Tidbits on October 5, 2009
Bob Jensen
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
We had a beautiful
warm and dry September following a cold and wet summer. Sadly, to the
disappointment of the thousands of foliage tourists on the weekend of October
3-4 it was cold, windy, and wet with fog covering the tops of our mountains. By
the way, last week the tops of our mountains got their first blanket of snow
which, thus far, seems to be hanging on in the cold weather. Hopefully it will
warm up this week and the snow will disappear for a short while before coming
back with more serious business. When the time comes I'm ready.
Thus far our lawns are still green
and there's quite a lot of green left to turn in our big maples.
If you look close, from our bedroom window, you will see a woodchuck peering off
across the golf course
If you look close, you can see the
new vacation home that two physicians (man and wife from Harvard, Mass.)
built within our view to the north. The town of Littleton can be seen about 10
miles to the north.
Our two very good neighbors up the
road have two golden retrievers
A bunch of my 2004 Summer and Autumn Pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/NewHampshire/2004Autumn/2004autumn.htm
Large Wild Animal Report
An older couple kept coming back day after putting up a telescope at a lookout
point near the front of our cottage. They revealed to me that they were avid
bird watches, and what they were watching for were hawks. In less than three
hours on the morning I talked to them, they had spotted 141 hawks flying between
here and the Kinsman mountain range.
What do you mean "the milk shake machine is broken?"
In one of the sand traps on the golf course behind our house there were
enormous footprints of a bull moose this week. I did not see the moose which
probably was roaming about up here while I was asleep. Also I did not see the
bear that chased the greens keeper, Sam Kerr, this week. He made a mad dash for
his tractor when the bear came out from behind our barn.
"Moose and Bear follow seasonal rhythm," by Jeff Woodburn, The
Courier (Littleton, New Hampshire), September 30, 2009. Page A11
The two largest creatures that roam and regale the
North Country region are busy this season. While moose are looking for love,
black bears are looking for food. These phenomena alter the animals travel
patterns, which impacts everything from road collisions, tourism activity to
hunting rituals.
"The bulls are on the prowl," reports Kristine
Rines, Moose Project Leader for New Hampshire Fish and Game. The bull
Moose's behavior changes during the mating season. They are crazed with
lust, full of testosterone and very unpredictable. Rines said the bull
moose is traveling as much as 27 miles a day during these days of searching
and listening for a cow's (female moose) call. Once the bull hears the cow,
which generally stays around her home range, he makes a beeline for her.
. . .
For the black bear, fall is all about food. The
Bear harvest, which runs from September 1 to November 11 in this region, is
off to a strong start with 312 bears killed by hunters in the first three
weeks of the season.
. . .
Ample food supply keeps bears deep in the forest
and reduces the amount of travel required to meet their heavy eating demands
before hibernating. Bears, who are opportunistic eaters, cn travel as much
as 50 miles in a day. They consume mostly soft mast, like berries and
apples, and hard mast, like acorns and hazel-nuts.
Continued in article
Jensen comment
Acorns are the main staple of bears. Bears are more apt to
stray closer to civilization in bad acorn season. Apart from dumpsters, bears love, love,
love bird feeders. I had to stop feeding birds in the fall, spring, and
summer after bears kept ripping off my bird feeders on the deck. I still put
out some bird feed when the bears hibernate.
More moose pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/NewHampshire/2004Autumn/2004autumn.htm
Albino Moose ---
http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/albinomoose.asp
Forwarded by Dr. Wolff
One day a woman's husband died, and on that clear,
cold morning, in the warmth of their bedroom, the wife was struck with the
pain of learning that sometimes there isn't "anymore".
No more hugs, no more special moments to celebrate
together, no more phone calls just to chat, no more "just one minute."
Sometimes, what we care about the most gets all
used up and goes away, never to return before we can say good-bye, say "I
love you."
So while we have it, it's best we love it, care for
it, fix it when it's broken and heal it when it's sick.
This is true for marriage ..... And old cars .. And
children with bad report cards, and dogs with bad hips, and aging parents
and grandparents.
We keep them because they are worth it, because we
are worth it..
Some things we keep -- like a best friend who moved
away or a sister-in-law after divorce. There are just some things that make
us happy, no matter what.
Life is important, like people we know who are
special.. And so, we keep them close!
I received this from someone who thought I was a
'keeper'! Then I sent it to the people I think of in the same way... Now
it's your turn to send this to all those people who are "keepers" in your
life, including the person who sent it, if you feel that way.
Suppose one morning you never wake up, do all your
friends know you love them?
I was thinking...I could die today, tomorrow or
next week, and I wondered if I had any wounds needing to be healed,
friendships that needed rekindling or three words needing to be said.
Let every one of your friends know you love them.
Even if you think they don't love you back, you would be amazed at what
those three little words and a smile can do. And just in case I'm gone
tomorrow.
I LOVE YOU!!!
Live today to the fullest because tomorrow is not
promised.
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between September 25 and October
5, 2009
To Accompany the October 5, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090924Quotations.htm
Now in Another Tidbits Document
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 October 5, 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
How to author books and other
materials for online delivery
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.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
United Nations Speech By Benjamin Netanyahu ---
Click Here
Two videos side by side:
Video 1 showing that he said Obamacare protesters were racists" and
Video 2 denying what he said in video 1
http://www.thefoxnation.com/culture/2009/10/01/carter-i-never-said-obama-protesters-were-racists
Video: Special Cleaner for the Inside of Your Monitor
(free product) ---
http://www.raincitystory.com/flash/screenclean.swf
Video: Address by President Obama on NBC's Saturday
Night Live
What have I accomplished almost one year as your President
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/episodes/?vid=1163334#vid=1163334
Video: Watch Jay Leno bash David Letterman ---
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/10/03/leno-bashes-letterman-ive-never-had-sex-staff-member
Jensen Comment
I'm anxiously awaiting his revelations of the Top 10.
Doom and Gloom
Video From CNN: Julian Robertson Discusses The US Debt And Upcoming Inflation
Expectations ---
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/julian-robertson-discusses-us-debt-and-upcoming-inflation-expectations
Video: David Dreman Warns About 10-12% Inflation,
Simoleon Sense, August 5, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/videodavid-dreman-warns-about-10-12-inflation/
Letterman Scandal Videos and Pictures ---
Click Here
Keep the Palin jokes coming
Funny Video From and Unlikely Comedian (found at the Financial
Rounds Blog on October 1, 2009)
It turns our Austan Goolsbee (U of Chicago Economics prof and member of
President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors) is a pretty funny guy ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Pretty Dull Video From My Alma Mater
Five Speaker Videos from the Stanford Graduate School of Business (on the
economic crisis and leadership) [Scroll Down]
Top 5 Speaker Videos for 2009 ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/top-videos.html?cmpid=alumni&source=gsbtoday
Ernesto Cortazar “Eternal Love Affair” Adriana Le Miroir ---
Click Here
http://www.authorstream.com/presentation/tdhoanh-241086-le-miroir-entertainment-ppt-powerpoint/
Video: Learn the new (RSS) way to view the news you are
most interested in from your favorite news sites ---
www.commoncraft.com
has a “RSS in Plain English” video
This great link was forwarded by Mary Jo Sanz
[MSANZ@BENTLEY.EDU]
Animator versus Animation ---
http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs13/f/2007/077/2/e/Animator_vs__Animation_by_alanbecker.swf
Video: Learn the new (RSS) way to view the news you are most interested
in from your favorite news sites ---
www.commoncraft.com
has a “RSS in Plain English” video
This great link was forwarded by Mary Jo Sanz
[MSANZ@BENTLEY.EDU]
Also see Nanoscale ---
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/NR/
Video: Internet Real Time Communication and Collaboration
(1 hour, 20 minutes)
Google Wave ---
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the
web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost
instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos,
videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open
APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build
extensions that work inside waves.
Developer Preview ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
Microsoft has produced its share of quirky marketing
messages, but a
YouTube clip produced to promote a series of
Windows 7 launch parties is a special sort of odd. Oh, so very special. They
apparently didn't factor in how the video might look to those who have yet to
hop on the Win 7 bandwagon. As you can see below, our four implausibly perky,
demographically balanced hosts -- standing in a spotless kitchen decorated with
red, blue and orange balloons -- talk about how "great it is to host a launch
party!" that's really just another social gathering ("in a lot of ways, you're
just throwing a party with Windows 7 as an honored guest!"). They suggest
watching some of the other 100 or so YouTube clips for ideas about showing off
Windows 7, while one wisely reminds hosts to make sure that the new operating
system's set up a couple of days early: "play with Windows 7 before the party,"
he emphasizes. In addition, they recommend ... oh, good grief, I can't keep
describing this with a straight face. Just watch yourself:
Rob Pegoraro, "Comedy Is an
Uninvited Guest at Microsoft's 'House Party'," The Washington Post,
September 25, 2009 ---
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2009/09/microsofts_house_party_an_invi.html?wprss=fasterforward
The YouTube video is at the above site or go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ&feature=player_embedded
I think it would be better to have
Windows 7 and new MS Office products come dancing in as Hors dourves
LATRAVIATA (VERDI) Hors dourves ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/LATRAVIATAVERDI.wmv
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Video: Cramer (CNBC) Freaks Out On The SEC
Over Flash Trading ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/cramer-freaks-out-on-the-sec-over-flash-2009-09
LATRAVIATA (VERDI) Hors dourves ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/LATRAVIATAVERDI.wmv
Ernesto Cortazar “Eternal Love Affair” Adriana Le
Miroir ---
Click Here
http://www.authorstream.com/presentation/tdhoanh-241086-le-miroir-entertainment-ppt-powerpoint/
The Autumnal Glow Of Strauss' Four Last Songs ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111554634
Baroque In Boston: Bach And Company In Concert
---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112448300
Video: Remember That You're Living on a
Planet That's Evolving ---
http://dingo.care-mail.com/cards/flash/5409/galaxy.swf
Carla Bruni
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
Wow! Astronomy Picture of the Day (Saturn at
Equinox) ---
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Art and Art History ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/arthist.html
Art Forum ---
http://artforum.com/
Oameni (Nx Power Lite) ---
http://www.slideshare.net/shvax/oameni-nx-power-lite-1989451
Linsey Addario ---
http://www.lynseyaddario.com/
National Geographic Photos ---
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography
LIFE (photos) in Israel in 1948 – Part 1 ---
http://benatlas.com/2009/07/life-in-israel-in-1948-part-1/
Amazing Facts About Israel (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxK6OwIpK5o
Life and Death in Darfur ---
Click Here
Sydney’s Apocalyptic Dust Storm Seen From Space
---
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/sydney-dust-storm-from-space/#Replay
Reader Photo Gallery: Awesome DIY Astronomy ---
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/reader-astronomy-photos/
Sam Higgins: A Photo Essay in the New
Yorker magazine (some nudes) ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/09/sam-haskins-a-photo-essay.html
Behind the Scenes from Time to Time ---
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/lynsey-addario/
Who wrote those delightful Maxine cartoons? ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Maxine/Maxine.htm
Ernesto Cortazar “Eternal Love Affair” Adriana Le
Miroir ---
Click Here
http://www.authorstream.com/presentation/tdhoanh-241086-le-miroir-entertainment-ppt-powerpoint/
African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts ---
http://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/?queryID=61
Images of the Antislavery Movement in
Massachusetts ---
http://www.masshist.org/online/abolition.cfm
Irish Architecture Foundation ---
http://www.architecturefoundation.ie/
SFMOMA: Open Space (San Francisco art) ---
http://blog.sfmoma.org/
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) ---
http://www.sfmoma.org/media/features/miller/
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
Thornton Wilder for Sophisticated Blokes ---
Click Here
James Joyce for Ordinary Blokes? ---
Click Here
Books by James Joyce ---
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/
Books by James Joyce ---
http://joycean.org/?w=
JAMES JOYCE' DIRTY LETTERS ---
http://www.arlindo-correia.com/joyce.html
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 25 and October
5, 2009
To Accompany the October 5, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090924Quotations.htm
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Unabashed Bragging About Trinity University
Across my years on the faculty, Trinity University was always very good to
me.
My retirement pictures in 2006 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2006/tidbits060512.htm
Thank you Trinity University for 24 wonderful years.
Fiske Guide to Colleges 2010, an independent
publication offering information and advice to students and parents searching
for a school, features Trinity University as one of the guide’s “Best Buys” in
the nation. Of the more than 300 schools profiled in the current Fiske Guide,
only 24 private institutions and 20 public colleges and universities received
the endorsement. According to the guide, the institutions were awarded the “Best
Buy” label for offering “outstanding academics with relatively modest prices.”
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/news_releases/090807fiske.htm
For the 16th consecutive year, Trinity University
has been ranked No. 1 in the U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best
Colleges” guide. Trinity was awarded the No. 1 spot in the category of
institutions that offer a full range of undergraduate programs as well as select
master’s programs in the Western part of the United States. Trinity also
received a No. 1 ranking in the publication’s best value category, “Great
Schools, Great Prices.” In addition, U.S. News & World Report ranked the
University’s engineering science program No. 31 among the nation’s best schools
whose highest degree is a bachelor’s or master’s.
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/news_releases/070822_usnews.htm
Where am I now?
At my age I can’t be certain, but the last I can recall is at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm
Trinity University Lands a New President
September 25, 2009 message from George C. (Tim) Hixon
To the Trinity University Community:
On behalf of Trinity University’s Board of Trustees,
I am pleased to announce that Dennis A. Ahlburg,
Ph.D. has been elected to serve as the University’s 18th president.
Dr. Ahlburg is currently the dean of the Leeds
School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder and will assume
the presidency Jan. 1, 2010. Dennis Ahlburg is an internationally renowned
economist who brings to Trinity a distinguished record of research and
teaching and an impressive career as a transformational academic
administrator. The Board believes
Dr. Ahlburg will provide the kind of leadership
needed to build on Trinity’s achievements and bring further recognition to
this extraordinary University. You can find more information about Dr.
Ahlburg’s credentials and career accomplishments in the news release
prepared for the Trinity Web site. Dr. Ahlburg’s selection is the result of
a nationwide search that drew a highly-qualified pool of applicants. The
Board of Trustees would like to express its gratitude to the members of the
Presidential Search Committee for their hard work and dedication to this
important task. We are most pleased with the collaborative nature of the
search process and the many suggestions and nominations that came from
within the Trinity community as we identified the desired qualifications and
the challenges and opportunities facing Trinity now and in the future.
Thank you for your support and service to Trinity
University. Sincerely,
George C. (Tim) Hixon Chairman,
Board of Trustees
October 2, 2009 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
ONLINE TEACHING TIPS
The September issue of ELEARN MAGAZINE has
two articles from long-time online teaching practitioners that feature
practical advice for new online instructors:
"10 Things I've Learned About
Teaching Online" By Michelle Everson, University of Minnesota
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=57-1
"Discussion Management Tips
For Online Educators" By Jo Macek, Anthem Education Group ---
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=59-1
eLearn Magazine is published
by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.), a not-for-profit
educational association serving those who work, teach, and learn in the
various computing-related fields. For more information, contact: eLearn
magazine, eLearn Magazine ACM, 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY
10121-07016 USA;
Web:
http://www.elearnmag.com/
See also:
From the corporate side of eLearning, tips not to follow:
"7 Ways to Turn eLearning Programs into Real Snoozers" By Josh Little
TRAINING MAGAZINE, September 28, 2009
http://www.trainingmag.com/msg/content_display/publications/e3i8a59b9acd0fa94f3bcac023669928cd9
Bob Jensen's threads on ideas and tips for teaching online ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
October 2, 2009 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
E-LEARNING AND LEARNING
STYLES
"Evaluating students' learning styles provides knowledge about their
particular preferences. This awareness can be used to develop, design,
format, and deliver educational programs and resources that will motivate
and stimulate students' acquisition, integration, and application of
information and professional knowledge in an attempt to individualise
instruction."
The paper "Are Learning Style
Preferences of Health Science Students Predictive of Their Attitudes Towards
E-Learning?" (by Ted Brown, et al., in AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL
TECHNOLOGY, vol. 24, no. 4, 2009; pp. 524-43), reports on a study conducted
with students enrolled in allied health programs at Monash University in
2006-2007. While the researchers concluded that knowing the learning styles
of the students "can be used only to a limited extent as a predictor of
students' attitudes towards e-learning. Nevertheless, educators should still
consider student learning styles in the context of using technology for
instructional purposes."
The paper is available at
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet25/brown.html
The Australasian Journal of
Educational Technology (AJET) [ISSN 1449-5554] is a refereed journal
publishing research and review articles in educational technology,
instructional design, educational applications of computer technologies,
educational telecommunications, and related areas. For more information and
back issues go to
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/
See also:
"The Effect of Learning Styles on Achievement in Different Learning
Environments"
By Meryem Yilmaz-Soylu and Buket Akkoyunlu THE TURKISH ONLINE JOURNAL OF
EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, vol. 8, no. 4, October 2009
http://www.tojet.net/articles/844.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on ideas and tips for teaching online ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
October 2, 2009 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
A SOCIO-TECHNICAL VISION OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING
"Universities currently outsource the marketing and
distribution of their knowledge to publishers with little interest in their
communities. If knowledge distributors who create no knowledge dominate its
exchange, then the publishing tail is wagging the academic dog. . . . If
universities let publishers kidnap their knowledge and hold them to
copyright ransom, they fail their public duty of knowledge guardianship."
The September issue of FIRST MONDAY concludes its
two-part series "Reinventing Academic Publishing Online" (mentioned in the
August 2009 issue of INFOBITS:
http://its.unc.edu/TeachingAndLearning/publications/tlinfobits/CCM3_007929#4
) with "A Socio-technical Vision." In this paper,
authors Brian Whitworth and Rob Friedman present a "blueprint for change" in
academe that proposes a "democratic online knowledge exchange, run by the
academic many rather than the few." The paper is available at
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2642/2287
First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466] is an online,
peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the
Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in
cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.
For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief
Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA;
email: ejv@uic.edu;
Web:
http://firstmonday.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on ideas and tips for teaching online ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
October 2, 2009 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
A MODEL FOR DETECTING
STUDENT PLAGIARISM
Using their own experience as
university instructors, authors Tracey Bretag and Saadia Mahmud (in "A Model
for Determining Student Plagiarism: Electronic Detection and Academic
Judgement," JOURNAL OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING AND LEARNING PRACTICE, vol. 6,
no. 1, 2009), present a simple model for detecting student plagiarism. They
discuss the shortcomings of electronic text-matching software tools, while
providing suggestions on how the limitations can be lessened when combined
with the instructor's manual analysis and "nuanced academic judgement." The
paper is available at
http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=jutlp
The Journal of University
Teaching and Learning Practice [ISSN: 1449-9782], published by the
University of Wollongong, is a bi-annual, peer-reviewed journal publishing
papers that "add significantly to the body of knowledge describing effective
and innovative teaching and learning practice in the higher education
environment." For more information, contact: Journal of University Teaching
and Learning Practice, University of Wollongong, c/o Centre for Educational
Development and Interactive Resources, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW
2522, Australia;
email: jutlp@uow.edu.au;
Web: http://jutlp.uow.edu.au/
See also:
"The New (and Old) News about Cheating for Distance Educators," By Scott
Howell, Don Sorensen, and Holly Rose Tippets ONLINE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE
LEARNING ADMINISTRATION, vol. 12, no. 3, Fall 2009
http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall123/howell123.html
"Those in distance
education are faced with a formidable challenge to ensure the identity
of test takers and integrity of exam results, especially since students
are physically removed from the classroom and distributed across the
globe. This news digest will provide distance educators not only with a
better understanding and awareness of issues surrounding cheating but
also suggest solutions that might be adopted to help mitigate cheating
in their programs."
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
I think this is sad.
Read the graphs of the plunging stock prices and circulation revenues of the
major newspapers
What on earth will replace all those salaried reporters and correspondents
around the world?
Infographic: The Death Of The Newspaper Industry ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/infographic-the-death-of-the-newspaper-industry/
At the University of Texas at Austin's
McCombs School of Business (McCombs
Undergraduate Business Profile), the minimum GPA in
2009 for undergraduate students, resident or nonresident, who wanted to transfer
into the business school was 3.6, according to the school's admissions Web site.
Back in 2005, the minimum GPA for an internal transfer was 3.4 for residents and
3.5 for nonresidents.
