final nail in the coffin of dial-up Internet
access.
20. Phone Landlines According to a survey from the National Center for
Health Statistics, at the end of 2007, nearly one in six homes was cell-only
and, of those homes that had landlines, one in eight only received calls on
their cells.
19. Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs Maryland 's icon, the blue crab, has been
fading away in Chesapeake Bay . Last year Maryland saw the lowest harvest
(22 million pounds) since 1945. Just four decades ago the bay produced 96
million pounds. The population is down 70% since 1990, when they first did a
formal count. There are only about 120 million crabs in the bay and they
think they need 200 million for a sustainable population. Overfishing,
pollution, invasive species and global warming get the blame.
18. VCRs For the better part of three decades, the VCR was a best-seller
and staple in every American household until being completely decimated by
the DVD, and now the Digital Video Recorder (DVR). In fact, the only
remnants of the VHS age at your local Wal-Mart or Radio Shack are blank VHS
tapes these days. Pre-recorded VHS tapes are largely gone and VHS decks are
practically nowhere to be found. They served us so well.
17. Ash Trees In the late 1990s, a pretty, iridescent green species of
beetle, now known as the emerald ash borer, hitched a ride to North America
with ash wood products imported from eastern Asia . In less than a decade,
its larvae have killed millions of trees in the Midwest, and continue to
spread. They've killed more than 30 million ash trees in southeastern
Michigan alone, with tens of millions more lost in Ohio and Indiana . More
than 7.5 billion ash trees are currently at risk.
16. Ham Radio Amateur radio operators enjoy personal (and often
worldwide) wireless communications with each other and are able to support
their communities with emergency and disaster communications if necessary,
while increasing their personal knowledge of electronics and radio theory.
However, proliferation of the Internet and its popularity among youth has
caused the decline of amateur radio. In the past five years alone, the
number of people holding active ham radio licenses has dropped by 50,000,
even though Morse Code is no longer a requirement.
15. The Swimming Hole Thanks to our litigious society, swimming holes are
becoming a thing of the past. '20/20' reports that swimming hole owners,
like Robert Every in High Falls, N.Y., are shutting them down out of worry
that if someone gets hurt they'll sue. And that's exactly what happened in
Seattle . The city of Bellingham was sued by Katie Hofstetter who was
paralyzed in a fall at a popular swimming hole in Whatcom Falls Park . As
injuries occur and lawsuits follow, expect more swimming holes to post 'Keep
out!' signs.
14. Answering Machines The increasing disappearance of answering machines
is directly tied to No 20 our list -- the decline of landlines. According to
USA Today, the number of homes that only use cell phones jumped 159% between
2004 and 2007. It has been particularly bad in New York ; since 2000,
landline usage has dropped 55%. It's logical that as cell phones rise, many
of them replacing traditional landlines, that there will be fewer answering
machines.
13. Cameras That Use Film It doesn't require a statistician to prove the
rapid disappearance of the film camera in America . Just look to companies
like Nikon, the professional's choice for quality camera equipment. In 2006,
it announced that it would stop making film cameras, pointing to the
shrinking market -- only 3% of its sales in 2005, compared to 75% of sales
from digital cameras and equipment.
12. Incandescent Bulbs Before a few years ago, the standard 60-watt (or,
yikes, 100-watt) bulb was the mainstay of every U.S. home. With the green
movement and all-things-sustainable-energy crowd, the Compact Fluorescent
Lightbulb (CFL) is largely replacing the older, Edison-era incandescent
bulb. The EPA reports that 2007 sales for Energy Star CFLs nearly doubled
from 2006, and these sales accounted for approximately 20 percent of the
U.S. light bulb market. And according to USA Today, a new energy bill plans
to phase out incandescent bulbs in the next four to 12 years.
11. Stand-Alone Bowling Alleys BowlingBalls.US claims there are still 60
million Americans who bowl at least once a year, but many are not bowling in
stand-alone bowling alleys. Today most new bowling alleys are part of
facilities for all types or recreation including laser tag, go-karts, bumper
cars, video game arcades, climbing walls and glow miniature golf. Bowling
lanes also have been added to many non-traditional venues such as adult
communities, hotels and resorts, and gambling casinos.
10. The Milkman According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 1950,
over half of the milk delivered was to the home in quart bottles, by 1963,
it was about a third and by 2001, it represented only 0.4% percent. Nowadays
most milk is sold through supermarkets in gallon jugs. The steady decline in
home-delivered milk is blamed, of course, on the rise of the supermarket,
better home refrigeration and longer-lasting milk. Although some milkmen
still make the rounds in pockets of the U.S. , they are certainly a dying
breed.
9 Hand-Written Letters In 2006, the Radicati Group estimated that,
worldwide, 183 billion e-mails were sent each day. Two million each second.
By November of 2007, an estimated 3.3 billion Earthlings owned cell phones,
and 80% of the world's population had access to cell phone coverage. In
2004, half-a-trillion text messages were sent, and the number has no doubt
increased exponentially since then. So where amongst this gorge of gabble is
there room for the elegant, polite hand-written letter?
8. Wild Horses It is estimated that 100 years ago, as many as two million
horses were roaming free within the United States . In 2001, National
Geographic News estimated that the wild horse population had decreased to
about 50,000 head. Currently, the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory
board states that there are 32,000 free roaming horses in ten Western
states, with half of them residing in Nevada . The Bureau of Land Management
is seeking to reduce the total number of free range horses to 27,000,
possibly by selective euthanasia.
7. Personal Checks According to an American Bankers Assoc. report, a net
23% of consumers plan to decrease their use of checks over the next two
years, while a net 14% plan to increase their use of PIN debit. Bill payment
remains the last stronghold of paper-based payments -- for the time being.
Checks continue to be the most commonly used bill payment method, with 71%
of consumers paying at least one recurring bill per month by writing a
check. However, on a bill-by-bill basis, checks account for only 49% of
consumers' recurring bill payments (down from 72% in 2001 and 60% in 2003).
6. Drive-in Theaters During the peak in 1958, there were more than 4,000
drive-in theaters in this country, but in 2007 only 405 drive-ins were still
operating. Exactly zero new drive-ins have been built since 2005. Only one
reopened in 2005 and five reopened in 2006, so there isn't much of a
movement toward reviving the closed ones.
5 Mumps & Measles Despite what's been in the news lately, the measles and
mumps actually, truly are disappearing from the United States . In 1964,
212,000 cases of mumps were reported in the U.S. By 1983, this figure had
dropped to 3,000, thanks to a vigorous vaccination program. Prior to the
introduction of the measles vaccine, approximately half a million cases of
measles were reported in the U.S. annually, resulting in 450 deaths. In
2005, only 66 cases were recorded.
4. Honey Bees Perhaps nothing on our list of disappearing America is so
dire; plummeting so enormously; and so necessary to the survival of our food
supply as the honey bee. Very scary. 'Colony Collapse Disorder,' or CCD, has
spread throughout the U.S and Europe over the past few years, wiping out 50%
to 90% of the colonies of many beekeepers -- and along with it, their
livelihood.
3. News Magazines and TV News While the TV evening newscasts haven't gone
anywhere over the last several decades, their audiences have. In 1984, in a
story about the diminishing returns of the evening news, the New York Times
reported that all three network evening-news programs combined had only 40.9
million viewers. Fast forward to 2008, and what they have today is half
that.
2. Analog TV According to the Consumer Electronics Association, 85% of
homes in the U.S. get their television programming through cable or
satellite providers. For the remaining 15% -- or 13 million individuals --
who are using rabbit ears or a large outdoor antenna to get their local
stations, change is in the air. If you are one of these people you'll need
to get a new TV or a converter box in order to get the new stations which
will only be broadcast in digital.
1. The Family Farm Since the 1930s, the number of family farms has been
declining rapidly. According to the USDA, 5.3 million farms dotted the
nation in 1950, but this number had declined to 2.1 million by the 2003 farm
census (data from the 2007 census hasn't yet been published). Ninety-one
percent of the U.S.farms are small family farms.
To this we might add both Newspaper Companies and Journalism (J-Schools)
Schools
These days the
important factors when students are choosing majors and careers are --- jobs,
jobs, and more jobs. Business schools still provide relatively good
opportunities for jobs, especially the largest accounting firms that have,
gratefully, provided many, many job opportunities and training to entry-level
graduates. The market is bleak at the moment for finance and MBA graduates,
but not nearly as bleak as the job market for journalism (J-School) graduates.
The most obvious
comparison is that the large international CPA firms are thriving/hiring when
compared to the world’s great newspapers. Aside from The Wall Street Journal,
what major newspaper is not in dire financial trouble? The Boston Globe
is now on the chopping block and its owner, the New York Times, had to
sell its Manhattan building to keep paying its bills.
The Internet has
not been kind to journalists. The public has come to expect news and news
commentaries on the cheap --- read that free. This does not bode well for
J-School majors, and probably nobody knows it better than college students since
they’re intensive users of the Internet, Blogs, and Social Networks.
Newspapers also
have an extremely expensive business model with huge networks of reporters and
correspondents around the world. It will be a huge loss when this business model
fails, because television stations, bloggers, and social networks rely heavily
on the news dredged up by newspaper reporters. When the newspapers shut down the
global network of reporters or commence to pay reporters a pittance, who will
dredge up the news? Certainly not bloggers like me sitting on their butts in the
mountains.
Newspapers have
extremely expensive distribution costs in large part because the product is
relatively heavy and is mostly trashed by readers in less than a day.
Newspapers are
facing a seriously declining share of advertising revenues due in large part to
competition from sites like Google and Yahoo, to say nothing about the online
magazines that download Associated Press reports and share the news with the
world for free ---
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
So who wants to
major in journalism? Practically nobody!
Journalism school majors are now competing with philosophy graduates for
burger-flipping careers.
Am I happy about this? Absolutely and irrevocably --- NO!
Reviving Journalism Schools
For as long as doomsayers have predicted the
decline of civic-minded reportage as we know it, reformers have sought to draft
a rewrite of the institutions that train many undergraduate and graduate
students pursuing a career in journalism. Criticisms of journalism schools have
ranged from questioning whether the institutions are necessary in the first
place (since many journalists, and most senior ones, don’t have journalism
degrees) to debating the merits of teaching practical skills versus theory and
whether curriculums should emphasize broad knowledge or specialization in
individual fields . . . The sessions were part of an effort to evaluate the
function of journalism schools in an age of new media and the public’s declining
faith in the fourth estate: the
Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education,
which in 2005 enlisted top institutions in the
country to bolster their curriculums with interdisciplinary studies and expose
students to different areas of knowledge, including politics, economics,
philosophy and the sciences. The initiative, funded by the Carnegie Corporation
of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also works with
journalism schools to incubate selected students working on national reporting
projects.