"Business: Big Major on Campus: A flight to safety is driving up
enrollment at many undergraduate business programs, but that's making it tougher
to get in," by Alison Damast, Business Week, September 24,
2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/sep2009/bs20090924_680815.htm?link_position=link1
Every fall, Linda Salchenberger, dean of Marquette
University's College of Business Administration (Marquette
Undergraduate Business Profile), meets with
parents of freshman students to welcome them to the school and gauge their
expectations for the years ahead. This year, she stood in front of a group
of 400 of them and posed a question she thought would receive a lukewarm
response in today's challenging economic climate.
"I asked, 'How many of you are optimistic about the
job prospects for your students four years from now,' and I'd say easily
three-quarters of them raised their hand," she says.
That was just the first bit of good news
Salchenberger received. Enrollment in the freshman class is up 7% over last
year and the school just welcomed its largest ever freshman, sophomore, and
junior classes to campus, she says.
This is a scenario being played out on the campuses
of many colleges and universities across the country this fall. Driven by
the recession and one of the largest incoming freshman classes in the
nation's history, the business major is experiencing a surge in popularity
among students. Dozens of business schools, including Emory University's
Goizueta Business School (Goizueta
Undergraduate Business Profile), Santa Clara University's
Leavey School of Business (Santa
Clara Undergraduate Business Profile), and the University of Scranton's
Kania School of Management (Scranton
Undergraduate Business Profile) are reporting an
uptick in their entering freshman classes, with many boasting record
enrollment and interest from high school graduates. At some schools,
enrollment is up by as much as 10% or 15%, stretching them to capacity and,
in some cases, forcing admissions officers to be more selective and tighten
their criteria.
Starting Salaries Take a Hit
Deans and admissions officers say students and
parents are increasingly viewing the business major as the most practical
major in this economy, one that will put them in the best position to land a
job after graduation. Increasingly, many who intended to become liberal arts
majors are switching gears to business, or double majoring, pursuing a
degree in history, for example, at the same time as one in finance,
administrators say.
Many of these students are positioning themselves
for what they hope will be an economic recovery down the road. However,
their confidence in a business degree as the key to jump-starting their
careers may be misplaced, especially if they graduate in the next year or
two. Business graduates have been as hard hit by the downturn as most
majors, a trend that shows no signs of abating, and their salaries are not
faring much better. According to a July report from the National Association
of Colleges and Employers, the average starting salary for 2009 college
graduates with bachelor's degrees in business increased less than 1%, to
$47,239. Some business majors fared especially poorly. Business
administration majors saw their salaries sink 2.1%, to $44,944. Meanwhile,
economics graduates saw their salaries dip by 1.3%, to $49,829, according to
the report.
Even so, business has always been a popular major
among undergraduates. In academic year 2006-07, the largest number of
bachelor's degrees conferred was in business (21%), followed by social
sciences and history (11%), education (7%), and health sciences (7%),
according to the most recent figures available from the Education Dept.'s
National Center for Education Statistics. Fueling that trend, many students
enter college already knowing they want to become business majors; nearly
17% of full-time freshmen at four-year colleges across the country said they
planned to major in business in the fall of 2008, according to data from the
latest national student survey conducted by the University of California,
Los Angeles' Higher Education Research Institute.
Majoring in Business as an Investment
Though enrollment figures for fall 2009 are not yet
available, John Fernandes, president of the Association to Advance
Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a leading accreditation group, says
he expects that trend to continue its upward spiral this academic year. He
says he's heard anecdotally from a number of schools that business is the
most popular major this year on campus, with many students even choosing to
pursue double majors within the business school, such as a
finance-and-accounting combination. That's a strategy students believe will
give them more concrete skills and an edge when they enter the job market,
Fernandes says.
"Any time the economy looks difficult, that means
undergraduates will look towards a degree that they can more quickly apply
to a job. And students see business as the major with the greatest
likelihood of getting one," Fernandes says.
That's the case for Christopher Paschal, 18, a
freshman at Santa Clara, who intends to double-major in accounting and
political science. Paschal says he is not certain yet whether he'll pursue a
career in politics or business but notes that with the recession he felt it
was more important than ever to have a business foundation, no matter what
path he ends up pursuing.
"It is a safe choice. I knew business would help
set me up for a good career, even if the economy is good or bad," he says.
Another reason he's taking a closer look at the
business field? Paschal says he was strongly urged by his mother, who works
at IBM (IBM),
to consider a business major. That's a conversation
that more and more parents are having with their children these days before
sending them off to college, says Drew Starbird, acting dean of Santa
Clara's Leavey School. He believes it is one of the reasons Leavey's
enrollment is up 13% this year, with 320 students majoring in business.
"Higher education is an expensive proposition for
families and many families look on it as an investment. It can pay off in a
lot of different ways and one of the ways it pays off is in a job and higher
salary down the road," he says. "Especially now, the families who send their
kids to college are doing that calculation."
That mindset among families is also evident at
Scranton's Kania School, where freshman enrollment is up about 10% over last
year, says Dean Michael Mensah. Meanwhile, total undergraduate enrollment at
the business school continues to rise. Back in academic year 2006-07, there
were 816 students enrolled at the school; this fall, enrollment tops off at
891 students.
Mensah says the school's curriculum—which has an
emphasis on ethics and responsibility—is helping draw students. But that's
only part of the appeal, he says.
"Business graduates usually get a chance at a good
career much faster than any other majors and this is a time when people
would probably like to stay away from additional education, or at least
recoup some of their undergraduate investment before pursuing some other
path," Mensah says.
Raising the Standards
On some campuses, the increased fervor for the
business major means it is becoming more competitive to get into B-schools.
For example, applications have been so strong recently at some universities,
especially large state ones, that they are increasing their minimum grade
point averages (GPA) to 3.2 or higher to narrow the field of candidates,
AACSB's Fernandes says.
At the University of Texas at Austin's
McCombs School of Business (McCombs
Undergraduate Business Profile), the minimum GPA
in 2009 for undergraduate students, resident or nonresident, who wanted to
transfer into the business school was 3.6, according to the school's
admissions Web site. Back in 2005, the minimum GPA for an internal transfer
was 3.4 for residents and 3.5 for nonresidents.
Continued in article
Decline of the Humanities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz
Do We Need Changes in J-Schools and B-Schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#JSchools
I think this is sad.
"Decline of the Humanities," by Stephen Hsu, MIT's Technology
Review, September 25, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=354&bpid=24172&nlid=2385
From an
essay by William Chace, professor of English and former president of
Wesleyan and Emory.
... Here is how the numbers have changed from
1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):
English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent
In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the
humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16
percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from
14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street,
the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that
business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.
What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root
is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion,
with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to
undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in
which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have
done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion
that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books
themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity
studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so
doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested
in good books.
... Alexander W. Astin’s research tells us that in the mid-1960s, more
than 80 percent of entering college freshmen reported that nothing was
more important than “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” Astin,
director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, reports
that “being very well off financially” was only an afterthought, one
that fewer than 45 percent of those freshmen thought to be an essential
goal. As the years went on, however, and as tuition shot up, the two
traded places; by 1977, financial goals had surged past philosophical
ones, and by the year 2001 more than 70 percent of undergraduate
students had their eyes trained on financial realities, while only 40
percent were still wrestling with meaningful philosophies.
Regarding the last paragraph, while there has
undoubtedly been a general cultural shift, it is also true that a much
larger fraction of the population attends college now, with resulting
decline of average cognitive ability. Perhaps the
elite of the 1960s had the luxury and cognitive ability to concentrate on
their philosophy of life, as opposed to earning a living; students today do
not.
For more see
here:
Education and Verbal Ability over Time: Evidence from Three Multi-Time
Sources
Nie, Golde and Butler
Abstract: During the 20th century, there
was an unprecedented expansion in the level of educational
attainment in America. Using three separate measures, this paper
investigates whether there was a concurrent increase in verbal
ability and skills. Changes in verbal ability in the general
population as well as changes in the verbal ability of graduates of
different levels of education are investigated. An additional
investigation of how changes in the differences between males' and
females' educational attainment are associated with changes in
differences between their respective verbal abilities follows. The
main finding is that there is little evidence that the large
increase in educational attainment has resulted in an increase in
any of the measures of verbal abilities and skills.
College students are not as intelligent
Where as college grades are being inflated, intelligence of students in college
is being deflated with rising numbers of college admissions. A much larger
fraction of the population attends college now, with resulting decline of
average cognitive ability.
"College students are not as intelligent" ---
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/college_students_are_not_as_in.php
September 28, 2009 reply from
'will@willyancey.com'
Bob,
I am confused. Are you saying students should talk
on more debt and take more time to study topics that will be not help their
employment? Are you saying the government should subsidize activity that
students do not want to pay for?
If English and humanity departments are not able to
attract enough students, then perhaps the departments are too large and
should be reduced. It appears to me that young people are very interested in
communication whether that is by reading, internet, text messaging,
websites, church activities, etc. They can get a lot of that communication
without paying for college tuition. I am one of those old-fashioned people
that believe that in the long run markets work and people make rational
decisions.
I agree that verbal skills have declined. Perhaps
we need better verbal skills development to take place within the business,
math, and science courses. Why should English departments have a monopoly on
teaching communication?
Will
September 28, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Will,
This
all gets very complicated, and perhaps
the reason is that the 1960s general education model no longer fits the 21st
Century. I firmly believe that the difference between education and training
is education’s scholarly foundations in humanities and science. I also
believe that the present general education model is a mess --- at Harvard
all first and second year students simply take small discretionary samples
from a large smorgasbord.
The University of North
Texas experimented (on an AAA Accounting Education Change Commission grant)
by having accounting and humanities professors jointly teach accounting
courses. The UNT, by the way, has one of the strongest humanities faculty
systems
in the University of Texas system of universities.
It is rumored that the UNT
AECC experiment was pretty much a failure, although I’ve not studied this
experiment myself. Apparently, when given choices between all-accounting
sections versus accounting-humanities sections, the students overwhelmingly
chose all-accounting sections. Once again this is only what I heard from one
insider, a big insider accountant and scholarly opera buff, in the UNT
accounting program.
I don’t have any answers to
the liberal-core curriculum dilemma. At Trinity we once had a Quest program
where all first year students took the same overview course on history,
religion, philosophy, etc. That did not meet evolutionary success and gave
way to categories of courses in things like “Western Civilization” and a
number of other categories for qualified general education courses. That is
pretty much the system still in place, but it has become more and more like
a Harvard smorgasbord.
The trouble with
smorgasbord humanities is that there’s literally no consistency between
graduates in terms of what they learned about humanities. Another problem is
the turf wars that go on between humanities departments. If you don’t have
any majors (e.g., Southern Mississippi has something like three economics
majors) then departments fight for survival by attracting general education
course enrollments. The Economics Department at Southern Mississippi is
currently on the chopping block. Really!
Bob Jensen
Question
If your budget forces you to drop the Department Bad Luck that has one or
more required courses in the general education curriculum, what department
should be eliminated?
Hints:
-
That department may also have one or more courses required of all
accounting, finance, and general business majors.
-
That department may also have one or more courses required of all social
science majors.
-
That department is quite popular in many colleges for students planning
on entering MBA programs and law schools.
. But
that department may not be quite as popular at Southern Mississippi as
it is in most colleges.
-
That department teaches subject matter closest to astrology.
"So,
Department Bad Luck
was right in line with Accounting, Management,
and Marketing for [Credit Hour Production]/FTE -- three degree programs that
produced over 300 graduates last year compared to 3 for
Department Bad Luck," Nail wrote in an e-mail
to Inside Higher Ed.
"Cruel Irony," Inside Higher Ed, by Jack Stripling, Inside Higher
Ed, August 14, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/14/economics
Amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the
University of Southern Mississippi is poised to eliminate -- of all things
-- its economics department, faculty were informed this week.
The elimination of economics, along with five tenured and four
tenure-track faculty positions, is part of a plan to reduce spending by $11
to $12 million, universitywide, within a year. While university officials
stress the plan isn't yet final, they are slated to decide by September 1
whether to go forward with the proposed cuts, according to a news release.
Tenured and tenure-track faculty are legally required to a year's notice
prior to termination, and economics faculty say they've already received
such notice.
The proposal was crafted by a provost-led committee, which also
included faculty. The committee’s proposal recommends 12 tenured or
tenure-track positions be cut across the university, and three quarters of
those will come from economics.
George Carter, a professor of economics at Southern Mississippi,
sent a
letter to colleagues proclaiming that “USM
will stand alone as a major university without an economics faculty.” He
went further, attesting that “due process has been denied” to economics
professors who were unrepresented on the budget committee and kept in the
dark about its deliberations throughout the process.
Much of the justification for eliminating the economics department
was tied to student demand. An outline of the
plan drafted by the committee notes that the
program has “less than five graduates per year,” but that number is in
dispute. Until recently, the department housed the university’s
international business program, which produced 17 graduates in 2007-8. If
those graduates were added to the total, economics would have produced 20
graduates that year.
Even with the international business graduates included, however,
economics trails all other departments in the college in the number of
degrees awarded. The highest degree producer in 2007-8 was Management and
Marketing, which had 293 graduates. The second-lowest was Tourism and
Management, which had 29 graduates -- nine more than economics, even with
international business included in the tally.
While faculty in the department acknowledge the need to boost
degree numbers in core economics programs, they note that the economics
courses they teach support many other majors.
“We actually have, I believe, the highest student credit hours per
[full-time equivalent faculty member] in the College of Business, and maybe
one of the highest at the university," said Mark Klinedinst, a professor in
the department. "[Administrators] were constantly complaining 'Oh, we're
overstaffed.' How can we be overstaffed if we teach one of the heavier
course loads at the college and the university?"
Southern Mississippi did not provide universitywide data on
teaching loads requested by Inside Higher Ed, but the teaching loads
economics faculty carry are actually relatively close to two of the four
other departments within the college, according to data provided by the
faculty and Lance Nail, dean of the college. About 275 credit hours were
produced by each full-time equivalent economics faculty member in 2007-8,
according to slightly differing data supplied by both the dean and faculty.
That ratio is similar to the load carried by the Department of Accountancy
and Information Systems -- 310 credit hours per FTE -- and Management and
Marketing -- 307 per FTE, Nail's data show.
To Nail, the credit hour data illustrate that faculty in other
departments are producing just as many credit hours, while also producing
more degrees than economics.
"So, ECON was right in line with Accounting, Management, and
Marketing for [Credit Hour Production]/FTE -- three degree programs that
produced over 300 graduates last year compared to 3 for ECON," Nail wrote in
an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed.
Dean's Process Criticized
Economics faculty are still smarting that the international
business program was moved to another department, but their primary
complaint is about the process by which that change took place. The move was
part of an overall redesign proposed by Nail, who went ahead with the plan
over the objections of the university’s Academic Council, December
meeting minutes indicate. While the council
acknowledged that it did not have governing authority over the redesign, it
nonetheless voted against the proposal in a symbolic gesture. The
Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning,
however, endorsed the redesign, and it went forward.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Economics faculty are among the most articulate faculty and trench fighters
on campus. My guess is that this "just ain't going to happen." Otherwise
Southern Mississippi will become the most frowned upon university in the
world.
What would corporations do when faced with such fiscal emergencies? Many
will turn to what accountants call zero-based budgeting ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Based_Budgeting
Given only the facts in the article, it would seem that zero-based budgeting
alone may point to ECON as the bad luck department because of having almost
no majors. But this is precisely the mistake that zero-based budgeting can
make in the academy since the academy is much more than a business.
Years ago, Colorado College dropped Accounting (and I think the entire
department of Business Administration).. But in fear of losing a huge number
of applicants to the university, a sufficient number new accounting courses
were offered in the Economics Department such that graduates became eligible
for sit for the CPA examination in Colorado --- ergo old wine in new
bottles. I don't think there was any difference between Intermediate
Accounting and the Economics of Intermediate Accounting. I think Colorado
College soon afterwards brought back accounting, finance, and business
administration.
Economics is probably more vulnerable than Business Administration in terms
of appeal to applicants seeking careers, but economics is so part and parcel
to business education and research, I just cannot imagine having a business
administration department that is not served by economics courses in one
structure or another. If the Department of Economics is eventually dropped
at Southern Mississippi, watch for new courses called Finance of Economics
Principles, Finance of the Macro Economy, Principles of Microeconomics in
Business, etc.
The bit about astrology was just a joke (... er... well sort of anyway).
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Who the hell cares?
That lack of basic knowledge (among students) is
not necessarily calamitous. Basic knowledge can be acquired, even at the college
level. The more critical problem is the high percentage of high school graduates
who will read about the connection between Caesar and Kaiser and Czar and think,
"Who the hell cares?" In other words, you can teach facts. You can teach skills.
But you can't teach intellectual curiosity. If students haven't caught the bug
after twelve years of elementary and secondary school, if they don't prize
knowledge for its own sake, nothing their college professors do or say is going
to remedy that lack. The phrase "college material" has an antiquated sound.
That's not such a bad thing, on the one hand, since it reeks of a time when
women and ethnic minorities were kept out of elite universities by gentlemen's
agreements. On the other hand, students who enter a degree-granting college with
core-curriculum requirements who don't possess even a cursory measure of
intellectual curiosity are, in the long run, only wasting their time. They're
not college material.
Mark Goldblatt (English teacher), "Who Is College Material?" American
Spectator, September 28, 2009 ---
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/28/who-is-college-material
Jensen Comment
Perhaps the students have fundamentally changed between 1960 and 2000, but I
think it's more apt to be that our humanities teachers have changed by focusing
on topics that really don't turn students on to history, literature, and
language. In accounting we have an advantage because students want to learn
accounting for their careers. Many humanities many teachers have a harder time
teaching inspiring personal agendas (feminism and racial studies) to students
who might indeed find it more inspiring to the study the "connection between
Caesar and Kaiser and Czar."
What are the causes for this decline?
There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English
across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a
strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the
tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments
have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that
historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a
scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory,
sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced
themselves from the young people interested in good books.
William Chace, professor of English and
former president of Wesleyan and Emory, The American Scholar
essay ---
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/
Sigh: You
can lead some horses to water but not make them drink: College students
are not as intelligent
Where as college grades are being inflated, intelligence of students in college
is being deflated with rising numbers of college admissions. A much larger
fraction of the population attends college now, with resulting decline of
average cognitive ability.
"College students are not as intelligent" ---
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/college_students_are_not_as_in.php
September 28, 2009 reply from Barbara Scofield
[barbarawscofield@GMAIL.COM]
The University of Dallas has a BA in Business
Leadership that integrates with a Master of Science in Accounting that
provides the closest experience to a liberal arts education that meets the
Texas CPA candidacy requirements in 5 years that I have ever seen. I taught
in this program for 4 1/2 years and I can't tell you the how much superior
these students were in writing and critical thinking to my students at UTPB.
The University of Dallas undergraduate core is has
a common core of Great Books that are used in English, History, Philosophy,
and Theology (Catholic school). The students have choices in their foreign
language (but they must have a foreign language), the level of mathematics,
the type of fine arts, and the type of science, but the humanities core is
in common. UD is a small college and the students interested in this
accounting program are few, but they have jobs two years ahead of
graduation.
The undergraduate business program at UD was added
after a long history of liberal arts education, rather than trying to impose
liberal arts after a long history of practice-oriented education, so the
students were surrounded by fellow students, faculty, and administration
supporting the liberal arts model -- and there was no alternative once a
student was at UD.
Most of my accounting students at UD were in the
MBA/MS Accounting joint program because they had a variety of non-business
undergraduate degrees and now were interested in becoming accountants.
Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA
Chair of Graduate Business Studies Professor of Accounting
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
4901 E. University Dr. Odessa, TX 79762
432-552-2183 (Office) 817-988-5998 (Cell)
BarbaraWScofield@gmail.com
Jensen Comment
That's good to know Barbara. I might add that the AACSB took a move in the right
direction by allowing accredited business schools to define their own missions
rather than put straight jackets on curricula and courses. This removed one of
the huge barriers to liberalization of business education. But there are huge
remaining barriers remaining such as student preferences for courses that fit
more directly to their career goals in business.
One thing I noted at Trinity University, which has a strong
Modern Languages Department, is the increase in joint majors in accounting
and a foreign language. Particularly popular has been joint majoring in Chinese
and Spanish for the obvious reason that some accounting graduates have interests
in getting assignments in China and Latin America. For a time, joint majoring in
Russian was popular but I think perceived career opportunities in Russia dried
up due to Russian crime and anti-business initiatives of the current regime.
Sometimes the unexpected happens such as having a Russian student majoring in
Chinese ---
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/thinkmap/index.htm
Read about dual majoring in physics and accounting
---
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/thinkmap/index.htm
I actually had a student years ago who won the first-year prize as
Outstanding Physics Student who eventually changed to a dual major in accounting
and computer science. The student, Igor Vaysman, went on to earn an "accounting"
doctorate at Stanford University, but he mostly studied advanced mathematics
under game theorist
Robert Wilson at Stanford. Igor later had faculty appointments at UC
Berkeley and the University of Texas before moving on to INSEAD ---
http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/profiles/ivaysman/ .
His brilliance in some ways may have stood in his way in life because, in my
opinion, he spread himself a bit thin by wanting to learn more and more about
virtually everything.
Igor is the smartest student I ever advised or had in class. He earned a
minimum of 18 credits per semester and also earned all A grades except for one
A-. He's the second closest person I ever met with a nearly-photographic memory
(the number one person in that regard was a mathematics professor that I had at
Stanford who earned a Harvard PhD in mathematics when he was 17 years old).
While a student carrying 18 hours a semester Igor also worked half time as a
computer systems engineer. In high school he was a Master Chess Player, all-star
soccer player, and an extremely successful judo expert.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
In particular, note the link on our compassless colleges ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz
Online Scholarship: Make a DASH for Harvard
Harvard's leadership in open access to scholarship took a
significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital
Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. More
than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of
the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly
works in DASH.
Harvard University Library, September 1, 2009 ---
http://hul.harvard.edu/news/2009_0901.html
Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/electronicliterature.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of knowledge ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"Student-Loan Companies Spend Millions on Lobbying and Campaign
Contributions," by Kelly Field, Chronicle of Higher Education,
September 28, 2009 ---
A shrunken student-loan industry, faced with the
legislative fight of its life, has spent millions of dollars on lobbying and
campaign contributions over the last year and a half, even as subsidy cuts
and a continuing credit crunch have squeezed its margins and driven dozens
of banks from federal student lending.
Between January 1, 2008, and the end of June 2009,
the top 20 participants in the federal bank-based loan program spent nearly
$14-million lobbying the federal government, some $3.1-million of it in the
first half of this year alone, according to a Chronicle analysis of federal
records available through the Center for Responsive Politics. At the same
time, they've showered members of the Congressional education committees
with close to $600,000 in donations. The lenders' chief goal: to persuade
Congress to reject President Obama's plan to end bank-based student lending.
Lately, lenders haven't seen much of a return on
their investment. In September, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a
bill that would shift all lending into the government's direct-loan program;
the Senate is expected to introduce a similar measure soon. Some lenders and
Congressional aides see the legislation as a sign that the loan industry's
storied clout is waning, or was exaggerated to begin with.
Still, lenders have won some small victories along
the way. In July a group of 31 moderate Democrats sent a letter to the
chairman of the House education committee, Rep. George Miller, Democrat of
California, warning that Mr. Obama's plan to end the bank-based,
guaranteed-loan program would cost jobs in their home states. Less than two
weeks later, Mr. Miller introduced a bill that adopted the president's
approach but set aside a portion of the government's loan-servicing
contracts for state-based nonprofit lenders.
The bill also offered a minor concession to
commercial lenders: a change in the subsidy rate on outstanding student
loans that would make them more profitable.
Now, with the Senate poised to offer its bill as
early as this week, lenders are turning their attention to a handful of
moderate Democrats from states where lenders are large employers. The
president himself is urging lawmakers to resist their appeals.
Speaking at Hudson Valley Community College in
September, Mr. Obama called efforts to end federal student-loan subsidies "a
no-brainer for folks everywhere—except some folks in Washington."
"We're already seeing special interests rallying to
save this giveaway," he said. "That's exactly the kind of special-interest
effort that has succeeded before, and we can't allow it to succeed this
time."
Sallie Mae Leads the Way Leading the lobbying
effort is the giant of the student-loan industry, Sallie Mae, which
according to the Education Department originated $14.3-billion in federal
student loans in 2008, roughly a quarter of the program's total volume for
that year.
The lender, which spearheaded the industry's
efforts to develop an alternative to Mr. Obama's plan, has spent
$5.8-million lobbying over the last year and a half, $2.5-million of it in
this year alone, according to the Chronicle analysis. While much of that
money—some $1.8-million—went to the lender's in-house lobbyists, Sallie Mae
spent $682,500 assembling an army of outside lobbyists with ties to the
administration and Capitol Hill.
One of its key consultants was Jamie S. Gorelick, a
former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who is now a
partner in the Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and
Dorr LLP. Sallie Mae paid the firm $270,000 in the first half of 2009.
Another $110,000 went to the Podesta Group, a
lobbying shop founded by Tony Podesta, a top Democratic fund raiser whose
brother was President Bill Clinton's chief of staff and led President
Obama's transition team.
Martha E.H. Holler, a spokeswoman for Sallie Mae,
declined to comment on the lender's lobbying strategy but said its goal was
to ensure that members of Congress understood the importance of preserving
competition and borrower choice in student lending.
"That's what we're seeking to do," she said. "It's
not a partisan issue, so we're telling that story to as many members of
Congress as we can."
Sallie Mae's lobbying effort dwarfs that of the
second-biggest spender on student-loan lobbying this year, Nelnet, which
spent $1-million over the last year and a half, including $360,000 during
the first half of 2009.
Most of the other lenders on the top-20 list
averaged about $20,000 for that period. It's impossible to compare banks'
spending on federal lobbying on student-loan matters five years ago with
today's because banks lobby on a variety of issues. Lobbyists began
reporting the specific topics on which they lobby only last year, when new
disclosure rules went into effect.
Industry insiders say Sallie Mae's spending
shouldn't come as a surprise. As the nation's largest lender, it has the
most to spend—and the most to lose if the president's plan is approved.
Albert L. Lord, Sallie Mae's chief executive, has estimated that his company
will have to cut is work force by 25 percent, or 2,000 employees, if
Congress ends bank-based lending.
Meanwhile, some small nonprofit lenders have
outspent the big banks on lobbying. ALL Student Loan, which made only
$326-million in student loans in 2008, spent $95,000 in the first half of
this year advocating for nonprofit lenders. Among the lender's lobbyists was
Michael A. Forscey, a former top aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of
the Senate education committee until his recent death, and Vincent P.
Reusing, a personal friend of Representative Miller's. South Carolina
Student Loan, another nonprofit lender, paid Mr. Reusing's company $5,000,
and KnowledgeWorks Foundation, an Ohio-based nonprofit lender, recently
retained its services, too.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on admissions and financial aid are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#FinancialAid
When interest rates are confounded by uncertain foreign exchange movements
and an unpredictable dictator
An Economics/Finance Lesson from South of the Border: A Teaching Case With
Accounting Implications
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on October 1,
2009
Venezuela to Sell $3 Billion in Dollar-Denominated Bonds
by Dan
Molinski and Darcy Crowe
Sep 29, 2009
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Advanced
Financial Accounting, Bond Prices, Bonds, Foreign Currency Exchange Rates
SUMMARY: "Venezuela
announced a dollar-denominated government-bond sale for at least $3 billion,
a move that gave the Bolivar currency a boost against the dollar in the
black market."
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Questions
relate primarily to factors in bond issuance, with some reference to
currency exchange, suitable for use in intermediate and advanced financial
accounting courses.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory)
Why is the Venezuelan government taking an action which is influencing black
market trades of the country's currency, the Bolivar? In your answer, define
the terms black market as well as fixed rate and floating rate for currency
exchanges.
2. (Advanced)
The bonds are "directed at people living or residing in Venezuela." Does
this mean they must acquire dollars to pay for these dollar-denominated
bonds in their home country? Explain.
3. (Introductory)
Venezuela's central bank said on its Web site the 2019 bond will have a
coupon of 7.75% while the 2024 bond will have an 8.25% coupon. What is a
coupon? Why do these two bonds issued by the same government have different
coupon rates?
4. (Advanced)
Based on information in the article, describe the expectations of the
effective interest rate for these bonds.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
"Venezuela to Sell $3 Billion in Dollar-Denominated Bonds," by Dan Molinski
and Darcy Crowe, The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125414560675846299.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC
Venezuela announced a dollar-denominated
government-bond sale for at least $3 billion, a move that gave the bolivar
currency a boost against the dollar in the black market.
Venezuela's Finance Ministry said that the bond
sale, which is being managed by Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc., would
come in two issues, one for $1.5 billion with a 2019 maturity and another
for the same amount, with a 2024 maturity.
The ministry statement said the sale is directed at
"people living or residing in Venezuela," who would pay for the bonds with
the bolivar. Investors would then be able to exchange them for dollars, and
that is the part that helped lift the bolivar, as the sale could absorb
excessive local demand for the U.S. currency.
The bolivar has for years traded at an official,
fixed rate of 2.15 for $1 that was set by the Socialist government of Hugo
Chávez. But that rigidity has spawned a robust, unregulated black market in
which the bolivar is much weaker. Last month, it cost as much as seven
bolivars for $1.
But speculation of the dollar-denominated bond sale
and the official announcement Monday turned the bolivar as strong as 5.2
bolivars for $1, nearly its best showing in 2009.
The government hopes the bond sale will allow the
bolivar to maintain its upward trend, which could allow manufacturers and
other local businesses easier access to dollars at cheaper levels so they
can buy goods and ramp up activity.
Based on calculations from Caracas brokerage firm
BBO Financial Services, the bond issue could allow investors to buy dollars
at a rate of 4.6 bolivars, a price well below the parallel market rate.
The primary market price for the bonds is seen at a
premium to par, with the price to be determined by auction, according to a
statement from a syndicate desk.
Venezuela's central bank said on its Web site the
2019 bond will have a coupon of 7.75%, while the 2024 bond will have an
8.25% coupon. The government will take orders through Friday, and results
will be announced Oct. 6, the bank said.
The sale is the first dollar-denominated issue by
the government in more than a year, although the state-run oil firm issued
$3 billion earlier this year.
The finance minister said over the weekend that
state-run entities would have the option of more bond sales during the
remainder of the year.
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
"Foreign Students Pour Back Into the U.S.," by Beth McMurtrie,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i13/13a00101.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
"'The Chinese Are Coming'," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
September 28, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/28/china
Carleton College has 18 new students from China
this year, and they are paying about half of their own expenses. A handful
of them don't need any financial aid at all. While Chinese graduate students
are no shock on university campuses, significant cohorts of undergraduate
applications from China are a new phenomenon at most colleges. Just a few
years ago, Carleton had only three or four students enrolling from China,
and it never enrolled students who could afford to pay their own way.
In the past few years, the number of annual
applications from China has grown to 300 from 50 or 60 most years. "It's
remarkable how the tide has shifted," said Paul Thiboutot, dean of
admissions at Carleton. He described the growth -- and related issues -- at
a session here Friday at the annual meeting of the National Association for
College Admission Counseling.
Carleton isn't alone in seeing this increase. At
Duke University, the number of undergraduate applications from China hit 500
this year, up from 175 three years ago. The number of matriculants is up to
30, from 8.
Even as admissions officials welcome the interest,
many are concerned about a range of issues -- practical and ethical -- that
come with recruiting and evaluating these students. Deans here reported that
they are routinely blocked from direct recruiting in high schools, or asked
by high school principals to guarantee admission (and scholarships) to a
specified number of students as a price of gaining access to students. (The
admissions deans say they decline such offers.)
A thriving industry in China provides assistance to
applicants on identifying American colleges and helping them apply -- but
the help goes well beyond what admissions officers consider even remotely
ethical. There are reports about forged transcripts and test scores. Several
here said that when they e-mail applicants, the answers they get back aren't
close to level of English fluency suggested by essays that have been
submitted on the students' behalf.
At the same time, admissions officials stressed
that there are many honest Chinese students and educators -- many of whom
would be outstanding students at American colleges. But the process of
identifying them, in a country where agents promise that they can guarantee
admission (for a fee) and where such admission is considered even more
valuable than it may be in much of the United States, is challenging.
"We are all dealing with an uneasy intersection of
two cultures," said Christoph Guttentag, dean for undergraduate admissions
at Duke.
Many in the audience said that they were excited
about the opportunities but also more than a little scared -- especially if
they didn't have much experience in the area. The session was called "The
Chinese Are Coming," and while this is no Red Scare, there is quite a lot of
anger at the companies that coach applicants. Joyce Slayton Mitchell, who
introduced the session and who is author of Winning the Heart of the College
Admissions Dean, called some of the companies "vultures."
Mitchell and others made clear that those agents
are already involved in the admissions process, and that the Chinese system
enables this, given that there are far too few places for qualified Chinese
students to enroll in their own country, and direct recruiting is difficult.
"The only place left in the world that is difficult
to have access to the public schools is in China," she said. "So you know
very well that most [Chinese] students who apply to your colleges come
through a business or a test-prep company or an agent or some kind of
service that costs them quite a bit of money."
Timothy Brunold, director of undergraduate
admission at the University of Southern California, said that "not a week
goes by that I don't get a call from a faculty colleague who mentions many
of the grave concerns we've heard today," who wants to know "how do we know
that these credential are valid?"
USC has long had a large population of Chinese
graduate students, but the undergraduate population is new. This year, there
are 60 freshmen from China. Bunold said that in the previous five years, the
total combined population of freshmen from China wouldn't have reached 60.
Given the concerns, Brunold said he recently
conducted an analysis on those who have been admitted in recent years -- and
the findings reassured him. Retention and graduation rates are around 85
percent, he said.
It's true, Brunold said, that reaching Chinese
students will involve a need "to take some chances," and that "we should be
very concerned" about agents claiming the ability to get students admitted.
But Brunold said that the healthy retention rates at his campus reinforce
the idea that there are many outstanding students and "it's time to embrace
students from China" coming as undergrads.
The key, he said, is to "apply the same sorts of
approaches" used on domestic applications -- careful, individual attention
to each candidate.
Guttentag of Duke also said that there are great
benefits for American colleges of adding qualified Chinese undergraduates.
But he said that there are serious cultural issues to face. The Chinese
"educational culture," he said, is based much more than is the case in the
United States on "rote learning and memorization" with a "desire for the
quickest path to success." These values encourage students to use agents to
get in, and to engage in what would be seen as corner cutting at best to
American admissions counselors.
While this culture offends many American educators,
Guttentag said it was important to remember that "their system is stable,
entrenched and, for them, successful" in terms of economic growth. American
educators ignore the success of the Chinese system "at our peril," he said.
Strategies for Colleges
So what should admissions counselors do?
Guttentag said that they need to send more people
to China and boost their ability to evaluate Chinese students. Admissions
offices would benefit from a Mandarin speaker, he said, offering an example
of why: He recently receiving an anonymous letter alleging wrongdoing by a
company seeking potential applicants as clients and whose advertisement
(partly in Chinese that he can't read) was attached.
Colleges also need to trade information and learn
from one another he said. While there are cases where admissions deans are
in competition, this need not be one of them, he said. "There are a lot of
Chinese. There are more than enough to go around," he quipped. "It's not
like when we're all competing for the top 10 kids from North Dakota."
Thiboutot, of Carleton, said he too worried about
the practices of some Chinese schools and businesses. But he said that
before "we malign a system of culture," American guidance counselors might
also compare what they find so offensive across the Pacific to what they see
at home. When he travels to China, he is frequently asked what test score
would guarantee admission for an applicant. While the question is
frustrating, he said that he gets the same question in affluent suburbs in
the United States.
Many American educators object to the companies
that act as agents for Chinese students, he said. But when some independent
counselors in the United States charge tens of thousands of dollars to
wealthy families for help in the college admissions process, he asked how
different the systems are. "Is the [Chinese] experience foreign to us, or
are we being imitated?" he asked.
If there is a difference, he said, it may be that
the Chinese "are more up front about announcing that they are using such and
such a firm, and explain this is how it is done in their country."
Have American colleges admitted Chinese students
who didn't send original material? The answer is probably Yes, Thiboutot
said. "But that can be said of domestic and international students."
The Counseling Business in China
Much of the criticism of agents in China concerned
businesses that are thriving in the country without formal ties to American
colleges or organizations. Several international businesses, such as IDP
Education and Hobsons, operate networks of agents or counselors. Asked if
these companies' counselors raised the same concerns as the local agents,
the panelists said Yes, and that their goal was direct communication with
students, without intermediaries.
Continued in article
September 28, 2009 reply from George Durler
[mdurler@EMPORIA.EDU]
Bob,
Almost half of my current students are Chinese due
to reciprocal agreements with several universities in China. In general,
once you get past the language issues, they are good students. As with any
group you have some that are outstanding, some that are average, and some
that you wonder why they are here.
Dr. M. George Durler
Associate Professor of Accounting and Beta Alpha Psi Advisor
Emporia State University
1200 N. Commercial Emporia, KS 66801
620-341-5476
mdurler@emporia.edu
September 29, 2009 reply from Linda A Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
George's comments lead me to a question for the
group. What has been your experience with Chinese students in masters
programs? We used to have several, but we found that their accounting
undergraduate degrees from China just did not prepare them for graduate work
here. As a result, we've added prerequisites of US GAAP, US auditing, and US
taxation for entry to the masters. What are others doing?
Linda Kidwell
September 29, 2009 reply from Bruce Lubich
[BLubich@UMUC.EDU]
We found the same problems with many of our
international students, but were concerned about a potential discrimination
issue. So we require every student to have 15 undergrad accounting credits
before they can enroll in our first grad accounting class. We strongly
recommend 6 ch principles, 6 ch intermediate, and 3 ch of either
cost/tax/audit. If it gets to me, I recommend the latter class be either tax
or audit.
Bruce Lubich
Bob Jensen's threads on foreign students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForeignStudents
Interactive (online or offline) Homework and Other Student-Friendly
Features of Google Apps
Google Docs has added an equation editor so students
can actually complete math problems within a document, allowing students to not
only write papers that include numbers and equations but also take notes from
quantitative classes using Google Docs. Google has also added the ability to
insert superscripts and subscripts, which can be useful for writing out chemical
compounds or algebraic expressions.
"Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly," by Lena Rao, TechCrunch.com via The
Washington Post, September 28, 2009 ---
Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/28/AR2009092802665.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Google has been aggressively marketing Google Apps
to schools, recently
launching a
centralized site designed to recruit universities and colleges. Now, Google
is
tweaking Google Docs, which is a part of Google
Apps' productivity suite, by adding a few student-friendly features.
Google Docs has added an equation editor so
students can actually complete math problems within a document, allowing
students to not only write papers that include numbers and equations but
also take notes from quantitative classes using Google Docs. Google has also
added the ability to insert superscripts and subscripts, which can be useful
for writing out chemical compounds or algebraic expressions.
Google is also trying to
make Docs appealing to those humanities majors out there by letting users to
select from various bulleting styles for creating outlines and giving
students ability to print footnotes as endnotes for term papers. And a few
weeks ago, Google
launched a translation feature in Google Docs.
As we've written in the
past, Google is wise to recruit educational institutions because that's
where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances
to productivity apps. Drawing from Apple's strategy, Google knows that brand
loyalty is definitely forged at these schools and is steadily developing its
products to become more appealing to students. Rival Microsoft is also
launching web-based versions of its Office
products aimed at the student audience. And startup
Zoho offers a free web-based productivity suite.
How to author books and other materials for
online delivery
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
How Web Pages Work ---
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-page.htm
"Mentoring Is Overrated. Try Tutoring Instead," by Michael Schrage,
Harvard Business School Blog, September 21, 2009 ---
Click Here
The idea that the best way to learn a subject is to
teach it may be the bane of undergraduates left to the mercies of graduate
teaching assistants, but it's remarkably true. In medical school, the cliché
"See
one; do one; teach one" has become a dominant pedagogical principle. In
fact,
George Bernard Shaw's notorious anti-educational
quip gets flipped — instead of "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach,"
it's "Those who teach effectively learn how to do."
The power of this practice was recently reinforced
at a statistical software customer conference I attended. A participant
complained that one of the training sessions was really more of a "technical
demo" than a class. The session leader was less a teacher or facilitator
that a presenter. The collective frustration was palpable. This seminar's
attendees could "see" what the presenter was doing and observe the outcomes
but they simply couldn't "get" the underlying principles. You really
couldn't divorce getting business value out of the software from
understanding the core statistical techniques.