Andy Guess, "Reviving the J-School," Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2008
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/10/jschools
There are an increasing number
of scholarly videos on this topic at
BigThink: YouTube for Scholars (where intellectuals may post their lectures on
societal issues) ---
http://www.bigthink.com/
I have a section
comparing J-Schools to B-Schools at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#JSchools
Singularity University ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_University
Why the huge student demand for the expensive Singularity University?
"What Traditional Academics Can Learn From a Futurist's University," by
Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2009 ---
Click Here
"We're going to be unapologetically
interdisciplinary," said Neil Jacobstein, chairman of the Institute for
Molecular Manufacturing, during one of the first lectures at Singularity
University. "That's not because it's fashionable, or because the faculty
took a vote, but because nature has no departments."
The students burst into applause.
That dig against traditional institutions was par
for the course at the unusual new high-tech university, which wrapped up its
first nine-week session at NASA's Ames Research Center here last month.
Students were asked to come up with technological projects that would help
at least a billion people around the world, reflecting the techno-utopian
vision of the institution's founders.
Those founders had a bigger stamp on the curriculum
than would any traditional university president or chancellor. They are Ray
Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist who believes artificial intelligence soon
will exceed human thinking, and Peter H. Diamandis, a successful
entrepreneur devoted to helping humans colonize other planets.
Mr. Kurzweil helped popularize the term
"singularity," used to describe the moment when thinking machines transcend
their creators.
Mr. Diamandis co-founded a company that was the
first to take a tourist to the international space station and is best known
for creating the X Prize, which offers multimillion-dollar prizes to
motivate people to solve grand challenges, like making commercial
spaceships.
Absorbing Genius Both men are known for thinking
big about the future and for starting companies that capitalize on their
predictions. And both are, well, out there in their views of how radically
different things will be in just a few years. Mr. Kurzweil, for instance,
just co-wrote Transcend, a book in which he argues that technology will soon
allow us to replace our DNA with tiny computers that we can reprogram to
help fight off diseases.
Many of the 40 students who made up the inaugural
class said they agreed with some (though not all) of the founders' beliefs,
but they appeared far more interested in learning what makes them tick as
entrepreneurs. Spending quality time with Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. Diamandis—and
with the famous professors on the summer program's roster—was a key reason
several students cited for shelling out the $25,000 for tuition.
As one participant put it: "This is what we're
actually aiming for—to absorb as much of the genius as we can."
Demand for the program was stratospheric, with more
than 1,200 students applying to fill 40 slots, according to the
institution's leaders. That makes the program more selective than Harvard
University. And Singularity University isn't even accredited.
It's all evidence that the university has touched a
cultural nerve, playing on hopes and anxieties about how technology is
changing society—and tapping into an urge to more actively shape that
future.
Those same forces are leading professors at
traditional universities to explore similar questions. A high-profile
meeting of computer-science professors this year, for instance, explored the
potential long-term dangers of computer technologies, with an eye toward
shaping policies to avoid the worst-case scenarios popular in Hollywood
movies like The Terminator.
Singularity University is itself an innovative
approach to education, bearing more in common with a fast-paced start-up
company than an ivory-tower university. Some of the professors here—many of
whom teach at traditional colleges during the year—said traditional higher
education can learn from the entrepreneurial venture.
A Different Culture During Singularity University's
orientation in June, a cellphone taped under one of the students' chairs
suddenly started ringing. Students gradually realized that each of their
chairs concealed a new G1 smartphone—a gift from Google, which makes the
software that runs on the phones, and which is a corporate sponsor of the
university.
It was the first of many corporate-sponsored
surprises that made the university's proceedings feel, at times, like a
reality-TV show packed with product placements. (Many sessions were in fact,
filmed, and leaders say some of the lectures will soon be made available
free on the university's Web site.)
Among them:
* When one homework assignment was due, the first
student to turn it in got an unusual perk—a ride in an electric sports car
made by Tesla Motors. All the students received a "lecture" about the car by
a company spokesman, as part of a session on emerging trends in energy
technology.
* During the first week of classes, the university
held a "spit party," where students submitted saliva samples to have their
DNA sequenced by a company called 23andMe. The students were later given
their results as part of a discussion about trends in genetic research.
* And several students participated in an optional
field trip into zero gravity (for an extra fee), in an airplane that made
violent maneuvers to create short periods of weightlessness for its
passengers. The trip was operated by Zero Gravity Corporation, which was
co-founded by—you guessed it—Mr. Diamandis. The students dressed up in
evening attire (with women wearing shorts underneath) and called it the
first-ever cocktail party in weightlessness.
The summer session was divided into three parts: In
the first three weeks, students sat through marathon lecture sessions by
experts from business and academe. During the next three weeks, each student
chose one of four areas of focus for more in-depth study. And during the
final three weeks, students broke into groups to work on those
world-changing student projects.
At times the proceedings had a chaotic feel, with
leaders adding new speakers at the last minute and making other changes in
the schedule, according to some instructors. But students say they were
given an unusual amount of influence in how things progressed. Halfway
through the first full day of lectures, for instance, students were asked to
rate the quality of the presentations with a show of hands. Most students
gave them a six or seven out of 10 and said they wanted more time for
questions—a request that leaders pushed future speakers to meet. At many
traditional universities, student evaluations occur only after a course is
over. Singularity students, many of them entrepreneurs themselves, were also
not shy about trying to change the agenda.
"Students would just say I would really like to see
this, so I'm just going to do it," says Neil Thompson, a student who at one
point organized a lunch meeting between a few students and an expert the
group wanted to meet.
The bulk of the sessions dealt with the good that
technology could do for the world—and many students described themselves as
firm optimists.
But in one two-night session, the students listed
the 10 most difficult challenges posed by the coming "singularity."
But even that ended on an upbeat note, according to
Marianne Ryan, a student at the university who is now headed back to a
doctoral program at the University of Michigan's School of Information. "On
the second night," she said, "we brainstormed solutions to them."
Other Studies of the FutureOther Meetings Just a
few months before Singularity University opened, another big meeting of the
minds convened to talk about the future of technology. Eighteen top computer
scientists from college and business laboratories attended the
invitation-only event, sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence.
This one was held at a conference center at
Asilomar State Beach, in California, the location of a famous gathering in
1975 of scientists to discuss social and policy implications of genetics
research.
Participants in the meeting, which lasted two days,
discussed three major topics: concern about the pace of technological
change, shorter-term technological challenges, and ethical and legal issues.
Most disagreed with Ray Kurzweil's scenario of the future, though his worke
clearly shaped the discussion.
"There was overall skepticism about the prospect of
an intelligence explosion as well as of a 'coming singularity,' and also
about the large-scale loss of control of intelligent systems," said a draft
report from the meeting, released last month. "Nevertheless," the report
said more research should be done to "minimize unexpected outcomes."
A few universities have departments or centers
devoted to "futures studies," to tackle just such concerns and to make
forecasts about what's to come. Such centers flourished in the 1970s, in the
wake of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. "They were like mushrooms after the
rain," says James A. Dator, director of the Hawai'i Research Center for
Futures Studies, at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. "But very few of them
remain."
Mr. Dator says there is a rise in interest these
days, though, and he sees Singularity University as an example of that. He
points to courses in futures studies that have started at Anne Arundel
Community College, the University of Notre Dame, San Diego City College, and
other institutions in the past few years.
The benefit of futures studies, he says, is to
question the assumptions of universities themselves, which he sees as
offering a "pro-growth perspective" rather than recognizing that our uses of
fossil fuels may not be sustainable, or other scenarios.
Peter C. Bishop, an associate professor of human
development and computer science at the University of Houston, agrees that
interest in futurism is on the rise. He is a founding board member of the
Association of Professional Futurists.
He says that though Mr. Kurzweil is the most
popular futurist of the moment, he is unusual in his certainty about how
things will pan out. Most futurists try to imagine many possible outcomes,
Mr. Bishop says, rather than describe a single vision. "Being certain about
what's going to occur gets you lots of attention, but we don't think that's
the right way to approach the future," he added.
Mr. Bishop was an early adviser to Singularity
University, but says he did not have time to participate further.
Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster who is a
consulting professor at Stanford University, chaired the futures-studies
track of Singularity University. He says technology has become "an elemental
force that, more than any other single factor, is changing our lives," and
so should be considered by students in all disciplines. He praises Mr.
Kurzweil's books for giving context to the new university, and for helping
people understand just how fast change may come as technology improves at an
exponential rate.
He says one thing he has been surprised at is how
little higher education has changed as a result of technology. "Compared to
most other markets, higher education in particular really hasn't felt the
earthquake," Mr. Saffo says. "It hasn't had the, 'Oh my god, the world is
different from now on.' Higher education is still pretty much the way it was
in the 1950s."
The Singularity University model offers "some
interesting lessons for academics," Mr. Saffo says.
Connecting DisciplinesOrigins Mr. Diamandis says he
dreamed up the idea for Singularity University while trekking in Chile
during a vacation. He had brought along Mr. Kurzweil's hefty book, The
Singularity Is Near, which boldly pronounces a timeline for drastic
technological change over the next few years. Mr. Diamandis says that he
felt it suggested a need to study the many technological areas identified as
exhibiting exponential change, and that his first thought was to start a
university to do just that.
Mr. Diamandis has created an academic institution
before. In 1987 he cofounded the International Space University, which has
become a leading training ground for officials in space programs around the
world. The university has a campus in France, where it teaches a
master's-level program, and holds a summer session here at NASA Ames.
Just a few months after thinking of the idea, Mr.
Diamandis rounded up some heavy hitters from business and academe for a
planning meeting last summer.
Mr. Saffo, the Stanford University futurist,
remembers the gathering. "We all said, 'What year are you thinking of
starting?' And they said 2009, which was just a few months away," he says.
"We said, 'You've got to be kidding!' I mean, I start planning my course for
20 students at Stanford a year in advance."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on our "compassless colleges" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz
"The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," by Jane
Park, Creative Commons, June 26th, 2009 ---
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15522
Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on available online training and education programs
are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Also see
http://www.convergemag.com/workforce/47240132.html
Breaking the Bank Frontline Video
In Breaking the Bank, FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk
(Inside the Meltdown, Bush’s War) draws on a rare combination of high-profile
interviews with key players Ken Lewis and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to
reveal the story of two banks at the heart of the financial crisis, the rocky
merger, and the government’s new role in taking over — some call it
“nationalizing” — the American banking system.