So what happened? Three participants — each from
different companies — got together during the break to teach themselves (and
each other) how to marry the software to the statistics. Intriguingly, this
ad hoc group had synergistic skills: One knew the software but had a shaky
understanding of the statistics; another understood stats but had only a
casual acquaintance with the software; and the third had a problem he
thought the software could solve. Fifteen minutes of explanatory
give-and-take around the keyboard later, everyone had clearly "learned" more
about their own skill and competence by attempting to "teach" their
colleagues. The software jockey gained greater fluency with the package as
he demo-ed how to integrate the problem with the statistics. The stats geek
got a better sense of the math in the course of helping translate the
problem into the software. The guy with the problem better understood its
underlying challenges in the course of defining it for the statistician and
the software.
Of course, they each came away with a better
understanding of their colleagues' expertise too — a win/win/win. My
opinion: None of these individuals could have succeeded on their own. Just
as significantly, the challenge of "teaching" their particular expertise to
their two other partners had really pushed their own understanding of their
particular skill. I was impressed. I wasn't surprised.
Nobel laureate physicists such as
Enrico Fermi and
Leon Lederman took pride in teaching bright
undergraduates because it forced them to keep in touch with the fundamentals
of their field and express themselves simply and clearly. Teaching wasn't
merely imparting knowledge — it was a learning experience. I see this all
the time in software and finance: The "power user" isn't the
individual who has spent the most time digging through and learning the
intricacies of the code; it's the person who is teaching others how to use
that software to solve unusual problems. Similarly, the "quant"
designing a novel financial instrument typically discovers details, nuances
and substantive insights in the course of "educating" colleagues about what
makes that innovation special.
When I observe how communities of practice and
expertise evolve in entrepreneurial firms or global enterprises, I'm struck
by how often the designated "teachers" get so much more value from the
experiences than the fledgling "learners." Indeed, what really
creates critical mass and momentum is a surge in those small three-or-four
person "study groups" where it's delightfully unclear whether the individual
participants learn more by teaching or by collaborative learning.
That's one reason I believe "mentoring" is overrated as a human capital
investment. I suspect that there are CMOs and CFOs who would become far more
expert — and effective — in their roles if they took the time to explicitly
teach people core skills and competencies in their specialty. Better yet,
the scalable impact would come when those "students," in turn, sought to
reinforce their learning by teaching others. See one; do one; teach one.
It would be a wonderful — if appropriate — irony if
the new paradigm for "executive education" emphasized that the best way for
executives to learn well is to insist they teach well. When you look at what
Jack Welch did with
Crotonville, you can't help but wonder if the best
way to have a "learning culture" is to invest in a "teaching culture."
"Do Charters 'Cream' the Best? A new study finds breakthrough evidence,"
The Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2009 --
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488304574429203296812582.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
'Creaming" is the word critics of charter schools
think ends the debate over education choice. The charge has long been that
charters get better results by cherry-picking the best students from
standard public schools. Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found a way
to reliably examine this alleged bias, and the results are breakthrough news
for charter advocates.
Her new study, "How New York City's Charter Schools
Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more
disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as
students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more
applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery
system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students
who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the
lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are
scientific and more reliable."
According to the study, the most comprehensive of
its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the
average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults
who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin
to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8
points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in
English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5
more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.
Charter students are also shrinking the learning
gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average,"
the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of
the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the
'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in
English."
The New York results are not unique. In a separate
study, Ms. Hoxby found Chicago's charters performing even better than the
Big Apple's. Using the same methodology, other researchers have seen similar
results in Boston.
Charters are also a bargain for taxpayers.
Nationwide on average, per-pupil spending is 61% that of surrounding public
schools. New York charters spend less than district schools but more than
the national average because, unlike district schools, they generally have
no capital budget and must pay rent from operating expenses.
Little wonder President Obama and Education
Secretary Arne Duncan are pressuring states to become more charter-friendly.
Why the Administration can't connect the dots from the evidence to other
effective school choice reforms, such as vouchers, can only be explained by
union politics. Caroline Hoxby has performed a public service by finally
making clear that "creaming" is a crock.
Charter Schools - A Choice but not Necessarily a Great Choice
The
Center for Research on Educational Outcomes at Stanford University recently
released a report (executive
summary,
full report) that compares educational
outcomes for charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia with
their corresponding traditional public schools. The
bottom line from this study is that charter schools are very much a mixed bag.
They are not in any sense a panacea. Some charters are better than other
charters, and some charters are better than their corresponding traditional
public schools. But, many charters are worse than traditional public schools.
Parents who are considering sending their children to a charter school need to
investigate the educational outcomes for the particular charter schools they may
be considering; and, they need to follow their children's progress carefully. If
they don't they may find that their children are worse off than they were in
traditional public schools.
Mark Shapiro, The Irascible
Professor, September 20, 2009 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-09-20-09.htm
As can be seen in Figure 16 above, the results for
reading are fairly dispersed. Colorado (Denver) and Missouri show equal or
better than average performance on NAEP and positive charter school effects.16
Arkansas, California, Georgia, Illinois (Chicago), Louisiana and North Carolina
all score lower than the NAEP average but still have positive charter growth.
Less favorable results are apparent in Arizona, the District of Columbia and New
Mexico as their NAEP scores are less than the national average and their charter
school effect is negative. In Florida, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas charters also
have negative charter effects but their NAEP scores beat the national average.
The overall array of results suggests that
charters may have better impacts if they operate in states with low overall
performance, and is worthy of further study.
Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Stanford
University, June 2009, Page 48 ---
http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf
Throwing Money at Schools Does Not Always Lead to Desired Improvement
Washington DC Schools Are Not Getting Much Bang for the Buck
Are many of the graduation diplomas fraudulent?
Only 14 percent of Washington's fourth-graders score at or above proficiency in
the reading and math portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) test. Their national rank of 51 makes them the nation's worst.
Eighth-graders are even further behind with only 12 percent scoring at or above
proficiency in reading and 8 percent in math and again the worst performance in
the nation. One shouldn't be surprised by Washington student performance on
college admissions tests. They have an average composite SAT score of 925 and
ACT score of 19.1, compared to the national average respectively of 1017 and
21.1. In terms of national ranking, their SAT and ACT rankings are identical to
their fourth- and eighth-grade rankings -- dead last.
Walter E. Williams, Townhall, September 16, 2009
---
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/09/16/education
Washington's political and education
establishment might excuse these outcomes by arguing that because most
students are black, the schools are underfunded and overcrowded. Let's look
at such a claim. During the 2006-07 academic year, expenditures per pupil
averaged $13,848 compared to a national average of $9,389. That made
Washington's per pupil expenditures the third highest in the nation coming
in behind New Jersey ($14,998) and New York ($14,747). Washington's
teacher-student ratio is 13.9 compared with the national average of 15.3
students per teacher, ranking 18th in the nation. What about teacher
salaries? Washington's teachers are the highest paid in the nation, having
an average annual salary of $61,195 compared with the nation's average
$46,593. Despite the academic performance of Washington's students, they
have a graduation rate of 61 percent compared to the national average of 70
percent. That suggests the issuance of
fraudulent high school diplomas.
Jensen Comment
What seems to perform
better for ghetto schools is more intense, longer-hour schools that keep
children away from their sorry home environments for longer periods of time
during all 12 months of the year. Neither public nor charter schools are
answering this call to the extent that’s really needed.
Video Tutorials on Excel's Goal Seek and Data Table Construction
The Unknown Professor (I know who he is) who created the Financial Rounds
Blog created four Camtasia videos illustrating Excel's Goal Seek utility and
Data Table Construction (served up in Screencast) ---
http://www.screencast.com/users/financeprof/folders/BUS424/media/531b4a8e-5281-4170-99bc-6c1916409a06
Bob Jensen's videos on Goal Seek are among those videos listed at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
Excel's Solver videos are also among the video files listed at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
Raise Your Guinness Glasses
It may not be the first company to offer pensions and health care benefits to
employees, but it was one of the first companies to do so in history.
"Guinness celebrates 250 years: In 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a
9,000-year lease on a brewery. Centuries later, his eponymous dark stout is one
of Ireland's best-known exports" by Julianne Pepitone, CNN Money, September 24,
2009 ---
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/24/news/companies/guinness_250_anniversary/
But 250 years later, it's clearly
worked out well. The brewery at St. James's Gate has helped make Guinness
stout one of the most successful beer brands worldwide.
To celebrate what the company has
dubbed "Arthur's Day," stout-lovers around the world lifted a glass of the
foamy black brew to Arthur Thursday at 17:59 Greenwich Mean Time, or 1:59
ET. (See correction, below.)
Guinness parent Diageo PLC expects
thousands to attend an invitation-only party tonight at the Dublin brewery,
where musical acts Tom Jones, Kasabian and Estelle will play. Additionally,
other artists will perform at events being held at four major music venues
and 28 smaller pubs across the city.
Guinness may be distinctly Irish,
but the celebration of its birth is happening all over the world; parties
are being hosted in more than 150 different countries, according to the
beermaker's website.
To mark the occasion, Diageo PLC
has pledged to give €2.5 million this year from the Arthur Guinness Fund to
entrepreneurs.
The company says its founder was
one of the first employers in Ireland to provide pensions and health care
for workers, and the foundation aims to preserve that legacy.
David Noble's Last Fight? I doubt it!
David Noble, a historian at York University in Canada,
is well known as a critic of online education and of higher education leaders.
Now
The Toronto Star
reported that he is appearing before an Ontario Human
Rights Commission arguing that his stances against discrimination have led the
university to retaliate against him by scheduling his lectures at unpopular
times and failing to protect him from disruptions, such as a student angry with
his views interrupting his class. Among Noble's recent controversial campaigns
have been complaints that the university was discriminating against non-Jews by
calling off classes on Jewish holidays (a practice that the university has since
ended). The Star
also reported
that university officials deny Noble has been the
target of any retaliatory acts by the institution.
"David Noble's Last Fight," Inside Higher Ed, September 25, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/25/qt#209163
Jensen Comment 1
My tidbits on David Noble go back for years
Note especially my Tidbit at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
I
notice that David Noble does not devote much attention to successful (and
highly profitable) online programs such as
Stanford's
ADEPT and
Duke's online Global MBA programs. That plus Noble's bad spelling and
sloppy grammar make me wonder how carefully crafted his "research" stands up
to rigorous standards for due care and freedom from bias. He does, however,
raise some points worth noting. Links to his defiance of distance education
at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#DavidNoble
Bob Jensen
Onsite Versus Online Learning and Teaching ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Jensen Comment 2
I'm reminded of an accounting professor at the University of Illinois who once
distributed a memo suspecting that his supervisor was a liar. Shortly thereafter
his office was moved closer to the hog/cattle barns on a remote part of the
campus, or so the rumor circulated at an AAA meeting years ago.
How to author books and other materials for
online delivery
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
How Web Pages Work ---
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-page.htm
Toolbook, unlike Authorware, Still Lives
ToolBook ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToolBook
September 25, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Richard,
Thanks for the update. At one time ToolBook was my main man, but those
days are long gone. ToolBook has morphed through many changes in ownership
and codes, but it does somehow manage a Darwinian evolution. It evolved from
early versions that required authors to be techies in coding in OpenScript
to later versions that feature over a dozen templates for relatively simple
course authoring --- almost plug and play.
It seems to have caught on with training programs in some deep pockets
corporations, including Big Four accounting firms. Some of the sample
courses look great ---
http://www.sumtotalsystems.com/resources/toolbook/learn_showcase.html?src=tbhome
However, there are no samples from universities as far as I can tell.
Is there a reason?
I do not see signs that the latest ToolBook upgrades have cracked into
the academic market.
Are there any universities that have ToolBooks to demo?
Are there any college online education or training programs built on
ToolBook?
Is there special academic pricing for Version 10?
ToolBook's Homepage ---
http://www.sumtotalsystems.com/products/content-creation/tb_index.html
ToolBook 10:
Revolutionize the way you create e-Learning content ToolBook empowers
subject matter experts and learning professionals to rapidly create
interactive learning content, quizzes, assessments, and software
simulations. With the convenience of on-demand and mobile access, your
employees will learn more, faster—and deliver better business results.
Learning content that you create in ToolBook is
distributed as HTML and delivered through almost any Learning Management
System (LMS) available, including the SumTotal LMS, other SCORM/AICC-compliant
LMS, or standalone systems.
Thousands of corporations use ToolBook today to
deliver high-value learning. ToolBook users span multiple
industries—including healthcare, manufacturing, finance, retail, government,
education and more—and easily deploy across major operating systems, Web
browsers, and mobile devices.
September 25, 2009 reply from Richard Campbell
[campbell@RIO.EDU]
Bob:
I'll be developing in Toolbook, and will share some of my output, but I am
very busy until the end of the year at least.
They have become more aggressive in pricing - A
single license is now in the $2,800 range, and I am not aware of any
academic pricing. I usually shy away from academic licenses, since I sell my
output in the commercial market, and most academic licenses prohibit that.
Most content authoring tools like Toolbook do not have royalty sharing
arrangements. You are paying big bucks for the product, why pay more?
Jeff Rhodes at
www.plattecanyon.com
is the smartest, most productive multimedia programmer
in the world (IMHO) created a very profitable private corporation around
Toolbook and multimedia development.
Richard
Statistics Lesson for the Week: Spanking is a cause of lower IQ?
U.S. children who were spanked had lower IQs four years
later than those not spanked, researchers found. University of New Hampshire
Professor Murray Straus, who is presenting the findings Friday at the
14th International Conference on Violence, Abuse
and Trauma, in San Diego, called the study
"groundbreaking." "The results of this research have major implications for the
well being of children across the globe," Straus said in a statement. "It is
time for psychologists to recognize the need to help parents end the use of
corporal punishment and incorporate that objective into their teaching and
clinical practice." "How often parents spanked
made a difference. The more spanking the, the slower the development of the
child's mental ability," Straus said. "But even small amounts of spanking made a
difference."
"Study: Spanking linked to lower IQ," Breitbart, September
25, 2009 ---
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=upiUPI-20090925-121520-9596&show_article=1&catnum=0
Jensen Comment
I think Straus was frequently spanked as a child. Could it be that lower IQ
students get more frustrated and are inclined toward greater degrees of misbehavior?
This is a little like the historic 0.63 correlation between stork nests and
birth rates ---
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2983064
"Unmuzzling Diploma Mills: Dog Earns M.B.A. Online," by Marc Parry,
Chronicle of Higher Education (with a picture of Chester Ludlow), September
23, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Unmuzzling-Diploma-Mills-Dog/8175/
How's this for "hounding" diploma mills?
GetEducated.com, an online-learning consumer group,
managed to purchase an online M.B.A. for its mascot, a dog named Chester
Ludlow.
The Vermont pug earned his tassles by pawing over
$499 to Rochville University, which offers "distance learning degrees based
on life and career experience," according to a
news release from GetEducated. He got back a
package from a post-office box in Dubai that contained a diploma and
transcripts, plus a certificate of distinction in finance and another
purporting to show membership in the student council.
GetEducated.com belives Chester is the first dog to
get a diploma for life experience. But his bow-wow M.B.A. isn't the first
canine college degree: Witness
this 2007 story about
a police-department dog's diploma.
Here's GetEducated.com's video about the stunt:
"Dog
Earns Online MBA: A Cautionary Tail."
Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills and gray zones ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
Jensen Comment
Why not a diploma? Thanks to ACORN, Chester Ludlow was registered to vote in the
2008 election. In all seriousness, proper identification of students is a
problem for legitimate colleges whether the students are onsite or online. My
daughter's first chemistry course at the University of Texas was given in a
lecture hall of 600 students. It would've been very easy for he to have hired a
surrogate to take the entire course in her name or examinations in her name.
I know of an outsourcing case like this from years ago when I was an
undergraduate student, because I got the initial offer to take the course for
$500.
Fake IDs are easy to fabricate today on a computer. Just change the name and
student number on your own ID or change the picture and put the fake ID in
laminated plastic.
Online there are ways authenticate honesty online. One way is to have a
respected person sign an attestation form. In 19th Century England the Village
Vicar signed off on submissions of correspondence course takers. There are also
a lot of
Sylvan Centers throughout the U.S. that will administer examinations.
To comply with the newly reauthorized
Higher Education Act, colleges have to verify the
identity of each of their online students.
Several tools can help them do that, including the
Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree
view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors
watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.
Now colleges have a new option to show the
government that they’ll catch cheating in distance education. Acxiom
Corporation and Moodlerooms announced this month that they have integrated
the former’s identity-verification system, called FactCheck-X, into the
latter’s free, open-source course-management system, known as Moodle.
“The need to know that the student taking a test
online is in fact the actual one enrolled in the class continues to be a
concern for all distance-education programs,” Martin Knott, chief executive
of Moodlerooms, said in a
written statement.
FactCheck-X, which authenticates many
online-banking transactions, requires test takers to answer detailed,
personal “challenge” questions. The information comes from a variety of
databases, and the company uses it to ask for old addresses, for example, or
previous employers.
The new tool requires no hardware and operates
within the Moodle environment. Colleges themselves control how frequently
students are asked to verify their identities, Acxiom says, and because
institutions don’t have to release information about students, the system
fully complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Comments
Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers
(and took two online courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida
linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for
him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the
university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to
The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt
called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was
a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud,
the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA
investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, January 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If Florida investigates this and discovers it was true, I wonder if Moffitt's
diploma will be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.
Ideas for online testing and other types of assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Also see the helpers for assessment in general at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
What should be done about credit rating companies?
"Ratings Downgrade," by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker,
September 28, 2009 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2009/09/28/090928ta_talk_surowiecki
When Barack Obama went to Wall Street last
week to make the case for meaningful financial regulation, he took
well-deserved shots at some of the villains of the financial crisis: greedy
bankers, reckless investors, and captive regulators. But to that list he
could have added credit-rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s.
By giving dubious mortgage-backed securities top ratings, and by
dramatically underestimating the risk of default and foreclosure, the
agencies played a key role in inflating the housing bubble. If we’re going
to reform the system, fixing them should be high on the list.
Unfortunately, that’s not an easy task,
since over the years the government has made the agencies an increasingly
important part of the financial system. Rating agencies have been around for
a century, and their ratings have been used by regulators since the
thirties. But in the seventies the S.E.C. dubbed the three biggest
agencies—S. & P., Moody’s, and Fitch—Nationally Recognized Statistical
Rating Organizations, effectively making them official arbiters of financial
soundness. The decision had a certain logic: it was supposed to make it
easier for investors to know that the money in their pension or money-market
funds was going into safe and secure investments. But the new regulations
also turned the agencies from opinion-givers into indispensable gatekeepers.
If you want to sell a corporate bond, or package a bunch of mortgages
together into a security, you pretty much need a rating from one of the
agencies. And though the agencies are private companies, their opinions can
effectively have the force of law. The ratings often dictate what
institutions like banks, insurance companies, and money-market funds can and
can’t do: money-market funds can’t have more than five per cent of their
assets in low-rated commercial paper, there are limits on the percentage of
non-investment-grade assets that banks can own, and so on.
The conventional explanation of what’s
wrong with the rating agencies focusses on the fact that most of them are
paid by the very people whose financial products they rate. That problem
needs to be fixed, and last week the S.E.C. proposed new rules to address
conflicts of interest. But there’s a much bigger problem, which is that,
even though nearly everyone knows that the agencies are compromised and
exert too much influence, the system makes it impossible not to rely on
them. In theory, of course, the mere fact that a rating agency says a
particular bond is AAA (close to risk-free) doesn’t mean that investors have
to buy it; the agencies’ opinions should be just one ingredient in any
decision. In practice, the government’s seal of approval, coupled with those
regulatory requirements, encourages investors to put far too much weight on
the ratings. According to a recent paper on the subject by the academics
Darren Kisgen and Philip Strahan, that’s true even when the agency doing the
rating doesn’t have a long track record. During the housing bubble,
investors put a huge amount of money into AAA-rated mortgage-backed
securities—which would have been fine had the rating agencies’ judgments
been sound. Needless to say, they weren’t. Despite subprime borrowers’
notoriously shaky finances, the agencies failed to allow for the possibility
that housing prices might fall sharply.
The rating agencies’ role in inflating the
bubble is well known. Less obvious is their role in accelerating the crash.