Simoleon Sense, September 18, 2009
---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-frontline-breaking-the-bank/
Bob Jensen's threads on the banking bailout ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
The more I read in the book Dear Mr. Buffet by Janet
Tavakoli, the more I see a parallel between investment bankers and
accountics researchers.
After almost 20 years working for Wall
Street firms in New York and London, I made my living running a
Chicago-based consulting business. My clients consider my expertise in
product they consume. I had written books on credit derivatives and
complex structured finance products, and financial institutions, hedge
funds, and sophisticated investors came to identify and solve potential
problems.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 5)
Jensen Comment
Before she wrote Dear Mr. Buffett, her technical book on
Structural Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations (Wiley) sat on
my desk for constant reference. Janet also runs her own highly
successful hedge fund. She won't disclose how big it is, but certain
clues make me think it is over $100 million with very wealthy clients.
Her professional life changed when she commenced to correspond with what
was the richest man in the world in 2008 (before he gave much of
his wealth to the Gates Charitable Foundation). He's also one of the
nicest and most transparent and most humble men in the world.
Warren Buffett ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
Warren Buffett disproved the theory of
efficient markets that states that prices reflect all known information.
His shareholder letters, readily available (free)
through Berkshire Hathaway's Web site, told
investors everything they needed to know about mortgage loan fraud,
mospriced credit derivatives, and overpriced securitizations, yet this
information hid in plain "site."
Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 7)
Jensen Comment
Berkshire Hathaway ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway
Jensen Comment
This of course does not mean that on occasion Warren is not fallible.
Sometimes he does not heed his own advice, and rare occasions he loses
billions. But a billion or two to Warren Buffett is pocket change.
I finally grasped what
Warren was saying. Warren has such a wide body of knowledge that he does not
need to rely on “systems.” . . . Warren’s vast knowledge of corporations and
their finances helps him identify derivatives opportunities, too. He only
participates in derivatives markets when Wall Street gets it wrong and
prices derivatives (with mathematical models) incorrectly. Warren tells
everyone that he only does certain derivatives transactions when they are
mispriced.
Janet Tavokoli,
Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 19)
Why
investment bankers are like many accoutics professors
Wall Street derivatives traders construct trading models with no clear idea
of what they are doing. I know investment bank modelers
with advanced math and science degrees
who have never read the financial statements of the corporate credits they
model. This is true of some credit derivatives traders, too.
Janet Tavokoli,
Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 19)
Jensen Comment
Especially note the above quotation when I refer to Reviewer A below.
Warren is aided by the fact that most
investment banks use sophisticated Monte Carlo models that misprice the
transactions. Some of the models rely on (credit) rating agency inputs,
and the rating agencies do a poor job of rating junk debt.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 21)
Investment banks could put on the
same trades if they did fundamental analysis of the underlying
companies, but they are too busy
playing with correlation models.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 24)
Warren has another advantage: Wall
Street underestimates him. I mentioned that Warren Buffett and I have
similar views on credit derivatives . . . My former colleague, a Wall
Street structured products "correlation" trader, wrinkled his nose and
sniffed: "That old guy? He hates derivatives."
Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 24)
Warren Buffett writes billions of dollars worth of put options
When Warren sells a put buyer the right to make
him pay a specific price agreed today for the stock index (no matter
what the value 20 years from now), Warren receives a premium. Berkshire
Hathaway gets to invest that money for 20 years. Warren thinks the
buyer, the investment bank, is paying him too much . . . Furthermore,
Berkshire Hataway invests the premiums that will in all likelihood cover
anything he might need to pay out anything at all, since the stock index
is likely to be higher than today's value.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear
Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 24)
"Janet Tavakoli Says “Revoke Rating Agencies’ NRSRO Designation for
Structured Products,” Simoleon Sense, September 17, 2009 ---
Click Here
Our friend Janet Tavakoli has been kind enough to
send us her thoughts on the Rating Agencies. As always, she’s sharp as a
tack, read this.
Author Background (Via Tavakoli Structured
Finance)
Janet Tavakoli is the president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a
Chicago-based firm that provides consulting to financial institutions and
institutional investors. Ms. Tavakoli has more than 20 years of experience
in senior investment banking positions, trading, structuring and marketing
structured financial products. She is a former adjunct associate professor
of derivatives at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
Author of: Credit Derivatives & Synthetic Structures (1998, 2001),
Collateralized Debt Obligations & Structured Finance (2003), Structured
Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations (John Wiley & Sons, September
2008), and
Dear Mr. Buffett: What An Investor Learns 1,269 Miles From Wall Street
(Wiley, 2009).
Entire Article (Via Tavakoli Structured
Finance)
Click
Here To Download Article As PDF
The IMF invited me to present my views on the
global financial crisis as detailed in my book, Dear Mr. Buffett: What an
Investor Learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street on Monday, September 21. Among
other recommendations, I will suggest Congress approve more funding for
investigations that should lead to felony indictments of financial
professionals involved in the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the
capital markets. Predatory securitizations of fraudulent loans, the credit
derivatives that referenced them, and fraudulent accounting enabled former
investment banks and some legacy banks to raise money from new investors to
pay back old investors (themselves and mortgage lenders) in what was known
to be an unsustainable and fraud riddled business model.
The rating agencies have been in the news as they
fend off lawsuits for their ratings of ABS CDOs (collateralized debt
obligations backed by asset backed securities). The rating agencies claim
their ratings are protected by free speech, and they may or may not be
successful in defending themselves in court. In my book, Structured Finance
, I explain the rating agencies’ history of failure (in my opinion) to
competently rate hundreds of billions of dollars worth of these and other
structured products. The relevant rating agencies involved in these ratings
are the top three: Moody’s Corporation; Standard & Poor’s (S&P), part of
McGraw-Hill Cos., inc.; and Fitch, owned by France-based Fimalac SA.
The rating agencies are quick to point out that
they do not perform due diligence on the data they use and take no
responsibility for unearthing fraud; they merely issue “opinions.” But
rating agencies can demand to see evidence of appropriate due diligence from
the underwriters, who are obliged to perform it. Instead, rating agencies
failed to adhere to basic statistical principles.
Meanwhile, the SEC seeks comments about the steps
it should take to regulate the rating agencies. In my letter to the SEC
dated February 13, 2007, I called for the SEC to revoke the rating agencies’
registration as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (NRSRO)
for structured products. The SEC failed to act in 2007, but it can correct
that error and do it now.
In addition to criticizing rating agencies for
their ratings of CDOs, I mentioned another class of structured products,
CPDOs that were rated “AAA” at the time I wrote the letter. I asserted CPDOs
had substantial principal risk. That meant these “AAA” rated products
deserved a junk rating. By January 2008, within a year of my warning,
Moody’s noted that two of the originally AAA-rated CPDO’s would unwind
causing substantial principal loss to investors. In fact Moody’s, the rating
agency that bases its “AAA” rating on expected loss, belatedly projected
investors would have a 90 percent loss. Although I had flagged the looming
danger to investors’ principal, the SEC did nothing.
NRSRO Grades, Not Mere Opinions
The problem with rating agencies’ assertion that
they issue mere opinions is that the NRSRO designation gives ratings the
appearance of being issued from a position of authority. Regulators rely on
this pseudo-authority so much that they have enacted capital rules for banks
based on ratings. Many investment funds and investors have charters
requiring them to only buy products that have been rated by one or more of
the top three rating agencies. Ratings are relied upon as if they are based
on reliable and reproducible methods, but they are not when it comes to
structured products.
If the FDA repeatedly approved tainted meat that
sickened people, we would demand a top to bottom overhaul of the
organization and its methods. Since the rating agencies issued ratings that
contributed to massive damage to our economy, we should strip them of their
NRSRO designation and demand a complete overhaul of their flawed procedures
and methodologies.
Bob Jensen's threads on the credit rater scandals ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
CPA auditors will undoubtedly be drawn into the
Calpers lawsuit because of the way auditors went along with absurd
underestimations of bad debt and loan loss reserves. For claims that auditors
knew these reserves were badly underestimated see the citations at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#AuditFirms
"Calpers Sues Over Ratings of Securities,"
by Leslie Wayne, The New York Times, July 14, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/business/15calpers.html
The nation’s
largest public pension fund has filed suit in California state court in
connection with $1 billion in losses that it says were caused by “wildly
inaccurate” credit ratings from the three leading ratings agencies.
The suit from the
California Public Employees Retirement System, or
Calpers, a public fund known for its shareholder
activism, is the latest sign of renewed scrutiny
over the role that credit ratings agencies played in
providing positive reports about risky securities
issued during the subprime boom that have lost
nearly all of their value.
The
lawsuit, filed late last week in California Superior
Court in San Francisco, is focused on a form of debt
called structured investment vehicles, highly
complex packages of securities made up of a variety
of assets, including subprime mortgages. Calpers
bought $1.3 billion of them in 2006; they collapsed
in 2007 and 2008.
Calpers maintains that in
giving these packages of securities the agencies’
highest credit rating, the three top ratings
agencies —
Moody’s Investors Service,
Standard & Poor’s and
Fitch — “made negligent
misrepresentation” to the pension fund, which
provides retirement benefits to 1.6 million public
employees in California.
The
AAA ratings given by the agencies “proved to be
wildly inaccurate and unreasonably high,” according
to the suit, which also said that the methods used
by the rating agencies to assess these packages of
securities “were seriously flawed in conception and
incompetently applied.”
Calpers is seeking damages,
but did not specify an amount. Steven Weiss, a
spokesman for McGraw Hill, the parent company of
Standard and Poor’s, said the company could not
comment until it had been served and seen the
complaint.
Moody’s and Fitch did not
respond to a request for comment.
As the Obama administration
considers an overhaul of the
financial regulatory system,
credit rating agencies have
come in for their share of the blame in the recent
market collapse. Critics contend that, rather than
being watchdogs, the agencies stamped high ratings
on many securities linked to subprime mortgages and
other forms of risky debt.
Their approval helped fuel a boom on Wall Street,
which issued billions of dollars in these securities
to investors who were unaware of their inherent
risk. Lawmakers have conducted hearings and debated
whether to impose stricter regulations on the
agencies.
While the lawsuit is not the first against the
credit rating agencies, some of which face
litigation not only from investors in the securities
they rated but from their own shareholders, too, it
does lay out how an investor as sophisticated as
Calpers, which has $173 billion in assets, could be
led astray.
The
security packages were so opaque that only the hedge
funds that put them together — Sigma S.I.V. and
Cheyne Capital Management in London, and Stanfield
Capital Partners in New York — and the ratings
agencies knew what the packages contained.
Information about the securities in these packages
was considered proprietary and not provided to the
investors who bought them.
Calpers also criticized what contends are conflicts
of interest by the rating agencies, which are paid
by the companies issuing the securities — an
arrangement that has come under fire as a
disincentive for the agencies to be vigilant on
behalf of investors.
In
the case of these structured investment vehicles,
the agencies went one step further: All three
received lucrative fees for helping to structure the
deals and then issued ratings on the deals they
helped create.
Calpers said that the three agencies were “actively
involved” in the creation of the Cheyne, Stanfield
and Sigma securitized packages that they then gave
their top credit ratings. Fees received by the
ratings agencies for helping to construct these
packages would typically range from $300,000 to
$500,000 and up to $1 million for each deal.
These fees were on top of the revenue generated by
the agencies for their more traditional work of
issuing credit ratings, which in the case of complex
securities like structured investment vehicles
generated higher fees than for rating simpler
securities.
“The
ratings agencies no longer played a passive role but
would help the arrangers structure their deals so
that they could rate them as highly as possible,”
according to the Calpers suit.
The
suit also contends that the ratings agencies
continued to publicly promote structured investment
vehicles even while beginning to downgrade them. Ten
days after Moody’s had downgraded some securitized
packages in 2007, it issued a report titled
“Structured Investment Vehicles: An Oasis of Calm in
the Subprime Maelstrom.”
Bob Jensen's threads on the bad behavior of credit ratings agencies see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
This study is consistent with remarks made earlier by Linda Kidwell
regarding student cheating.
"Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe not," by Marc Parry,
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 16, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-Students-Cheat-More-in/8073/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A new study contradicts the perception that
cheating is more widespread in online classes, finding that students in
virtual courses were less likely to cheat than their face-to-face peers.
You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results, since the
study only looked at 225 students at Friends University, a private,
mid-sized, Christian-based institution in Wichita, Kansas.
But the study, “Point,
Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual
Classroom,” adds fresh data to the ongoing debate
about academic integrity online. The issue is on the minds of many in the
distance education world because the recently reauthorized Higher Education
Opportunity Act requires accreditors to monitor steps that colleges take to
verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the course work.
For the new study, researchers surveyed undergraduate
students about seven types of academic misconduct. These included cheating
on tests, plagiarism, and aiding and abetting (letting a classmate copy a
paper, for example). In both traditional and online classes, aiding and
abetting was found to be the cheating method of choice.
Asked about the results, Donna Stuber-McEwen, an author of the study,
suggested that age may be one factor.
“Research has show that older students tend to cheat less frequently than
younger students,” said Stuber-McEwen, a psychology professor, told The
Chronicle. “And our sample tended to have a greater percentage of
nontraditional students in the online classes.”
September 16, 2009 reply from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
I play duplicate bridge, a card game. In duplicate
bridge, a dealt hand will be played until all pairs have played it.
At club games, cheating is minimal. You are sitting
within inches of a competitor, and will not be likely to permit their
cheating against it will work toyour disadvantage.
Online duplicate bridge, however, is reputedly rife
with cheating, as one need only call up partner via cell phone to see what
partner has and to plot a strategy. It is playing double dummy.
Online duplicate bridge has a huge potential
audience, but is not big because the cheating problem cannot be solved.
Online bridge players are surveyed, and one of the
site touts the survey statistics in promotions, saying that since no one
surveyed admitted cheating, their online bridge service does not have the
cheating problem that the other sites have.
The incidence of online cheating saddens me, as
I've moved to North Dakota, where there are not many bridge players
attending local club games. Online bridge is not an attractive alternative
for me because of the cheating.
David Albrecht
September 17, 2009 reply from Linda A Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
Since my article on this topic
is not available in an on-line format, I thought I'd copy in the conclusions
for those interested in this topic.
As to method, I also used
self-reports based on the seminal work of Donald McCabe, and I had 459
usable responses from distance and campus-based students across three
campuses of the same university. A very slight majority of responses came
from distance students. Here's the citation if you'd like to look up the
article:
L. A. Kidwell & J.E. Kent.
2009. “Integrity at a distance: A study of academic misconduct among
university students on and off campus.” Accounting Education: An
International Journal, Vol. 17, no. S1: S3 – S16.
Here's the excerpt:
The distance students
reported considerably less cheating than did traditional students in
every behaviour category. They also had harsher views of various
cheating behaviours and were more likely to claim they would turn in
known offenders. These findings have many potential explanations.
First, prior research (e.g., Diekhoff et al., 1996) has shown that more
mature students (older, paying their own way, married,
etc.) cheat less.
Although the internal students placed more importance on workload and
family pressures as excuses for cheating than did distance students, it
is likely that distance students face more of these pressures in
actuality. Therefore it may be true that distance students, because
they are older and more mature, are swayed less by external factors than
by their own moral codes.
Internal students are
also more susceptible to the temporary social groups of universities,
where culture control may result in students’ rejection of general
society’s norms in favour of the norms of subcultures, such as student
organizations and sports clubs (Eve & Bromley, 1981). Since distance
students have very little, if any, interaction with other students,
longer-term general socialization may prevail, leading to lower cheating
rates.
Whatever the root causes
of the differences between internal and distance students, be they
maturity, lack of campus socialization, or lack of opportunity, the
distance students in this survey were far less engaged in academic
dishonesty. This finding should put educators at ease as they
contemplate moving into distance education delivery. Of course this
research only surveyed students at one university in Australia, thus it
may not be generalizable to a broader set of universities. However, the
similarity between the results for internal students and the findings of
past research, as well as the cultural similarities between Australia
and the USA, lead us to believe these results can guide academics in
both countries. It is less clear whether these findings can be
generalized to countries that are less similar culturally, as cheating
norms in countries including Croatia, Russia, Israel, Turkey, and the
Netherlands have demonstrated different attitudes toward cheating (e.g.,
Hrabek et al., 2004; Magnus et al., 2002; Arzova & Kidwell, 2004).
Therefore instructors in Australia or the USA involved in distance
education should inform themselves as to cultural norms elsewhere, so
that adequate safeguards can be utilized.
Linda Kidwell
September 17, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi David,
Das too bad
dat Lars and Sven don’t play dat bridge game in Moorehead, Minnesoda or
nearby in Nord Dakota
---
http://olieandlenajokes.blogspot.com/
In Swea
City, Iowa da Swedes play dhe duplicate bridge, but dey cheat like crazy.
When Ole scratch his head (top right, top left, bottom right, bottom left)
den Lena know where Ole is void (besides betwixt da ears) and touching his
noze, right eye, or left eye signals whedder his long suit is topped by an
ace, king, or queen. Ole scratches a lot of udder places just to confuse
opponents wid nonsense.
Ole and Lena
are da best bidders in da local Swea City bridge games. But Ole makes deeze
games more fair wid inept playing of vot vould udderwize be da winning
contracts.
Lena dinks Ole is
like a game of bridge
You need a Heart to love him
A Diamond to marry him
A Club to beat him
And a Spade to bury him
Author unknown
And when
Obamacare passes, Lena says Ole vill be da first vone in Swea City dat’s
shovlin’ ready
____________
One time at Trinity University, in Spring Semester 2001, an instructor was
curious why a young man would appear to need a
FloMax prescription
judging from the number of times the student went to the bathroom during a
final examination. Out of curiosity the instructor checked out the men’s
room and found that the student had already discarded the course textbook at
the bottom of the bin of used paper towels. The student’s name was on the
inside cover.
You might
guess that, between the covers, the book looked virtually unused. The
instructor inserted a note inside the book and replaced it at the bottom of
the bin. The note disclosed that the course would not be offered again until
Spring Semester 2002 and that the student probably should cancel plans to
have his family visit for Spring 2001 commencement.
Without
punishing the student for suspected cheating, the instructor assigned all
grades on the basis of accumulated points for the semester. You might say
that the FloMax student really earned his F grade! Others might conclude
that he pissed the course, his graduation, and his life away. I suspect that
in Spring 2001 he started celebrating his graduation heavily before its
time.
In recent
years, a Trinity University instructor cannot simply assign a F grade for
cheating. Instead the cheating incident has to be reported to an Honor Court
run by students. The instructor’s role is to be a witness in the Court
proceedings. Cheaters also have their “day” in court. The Honor Court doles
out the punishments.
I’m told
that cheaters would rather return to the old system at Trinity University
--- absent the dreaded Honor Court.
When
professors let students cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Volunteer work might get you government funding to pay off your student
loan indebtedness, but it's tricky.
"Kiss Those Student Loans Goodbye: There are lots of programs that help
grads repay their student loans. A few will even wipe the slate clean. But
qualifying isn't easy," by Alison Damast, Business Week, September 10,
2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/sep2009/bs20090910_636521.htm?link_position=link1
Shawn Agyeman was down on his luck last
fall, having just lost his job as a research assistant at the University of
Pittsburgh, his alma mater. With looming monthly student loan payments of
around $200 a month hanging over his head, the recent college graduate was
starting to worry about how he'd meet his debt obligations, fearful that
creditors would harass his parents—who co-signed his loans—if he couldn't
come up with the money. Then he got a phone call from the director of a new
grass-roots nonprofit that he says changed his life. Raymar Hampshire,
co-founder of a volunteer group called SponsorChange.Org, presented Agyeman
with a tempting offer: volunteer in the local Pittsburgh community several
hours a week and receive a stipend that would help to cover his looming
student loan payments.
"When I heard about it, I said: 'I'd
almost be a fool not to do this,'" says Agyeman, 25, who signed up for the
pilot program in the spring of 2009 and will be doing it again this fall,
with plans to earn $1,000 for his efforts. "I jumped all over it."
Agyeman is one of thousands of people
saddled with student loan debt looking for innovative ways to meet their
monthly payments. Their plight has become even more severe as unemployed
recent college graduates lose their jobs or continue to have trouble landing
one, running the risk of not being able to pay back their student loans or,
in the worst-case scenario, defaulting. Fortunately, there is a raft of
programs that have emerged in the past year or two that can either help
students and recent graduates make their student loan debt more manageable
or, in some cases, get the loans either partially or completely forgiven.