Agencies have typically resisted changing their ratings on a frequent basis,
so changes, when they occur, tend to be belated, widespread, and big. In the
space of just a few months between late 2007 and mid-2008 (after the housing
bubble burst), the agencies collectively downgraded an astonishing $1.9
trillion in mortgage-backed securities: some securities that had carried a
AAA rating one day were downgraded to CCC the next. Because many
institutional investors are prohibited from owning too many low-rated
securities, these downgrades necessarily led to forced selling, magnifying
the panic, and prevented other investors from swooping in and buying the
distressed debt cheaply. In effect, the current system pushes many big
investors to buy high and sell low.
Rating agencies existed long before they
carried a government imprimatur, and, their recent dismal performance
notwithstanding, they’ll exist in the future, if only because few investors
have the patience to sort through all the bond offerings and
structured-finance deals out there. But we need a divorce: the rating
agencies shouldn’t be government-sanctioned and government-protected
institutions and their judgments shouldn’t be part of the rules that govern
how investors can act.
Given how rarely real reform happens in
Washington, that may sound like a hopeless goal. But last summer the S.E.C.
seriously considered enacting a series of proposals that would have gone
some way toward uncoupling the rating agencies from the regulatory system.
The plan fizzled, however, thanks in part to pressure from a surprising
source: big investors. Oddly, the ratings system, broken as it is, remains
attractive to many investors who have been burned by it. For one thing, it
provides an easily comprehensible standard: without it, we’d need to come up
with new ways of measuring risk. More insidiously, the ratings system
provides a ready-made excuse for failure: as long as you’re buying AAA-rated
assets, you can say you’re being responsible. After the housing crash,
though, we know how illusory those AAA ratings can be. It’s time for
investors to face reality: working with a fake safety net is more dangerous
than working without any net at all.
Bob Jensen's threads on credit rating agencies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#CreditRatingAgencies
I assume ABC News double checked the authenticity of this one.
"Get Out of Jail Free: Monopoly's Hidden Maps Silk Escape Maps Concealed in
Game Boards Helped WWII Prisoners," by Ki Mae Heussner, ABC News,
September 18, 2009 ---
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=8605905
It's a story that will forever change the way you
think of the phrase, "Get Out of Jail Free."
During World War II, as the number of British
airmen held hostage behind enemy lines escalated, the country's secret
service enlisted an unlikely partner in the ongoing war effort: The board
game Monopoly.
It was the perfect accomplice.
Included in the items the German army allowed
humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers,
the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it was the ideal size for
a top-secret escape kit that could help spring British POWs from German war
camps.
The British secret service conspired with the U.K.
manufacturer to stuff a compass, small metal tools, such as files, and, most
importantly, a map, into cut-out compartments in the Monopoly board itself.
"It was ingenious," said Philip Orbanes, author of
several books on Monopoly, including "The World's Most Famous Game and How
it Got That Way." "The Monopoly box was big enough to not only hold the game
but hide everything else they needed to get to POWs."
British historians say it could have helped
thousands of captured soldiers escape.
So how did a simple board game end up in a position
to help out one of the most powerful military forces on the planet? Silk and
serendipity.
Silk Maps Were Key Escape Kit Elements Of all the
tools in a military-grade escape kit, the most critical item was the map.
But paper maps proved too fragile and cumbersome, said Debbie Hall, a
cataloguer in the map room at the Bodleian Library at the University of
Oxford in Oxford, England.
For hundreds of years, even before World War II,
silk was the material of choice for military maps, Hall said, because it
wouldn't tear or dissolve in water as easily as paper and was light enough
to stuff into a boot or cigarette packet. Unlike maps printed on paper, silk
maps also wouldn't rustle and attract the attention of enemy guards, she
said.
"Initially, they had some problems printing on
silk," Hall said. "It's quite technically challenging."
But then MI9, the British secret service unit
responsible for escape and evasion, found the one British company that had
mastered printing on silk: John Waddington Ltd., a printer and board game
manufacturer that also happened to be the U.K. licensee for the Parker Bros.
game Monopoly.
"Waddingtons in the pre-war era was printing on
silk for theater programs. For celebration events for royalty and that kind
of thing," said Victor Watson, 80, who retired as chairman of the company in
1993. "It made a name for itself for being able to print on silk."
He was just a child during the war but said his
father Norman Watson, president of the company at the time, worked with
British secret service to embed the maps in Monopoly games.
He said a secret service officer named E.D. Alston
(known around Waddington as "Mr. A.") used to come by to place the orders in
person.
"Because he was in the secret service, I never knew
who he was," Watson said.
Jensen Comment
Parker Bros. Monopoly or variations thereof are very important props for many
educators in accounting and economics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Monopoly
Escape Maps in WW II ---
http://www.mapforum.com/04/escape.htm#3
2009 Ig Nobel Award Winners ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/02/qt#209682
The Ig Nobel Prizes, the annual spoof of the Nobel
Prizes, were announced Thursday night. The honors include the following:
- Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of
Newcastle University, in Britain, won in veterinary medicine for showing
that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
- Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars
Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of
Bern, in Switzerland, won the honor for peace for determining — by
experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a
full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
- Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M.
Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, won in chemistry for
creating diamonds from ltequila.
- Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of
Cincinnati, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, and Liza J.
Shapiro of the University of Texas, won in physics for determining why
pregnant women don't tip over.
The complete list of winners
may be
found here. ---
http://improbable.com/ig/
The other Nobels kick off Monday with the prize in medicine.
"Pointless research: top 10 Ig Nobel award winners for silly science,"
by Tom Chivers, London Telegraph, September 24, 2009 ---
Click Here
Farts of the penguins: if you've ever wondered how
far a penguin can poo, here is your enlightenment Photo: POLAR BIOLOGY The
government has unveiled plans to allocate research funding according to how
much “impact” the research has.
The plans have come under fire from academics, who
say that curiosity-driven, speculative research has led to some of the most
important breakthroughs in scientific history, including penicillin,
relativity theory and the theory of evolution.
More than that, though, it might bring an end to
the quirky, sometimes daft, sometimes weirdly inspired research that brings
harmless entertainment and occasional enlightenment to armchair boffins and
science nerds everywhere.
Below, we take a look at
a few of the best. We have selected our favourites from the winners of the
splendid
Ig Nobel Awards –
take a look yourselves. The next award ceremony is in October.
http://improbable.com/ig/
Digital rectal
massage is a cure for hiccups, winner, Medicine, 2006
"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage", Annals of
Emergency Medicine, August 1988
In our day we used to be told to drink a glass of
water backwards. But research now suggests that, for intractable hiccups, a
simple finger up the bottom can work wonders. As it can for so many things.
It is not made clear whether or not the treatment
should be administered unannounced for greatest effect.
(We mock, but intractable hiccups can be a genuine
problem for sufferers, and this treatment may be preferable to the powerful
anti-spasmodics and other drugs that are often used.)
Chinstrap penguins can squirt poo up to
40cm, winner, Fluid Dynamics, 2005
"Pressures
Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation",
Polar Biology, 2003
Rather sweetly, the researchers end their
conclusions by saying: “Whether the bird deliberately chooses the direction
into which it decides to expel its faeces or whether this depends on the
direction from which the wind blows at the time of evacuation are questions
that need to be addressed on another expedition to Antarctica.” No doubt
governments will be falling over themselves to fund that trip.
Ducks can be homosexual necrophiliacs
too (winner, Biology, 2003)
"The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos
(Aves: Anatidae)", Deinsea: Annual of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam,
2001.
One of the greatest sentences in modern science
writing: “Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard… mounted the
corpse and started to copulate, with great force.” Take that, March Of The
Penguins.
Suicide rates are linked to the amount
of country music played on the radio, winner, Medicine, 2004
"The Effect of Country Music on Suicide", Social Forces, 1992
If you knew there was something profoundly
unacceptable about Billy Ray Cyrus, but you could never quite put your
finger on what it was, here is your answer. The man makes people kill
themselves.
Dog fleas can
jump higher than cat fleas, winner, Biology, 2008
"A
Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis
(Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835),"
Veterinary Parasitology, 2000
Presumably the research team set up some sort of
tiny high-jump bar for the fleas to Fosbury-flop over. It’s not entirely
pointless; knowing which that dog fleas jump higher tells you that buying a
dog is more likely to lead to getting bitten yourself.
Lap dancers get
higher tips when they are ovulating, winner, Economics, 2008
"Ovulatory
Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human
Estrus?"
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2007
This research might be hard to put into practical
use – unless you’re a lap dancer – but you imagine the (all male) research
team put in an awful lot of field work.
Rats can’t always
tell the difference between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken
backwards, winner, Linguistics, 2007
"Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language
Discrimination by Rats," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior
Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005
The Linguistics Ig Nobel winner in 2007. In
fairness to the researchers, they were trying to find similarities between
human infants and other mammals, in order to better determine the
evolutionary origins of speech. But what they actually did was show the
world that rats don’t speak backwards Japanese. A miss, really.
You can extract
vanilla flavouring from cow dung, winner, Chemistry, 2006
"Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using
Subcritical Water Reaction," International Journal of Chemical Engineering,
2008
Maybe you can, but would you eat it?
(Note: a Massachusetts ice cream parlour introduced
a new flavour in honour of this research, which was presented alongside the
award. The ice cream was called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist", after the lead
researcher Mayu Yamamoto)
Why woodpeckers
don’t get headaches – winner, Ornithology, 2006
"Woodpeckers and Head Injury,", Lancet, 1976; "Cure for a Headache," Ivan R
Schwab, British Journal of Ophthalmology, 2002
It is pretty baffling, when you think about it.
Woodpeckers headbutt trees for a living, experiencing impact deceleration of
more than 1000 times the force of gravity. So how do they prevent
catastrophic brain injury? The difference between ordinary people and good
scientists is that where we just wonder, the scientist finds out.
(The answer, if you were wondering, is: brain more
tightly packed into the skull; a smooth brain surface to maximise impact
surface area; and minimal side-to-side movement. So there you go.)
Malaria
mosquitoes are as attracted to limburger cheese as they are to human foot
odour – winner, Biology, 2006
"On Human Odour, Malaria Mosquitoes, and Limburger Cheese," The Lancet, 1996
(paper requires log-in)
Next time you go to Africa, don’t bother with
insect repellent or mosquito nets – just take a nice ripe limburger, leave
it outside your tent, and presto! A bite-free night. (Note to readers:
please do bother with insect repellent and mosquito nets.)
Spanish scientists develop the first intelligent financial search engine
---
http://www.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/actualidad_cientifica/noticias/financial_search_engine
Link forwarded by Glen Gray
Researchers from the Carlos III University of
Madrid (UCM3) have completed the development of the first search engine
designed to search for information from the financial and stock market
sector based on semantic technology, which enables one to make more accurate
thematic searches adapted to the needs of each user.
Unlike conventional search engines, SONAR -so named
by its creators- enables the user to perform structured searches which are
not based solely on concordance with a series of key words. This corporate
financial search engine based on semantic technology, as described on the
project website (www.proyecto-sonar.org), was developed by researchers from
the UC3M in partnership with the University of Murcia, el Instituto de
Empresa (the Business Institute) and the company Indra. According to its
creators, it has two main advantages. First, its effectiveness in a concrete
domain- that of finance- which is closely defined and has very precise
vocabulary. According to Juan Miguel Gómez Berbís, from the Computer
Department of the UC3M “This verticality distinguishes SONAR from other more
generic search engines, such as Google or Bing” Second, its capacity to
establish relations between news, share valuations and prices via logical
reasoning.
The first prototype works by making use of semantic
web elements. Basically, the system collects data from both public
information sources (Internet) and private, corporate ones (Intranet), adds
them to a repository of semantically recorded data (labelled and structured)
and allows intelligent access to this data. To achieve this, the platform
incorporates an inference engine, a mechanism capable of performing
reasoning tasks on the recorded information, as well as a natural language
processor, which helps the user to perform the search in the simplest way
possible. In this way the results obtained are matched to requests,
eliminating ambiguities in polysemic terms, for example in searches carried
out by users on stored data. “SONAR enables us to establish relations
between different sources of information and discover and expand our
knowledge, while at the same time it allows us to classify them so that
users can get much more benefit from the experience”
Potential users
This search tool is designed for both private
investors and large financial concerns. Its creators anticipate that it will
be a very useful tool for analysts and stockbrokers. “It will be especially
useful to the finance departments of banks and saving banks or to add to an
existing search engine added value over its competitors” Gómez Berbís points
out. And the search for accurate, reliable, relevant information in this
business area has become a key factor in a domain where speed and quality of
data are critical factors with an exceptional impact on business processes.
According to the researchers, this project aims to
respond to a need from the financial sector, that is, the analysis of a
large volume of information in order to take decisions. In this way, the
execution of this project will allow the financial community to have access
to a set of intelligent systems for the aggregated search of information in
the financial domain and enable them to improve procedures for integrating
company information and processes. Researchers are currently incorporating
new functions into the search tool and also receiving requests to adapt it
to other domains, such as transport and biotechnology. In any case, the
project is constantly evolving in order to enhance accuracy and reliability.
“In SONAR2 we are working on two Intelligent Decision Support Systems for
Financial Investments, one based on Fundamental Analysis and the other on
Technical Chartist Analysis, which assists the work of the trader and
average investor”, reveals professor Gómez Berbis.
SONAR is a research project carried out by the
UC3m’s SoftLab group, directed by professors Juan Miguel Gómez Berbís and
Ángel García Crespo. It is an intelligent, financial search engine and is
part of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade’s AVANZA I+D Program.
The University of Murcia and the Instituto de Empresa (Business Institute)
have also collaborated in this project, together with Indra.
Semantic Web Searching ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Xerox
October 1, 2009 reply from McCarthy, William
[mccarthy@BUS.MSU.EDU]
This was a very good pointer to an interesting project, and I clearly
need to look at the primary research papers and descriptions for more
elaboration.
However, this most certainly was not the first “intelligent financial
search engine.” Accounting design science researchers and computer
scientists have been using semantic technologies for many years to
attack the problems of embedding semantics in both primary knowledge
structures and the procedures that act on those structures. Because
that research was not acceptable to the academic accounting mainstream (AOS,
JAR, JAE) does not mean it does not exist. I suspect that that we will
see many “re-inventions” as semantic web enthusiasts attack “interactive
accounting data” (Mr. Cox’s term) subjects with an AI mindset.
Bill McCarthy
Michigan State
"Dirty Secrets: Companies may be burying billions more in
environmental liabilities than their financial statements show," by Marie
Leone and Tim Reason, CFO.com, September 1, 2009 ---
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/14292477/c_14292723?f=magazine_featured
Today the financial world is up in arms over "toxic
assets," the bad loans and securities that have wreaked so much havoc on
bank balance sheets. But few investors understand the true magnitude of the
threat that toxic liabilities — environmental liabilities, that is — pose to
the financial health of some U.S. businesses. In large part that's because
accounting rules enable companies to conceal the full extent of these costs,
encouraging minimal disclosure — even when management knows the total bill
will be far higher.
It's no secret that many companies have expensive
toxic liabilities — asbestos, heavy-metal pollution, oil and gas leaks,
contaminated groundwater, and more. Since the 1970s, Superfund and other
laws have required companies to clean up their environmental liabilities and
undo the damage they caused. Nor is the primary accounting guidance for
toxic liabilities new. FAS 5, the accounting standard governing so-called
contingent liabilities, such as pending litigation and environmental
hazards, went into effect in 1975; Statement of Position 96-1, which tells
firms how to apply FAS 5 to mandated environmental remediation, was issued
in 1996. In brief, companies with toxic liabilities must take a one-time
charge to earnings and create a reserve of funds devoted to environmental
remediation. As a cleanup progresses, the reserve should shrink.
Yet companies are regularly topping up their
environmental reserves with new accruals. Some reserves are even growing. In
a recent study of 24 oil, gas, and chemical companies, the vast majority
reduced their reserves less than 50 cents for each dollar spent on cleanup,
says environmental attorney Greg Rogers, a CPA and president of consulting
firm Advanced Environmental Dimensions. (See "The Truth about Reserves" at
the end of this article.)
As a result, investors are left in the dark about
the full extent of toxic liabilities. Rogers compares environmental reserves
to a bathtub full of water: once the environmental problems are resolved,
the tub should be drained. But by adding new accruals each year, companies
are effectively leaving the faucet on. "What we don't know is the true
capacity of the tub, the cost to fully resolve these liabilities," says
Rogers, whose study attempts to estimate those costs using publicly
available data.
Whatever a never-ending cleanup bill implies about
actual damage done to the environment, such recurring drains on cash flow
certainly hurt investors. "Unlike nearly every other income-statement line
item, there is very little if any visibility into the annual charge for
'probable and reasonably estimable environmental liabilities,'" complained
JPMorgan analyst Stephen Tusa, who downgraded Honeywell for this reason in
2006.
"It's Scandalous." Companies typically cite three
reasons why their legacy cleanup reserves never drain: the difficulty of
estimating cleanup costs, new discoveries of contamination, or new costs
acquired through mergers. At some companies, however, those claims are
belied by the steady rate at which they funnel money into environmental
reserves, suggesting, critics say, that managerial discretion plays a large
part in reserve calculations. (One company, ConAgra, paid $45 million in
2007 to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it used
environmental reserves as a "cookie jar.") At best, the explanations mean
that companies are themselves blind to a major internal drain on cash.
Despite what companies say, it isn't difficult to
accurately estimate the future cost of environmental liabilities, asserts
Gayle Koch, a principal with The Brattle Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Koch says her firm regularly does so for both corporate and government
clients. "Companies estimate liabilities all the time for insurance
recovery, to get insurance, for mergers and acquisitions, and in
divestitures," she says. "Transactions go forward based on those estimates."
The problem isn't the estimates, she says, but the disclosure.
"I've been in court cases where I've seen detailed
cost recovery with very detailed distributions of costs," says Koch. "And
those same companies will disclose in their annual reports [only] the known
minimum cost."
Sanford Lewis, an attorney with the Investor
Environmental Health Network (IEHN), an advocacy group, agrees that
companies can and do produce accurate estimates of environmental costs — for
internal use. A company that tells investors that it expects liabilities of
$200 million during the next 5 years may advise its insurer to expect
liability claims of $2 billion over a 50-year period, wrote Lewis in a
recent report. "It is happening, it's scandalous, and investors should be
outraged," Lewis told CFO.
Increasingly, lawsuits, bankruptcy proceedings,
regulatory investigations, and independent research are revealing that
companies often know far more about the cost of their environmental
liabilities than they tell investors. For example, New York Attorney General
Andrew Cuomo is currently investigating whether Chevron misled investors —
including New York State's pension plan — about the extent of its liability
in a $27 billion lawsuit tied to "massive oil seepage" in Ecuador. Chevron
is widely expected to lose the case in Ecuador but fight payment in the
United States, and Cuomo has demanded that the company disclose estimates of
potential damages and its cash reserves.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's threads about audit professionalism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Professionalism
"How to Spot the Next Enron," by George Anders, Fast Company, December
19, 2007 ---
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/58/ganders.html
As cited by Smoleon Sense, on September 23, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/investors-beware-how-to-spot-the-next-enron/
Want to know how to avoid being fooled by the next
too-good-to-be-true stock-market darling? Just remember these six tips from
the cynics of Wall Street, the short sellers.
If only we could have spotted the rascals ahead of
time. That's the lament of anyone who bought Enron stock a year ago, or who
worked at a now-collapsed company like Global Crossing or who trusted any
corporate forecast that proved way too upbeat. How could we have let
ourselves be fooled? And how do we make sure that we don't get fooled again?
It's time to visit with some serious cynics. Some
of the shrewdest advice comes from Wall Street's short sellers, who make
money by betting that certain stocks will fall in price. They had a tough
time in the 1990s, when it paid to be optimistic. But it has been their kind
of year. Almost every day, new accounting jitters rock the stock market. And
if you aren't asking about hidden partnerships and earnings manipulation --
the sort of outrages that short sellers love to expose -- you risk being
blindsided by yet another business wipeout.
Think of short sellers as being akin to veteran
cops who walk the streets year after year. They pick up subtle warning signs
that most of us miss. They see through alibis. And they know how to quiz
accomplices and witnesses to put together the whole story, detail by detail.
It's nice to live in a world where we can trust everything we're told
because everyone behaves perfectly. But if the glitzy addresses of Wall
Street have given way to the tough sidewalks of Mean Street these days, we
might as well get smart about the neighborhood.