Some of these programs are oriented towards specific careers—such as
teaching or nursing—while others are open to recent graduates who meet
certain income and eligibility requirements. Still others are open to just
about anyone. Some programs, such as SponsorChange, help graduates repay a
portion of their student debt. Other programs help students, graduate or
undergraduate, avoid student loan debt entirely,
Raising Awareness Learning about these
options and mapping out a plan to take advantage of them is not always as
easy as one might think. Many students simply aren't even aware that some of
these programs exist, and, as a result, may take out hefty private loans
that they could have avoided with a little strategic planning, says Edie
Irons, a spokeswoman for the Project on Student Debt, a nonprofit that
raises awareness about financial aid. She recommends that students mapping
out their education paths learn as much as they can about the different type
of loan forgiveness programs available to students before taking out any new
loans or additional ones. One point to keep in mind: Most of these loan
programs apply only to federal student loans, with very few private loans
qualifying.
"People should definitely plan ahead and
learn about the loan-forgiveness programs that are out there," she says. "Be
sure that you are in a position yourself to qualify for them and then, if
you can make it work, go for it."
Here's a roundup of debt-reduction
strategies for recent graduates, current students, or those thinking about
going back to school:
VOLUNTEER: There are a number of volunteer
programs that help people pay off their student loans, though most require a
long-term commitment. Such programs could be a good short-term option for
college graduates who have been unable to find a job, says Mark Kantrowitz,
a student loan expert who runs FinAid, an online provider of student aid
information. "If you're unemployed right now, you might as well volunteer
and get a little bit of money to pay back your students loans," he says.
One of the best-known volunteer options is
AmeriCorps, a national network of service programs, which requires students
to volunteer for a year full-time. In exchange, they get a small living
stipend and, when the year is up, an education award of $4,725 that can be
applied to student loan debt or future education programs. The AmeriCorps
program has seen a surge in popularity this year, receiving 177,099 online
applications between November 2008 and July 2009, a 203% increase over the
same period a year ago, says Siobhan Dugan, a spokeswoman for AmeriCorps.
"We have seen the interest increase phenomenally," Dugan says, who says the
spike is likely due to a combination of factors, including the economy and
President Obama's call-to-service campaign.
Another popular program is the Peace
Corps, which requires volunteers to make a two-year commitment to serve in a
foreign country. Unlike AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps does not provide a
student loan payment award. However, it does allow participants under
several federal loan programs to defer their loan payments during their
service. Those with federal Perkins loans are eligible for a partial
cancellation benefit of 15% for one year of service up to 70% for four
years. Another perk? The program provides participants with a $6,000
readjustment allowance after the two-year term of service is completed, a
portion of which can be used to repay student loan debt, according to the
Peace Corps Web site.
If you don't have the time or
resources to devote to a year or two of full-time volunteer work, look for
programs locally that can help you pay off your student loan programs while
volunteering. For example, the SponsorChange.Org program in Pittsburgh
allows working young professionals to volunteer during their free time, in
exchange for student loan stipends paid for by donors. To be eligible,
students have to have a bachelor's degree and proof of student loan debt
(participants have, on average, $20,000 of debt), and they must fill out an
online profile. The program puts the program's "volunteer fellows" in touch
with local nonprofits—who pay a fee for the service—pairing them up with one
that meets their interests and providing them with leadership training. This
fall, 10 fellows will volunteer for 50 hours over a four-month period,
earning $1,000 each. "It's sort of a win-win situation for both the
nonprofit and the young professional," says Hampshire, the program's CEO and
founder.
Andrea Proie, 26, who works as a
hydrogeologist in Pittsburgh, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in
2006 with about $40,000 in student loan debt, She did the SponsorChange.Org
pilot program in April, serving as a volunteer manager at a local day camp,
wellness center and senior citizen home, earning about $400. As a fellow in
the program this fall, she expects to take in an additional $1,000, which
she will put directly to her loan payments. "I like the feeling of helping
people, so being able to go out and volunteer and get the added benefit of
having your student loans paid back is just awesome," she says. Hampshire
says his program, which is currently available only in Pittsburgh, is one
that can eventually be replicated in major metropolitan areas across the
country. "The student loan stipend is a big motivator," says Hampshire.
BECOME A TEACHER: Teaching has
traditionally been one of the professions that offer students the most
generous loan-forgiveness program. That has held true recently, with the
introduction of several new federal loan programs aimed at easing loan
burdens for those in the teaching profession.
One of the newer offerings is the Teach
Grant, a program established by the College Cost Reduction & Access Act of
2007. It's geared towards teachers who commit to teaching in a public or
private elementary or secondary school that serves students from low-income
families, enabling participants to earn up to $4,000 a year in grants that
can be applied to student loan debt. The only catch? It requires a four-year
commitment and if participants don't complete the program, the grants get
converted into a Federal Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loan—increasing the
participant's total debt load instead of decreasing it. Some who've signed
up are not aware of the consequences of withdrawing from the program, says
FinAid's Kantrowitz, who recommends those interested should investigate the
terms of the program thoroughly before committing. "The concern of a lot of
financial aid administrators have is that students don't really know what
they're getting into. They see the grant and don't hear about the loan until
later," says FinAid's Kantrowitz.
For those wary of signing up for a program
with such stringent conditions, there are other teaching programs that
require a shorter time commitment in return for some student loan awards.
Perhaps the most famous one is Teach For America, which this year selected
4,100 recent college graduates for training to serve as teachers in urban
and rural schools for a two-year period. Those chosen receive a salary and
benefits, plus an education award of $4,725 for each year of service, which
can be applied to student loans or future education.
Even if you decide not to apply for the
Teach Grant or Teach For America, you may still be eligible for loan
forgiveness. The Federal Perkins Loan Program has a provision that allows
certain teachers to be eligible for loan cancellation of up to 100% if they
teach at a low-income school or in certain high-need subject areas.
Likewise, teachers with Stafford loans who teach full-time for five
consecutive years at a low-income school may also be eligible to have up to
$17,500 in loans cancelled.
SWITCH CAREERS: Whether you're starting a
new undergraduate program, or returning to get a graduate degree, one thing
that should factor into your post-grad career plans is the availability of
loan forgiveness. "I think the creativity needs to come before the fact, not
after the fact," says Kevin Walker, CEO of Simpletuition.com, a student
lending Web site. "People need to think more about that, so maybe they can
then go into an area where this forgiveness is available to them."
Fortunately, with the recent passage of
the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, also a creation of the College
Cost Reduction Act of 2007, people from a wide variety of careers can get
their debt excused after 10 years of payments. People eligible for the
program include teachers, government workers, social workers, law
enforcement officers, nonprofit workers and those who hold jobs at public
universities and public hospitals. The good news for people eligible for
this program? If they work full-time in their respective field for 10 years,
their student loan debt will be forgiven at that time period. The program is
expected to be popular, but it's still too soon to tell how many people are
taking advantage, says Irons, of the Project for Student Debt. "There are
lot of people positioning themselves to take advantage of it, but it is
still too early yet to know how many people will sign up," says Irons.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Wall Street’s Math Wizards Forgot a Few Variables
What wasn’t recognized was the importance of a
different species of risk — liquidity risk,” Stephen Figlewski, a professor of
finance at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, told
The Times. “When trust in counterparties is lost, and markets freeze up so there
are no prices,” he said, it “really showed how different the real world was from
our models.
DealBook, The New York Times, September 14, 2009 ---
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/wall-streets-math-wizards-forgot-a-few-variables/
Can the 2008 investment banking failure be traced to a math error?
Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street ---
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/recipe-for-disaster-formula-that-killed.html
Some highlights:
"For five years, Li's formula, known as a
Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive
breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely
complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever
before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it
possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities,
expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.
His method was adopted by everybody from bond
investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And
it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that
warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.
Then the model fell apart." The article goes on to show that correlations
are at the heart of the problem.
"The reason that ratings agencies and investors
felt so safe with the triple-A tranches was that they believed there was
no way hundreds of homeowners would all default on their loans at the
same time. One person might lose his job, another might fall ill. But
those are individual calamities that don't affect the mortgage pool much
as a whole: Everybody else is still making their payments on time.
But not all calamities are individual, and
tranching still hadn't solved all the problems of mortgage-pool risk.
Some things, like falling house prices, affect a large number of people
at once. If home values in your neighborhood decline and you lose some
of your equity, there's a good chance your neighbors will lose theirs as
well. If, as a result, you default on your mortgage, there's a higher
probability they will default, too. That's called correlation—the degree
to which one variable moves in line with another—and measuring it is an
important part of determining how risky mortgage bonds are."
I would highly recommend reading the entire thing that gets much more
involved with the
actual formula etc.
The
“math error” might truly be have been an error or it might have simply been a
gamble with what was perceived as miniscule odds of total market failure.
Something similar happened in the case of the trillion-dollar disastrous 1993
collapse of Long Term Capital Management formed by Nobel Prize winning
economists and their doctoral students who took similar gambles that ignored the
“miniscule odds” of world market collapse -- -
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#LTCM
The rhetorical question is whether the failure is ignorance in model building or
risk taking using the model?
Also see
"In Plato's Cave: Mathematical models are a
powerful way of predicting financial markets. But they are fallible" The
Economist, January 24, 2009, pp. 10-14 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
Bob Jensen's threads on the current economic crisis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
"Creating the 21st-Century Classroom," Converge Magazine, July
15, 2009 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/paper/21st-Century-Classroom.html?elq=90fdac6e6ddf42b8b8e1dedd7d85e266
A 21st-century classroom is a global classroom — in
this classroom, students use various forms of technology to connect to
information, each other, and other classrooms and students throughout the
world.
By applying for and receiving American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grants and funding monies, schools can create
21st-century classrooms by adding to their existing technologies. Or they
can refresh the technology they currently have to be more energy and cost
efficient — it’s just a matter of knowing which grants to apply for and how
to apply for them.
This paper from Samsung details what it takes to be
a 21st-century classroom, and points to various ARRA funding buckets schools
can use to obtain the necessary technologies.
You can download the paper from the above link.
June 1, 2006 message form Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
DESIGNING THE FUTURE
PHYSICAL UNIVERSITY
"In discussions about the
future of the university, little has been said about how these changes will
affect its spatial layout, even though a university's physical characteristics
must complement and strengthen its mission." In "Designing the University of the
Future" (PLANNING FOR HIGHER EDUCATION, vol. 34, no. 2, 2005-2006, pp. 5-19)
Rifca Hashimshony and Jacov Haina discuss several factors, including teaching
and learning technology, that may define what the physical facilities of the
university of the future will look like.
The paper is online ---
Click Here
Planning for Higher
Education is published by the Society for College and University Planning, 339
E. Liberty, Suite 300, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 USA; tell: 734-998-7832; fax:
734-998-6532;
email:
info@scup.org
Web:
http://www.scup.org/
See also:
"The Impact of Facilities
on Recruitment and Retention of Students" by David Cain and Gary L. Reynolds
FACILITIES MANAGER, vol. 22, no. 2, March/April 2006
http://www.appa.org/FacilitiesManager/article.cfm?ItemNumber=2567&parentid=2542
or
http://www.appa.org/files/FMArticles/fm030406_f7_impact.pdf
According to a survey
conducted by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers: "Nearly
three out of 10 students spurned a college because it lacked a facility they
thought was important."
"Facilities Can Play Key
Role in Students' Enrollment Decisions, Study Finds" by Audrey Williams June THE
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, May 30, 2006
http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/05/2006053002n.htm
(Online access requires a subscription to the Chronicle.)
Jensen Comment
One thing I've argued for years that there is no Swiss knife classroom that
optimally serves all instructors. Some instructors prefer a lecture hall with
all the technology toys (DVD projectors, projectors for computer files and hard
copy, etc.) on stage; others prefer a computer station or laptop Internet
collection for each student; and others prefer learning pods where student team
"pods" surround a central meeting room with instructor hardware for
monitoring each of the team pods, etc.
One of the more impressive buildings that I've ever seen is the College of
Business Building at the University of Texas at San Antonio, although it, like
me, has seen a few years pass by.
My sadly neglected document on module on classroom design is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Design
Why can't professional schools of business and political science consider
new innovative types of doctoral programs rather than the non-creative
(quantitative social science) doctoral programs that dominate the landscape?
Why can't students who aspire to become leaders of schools of business and
political science find more relevancy in their doctoral studies and research?
"Harvard Offers New Doctorate for School Leaders Who Aim to Shake Up Status
Quo," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2009
---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Offers-New-Doctorate/48411/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Harvard University today announced a new doctoral
program in educational leadership that, in partnership with prominent
organizations pushing for change in elementary and secondary schools, will
seek to train people capable of bringing about major school reform.
Harvard's new Doctor of Education Leadership
Program will be based at its Graduate School of Education and will involve
faculty members of that school as well as Harvard's business school and John
F. Kennedy School of Government. In their third and final year in the
program, students will enter a yearlong residency with a partner
organization such as Teach for America, the National Center on Education and
the Economy, or one of the nation's largest urban school districts.
The program's mission will be to train top
officials of school districts, government agencies, nonprofit groups, and
private organizations who will be equipped to shake up the status quo in
elementary and secondary education.
"Our goal is not to develop leaders for the system
as it currently exists; rather, we aim to develop people who will lead
system transformation," Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Graduate School of
Education, said in written statement.
The Wallace Foundation has provided Harvard a
$10-million grant for the program, enabling the university to operate it
tuition-free and to offer its students a cost-of-living stipend. An initial
cohort of 25 students is expected to enroll in the program in the fall of
2010.
Some Doctoral Programs in Need of Big Change ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DoctoralProgramChange
Bob Jensen's threads on the sorry state of accounting doctoral programs
are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Pictures Versus Words
"Bending the Curve," by William Saphire, The New York Times, September
11, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13FOB-OnLanguage-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
Taking on the issue of the cost of health care, a
Washington Post editorialist intoned recently that “knowing more about which
treatments are effective is essential” — knowing about when to use a plural
verb is tough, too — “but, without a mechanism to put that knowledge into
action, it won’t be enough to bend the cost curve.”
That curvature continued in The Chicago Tribune,
which put the fast-blooming metaphor in a headline: ‘‘Bending the Curve on
Health Spending.” It leaps boundaries beyond costs and subjects: a book has
been titled “Bending the Curve: Your Guide to Tackling Climate Change in
South Africa.”
Why has curve-bending become such a popular sport?
Because the language is in the grip of graphs. The graphic arts are on the
march as “showing” tramples on “explaining,” and now we are afflicted with
the symbols of symbols. As an old Chinese philosopher never said, “Words
about graphs are worth a thousand pictures.”
The first straight-line challenge to the muscular
line-benders I could find was in the 1960s, when the power curve was first
explained to me by a pilot. “Being behind or ‘on the backside of the power
curve’ is an aviation expression,” rooted in World War I, he maintained.
“It’s a condition when flying slow takes more energy than going fast, and
you produce a result opposite to what you intended.” On the graph of the
power that a plane needs to overcome wind resistance, most “drag” increases
as a plane slows; that’s why you hear a fresh surge of power when a jet is
landing. Pilots know that being “behind the power curve” is to be on the way
to a crash. That image was snapped up in political lingo, when “to be behind
that power curve” quickly came to mean “to be out of the loop, trailing the
with-it crowd, doomed to be left behind the barn door when the goodies were
being handed out.”
Now we have President Obama, no slouch at seizing
on popular figures of speech, warning Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post that
“it’s important for us to bend the cost curve, separate and apart from
coverage issues, just because the system we have right now is unsustainable
and hugely inefficient and uncompetitive.” In other words, as the bygone
aviators knew — bend it or crash. That led to the Nation’s headline “Bend It
Like Obama,” a play on the movie title “Bend It Like Beckham.”
Came the current recession, the graphic-metaphor
crowd stopped worrying about a cost line bending inexorably upward and
directed its attention to the need to get the upward-bending unemployment
figures bending down. Thus, the meaning of the phrase bending the curve is
switching from “bend that awful, upward-curving line down before we can’t
afford an aspirin” to “bend that line up down quick, before we all head for
the bread line!” This leads to metaphoric confusion. It’s what happens when
you fall in love with full-color graphs to explain to the screen-entranced
set what’s happening and scorn plain words.
I am not the only one who observes this in
medium-high dudgeon. “Optics” is hot, rivaling content. “It seems that
politicians are now working to ensure that their policy positions are stated
in a way that’s ‘optically acceptable’ to their constituents,” writes Tom
Short of San Rafael, Calif. “Not good. Anytime I hear this word used in any
context outside of graphic arts, my eye doctor’s office or the field of
astronomy, my B.S. detector goes into high alert.”
Symbols are fine; we live by words, figures,
pictures. But as Alfred Korzybski postulated seven decades ago, the symbol
is not the thing itself: you cannot milk the word “cow,” and as he put it,
“a map is not the territory.” Arthur Laffer’s famous curve drawn on a
cocktail napkin offers some economists a nice shorthand guide to his
supply-side idea, but it is not the theory itself. Today’s mind-bending
surge toward the use of words about graphs and poll trends — even when
presented in color on elaborate PowerPoint presentations — takes us steps
away from reality. There must be a curve to illustrate that, and I say bend
it way back.
DEPARTMENT OF AMPLIFICATION
To a recent exploration of the origin of real
estate’s location, location, location, there have been these useful
additions from readers: David K. Barnhart of the lexicographical family
writes: “It reminds me of the book collector’s eccentric way of insisting
that bindings must be in not less than pristine shape. Our adage is
condition, condition, condition.”
Joe Asher of Seattle adds the three things that
matter in public speaking: “locution, locution, locution.”
And a fishhook on this page daring to suggest that
Abe Lincoln deliberately adopted the “mistakes were made” passive voice to
avoid taking personal responsibility drew this amplification from Frank
Myers, distinguished professor at Stony Brook University in New York:
“Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address contains (by my count) six uses of the
passive voice in his first seven sentences, tending to obscure the subject —
especially himself as speaker and actor. No doubt this is part of the
artistry of the speech.” Nobody’s perfect.
Finally, word from the geezersphere, pioneering
Comic Strip Division: “Your citation of Nov shmoz ka pop revitalized
nostalgic memories,” writes Albert Varon of Chicago earnestly if
redundantly. “My recollection is that the comic strip was called ‘The
Squirrel Cage’ and that the ride-thumbing little guy was half-buried in snow
next to a barber pole and was dressed in a full tunic or robe and some kind
of turban.” He adds proudly — and usefully to later generations — “For many
years, I have announced ‘Nov shmoz ka pop!’ assertively and dismissively to
put off phone solicitors and aggressive panhandlers. Thank you for
refreshing those halcyon days of my youth.”
Ed Scribner suggested that
AECMers commence to catalog problems where professors and students in the
accounting academy can one day make creative contributions (inventions?) that
will aid practitioners as well as researchers.
I’ve long thought that some of
the many ways we might be of help is in creating/inventing ways of visualizing
multivariate data beyond our traditional two dimensional spreadsheet graphs. I
once published some research with Chernoff faces, Glyph Plotts, etc. along this
lines which using social accounting data for power companies --- Volume 14
monograph entitled Phantasmagoric Accounting in the American Accounting
Association Studies in Accounting Research Series ---
http://aaahq.org/market/display.cfm?catID=5
Shane Moriarity later picked
up on this idea and analyzed some financial statements using Chernoff Faces.
“Communicating Financial Information Through Multidimensional Graphics”
Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring 1979 ---
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2490314
I don’t think any accounting
researchers picked up on the Jensen and Moriarity ideas, although I may have
missed some unpublished working papers.
I summarize some applications of
multivariate visualizations in other disciplines at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm
Frank Sinatra's Tribute to MySpace ---
http://americancomedynetwork.com/animation.html?bit_id=25239
"The Future of Social Networking," Business Week, July 2, 2009
---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/special_reports/20070618thefutureo.htm?link_position=link24
Extra Credit for Abstaining From Facebook
Robert Doade,
an associate professor of philosophy
at Trinity Western University, in British Columbia, is among those academics who
believe Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other forms of social media may be
distracting students and causing them anxiety. So Doade challenges students by
offering them a 5 percent extra credit bonus if they will abstain from all
social and traditional media for the three month semester of his philosophy
course, and keep a journal about the experience. Out of a class of around 35
students, only about 12 will try for the extra credit and by the end of the
semester only between 4 and 6 are still "media abstinent."
Inside Higher Ed, July 24, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/24/qt#204245
Are student usages of FaceBook correlated with lower grades?
Answer: YES!
Concerns About Social Networking, Blogging, and Twittering in Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Jensen Comment
But analysts may be in statistical quicksand by trying to extrapolate
correlation to causality on this one. The students who get lower grades are not
necessarily going to raise their grades by abstaining from Facebook or even
computer vices in general. They are more likely to be "time wasters" who will
find most any excuse not to study. If you take their computers away they will
spend hours arm wrestling, playing Frisbee, playing cards, necking, etc. In some
instances computers and video games are birth control devices.