The first rule of these streets, says David Rocker,
a top New York money manager who has been an active short seller for more
than two decades, is not to get mesmerized by a charismatic chief executive.
"Most CEOs are ultimately salesmen," Rocker says. "If they showed up on your
doorstep and said, 'I've got a great vacuum cleaner,' you wouldn't buy it
right away. You'd want to see if it works. It's the same thing with a
company."
A legendary case in point involves John Sculley,
former CEO of Apple Computer. In 1993, he briefly became chief executive of
a little wireless data company called Spectrum Information Technologies and
spoke glowingly of its prospects. Spectrum's stock promptly tripled. But
those who had looked closely at Spectrum's technology weren't nearly as
impressed.
Just four months later, Sculley quit, saying that
Spectrum's founders had misled him. The company restated its earnings,
backing away from some aggressive treatment of licensing revenue that had
inflated profits. The stock crashed. The only ones who came out looking
smart were the short sellers who disregarded the momentary excitement of
having a big-name CEO join the company. Instead, those short sellers focused
on the one question that mattered: Are Spectrum's products any good?
So in the wake of Enron, you want to know what to
look for in other companies. Or, more to the point, you need to know what to
look for in your own company, so you're not stuck explaining what happened
to your missing 401(k) fund. Here are six basic pointers from the
short-selling community.
1. Watch cash flow, not reported net
income. During Enron's heyday from 1999 to 2000, the company
reported very strong net income -- aided, we now know, by dubious
accounting exercises. But the actual amount of cash that Enron's
businesses generated wasn't nearly as impressive. That's no coincidence.
Companies can create all sorts of adjustments
to make net income look artificially strong -- witness what we've seen
so far with Enron and Global Crossing. But there's only one way to show
strong cash flow from operations: Run the business well.
2. Take a wary look at acquisition
binges. Some of the most spectacular financial meltdowns of
recent years have involved companies that bought too much, too fast.
Cendant, for example, grew fast in the mid-1990s by snapping up the
likes of Days Inn, Century 21, and Avis but overreached when it bought
CUC International Inc., a direct-marketing firm. Accounting
irregularities at CUC led to massive write-downs in 1997, which sent the
combined company's stock plummeting.
3. Be mindful of income-accelerating
tricks. Conservative accounting says that long-term contracts
should not be treated as immediate windfalls that shower all of their
benefits on today's financial statements. Sell a three-year magazine
subscription, and you've got predictable obligations until 2005. Those
expenses will slowly flow onto your financial statements -- and it's
prudent to book the income gradually as well.
But in some industries, aggressive practitioners
like to put jumbo profits on the books all at once. Left for later are
worries about how to deal with the eventual costs of those long-term deals.
In a recent Barron's interview, longtime short seller Jim Chanos identified
such "gain on sale" accounting tricks as a sure sign that the management is
being too aggressive for its own good.
Jensen Comment
Cash flow statements are useful, but they are no panacea replacement of accrual
accounting and earnings analysis. One huge problem is that unscrupulous
executives can more easily manipulate/manage cash flows ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#CashVsAccrualAcctg
Question
What do the department store chains WT Grant and Target possibly have in common?
Answer
WT Grant had a huge chain of departments
stores across the United States. It declared bankruptcy in the sharp 1973
recession largely because of a build up of accounts receivable losses. Now in
2008
Target Corporation is in a somewhat
similar bind.
In 1980 Largay and Stickney (Financial Analysts Journal) published a
great comparison of WT Grant's cash flow statements versus income statements. I
used this study for years in some of my accounting courses. It's a classic for
giving students an appreciation of cash flow statements! The study is discussed
and cited (with exhibits) at
http://www.sap-hefte.de/download/dateien/1239/070_leseprobe.pdf
It also shows the limitations of the current ratio in financial analysis and the
problem of inventory buildup when analyzing the reported bottom line net income.
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on March 14, 2008
IIs
Target Corp.'s Credit Too Generous?
by Peter Eavis
The Wall Street Journal
Mar 11, 2008
Page: C1
Click here to view the full article on
WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120519491886425757.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC
TOPICS: Allowance
For Doubtful Accounts, Financial Accounting, Financial Statement
Analysis, Loan Loss Allowance
SUMMARY: "'Target
appears to have pursued very aggressive credit growth at the
wrong time," says William Ryan, consumer-credit analyst at
Portales Partners, a New York-based research firm. "Not so."
says Target's chief financial officer, Douglas Scovanner, "The
growth in the credit-card portfolio is absolutely not a function
of a loosening of credit standards or a lowering of credit
quality in our portfolio."
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: This
article covers details of financial statement ratios used to
analyze Target Corp.'s credit card business. It can be used in a
financial statement analysis course or while covering accounting
for receivables in a financial accounting course
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory)
What types of credit cards has Target Corp. issued? Why do
companies such as Target issue these cards?
2. (Introductory)
In general, what concerns analysts about Target Corp.'s
portfolio of receivables on credit cards?
3. (Introductory)
How can a sufficient allowance for uncollectible accounts
alleviate concerns about potential problems in a portfolio of
loans or receivables? What evidence is given in the article
about the status of Target's allowance for uncollectible
accounts?
4. (Advanced)
"...High growth may make it [hard] to see credit deterioration
that already is happening..." What calculation by analyst
William Ryan is described in the article to better "see" this
issue? From where does he obtain the data used in the
calculation? Be specific in your answer.
5. (Advanced)
Refer again to the calculation done by the analyst Mr. Ryan. How
does that calculation resemble the analysis done for an aging of
accounts receivable?
6. (Advanced)
What other financial analysis ratio is used to assess the status
of a credit-card loan portfolio such as Target Corp.'s?
7. (Advanced)
If analysts prove correct in their concern about Target Corp.'s
credit-card receivable balance, what does that say about the
profitability reported in this year? How will it impact next
year's results?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
|
Early 1995 Warning Signs
That Bad Guys Were Running Enron and That Political Whores Were Helping
There were some warning signs, but nobody seemed care much as long as Enron
was releasing audited accounting reports showing solid increases in net
earnings.
Enron's Political Profit Pipeline
In early 1995, the world's biggest natural gas company began clearing ground 100
miles south of Bombay,
India for a $2.8 billion, gas-fired power
plant -- the largest single foreign investment in India.
Villagers claimed that the power plant was overpriced and that its effluent
would destroy their fisheries and coconut and mango trees. One villager opposing
Enron put it succinctly, "Why not remove them before they remove us?"
As Pratap Chatterjee reported ["Enron Deal Blows a Fuse," Multinational
Monitor, July/August 1995], hundreds of villagers stormed the site that was
being prepared for Enron's 2,015-megawatt plant in May 1995, injuring numerous
construction workers and three foreign advisers.
After winning Maharashtra state elections, the conservative nationalistic
Bharatiya Janata Party canceled the deal, sending shock waves through Western
businesses with investments in India.
Maharashtra officials said they acted to prevent the Houston, Texas-based
company from making huge profits off "the backs of India's poor." New Delhi's
Hindustan Times editorialized in June 1995, "It is time the West realized
that India is not a banana republic which has to dance to the tune of
multinationals."
Enron officials are not so sure. Hoping to convert the cancellation into a
temporary setback, the company launched an all-out campaign to get the deal back
on track. In late November 1995, the campaign was showing signs of success,
although progress was taking a toll on the handsome rate of return that Enron
landed in the first deal. In India, Enron is now being scrutinized by the
public, which is demanding contracts reflecting market rates. But it's a big
world.
In November 1995, the company announced that it has signed a $700 million deal
to build a gas pipeline from Mozambique to South Africa. The pipeline will
service Mozambique's Pande gas field, which will produce an estimated two
trillion cubic feet of gas.
The deal, in which Enron beat out South Africa's state petroleum company Sasol,
sparked controversy in Africa following reports that the Clinton administration,
including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Embassy and
even National Security adviser Anthony Lake, lobbied Mozambique on behalf of
Enron.
"There were outright threats to withhold development funds if we didn't sign,
and sign soon," John Kachamila, Mozambique's natural resources minister, told
the Houston Chronicle. Enron spokesperson Diane Bazelides declined to comment on
the these allegations, but said that the U.S. government had been "helpful as it
always is with American companies." Spokesperson Carol Hensley declined to
respond to a hypothetical question about whether or not Enron would approve of
U.S. government threats to cut off aid to a developing nation if the country did
not sign an Enron deal.
Enron has been repeatedly criticized for relying on political clout rather than
low bids to win contracts. Political heavyweights that Enron has engaged on its
behalf include former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, former U.S. Commerce
Secretary Robert Mosbacher and retired General Thomas Kelly, U.S. chief of
operations in the 1990 Gulf War. Enron's Board includes former Commodities
Futures Trading Commission Chair Wendy Gramm (wife of presidential hopeful
Senator Phil Gramm, R-Texas), former U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Charles
Walker and John Wakeham, leader of the House of Lords and former U.K. Energy
Secretary.
To this I
have added the following :
From the
Free Wall Street Journal Educators' Reviews for November 1, 2001
TITLE:
Enron Did Business With a Second Entity Operated by Another Company Official; No
Public Disclosure Was Made of Deals
REPORTER: John R. Emshwiller and Rebecca Smith
DATE: Oct 26, 2001
PAGE: C1
LINK: Print Only in the WSJ on October 26, 2001
TOPICS:
Disclosure Requirements, Financial Accounting, Financial Statement Analysis
SUMMARY:
Enron's financial statement disclosures have been less than transparent.
Information is arising as the SEC makes an inquiry into the Company's accounting
and reporting practices with respect to its transactions with entities managed
by high-level Enron managers. Yet, as discussed in a related article, analysts
remain confident in the stock.
QUESTIONS:
1.) Why
must companies disclose related party transactions? What is the significance of
the difference between the wording of SEC rule S-K and FASB Statement of
Financial Accounting Standards No. 57, Related Party Transactions that is cited
at the end of the article?
2.)
Explain the logic of why a drop in investor confidence in Enron's business
transactions and reporting practices could affect the company's credit rating.
3.)
Explain how an analyst could argue, as did one analyst cited in the related
article, that he or she is confident in Enron's ability to "deliver" earnings
even if he or she cannot estimate "where revenues are going to come from" nor
where the company will make profits.
Reviewed
By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
Reviewed
By: Benson Wier, Virginia Commonwealth University
Reviewed
By: Kimberly Dunn, Florida Atlantic University
---
RELATED ARTICLES ---
TITLE:
Heard on the Street: Most Analysts Remain Plugged In to Enron
REPORTER: Susanne Craig and Jonathan Weil
PAGE: C1
ISSUE: Oct 26, 2001
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004043182760447600.djm
TITLE:
Enron Officials Sell Shares Amid Stock-Price Slump
REPORTER: Theo Francis and Cassell Bryan-Low
PAGE: C14
ISSUE: Oct 26, 2001
LINK: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004043341423453040.djm
From
The Wall Street Journal Accounting Educators' Review on November 8, 2001
Subscribers to the Electronic Edition of the WSJ can obtain reviews in various
disciplines by contacting
wsjeducatorsreviews@dowjones.com
See
http://info.wsj.com/professor/
TITLE:
Arthur Andersen Could Face Scrutiny On Clarity of Enron Financial Reports
REPORTER: Jonathan Weil
DATE: Nov 05, 2001
PAGE: C1
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004919947649536880.djm
TOPICS: Accounting, Auditing, Creative Accounting, Disclosure Requirements
SUMMARY:
Critics argue that Arthur Andersen LLP has failed to ensure that Enron Corp.'s
financial disclosures are understandable. Enron is currently undergoing SEC
investigation and is being sued by shareholders. Questions relate to disclosure
quality and auditor responsibility.
QUESTIONS:
1.) The
article suggests that the auditor has the job of making sure that financial
statements are understandable and accurate and complete in all material
respects. Does the auditor bear this responsibility? Discuss the role of the
auditor in financial reporting.
2.) One
allegation is that Enron's financial statements are not understandable. Should
users be required to have specialized training to be able to understand
financial statements? Should the financial statements be prepared so that only a
minimal level of business knowledge is required? What are the implications of
the target audience on financial statement preparation?
3.) Enron
is facing several shareholder lawsuits ; however, Arthur Anderson LLP is not a
defendant. What liability does the auditor have to shareholders of client firms?
What are possible reasons that Arthur Anderson is not a defendant in the Enron
cases?
4.) What
is the role of the SEC in the investigation? What power does the SEC have to
penalize Enron Corp. and Arthur Anderson LLP?
SMALL
GROUP ASSIGNMENT: Should financial statements be understandable to users with
only general business knowledge? Prepare an argument to support your position.
Reviewed
By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
Reviewed By: Benson Wier, Virginia Commonwealth University
Reviewed By: Kimberly Dunn, Florida Atlantic University
From
The Wall Street Journal Accounting Educators' Review on November 6, 2001
Subscribers to the Electronic Edition of the WSJ can obtain reviews in various
disciplines by contacting
wsjeducatorsreviews@dowjones.com
See
http://info.wsj.com/professor/
TITLE:
Behind Shrinking Deficits: Derivatives?
REPORTER: Silvia Ascarelli and Deborah Ball
DATE: Nov 06, 2001 PAGE: A22
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004996045480162960.djm
TOPICS: Derivatives
SUMMARY:
An Italian university professor and public-debt management expert issued a
report this week explaining how a European country used a swap contract to
effectively receive more cash in 1997. That country is believed to be Italy
although top officials deny such "window dressing" practices. 1997 was a
critical year for Italy if it was to be included in the EMU (European Monetary
Union) and become a part of the euro-zone. To qualify for entry, a country's
deficit could not exceed 3% of gross domestic product. In 1996 Italy's deficit
was 6.7% of GDP, however, the country succeeded in "slashing its budget deficit
to 2.7%" in 1997. The question now is whether Italy accomplished this reduction
by clamping down on waste and raising revenues or engaging in deceptive swaps
usage.
QUESTIONS:
1.) Why
was the level of Italy's budget deficit so critical in 1997? How did Italy's
1997 budget deficit compare with its 1996 level?
2.) What
is an interest rate swap? How can the use of swap markets decrease borrowing
costs? What is a currency swap? When would firms tend to use these derivative
instruments?
3.) Does
the European Union condone the use of interest rate swaps by its euro-zone
members as a way to manage their public debt? According to the related article,
who are the biggest users of swaps in Europe? Do the U.S. and Japan use them to
manage their public debt?
4.)
According to the related article, interest-rate swaps now account for what
proportion of the over-the-counter derivatives market? Go to the web page for
the Bank of International Settlement at
www.bis.org . Select Publications & Statistics then go to
International Financial Statistics. Go to the Central Bank Survey for Foreign
Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity. Look at the pdf version of the report,
specifically Table 6. What was average daily turnover, in billions of dollars,
of interest-rate swaps in April 1995? 1998? and 2001? By what percentage did
interest-rate swap usage increase from 1995-1998? 1998-2001?
5.)
According to the related article, how did the swaps contract allegedly used by
Italy differ from a standard swaps contract? What was the "bottom line" result
of this arrangement?
6.) Assume
Italy did indeed use such measures to "window dress" their financial situation
and gain entry into the euro-zone. What actions should be taken to prevent such
loopholes in the future?
Reviewed
By:
Jacqueline Garner, Georgia State University and Univ. of Rhode Island
Beverly Marshall, Auburn University
Peter Dadalt, Georgia State University
---
RELATED ARTICLE in the WSJ ---
TITLE:
Italy Used Complicated Swaps Contract To Deflate Budget in Bid for Euro Zone
REPORTER: Silvia Ascarelli and Deborah Ball
ISSUE: Nov 05, 2001
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004908712922656320.djm
From
The Wall Street Journal Accounting Educators' Review on November 8, 2001
Subscribers to the Electronic Edition of the WSJ can obtain reviews in various
disciplines by contacting
wsjeducatorsreviews@dowjones.com
See
http://info.wsj.com/professor/
TITLE:
Basic Principle of Accounting Tripped Enron
REPORTER: Jonathan Weil
DATE: Nov 12, 2001
PAGE: C1
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB100551383153378600.djm
TOPICS: Accounting, Auditing, Auditing Services, Auditor Independence
SUMMARY:
Enron's financial statements have long been charged with being undecipherable;
however, they are now considered to contain violations of GAAP. Enron filed
documents with the SEC indicating that financial statements going back to 1997
"should not be relied upon." Questions deal with materiality and auditor
independence.
QUESTIONS:
1.) What accounting errors are reported to have been included in Enron's
financial statements? Why didn't Enron's auditors require correction of these
errors before the financial statements were issued?
2.) What
is materiality? In hindsight, were the errors in Enron's financial statements
material? Why or why not? Should the auditors have known that the errors in
Enron's financial statements were material prior to their release? What defense
can the auditors offer?
3.) Does
Arthur Andersen provide any services to Enron in addition to the audit services?
How might providing additional services to Enron affect Andersen's decision to
release financial statements containing GAAP violations?
4.) The
article states that Enron is one of Arthur Andersen's biggest clients. How might
Enron's size have contributed to Arthur Andersen's decision to release financial
statements containing GAAP violations? Discuss differences in audit risk between
small and large clients. Discuss the potential affect of client firm size on
auditor independence.
5.) How
long has Arthur Andersen been Enron's auditor? How could their tenure as auditor
contributed to Andersen's decision to release financial statements containing
GAAP violations?
6.) The
related article discusses how Enron's consolidation policy with respect to the
JEDI and Chewco entities impacted the company's financial statements. What is
meant by the phrase consolidation policy? How could a policy not to consolidate
these entities help to make Enron's financial statements look better? Why would
consolidating an entity result in a $396 million reduction in net income over a
4 year period? How must Enron have been accounting for investments in these
entities? How could Enron support its accounting policies for these investments?
Reviewed
By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
Reviewed By: Benson Wier, Virginia Commonwealth University
Reviewed By: Kimberly Dunn, Florida Atlantic University
RELATED WSJ ARTICLES
TITLE: Enron Cuts Profit Data of 4 Years by 20%
REPORTER: John R. Emshwiller, Rebecca Smith, Robin Sidel, and Jonathan Weil
PAGE: A1,A3
ISSUE: Nov 09, 2001
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1005235413422093560.djm
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting
Educators' Review on November 8, 2001
Subscribers to the Electronic Edition of the WSJ can obtain reviews in various
disciplines by contacting
wsjeducatorsreviews@dowjones.com
See
http://info.wsj.com/professor/
TITLE: Arthur Andersen Could Face
Scrutiny On Clarity of Enron Financial Reports
REPORTER: Jonathan Weil
DATE: Nov 05, 2001
PAGE: C1
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004919947649536880.djm
TOPICS: Accounting, Auditing, Creative Accounting, Disclosure Requirements
SUMMARY: Critics argue that Arthur
Andersen LLP has failed to ensure that Enron Corp.'s financial disclosures are
understandable. Enron is currently undergoing SEC investigation and is being
sued by shareholders. Questions relate to disclosure quality and auditor
responsibility.
QUESTIONS:
1.) The article suggests that the
auditor has the job of making sure that financial statements are understandable
and accurate and complete in all material respects. Does the auditor bear this
responsibility? Discuss the role of the auditor in financial reporting.
2.) One allegation is that Enron's
financial statements are not understandable. Should users be required to have
specialized training to be able to understand financial statements? Should the
financial statements be prepared so that only a minimal level of business
knowledge is required? What are the implications of the target audience on
financial statement preparation?
3.) Enron is facing several shareholder
lawsuits ; however, Arthur Anderson LLP is not a defendant. What liability does
the auditor have to shareholders of client firms? What are possible reasons that
Arthur Anderson is not a defendant in the Enron cases?
4.) What is the role of the SEC in the
investigation? What power does the SEC have to penalize Enron Corp. and Arthur
Anderson LLP?
SMALL GROUP ASSIGNMENT: Should
financial statements be understandable to users with only general business
knowledge? Prepare an argument to support your position.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University
of Rhode Island
Reviewed By: Benson Wier, Virginia Commonwealth University
Reviewed By: Kimberly Dunn, Florida Atlantic University
From The Wall Street Journal
Accounting Educators' Review on November 6, 2001
Subscribers to the Electronic Edition of the WSJ can obtain reviews in various
disciplines by contacting
wsjeducatorsreviews@dowjones.com
See
http://info.wsj.com/professor/
TITLE: Behind Shrinking Deficits:
Derivatives?
REPORTER: Silvia Ascarelli and Deborah Ball
DATE: Nov 06, 2001 PAGE: A22
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004996045480162960.djm
TOPICS: Derivatives
SUMMARY: An Italian university
professor and public-debt management expert issued a report this week explaining
how a European country used a swap contract to effectively receive more cash in
1997. That country is believed to be Italy although top officials deny such
"window dressing" practices. 1997 was a critical year for Italy if it was to be
included in the EMU (European Monetary Union) and become a part of the
euro-zone. To qualify for entry, a country's deficit could not exceed 3% of
gross domestic product. In 1996 Italy's deficit was 6.7% of GDP, however, the
country succeeded in "slashing its budget deficit to 2.7%" in 1997. The question
now is whether Italy accomplished this reduction by clamping down on waste and
raising revenues or engaging in deceptive swaps usage.
QUESTIONS:
1.) Why was the level of Italy's budget
deficit so critical in 1997? How did Italy's 1997 budget deficit compare with
its 1996 level?
2.) What is an interest rate swap? How
can the use of swap markets decrease borrowing costs? What is a currency swap?
When would firms tend to use these derivative instruments?
3.) Does the European Union condone the
use of interest rate swaps by its euro-zone members as a way to manage their
public debt? According to the related article, who are the biggest users of
swaps in Europe? Do the U.S. and Japan use them to manage their public debt?
4.) According to the related article,
interest-rate swaps now account for what proportion of the over-the-counter
derivatives market? Go to the web page for the Bank of International Settlement
at www.bis.org . Select
Publications & Statistics then go to International Financial Statistics. Go to
the Central Bank Survey for Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity.
Look at the pdf version of the report, specifically Table 6. What was average
daily turnover, in billions of dollars, of interest-rate swaps in April 1995?
1998? and 2001? By what percentage did interest-rate swap usage increase from
1995-1998? 1998-2001?
5.) According to the related article,
how did the swaps contract allegedly used by Italy differ from a standard swaps
contract? What was the "bottom line" result of this arrangement?
6.) Assume Italy did indeed use such
measures to "window dress" their financial situation and gain entry into the
euro-zone. What actions should be taken to prevent such loopholes in the future?
Reviewed By:
Jacqueline Garner, Georgia State University and Univ. of Rhode Island
Beverly Marshall, Auburn University
Peter Dadalt, Georgia State University
--- RELATED ARTICLE in the WSJ ---
TITLE: Italy Used Complicated Swaps
Contract To Deflate Budget in Bid for Euro Zone
REPORTER: Silvia Ascarelli and Deborah Ball
ISSUE: Nov 05, 2001
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004908712922656320.djm
From The Wall Street Journal
Accounting Educators' Review on November 8, 2001
Subscribers to the Electronic Edition of the WSJ can obtain reviews in various
disciplines by contacting
wsjeducatorsreviews@dowjones.com
See
http://info.wsj.com/professor/
TITLE: Basic Principle of Accounting
Tripped Enron
REPORTER: Jonathan Weil
DATE: Nov 12, 2001
PAGE: C1
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB100551383153378600.djm
TOPICS: Accounting, Auditing, Auditing Services, Auditor Independence
SUMMARY:
Enron's financial statements have long been charged with being undecipherable;
however, they are now considered to contain violations of GAAP. Enron filed
documents with the SEC indicating that financial statements going back to 1997
"should not be relied upon." Questions deal with materiality and auditor
independence.
QUESTIONS:
1.) What accounting errors are reported to have been included in Enron's
financial statements? Why didn't Enron's auditors require correction of these
errors before the financial statements were issued?
2.) What is materiality? In hindsight,
were the errors in Enron's financial statements material? Why or why not? Should
the auditors have known that the errors in Enron's financial statements were
material prior to their release? What defense can the auditors offer?
3.) Does Arthur Andersen provide any
services to Enron in addition to the audit services? How might providing
additional services to Enron affect Andersen's decision to release financial
statements containing GAAP violations?
4.) The article states that Enron is
one of Arthur Andersen's biggest clients. How might Enron's size have
contributed to Arthur Andersen's decision to release financial statements
containing GAAP violations? Discuss differences in audit risk between small and
large clients. Discuss the potential affect of client firm size on auditor
independence.
5.) How long has Arthur Andersen been
Enron's auditor? How could their tenure as auditor contributed to Andersen's
decision to release financial statements containing GAAP violations?
6.) The related article discusses how
Enron's consolidation policy with respect to the JEDI and Chewco entities
impacted the company's financial statements. What is meant by the phrase
consolidation policy? How could a policy not to consolidate these entities help
to make Enron's financial statements look better? Why would consolidating an
entity result in a $396 million reduction in net income over a 4 year period?
How must Enron have been accounting for investments in these entities? How could
Enron support its accounting policies for these investments?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University
of Rhode Island
Reviewed By: Benson Wier, Virginia Commonwealth University
Reviewed By: Kimberly Dunn, Florida Atlantic University
RELATED WSJ ARTICLES
TITLE: Enron Cuts Profit Data of 4 Years by 20%
REPORTER: John R. Emshwiller, Rebecca Smith, Robin Sidel, and Jonathan Weil
PAGE: A1,A3
ISSUE: Nov 09, 2001
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1005235413422093560.djm
TITLE: Arthur Andersen Could Face
Scrutiny On Clarity of Enron Financial Reports
REPORTER: Jonathan Weil
DATE: Nov 05, 2001
PAGE: C1
LINK:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1004919947649536880.djm
TOPICS: Accounting, Auditing, Creative Accounting, Disclosure Requirements
Bob Jensen's threads on the Enron/Worldcom/Andersen frauds ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm
"13 Academics Are Among 24 Winners of 2009 MacArthur Fellowships,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/13-Academics-Are-Among-24/48558/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Following are the 2009 fellows and their
achievements, as summarized by the foundation:
Lynsey Addario, 35, photojournalist, in
Istanbul. She is creating a powerful visual record of the most pressing
conflicts and humanitarian crises of the 21st century.
Linsey Addario ---
http://www.lynseyaddario.com/
Life and Death in Darfur ---
Click Here
Maneesh Agrawala, 37, associate professor of
electrical engineering and computer science, University of California at
Berkeley. He designs visual interfaces that enhance users' ability to
synthesize and comprehend large quantities of complex digital information.
Timothy Barrett, 59, research scientist and
adjunct professor, University of Iowa. He is reinvigorating the art of
hand-papermaking and leading the preservation of traditional Western and
Japanese techniques and practices.
Mark Bradford, 47, mixed-media artist, in
Los Angeles. He incorporates ephemera from urban environments into richly
textured abstract compositions that evoke a multitude of metaphors.
Edwidge Danticat, 40, novelist, in Miami.
She chronicles the power of human resistance and endurance through moving
and insightful depictions of Haitian immigrants' experience.
Rackstraw Downes, 69, painter, in New York.
He renders minutely detailed landscapes of unexpected vistas that reconsider
the interaction between the built and natural world.
Esther Duflo, 36, professor of poverty
alleviation and development economics, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. She analyzes the forces perpetuating cycles of poverty in South
Asia and Africa.
Deborah Eisenberg, 63, short-story writer,
in New York. She crafts distinctive portraits of contemporary American life
in tales of precision, fluency, and moral depth.
Lin He, 35, assistant professor of cell and
developmental biology, University of California at Berkeley. She advances
understanding of the role of microRNA in the development of cancer and is
laying the groundwork for future cancer treatments.
Peter Huybers, 35, assistant professor of
climate, Harvard University. He mines a wealth of often conflicting
experimental observations to develop compelling theories that explain global
climate change over time.
James Longley, 37, filmmaker, Daylight
Factory, in Seattle. He deepens understanding of conflicts in the Middle
East through intimate portraits of communities living under extremely
challenging conditions.
L. Mahadevan, 44, professor of applied
mathematics, Harvard University. He investigates principles underlying the
behavior of complex systems to address such questions as how flags flutter,
how skin wrinkles, and how Venus flytraps snap closed.
Heather McHugh, 61, professor of English,
University of Washington. She is a poet who composes richly layered verse
that unabashedly embraces such wordplay as puns, rhymes, and syntactical
twists to explore the human condition.
Jerry Mitchell, 50, investigative reporter,
The Clarion-Ledger, in Jackson, Miss. He ensures that unsolved
murders from the civil-rights era are finally prosecuted by uncovering
largely unknown details of decades-old stories of thwarted justice.
Rebecca Onie, 32, founder and executive
director of Project Health, in Boston. She is building a low-cost,
replicable program that joins the aspirations of college students to the
needs of health-care institutions to address the link between poverty and
poor health.
Richard O. Prum, 48, professor of
ornithology, ecology, and evolutionary biology, Yale University. He draws
from developmental biology, optical physics, and paleontology to address
central questions about avian development, evolution, and behavior.
John A. Rogers, 42, professor of materials
science and engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He
invents flexible electronic devices that lay the foundation for a revolution
in manufacture of industrial, consumer, and biocompatible technologies.
Elyn Saks, 53, professor of law, psychology,
and psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, University of Southern
California. She expands the options for those suffering from severe mental
illness, by working through scholarship, practice, and policy informed by a
life story that offers uncommon depth and insight.
Jill Seaman, 57, infectious-disease
physician, in Old Fangak, Sudan. She adapts the tools of 21st-century
medicine to treat infectious diseases endemic to southern Sudan and other
remote, war-torn regions of the world.
Beth Shapiro, 33, assistant professor of
biology, Pennsylvania State University. She uses molecular phylogenetics and
biostatistics to reconstruct the influences on population dynamics of
extinct or severely challenged species.
Daniel Sigman, 40, professor of geological
and geophysical sciences, Princeton University. He examines the interrelated
physical, chemical, geological, and biological forces that have shaped the
oceans' fertility and the earth's climate over the past two million years.
Mary E. Tinetti, 58, professor of medicine
and epidemiology and public health, and geriatric physician, Yale School of
Medicine. She challenges prevailing notions of falls as unavoidable
accidents associated with advanced age and identifies risk factors that
contribute to morbidity as a result of falls.
Camille Utterback, 39, digital artist, in
San Francisco. She redefines how viewers experience and interact with art,
through vibrant, pictorial compositions that are activated by human presence
and movement.
Theodore P. Zoli, 43, bridge engineer, HNTB
Corporation, in New York. He makes major technological advances to protect
transportation infrastructure in the event of natural and man-made
disasters.
No Cheers for Pornography and Gambling Sites and Addictive Social
Networking
This may seem a bit off topic, but it may be one of the most valuable links
you can forward to students and others. Besides being a social disgrace,
pornography sites are one of the most dangerous sources of malware that infects
computers along with gambling sites and sites offering malware protection just
after they've infected your computer. In the case of pornography and gambling
users are being infected in multiple ways.
These sites want your money, your I.D., and your mind.
"Pornography and You," by Rebecca Hagelin, Townhall, September
22, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/RebeccaHagelin/2009/09/22/pornography_and_you
According to Dr. Manning, the type of porn viewed
today, by both adults and children, is "deviant, vile and graphic. Young
people are witnessing rape, torture, and all kinds of degrading material."
Why would anyone gravitate to such horrible inhumane depictions? Dr. Reisman
has carefully studied and documented the effects that exposure to
pornography has on the brain – it acts like a drug and can easily capture
the “casual observer” and result in serious addiction, causing the user to
crave greater quantities of ever more perverse images.
If you suspect someone in your family has a porn
problem, arm yourself with truth. This column is much to short to delve into
all you need to know in order to protect your family. Visit
www.SalvoMag.com
where you can order the "Silent Bondage" issue and equip yourself to combat
pornography's stranglehold head-on.
If you have a pornography addiction, please get
help. At
www.VictimsofPornography.org you can connect with
counseling resources and hear the victory stories of others who have
overcome their bondage. It’s critical to understand that consuming porn is
never just “harmless entertainment.” Your use warps your view of women and
of common decency. It breeds selfishness and unfaithfulness. You might as
well be having an affair with every woman you gawk at in the glow of the
computer or while privately viewing that hotel room porn flick.
Your wife may be silent about your usage, but she’s
probably dying a little each day inside. I’ll never forget the
heart-wrenching words of a wife whose husband regularly viewed porn: “It was
like my husband had a mistress in our home.”
If you use pornography, you use people. You have a
problem. Get help.
September 22, 2009 reply from Richard.Sansing
[Richard.C.Sansing@TUCK.DARTMOUTH.EDU]
Dr. Judith Reisman's doctorate is
in communications. See
http://www.alternet.org/election04/20744/her_kinsey_obsession/
for more on "Dr." Reisman.
Richard Sansing
"QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE PROBLEM OF COMPULSIVE GAMBLING AND THE G.A.
RECOVERY PROGRAM," Gamblers Anonymous ---
http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/qna.html
Social Networking: The New Addiction
I wonder what would happen if students got extra credit from staying away from
porn for three months
There would probably be more female students earning extra credit
"How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why
that's dangerous," by Emily Yoffe, Slate Magazine, August 12, 2009
---
http://www.slate.com/id/2224932
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar
Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it
feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden
by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so
insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google
searches are becoming a cause of
mistrials as jurors,
after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts
for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina
Shen Rastogi confessed in
Double X, "My boyfriend
has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look
up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the
point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the
New York Times said she became so
obsessed with Twitter posts about the
Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days
"refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."
We actually resemble nothing so much as those
legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a
little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search
engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that
scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat
skulls.
In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were
working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned.
They would stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to
a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the
reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place,
and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner
where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was
put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a
lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they
collapsed.
Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the
brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). Later
experiments done on
humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal
hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.
But to Washington State University neuroscientist
Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center
didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating
rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of
creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The
animals, he writes in
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,
were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were
in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects
described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals
stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp
writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and
Panksepp wasn't referring to
Bing).
It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names
for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy.
He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping
the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals,
and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian
motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to
venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin
writes in
Animals Make Us Human, experiments
show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for
their food than to have it delivered to them.
For humans, this desire to search is not just about
fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get
just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when
we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual
connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are
firing.
The juice that fuels the seeking system is the
neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopamine circuits "promote states of
eagerness and directed purpose," Panksepp writes. It's a state humans love
to be in. So good does it feel that we seek out activities, or substances,
that keep this system aroused—cocaine and amphetamines, drugs of
stimulation, are particularly effective at stirring it.
Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer
just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only
to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank
dopamine. Our internal
sense of time is believed to be controlled by the
dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of
dopamine in their brains, which a recent
study suggests may be at the root of the problem.
For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas
Carr in
the
Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us
Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our
brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a
long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting "enter" to get our
next fix.
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
"The Flaws of Facebook," by Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed,
February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/03/golub
An acquisitions editor of a major university press
was nice enough to buy me a cup of coffee and a brioche and listen patiently
as I pitched him my book manuscript during a recent meeting of my
professional association. Things went well enough until, at the end of our
meeting, he surprised me. On our way out of the café, he turned to me and
asked “are you on Facebook?” “I am,” I replied, nonplussed, “but I, uh,
don’t really check it very often.” “Well I do,” he said, tone heavy in
significance, “so friend me.”
My dislike of Facebook is not based on ignorance or
a knee-jerk academic ludism. I understand exactly what Facebook is – it’s an
Internet replacement service that combines e-mail, instant messaging, photo
sharing, social networking, mailing lists, asynchronous gaming, and personal
Web hosting all in one. Crucially, it allows differing degrees of privacy,
so you can blog safely about the antics of your adorable cat or the
incredible evil of your department chair without either of them finding out
unless you add them to your friends list. What bothers me about Facebook —
the dilemma highlighted by my encounter with the editor — is the particular
problem it presents for academics, whose professional career and personal
goings-on are all rolled up together into one big life of the mind.
Teaching is an intensely public activity in a very
simple way: You spend hours and hours having people stare at you. Over time
this simple three-shows-a-week schedule blossoms into something infinitely
weirder. It does not take long for professors to find themselves walking
around a campus filled with half-remembered faces from previous classes —
faces worn by people who remember you perfectly well. If you teach at a
large state university, like I do, it does not take long before random
waiters and pharmacists start mentioning how much they did (or didn’t) enjoy
that survey class you taught. There are even apocryphal stories in Papua New
Guinea — the country that I study — about a man who more or less taught
every social science class at the country’s university during the late 70s.
He spent the rest of his life never having to stand in line or fill out a
form because he had trained the vast majority of the nation’s civil
servants, who all remembered him fondly.
The public created by your teaching is much larger
than just the students in your class. Whether we lament or rejoice in the
purportedly poor state of teacher evaluation, it does happen. Those forms
our students fill out have strange afterlives and become the source of
evaluation by deans and whispering among the senior faculty. The Internet
unleashes these evaluations as well, allowing our classroom antics to be
shared on Ratemyprofessor.com.
So is Facebook a dream come true for academics — a
private social networking site where professors can finally let down there
hair because you control your audience, in the way that the average “I hate
the world” anonymous adjunct blog cannot? I would say No. In the physical
world professors uneasily navigate the uneasy blurring of their public and
private lives, but Facebook doesn’t allow for blurring — you are either
friends or not. This extremely “ungranular” system forces you to choose
between two roles, private and public, that the actual, uncoded world allows
us to leave ambiguous.
Which of the following people would you friend on
Facebook? A friend from graduate school? Probably — Facebook is, for better
or worse, a great way to take the Old Boys Club online. A fellow faculty
member? If you get along with them, why not? Your graduate students? Hmmm...
well I suppose some people have that sort of relationship with their
graduate students. Your undergraduates? I’ve drawn a line in the sand and
said no to that one.
I think these cases are actually pretty easy —
categories like colleague and student are well-defined, as is the
distinction between a “purely” formal relationship and the intimate
friendships that grow up around it. I’m sure that many of the people reading
this got to be where they were today because a professor in our lives went
beyond the call of duty to become a friend and mentor. Facebook makes
handling the formal and the informal tricky, but in all of these examples a
lot of work has already been done for it because the relationships in
question can all be neatly divided into “formal” and “informal” registers.
What Facebook makes particularly uncomfortable are
relationships in which friendship and professionalism are not clear and
brightly bounded, but are tied to real political economic stakes. As a young
professor on the path to tenure, for instance, acquisitions editors have a
certain ominous power over me that compels me to friend them on Facebook
(and I did friend him, by the way) and might even include small favors up to
and including shining their shoes if the end of the deal includes an advance
contract. On the other hand, as someone with a tenure track job, I am also
in a position of diffuse power over people like adjuncts and lecturers, who
I get along well with in my department, but who do not come to faculty
meetings in which we discuss the budget (read: their pay).
The more widely you friend people on Facebook — and
it is a slippery slope — the more and more your Facebook page becomes a
professional Web replacement on Friendster’s slick Internet replacement Web
site. It becomes less and less a “private” space and more and more a place
to show a public face to a very wide audience. In forcing you to craft a
public persona, it raises uncomfortable issues of power and inequality and
lurk under the surface of our actual world interactions — which is probably
a good thing.
Continued in article
Videos
CBS Sixty Minute Module on Facebook ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cEySyEnxvU
Some Sobering Thoughts ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMWz3G_gPhU
Learn About Facebook (in a pretty good song) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpaxaxEWMSA
Facebook Fever ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHi-ZcvFV_0
Facebook Anthem ---
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Facebook&aq=f
Bob Jensen's threads on social networking are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Bob Jensen's bookmarks on social science tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Metacognitive Learning, “pedagogy of ironic minimalism,” and Accounting
Education's BAM
Often when I teach less, I find that I actually
teach more
"Resist the Pedagagogical Far Right," by Robert J. Nash, Inside
Higher Ed, September 22, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/09/22/nash
So much of what I’ve learned about teaching in the
academy for over four decades can be summarized in this way: often when I
teach less, I find that I actually teach more. I call this a “pedagogy of
ironic minimalism.” Whenever I take the time to call forth what it is my
students actually know, and whenever I intentionally minimize the “endless
breadth and depth” of my own “vast wisdom and knowledge,” then my students
learn the most. This, dear readers, is why I keep coming back to the
classroom — for lo these many years.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The title of the above document is misleading. He never really defines "Pedagagogical
Far Right" except by associating it with being less student-centered and
less teaching-centered as opposed to being research-centered. I do not view
this article as being so political as the title makes it sound, although
Professor Nash makes it clear that he is left-leaning in terms of politics
and what he conveys to students about liberal thinking.