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Bob Jensen's threads in social networks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Cyber criminals targeting small businesses
Cyber criminals are increasingly targeting small
and medium-sized businesses that don't have the resources to keep updating their
computer security, according to federal authorities.
Many of the attacks are being waged by organized cyber groups that are based
abroad, and they are able to steal not only credit card numbers, but personal
information -- including Social Security numbers -- of the card holders, said
Michael Merritt, assistant director of the U.S. Secret Service's office of
investigations. Merritt, in testimony prepared for the Senate Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs, said that as larger companies have taken on more
sophisticated computer network protections, cyber criminals have adapted and
gone after the smaller businesses who do not have such high-level security.
MIT's
Technology Review, September 14, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/23470/?nlid=2348&a=f
Bob Jensen's threads on computing and networking security are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
Enron Update
September 15, 2009 message from Thompson, Shari
[shari.thompson@pvpl.com]
Hi there Bob, Just thought I'd forward you this
latest development about Enron, in case you want it for your Enron timeline.
If I'm interpreting it correctly (attached), it's a notification that all
remaining Enron lawsuits are dismissed. I received it in U.S. mail this past
weekend.
I searched the web, but found only a couple
mentions of these dismissals. Strangely, they were both written March 2009.
I can't imagine why it took so long to notify us shareholders.
BTW, I just noticed your sort of business through
the ages post on your website. I enjoyed the definitions of feudalism...
enronism. That's hilarious, and so true...LOL!
Shari Thompson CIA | Internal Auditing Manager
Professional Veterinary Products Direct
402.829.5248 Fax 402.829.5322
www.pvpl.com
POWERING YOUR PRACTICE
Jensen Comment
To read the notice go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron2009Notice.pdf
"Let's (Credit) Grade Wall Street Like Colleges: The more rating
agencies the better," The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574413072842297920.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
Is Harvard really the best?
It turns out that depends on who you ask—and what
you ask. As students across America return to campus for the new school
year, new editions of three prominent college guides variously rank Harvard
at No. 1, No. 5, and No. 11. Therein lies a timely lesson for our system of
credit ratings.
Some students know from their earliest days they
want to go to Harvard, while others may want to follow mom or dad to East
Carolina or Purdue. Many more rely on the annual college guides to help them
make one of the most important financial decisions in their lives—in much
the same way an investor might look to Moody's to tell them about the
reliability of a corporate bond. The question with both is just how reliable
those ratings are.
When the housing bubble popped, our financial
institutions learned—the hard way—that the mortgage-backed securities on
their balance sheets did not merit the AAA-grades the credit ratings
agencies had assigned them. Similar complaints have long been advanced about
the trustworthiness of college guides. As the dominant player, U.S. News &
World Report's annual America's Best Colleges guide has borne the brunt of
this criticism.
In public, college presidents, deans, and spokesmen
pooh-pooh the U.S. News rankings. In private, however, many do what they can
to boost their schools up the rankings ladder. One area open to manipulation
has to do with the "peer assessment" category that accounts for a quarter of
the U.S. News ranking.
Earlier this year, Inside Higher Ed reported on a
charmingly frank presentation by a Clemson University official who admitted
her school's officials use the peer assessment to rate "all programs other
than Clemson below average." The university denied the charge. But further
reporting revealed that Clemson President James Barker had given his only
"strong" rating to his own school, while giving lower grades to every other
college in the land.
The revelations have been an embarrassment for
Clemson. Still, the woman who set off the firestorm was surely right when
she said, "I'm confident my president is not the only one who does that."
Other schools, after all, have found themselves in the news for manipulating
the way they report to U.S. News everything from their average SAT scores
and alumni giving to per pupil spending and class profiles.
So if the U.S. News report is so flawed, where's
the lesson for Wall Street? The answer lies in the new competition the U.S.
News guide has spawned. In the last few years, the Washington Monthly and
Forbes have each offered guides of their own. They are joined by the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which measures colleges by whether
they require seven core subjects the authors deem essential for a solid
liberal arts education. There's even the conservative Intercollegiate
Studies Institute's "Choosing the Right College," which offers advice about
the best professors and courses to seek out on campuses.
Different measures, of course, lead to different
results. The latest U.S. News guide has Harvard and Princeton tied for No.
1, followed by Yale. Over at the Washington Monthly, by contrast—where
editors measure colleges by how well they do at promoting social mobility,
national service and research—Harvard falls to No. 11. And the top three
slots are taken by public universities in the University of California
system: UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and UCLA.
Then there's Forbes, which just ranked West Point
as "America's Best College." The Forbes ratings include student satisfaction
with courses, post-graduate employment success (including salary data and
entries in Who's Who), the likelihood of graduation within four years, and
the average level of debt graduates are stuck with.
Which guide is best at picking the best? The answer
is that no single measurement or guide can tell everyone everything. The
more measures students and parents have, the fuller the picture before them,
and the better equipped they are to make a smart decision. Because the
federal government is not in the business of certifying particular college
guides, moreover, they compete by persuading students and parents to buy
them on the quality and relevance of their findings.
At a time when the Securities and Exchange
Commission is looking for ways to improve the flawed credit ratings that
contributed so much to our financial crisis, it might do well to stop
anointing particular credit rating agencies. Forcing these firms to compete
for customers the way the college guides do would give us better ratings—and
fewer investors lulled into the complacency that comes from thinking Uncle
Sam has done the due diligence. At least when it comes to ratings, the
Groves of Academe have a thing or two to teach our captains of finance about
competition.
Bob Jensen's threads on systemic problems of accountancy (including the
aggregation ratings of nutrients in vegetables) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
- Systemic Problem:
All Aggregations Are Arbitrary
- Systemic Problem:
All Aggregations Combine Different Measurements With Varying
Accuracies
- Systemic Problem:
All Aggregations Leave Out Important Components
- Systemic Problem:
All Aggregations Ignore Complex & Synergistic Interactions
of Value and Risk
- Systemic Problem: Disaggregating of Value or Cost is
Generally Arbitrary
- Systemic Problem:
Systems Are Too Fragile
- Systemic Problem:
More Rules Do Not Necessarily Make Accounting for
Performance More Transparent
- Systemic Problem:
Economies of Scale vs. Consulting Red Herrings in Auditing
- Systemic Problem:
Intangibles Are Intractable
|
Bob Jensen's threads on credit rating agencies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
"Book: AICPA Guide Helps Businesses Investigate Fraud," SmartPros,
September 9, 2009 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x67582.xml
The mechanics of a fraud investigation and
associated ramifications for business professionals are the theme of The
Guide to Investigating Business Fraud, the latest book publication from the
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ Specialized
Publications Group.
Authored by a team of seasoned professionals from
Ernst & Young’s Fraud Investigation and Dispute Services (FIDS) Practice,
the guide delivers practical, actionable guidance on fraud investigations
from the discovery phase through resolution and remediation.
“The decade’s high-profile scandals, with the
Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme being the most recent, underscore exactly how
critical it is for CPAs and the business owners, controllers and managers
they advise to understand what to do when fraud hits, how a fraud
investigation works, and how to avoid problems during the investigation,”
said Arleen Thomas, AICPA senior vice president – member competency and
development. “This book provides a very clear framework.”
Thomas added that a June report by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, in which the FBI disclosed that it had opened more
than 100 new cases involving corrupt business practices in the previous 18
months, emphasizes the need for the new guidance.
Ernst & Young Principal Ruby Sharma, the main
editor and a contributing author, notes the book, which collects the
knowledge of 18 firm contributors, took over two years to develop.
“This book is the result of many professionals’
hard work and draws upon their extensive experience,” she said. “This book
is for forensic accountants, litigation attorneys, corporate boards and
management, audit committees, students of accounting and anybody interested
in understanding the risk of fraud and its multiple implications."
In 14 chapters arranged to track the time sequence
of an investigation and all anchored to a central case study, The Guide to
Investigating Business Fraud answers four basic questions:
How do fraud experts examine and work a fraud case?
How do you reason and make decisions at critical times during the
investigation? How do you evaluate a case and interact with colleagues? How
do you handle preventive anti-fraud programs?
In addition to Sharma, the editors are Michael H.
Sherrod, senior manager, Richard Corgel, executive director; and Steven J.
Kuzma, Americas Fraud Investigation and Dispute Services chief operating
officer.
The Guide to Investigating Business Fraud is
available from CPA2Biz ( www.cpa2biz.com ). The cost is $79 for AICPA members and $98.75 for
non-members.
"A Model Curriculum for Education in
Fraud and Forensic Accounting," by Mary-Jo Kranacher, Bonnie W.
Morris, Timothy A. Pearson, and Richard A. Riley, Jr., Issues in
Accounting Education, November 2008. pp. 505-518 (Not Free)
---
Click Here
There are other articles on fraud and
forensic accounting in this November edition of IAE:
Incorporating Forensic Accounting
and Litigation Advisory Services Into the Classroom Lester E.
Heitger and Dan L. Heitger, Issues in Accounting Education
23(4), 561 (2008) (12 pages)]
West Virginia University: Forensic
Accounting and Fraud Investigation (FAFI) A. Scott Fleming, Timothy
A. Pearson, and Richard A. Riley, Jr., Issues in Accounting
Education 23(4), 573 (2008) (8 pages)
The Model Curriculum in Fraud and
Forensic Accounting and Economic Crime Programs at Utica College
George E. Curtis, Issues in Accounting Education 23(4), 581
(2008) (12 pages)
Forensic Accounting and FAU: An
Executive Graduate Program George R. Young, Issues in Accounting
Education 23(4), 593 (2008) (7 pages)
The Saint Xavier University Graduate
Program in Financial Fraud Examination and Management William J.
Kresse, Issues in Accounting Education 23(4), 601 (2008) (8
pages)
Also see
"Strain, Differential Association, and Coercion: Insights from the
Criminology Literature on Causes of Accountant's Misconduct," by James
J. Donegan and Michele W. Ganon, Accounting and the Public Interest
8(1), 1 (2008) (20 pages)
September 17, 2009 reply from Zabihollah
Rezaee (zrezaee) [zrezaee@MEMPHIS.EDU]
Dear Bob,
The second edition of my book on “FINANCIAL
STATEMENT FRAUD: PREVENTION AND DETECTION” coauthored with Richard A. Riley
is now available from Wiley (please see the attached flyer).
Best regards,
Zabi
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
FBI Corporate Fraud Chart in August 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2008/ataglance.htm#Chart1.htm
A great blog on securities and accounting fraud ---
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/securities/
Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm
From the Scout Report on September 11, 2009
Voca 4.2 ---
http://www.oriente.nl/voca/
If you're looking to brush up
on a bit of Turkish before a visit to Istanbul, you may want to give Voca
4.2 the once over. Visitors can use the "Help" file to learn about how the
program works, and they should also note that they will need to download a
vocabulary list before getting started.
After doing so, users can see
words in their native language, the foreign language, or a mix of both.
Visitors can test their knowledge this way, and they may also want to use
Voca to take a practice exam. Finally, visitors can also use the program to
learn grammatical inflections and pronunciations. This version is compatible
with computers running Windows XP and newer and computers running Linux.
FStream 1.4.3
---
http://www.sourcemac.com/?page=fstream
Perhaps you're listening to a Romanian news broadcast online and you'd like
to save it for future reference? Well, you're in luck if you happen to have
FStream installed on your Mac. This small application allows users to listen
and record Internet radio stations, and its size is definitely one of its
strongest selling points. Visitors will note that FStream comes preloaded
with a number of iTunes and Shoutcast stations, and even a selection of
stations from Europe. This version is compatible with computers running Mac
OS X 10.5 and newer.
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
British Columbia's History of
Education Web site http://www.mala.bc.ca/homeroom/
Academic careers
--- http://www.academiccareers.com/
Science Careers ---
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/
Linguistics Hoax: Pullum-Eskimo
Vocabulary Hoax, 1991 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf
Forwarded by Jagdish Gangolly
Great video on Complexity Theory: Simplicity
(stars) versus Complexity (guppies) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEc1-p7C_U&feature=related
Complexity Theory ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory
Jeffrey Kluger ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kluger
September 17, 2009 reply from Helmi Hammami
[helmi.hammami@GMAIL.COM]
Robert, The video is great ! Also a look
at the work of the French Philosopher Edgar Morin would be of great addition
to those interested in complexity theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Morin
Helmi
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Human Physiology Animations Homepage at Connecticut College ---
http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/departments/biology/humanphysanims/
University of California, San Francisco: Drug Industry Document Archive ---
http://dida.library.ucsf.edu/
Rare and Beautiful Books in Biology and Medicine
Turning the Pages Online ---
http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/intro.htm
Evolution of Life ---
http://www.evolution-of-life.com/en/home.html
Darwin’s evolving thoughts and private communications on the boundaries of
science and religion ---
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/index.php
Darwin 200 --- http://www.darwin200.org/
The
Complete Work of Charles Darwin ---
http://darwin-online.org.uk/
The Genius of Charles Darwing (great video tutorial) ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/the-genius-of-charles-darwin/
Beaked Whale Identification Guide ---
http://vertebrates.si.edu/mammals/beaked_whales/pages/main_menu.htm
Architectural Drawings of Willis and Lillian Leenhouts
http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/digilib/leenh/index.html
The Architecture of Jefferson County ---
http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/collections/image/jefferson_country.html
British Columbia's History of
Education Web site http://www.mala.bc.ca/homeroom/
Academic careers
--- http://www.academiccareers.com/
Science Careers ---
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/
Breaking the Bank Frontline Video
In Breaking the Bank, FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk
(Inside the Meltdown, Bush’s War) draws on a rare combination of high-profile
interviews with key players Ken Lewis and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to
reveal the story of two banks at the heart of the financial crisis, the rocky
merger, and the government’s new role in taking over — some call it
“nationalizing” — the American banking system.
Simoleon Sense, September 18, 2009
---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-frontline-breaking-the-bank/
Bob Jensen's threads on the banking bailout ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Great video on Complexity Theory: Simplicity
(stars) versus Complexity (guppies) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEc1-p7C_U&feature=related
Complexity Theory ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory
Jeffrey Kluger ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kluger
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
U.S. Department of State: Office of the Historian ---
http://history.state.gov/
British Columbia's History of
Education Web site http://www.mala.bc.ca/homeroom/
Denied Dignity: Systematic Discrimination and Hostility toward Saudi Shia
Citizens ---
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/09/03/denied-dignity-0
U.S. Department of State: Office of the Historian ---
http://history.state.gov/
Great video on Complexity Theory: Simplicity
(stars) versus Complexity (guppies) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEc1-p7C_U&feature=related
Complexity Theory ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory
Jeffrey Kluger ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kluger
Linguistics Hoax: Pullum-Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, 1991 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf
Forwarded by Jagdish Gangolly
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
Provenance in the World War II Era, 1933-1945 ---
http://provenance.si.edu/jsp/index.aspx
Studies in the History of Ethics ---
http://open-site.org/Society/Philosophy/Ethics/History
International Criminal Court ---
http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC/Home
Denied Dignity: Systematic Discrimination and Hostility toward Saudi Shia
Citizens ---
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/09/03/denied-dignity-0
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
Jacques Burkhardt and the Thayer Collection Expedition to Brazil ---
http://library.mcz.harvard.edu/wp/?page_id=63
Museum of Contemporary Art
Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson ---
http://www.mcachicago.org/eliasson/
University of Miami Libraries: Lydia Cabrera Papers ---
http://merrick.library.miami.edu/cubanHeritage/chc0339/
Darwin 200 --- http://www.darwin200.org/
The Architecture of Jefferson County ---
http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/collections/image/jefferson_country.html
Architectural Drawings of Willis and Lillian Leenhouts
http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/digilib/leenh/index.html
Thomas Jefferson's Library [video]
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/jeffersonslibrary/Pages/default.aspx
Telegraph: World War II Articles ---
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/
University of California, San Francisco: Drug Industry Document Archive ---
http://dida.library.ucsf.edu/
British Columbia's History of
Education Web site http://www.mala.bc.ca/homeroom/
U.S. Department of State: Office of
the Historian --- http://history.state.gov/
Linguistics Hoax: Pullum-Eskimo
Vocabulary Hoax, 1991 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf
Forwarded by Jagdish Gangolly
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/
September
16, 2009
September
17, 2009
September
18, 2009
September
21, 2009
September
22, 2009
September
23, 2009
Color-Blind Monkeys Get Full Color Vision
Dalton, a squirrel monkey who used to be red-green
colorblind, can now see those colors, thanks to a novel gene therapy treatment.
Scientists test his color vision by showing him a circle of red dots within a
grey-green background. When Dalton touches the correct location of the red spot,
he is rewarded with a drop of juice.
Emily Singer, MIT's Technology Review, September 16, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=438
"Beer for brain injury? Maybe," Reuters, September 22, 2009 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090922/hl_nm/us_beer_brain_injury
People who suffer a traumatic brain injury
from a car crash or other mishap are more apt to survive if they had been
drinking at the time of the injury, according to a study published Monday.
The finding "raises the intriguing
possibility" that giving alcohol to brain injured patients may improve
outcome, the study team suggests in the Archives of Surgery.
Alcohol and driving "is and will always
continue to be bad -- it contributes to over 40 percent of traffic-related
fatalities," first author Dr. Ali Salim of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los
Angeles emphasized in an email to Reuters Health.
"However, of those patients with moderate
to severe traumatic brain injury who survive their initial insult, those
with alcohol in their system seem to have a slight survival advantage
compared to those without alcohol in their system," Salim noted.
Among a little more than 38,000 people who
suffered moderate to severe brain trauma between 2000 and 2005, 38 percent
had alcohol in their system when they arrived at the hospital.
Compared to people who hadn't been
drinking before the accident, those who had been drinking were younger
(average age 37 years vs. 44 years) and they had less severe injuries. The
traumatic brain injured drinkers also spent less time on a ventilator and
less time in the intensive care unit.
And, according to Salim and his
colleagues, fewer of the drinkers than the non-drinkers died in the hospital
(7.7 percent compared with 9.7 percent).
However, the lower death rate among the
drinkers was "tempered" by an apparent increase in complications for
patients who had been drinking before the accident, the investigators note.
Exactly how alcohol may protect the brain
after trauma is unknown. One thought is that alcohol may lessen the body's
inflammatory response to the injury.
"There still needs to be further
investigation as to the mechanisms of this association we found before we
can consider this as a treatment option," Salim emphasized.
Jensen Comment
This still doesn't explain why the drunk driver who kills five people commonly
walks away with, at most, minor injuries.
Scott's a little late this year, but he produced a really great Father's Day
video ---
http://www.themaniknow.com/
Forwarded by Paula
What is the difference between Bird Flu and Swine Flu?
For bird flu you need tweetment and for swine flu you need oinkment.
Forwarded by Blan McBride
PHILOSOPHY 101
TODAY'S LESSON - WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
Grandpa: In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone
told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.
Captain James T. Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken had gone before!
Mr. Spock: It seemed like the logical thing for the chicken to do at the
time.
Bill Gates: We have just released e-Chicken 5.0 which will not only cross
roads but also lay eggs, file your important documents and balance your
checkbook. Internet Explorer is now an inextricable part of e-Chicken.
Albert Einstein: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move
beneath the chicken?
Moses: And God said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road!" And the
chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.
Colonel Sanders: I missed one?
Sir Isaac Newton: A chicken at rest will stay at rest, and chickens in motion
will cross the road.
Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
Werner Heisenberg: We can never be certain the chicken actually crossed the
road.
Charles Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the
trees.
Mark Twain: The news of the chicken's crossing the road has been greatly
exaggerated.
Aristotle: It is the nature of chickens to cross roads.
Douglas Adams: To find out why there is a road here.
Voltaire: I may not agree with the chicken’s crossing of the road, but I will
defend to the death its right to do so.
Caesar: To come, to see, to conquer.
The Sphinx: You tell me.
The Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
Erwin Schrodinger: The chicken was simultaneously on both sides of the road
until it was observed and its wave function collapsed.
Hemingway: To die, in the rain.
And so shall we all. THUS ENDETH THE LESSON
A guy in a bar leans over to the guy next to him and says, "Want to hear an
accountant joke?"
The guy next to him replies, "Well, before you tell that joke, you should
know that I'm 6 feet tall, 200 pounds, and I'm an accountant. And the guy
sitting next to me is 6'2" tall, 225 pounds, and he's an accountant. Now, do you
still want to tell that joke?"
The first guy says, "No, I don't want to have to explain it two times."
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
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/
Management and Accounting Blog ---
http://maaw.info/
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
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