What I found interesting is that his 41 years of classroom teaching lead
him in the direction of what, in accounting education, has become known as
the BAM Model or metacognitive learning. But he does not take his
“pedagogy of ironic minimalism.” to the
stressful extremes of BAM in accounting education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Political Correctness in Academe
Professor Stanley Fish is often credited with coining the phrase "political
correctness" in academe while on the faculty at Duke University. However, the
term itself has a much longer and broader history ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Correctness
"Fish to Profs: Stick to Teaching," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed,
July 1, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/01/fish
Stanley Fish is very clear about what college
professors should do in the classroom.
They "can (legitimately) do two things: (1)
introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had
not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same
students with the analytical skills -- of argument, statistical modeling,
laboratory procedure -- that will enable them to move confidently within
those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is
over."
And what should they not
do? Everything else.
In a new book to be published this month by Oxford
University Press,
Fish,
the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law
at Florida International University, argues that instructors need to
approach their jobs narrowly -- and to, as the title implies, Save the
World on Your Own Time.
That doesn't mean they
can't have opinions, espouse views outside of the classroom or make partisan
pronouncements in public. But the argument -- that professors should do
their jobs, and nothing else -- does establish a framework through which the
book tackles every major academic controversy, from Ward Churchill (a
professor who erred in melding politics and his academic work, Fish says,
not in expressing those views per se) to the intelligent design movement (a
relativistic attempt to sneak a nonscientific idea into the classroom) to
Larry Summers (a man who went beyond the bounds of his job description).
The book itself developed
from Fish's own experiences, both as a teacher of literature and law and as
an administrator. After chairing the theory-laden English department at Duke
University and serving as executive director of Duke University Press, he
surprised many by accepting a post as dean of the College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, from which he stepped
down in 2004. Now he's been enjoying his perch as a
weekly online columnist
at The New York Times, where he first articulated some of the book's
themes.
As someone who's been both
derided from the right as a postmodernist and
recently described by his editor
as a "curmudgeonly semiconservative guy," Fish's own positions have evolved
over time and can sometimes be hard to pin down -- and maybe that's the
point. But he's perfectly clear about his views on higher education, and the
book delves beyond classroom controversies into more familiar territory for
many academics: how to run a university (and should it be democratic?), the
life of a dean, the teaching of writing and, of course, the best way to
shake down state leaders for more funds.
Fish spoke over the phone
with Inside Higher Ed last week from upstate New York, where he lives
for about half the year. Below are excerpts from that conversation.
Q: How does the general
public view academe, and how does that view differ from reality?
A: I think the
perception is that college campuses these days are populated by
liberal/radical faculty who are always imposing their loyalties on the
students in an attempt ... to recruit students into a political agenda.
The reality is that the
percentage ... who do something like that is perhaps small, I would say, at
the most, 10 percent, probably more like 5 or 6 percent. But the success of
the neoconservative public relations machine has implanted in the public
mind this idea of a university simply permeated by political ideologues
masking as pedagogues....
[T]he word then begins to
be sounded as if you couldn't walk into a classroom in this country without
being subjected to liberal propaganda. In my experience, this is not the
norm. But even if it were only a small percentage of what happens in the
classroom, it's still, I think, the cause for concern if not alarm because
certainly in my view [it's] what should not be happening in the classroom.
Q: But even aside from
political implications, you argue, especially in the teaching of writing,
that such agendas can actually have a negative effect on learning.
A: Whether anyone
notices it or not or comments on it or not, the teaching of writing in
universities is a disaster. [There is] the conviction on the part of many
composition teachers that what they are really teaching is some form of
social justice, and that the teaching of writing ... takes a back seat. And
in fact in many classrooms the teaching of writing as a craft as something
that has rules with appropriate decorums ... is in fact demonized as an
indication of the hegemony of the powers that be. This happens over and over
again in classrooms and it's an absolute disaster.
Q: Are you mostly
talking about "quips" -- say, an aside about Dick Cheney in the middle of a
lecture?
A: It signals
something to the students about what the views of the professor are.... It's
my conviction that teachers should not have posters ... on the doors of
their office that indicate some political, partisan or ideological
affiliation. The office ... is an extension of the scene of teaching, and no
student should enter an office [believing that] some ideas are going to be
preferred and others are better not uttered. The larger part are those
professors who are sincerely convinced that it is their job to take their
students and mold both their characters and their ideological views....
I'm holding in my hand
right now ... a book called
Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice,
which is a popular book published by a very reputable press [Routledge,
2007], and its thesis is that teaching social justice, preparing students to
operate in the world in a particular way is what we should be doing.
[Quoting from the
book:]
"The goal of social
justice education is full and equal participation of all groups in a society
that is mutually shaped to meet their needs. Social justice includes a
vision of society in which the distribution of resources is equitable and
all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure. We envision
a society in which individuals are both self-determining (able to develop
their full capacities), and interdependent (capable of interacting
democratically with others)...."
I think there is a
significant number of persons espousing or being persuaded by that view,
some self-consciously and some less than self-consciously.... [At The New
York Times, a]ny number of readers will testify, and I think that is the
word, that they went to college and university never knowing what the
political and ideological affiliations of their professors might have been,
and several have written in to say when they later discovered by accident
... they were surprised, they never would have guessed.
I still like to believe
that most people go into classrooms attempting to do justice to the
materials that are taught in the course as described in the syllabus and
listed in the college catalog, and that ... is the core of my position.
This is a daunting enough
task, and it doesn't seem to me to be necessary or possible to perform other
tasks....
Q: Are you concerned
that your book will be brandished by those with an agenda to enforce
"intellectual diversity"?
A: Well, yes, I
think that there is a danger that this will be welcomed ... by some of those
conservative critics of the academy. But on the other hand there's plenty in
the book which criticizes the conservative efforts, for example, to enforce
proportional hiring in college and university faculty.... I over and over
again attack that argument, so even though the conservative critics of the
academy might find some comfort in parts of the book, they'll find other
parts of the book directly criticizing them.
One of the arguments that
conservative critics make is that there are very few or relatively few
conservative members of the faculty, especially in humanities and social
science departments. But when I came into the profession ... in 1962, the
statistics were the reverse. There were very few progressive members of the
faculty and there were of course determined efforts to exclude, for example,
people who self-identified as Marxists. [I don't think there are parallel
efforts of exclusion today,] although that is a charge that's been made.
Q: Do you believe the
current movement against perceived bias in academe is a recent trend, or
part of longstanding cultural currents?
A: The
anti-intellectualism that's always been a part of the disdain for the
academy doesn't, I think, operate in the current scene of the culture wars
at least as I describe them.... This is not a repetition of the old
anti-intellectualism which has been around forever; I think this is much
more specifically political and ideological.
Q: If all professors "academicized"
the topics they covered in class and avoided melding their material with
outside political views, as you advocate, would that leave room for
institutions with specific missions, such as "progressive" colleges,
colleges that identify as conservative-oriented or those with a Great Books
focus?
A: A Great Books
college or a progressive college is a college that is organized around a
certain view of the way higher education should be implemented. In other
words, these are colleges which are attached to an account of the best way
to perform higher education. But I have no quarrel at all with colleges like
that, because if one can think of them as having a point of view, it's an
educational point of view, not a political point of view. That would be
quite different if a college were self-consciously dedicated to the
conservation or promulgation of conservative principles or religious
principles.... [They would not be] operating according to the traditional
ideals of liberal education, which doesn't mean that they shouldn't be
allowed to exist ... they are simply not attaching themselves to the ideal
of liberal education....
Q: You've worked at
both private and public institutions. Do you see any difference in their
missions?
A: Well, there
certainly is a difference in terms of the funding and the way in which
funding is dispensed....
The interesting thing, or
actually distressing thing ... is that at the same time that the legislature
of many states takes the money away from universities, the legislatures seek
to impose more and more curricular and faculty control over the
universities, so it's a very unhappy situation in which colleges are being
told we're going to take your money away and we're going to increasingly
monitor every single thing you do.
Q: You describe a novel
approach to handling state lawmakers who control the purse strings, a tactic
you used during your time as a dean: criticizing, even belittling them, in
public. Did it work?
A: It worked in a
limited sense. My response was, look, higher education administrators go hat
in hand ... they're always in a begging or petitionary posture, and that
just doesn't work. People don't in fact respond well to that, and I found
what they did respond well to was confrontation of an aggressive kind.... If
you say to state legislators, "You guys don't know what you're talking
about! What if I came to your offices and told you within five minutes and
without having any experience ... what it is you should be doing, you'd
throw me out, laughing me out of the room." Well that's what we should be
doing.... "What do you know about 18th-century French poetry? ..."
If you embarrass people
... if you make them afraid of you, you are in a better position than you
are if you go to them on your knees. [S]econd, which might seem
contradictory ... is that most people who are not in or of the academy are
fascinated by it. On the one hand they disdain it in part because they
believe the academy disdains them. But on the other hand they would like to
be initiated into [its] pleasures.
Q: From your chapter on
administration, it seems that in many ways the perspectives of both a
faculty member and an administrator can be at odds.
A: There's a great
deal of faculty bashing in my book, especially on that point. But I think
that university administration is a wonderful, wonderful activity and in
fact when I used to go to conferences of administrators ... the word that
was most used by those fellow deans or provosts or chancellors or presidents
to describe what it is we did ... "it's fun." That might surprise a lot of
faculty members, I suspect it would.
Q: As a veteran of the
canon battles between proponents of French "theory" and the traditionalists,
do you think the outcome has had an impact on the public debate about
politics in academe?
A: I think academia
is very fundamentally different.... I'm old enough to remember when there
were three TV networks, NBC, ABC and CBS. That meant that everybody watched
the same thing.... But of course now there are all kinds of television
networks and semi-networks and so forth, and everything is diffused. The
same thing has happened in the curriculum, at least in the social sciences
and the humanities, so that whereas it used to be the case that the same set
of texts in relation to relatively the same set of questions was taught
everywhere in more or less the same way, now there's an explosion, a
tremendous variety. Much less of a mechanism of exclusion.... That's a huge
and important change.
And I think in the end, or
actually the middle, the theorists won. They won partly because of the
statistics of age and death, that is, the new people who were coming into
the departments had all been trained in and excited by [theory] and they
trained another generation of students.
I believe that to be a
beneficial change even though I also believe ... that a lot of people made a
mistake when they politicized theory and thought that the lessons of theory
could be immediately translated into an agenda that could be actively
pursued in the classroom. [T]heory's rise has contributed to the
politicization of some classrooms in higher education today. So it's a mixed
blessing.
Q: Any parting thoughts
on the book as a whole?
A: [I'd like to]
rehearse for your readers the three-part mantra which organizes the book: Do
your job, don't try to do someone else's job and don't let anyone else do
your job. And I think that if we as instructors ... would adhere to that
mantra, we would be more responsible in the prosecution of our task and less
vulnerable to the criticisms of those who would want to either undermine or
control us.
You can read more about political correctness in academe and AAUP policy
on the matter at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
From the Scout Report on October 2, 2009
VLC Media Player 1.0.2 ---
http://www.videolan.org/
VLC Media Player just came out of its beta release,
and users looking for an open source media player will want to give the
program a try. Visitors can use the program to play just about any media
file, and they can use the frame-by-frame advancement feature or the
live-recording feature as they see fit. The player is fairly simple to use,
and it works with a wide range of video and audio formats. This version is
compatible with computers running Mac OS 10.5 and newer.
Feed Demon 3.0 ---
http://www.newsgator.com/
So you want to stay up to date with news from the
Boston Globe and the New Orleans Times-Picayune and 75 other news outlets as
well? Feed Demon 3.0 can make it happen. This recently released edition of
the popular RSS news aggregator syncs effectively with Google Reader, and it
makes it easy to update your subscriptions and share items with others.
Visitors should also note the application's compatibility with Twitter feed
reading and tagging features. This version is compatible with computers
running Windows 95 and newer.
Some policy groups believe that using mobile phones as an economic
development tool may be a viable idea A special report on telecoms in
emerging markets: Mobile marvels
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14483896
Communication and Human Development: The Freedom Connection [Quick Time]
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/09/idrc
Mobile Phones for Microfinance [pdf] http://www.cgap.org/p/site/c/template.rc/1.9.2737/
Developing Telecoms: Development Agenda
http://www.developingtelecoms.com/development-agenda/
Microcredit from Grameen Bank in Bangladesh: Phone Ladies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VZ9i8NrcsY
The Role of NSF's Support of Engineering in Enabling Technological
Innovation: Chapter 4: The Cellular Telephone
http://www.sri.com/policy/csted/reports/sandt/techin2/chp4.html
When cell phones were first introduced on the mass market, they were
considered a luxury item. At first, it was captains of industry and their
ilk that responded to the call of constant communication, and later it was
concerned parents, hip teenagers, and just about everyone else. In recent
years, a number of policy experts have expressed optimism about the role
that mobile phones can play in the developing world. This week, The
Economist released a special report on mobile phones in emerging markets,
and other media outlets, including the New York Times popular "Freakanomics"
weblog, have commented on this work. One of the first practical uses of
mobile phones as an economic development tool emerged in places like Uganda
and Bangladesh. Five years ago, a number of women were set up as "village
phone" operators. Essentially, they were selling phone calls to other
persons in their village. In some cases, ancillary businesses started up
around these tiny call centers. Today, the hope is that farmers can use the
phones to get updates on crop conditions and relevant weather matters, and
others can use the phones to transfer monies to needy relatives, and so on.
The first link will take readers to the series of special reports on
mobile phones from this past week's Economist. Here they will also find an
interview with Tom Standage (who composed the reports), along with a
videographic illustrating the benefits of mobile phones in the developing
world. The second link leads to a video of a panel discussion from the
Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The panel
members include Amartya Sen, Michael Spence, Yochai Benkler, and Clotilde
Fonseca. In their discussion they touch on the "explosion of mobile phone
use in the developing world", among other topics. The third link will take
users to a paper written by Gautam Ivatury and Mark Pickens of the
Consulting Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) on the ways in which mobile
phones can be used for financial services and microfinance. Moving along,
the fourth link leads to the Developing Telecoms' page on the "Development
Agenda". Here visitors can read news items related to this subject, and also
look through their white papers. The fifth link leads to a video clip about
the "phone ladies" in Bangladesh, courtesy of the International
Telecommunications Union. Finally, the last link leads to a fascinating
report on the history of the development of the cellular telephone from the
Center for Science, Technology, and Economic Development.
Sharing Professor of the Year
Susan V. Crosson at Santa Fe College is one of the most sharing professors in
all of accounting education.
Her extensive free videos are tremendous.
She’s operating out an expanded server at
http://dept.sfcollege.edu/business/susan.crosson/
Other free online videos and textbooks in various
disciplines (including accounting, economics, finance, and statistics) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Video: Learn the new (RSS) way to view the news you are most interested
in from your favorite news sites ---
www.commoncraft.com
has a “RSS in Plain English” video
This great link was forwarded by Mary Jo Sanz
[MSANZ@BENTLEY.EDU]
Also see Nanoscale ---
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/NR/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
National Science Foundation: Current Newsletter ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/newsletter/
Irish Architecture Foundation ---
http://www.architecturefoundation.ie/
"Mystery of fish mercury levels solved,"
by Helen Altonn, Star Bulletin, September 22, 2009 ---
http://www.starbulletin.com/news/20090922_Mystery_of_fish_mercury_levels_solved.html
Hawaii researchers have solved the puzzle
of why different species of fish in the ocean have different levels of
mercury, even though they are the same size.
"It has to do with where they are feeding
in the water column and what they're eating," said Anela Choy, University of
Hawaii-Manoa oceanography graduate student who does consulting work with the
seafood industry.
Choy led the study with Brian Popp, a UH
Department of Geology and Geophysics professor; Jeff Drazen, Department of
Oceanography associate professor; and John Kaneko, project director at
Pacific Management Resources, known as PacMar Inc.
Mercury is a natural trace element in the
environment that has never been associated with toxicity in Hawaii's ocean
fish, said Kaneko, whose research focuses on public health.
But methylmercury, an organic form of the
mineral converted by bacteria, can be toxic if eaten at high levels by
animals or people.
Kaneko said the new research supports
evidence that mercury in open-ocean fish is naturally occurring from
deep-ocean processes.
The researchers suspected from other work
that deeper-ocean animals and predatory fishes might have more mercury, and
studies of almost 200 fish collected from longline and recreational
fishermen confirmed that, Choy said.
Their findings were published in the Aug.
18 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Choy said they looked at mercury levels in
tissues of the fish and what was in their stomach when they were caught.
Large fish such as bigeye tuna and
swordfish that feed deeper in the ocean have higher mercury levels than
yellowfin tuna and mahimahi, which live in shallower water, the team found.
That is because they are feeding on fish, squid and shrimp with higher
mercury levels, Choy said.
Popp said what was surprising was the
difference between yellowfin and bigeye tuna. "The significance (of the
study) is there is more to it than simply the size and age of the fish," he
said. "There's an ecological cause to mercury content and the depth at which
they're feeding."
Kaneko said there is an assumption that
mercury in open-ocean fish is directly related to atmospheric mercury
emissions and pollution, but there is no evidence of that.
Studies done in 1971 and again in 1998 on
the amount of mercury in Hawaii yellowfin tuna showed no differences despite
a 26 percent increase in atmospheric mercury emissions, he said.
The researchers are not sure where mercury
enters the food web, Drazen said. "It makes sense that it enters down in
deep waters, but we haven't actually looked at mercury in plankton, for
instance, consumed by little fish and shrimp. We have to look at lower
levels of the food web."
Kaneko said there is substantial
scientific evidence that high levels of selenium in ocean fish counteract
toxic levels of mercury. Selenium, also a natural element, has antioxidant
functions and is known to bind to mercury, he said. "When those two elements
bind together, they're biologically inert.
"What we're finding, in some research
we're just finishing now, is it's the ratios of mercury to selenium that is
more important than the amount of mercury in fish," Kaneko added.
Choy said the research will be expanded
and include chemical techniques to see "who's eating who in the open ocean.
The fish that end up on our dinner table we don't really know too much about
now. It's important to understand their ecology and how they're connected."
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
Governing Sourcebook ---
http://sourcebook.governing.com/
Video: Learn the new (RSS) way to view the news you are most interested
in from your favorite news sites ---
www.commoncraft.com
has a “RSS in Plain English” video
This great link was forwarded by Mary Jo Sanz
[MSANZ@BENTLEY.EDU]
Also see Nanoscale ---
http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/NR/
A Course in Game Theory ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/a-course-in-game-theory-martin-j-osborne/
African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts ---
http://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/?queryID=61
Images of the Antislavery Movement in
Massachusetts ---
http://www.masshist.org/online/abolition.cfm
"Pornography and You," by Rebecca Hagelin, Townhall, September
22, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/RebeccaHagelin/2009/09/22/pornography_and_you
Doom and Gloom
Video From CNN: Julian Robertson Discusses The US Debt And Upcoming Inflation
Expectations ---
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/julian-robertson-discusses-us-debt-and-upcoming-inflation-expectations
Video: David Dreman Warns About 10-12% Inflation,
Simoleon Sense, August 5, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/videodavid-dreman-warns-about-10-12-inflation/
History & Policy ---
http://www.historyandpolicy.org/index.html
The Torture Archive ---
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torture_archive/index.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
The Torture Archive ---
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torture_archive/index.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
A Course in Game Theory ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/a-course-in-game-theory-martin-j-osborne/
The Mathematical Association of America: Podcast Center ---
http://www.maa.org/audio clips/podcast/podcast.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
LIFE (photos) in Israel in 1948 – Part 1 ---
http://benatlas.com/2009/07/life-in-israel-in-1948-part-1/
Make History: National September 11 Memorial & Museum ---
http://makehistory.national911memorial.org/
Irish Architecture Foundation ---
http://www.architecturefoundation.ie/
Amazing Facts About Israel (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxK6OwIpK5o
Escape Maps in WW II ---
http://www.mapforum.com/04/escape.htm#3
History & Policy ---
http://www.historyandpolicy.org/index.html
African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts ---
http://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/?queryID=61
Images of the Antislavery Movement in
Massachusetts ---
http://www.masshist.org/online/abolition.cfm
Blueprint America ---
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/
The Torture Archive ---
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torture_archive/index.htm
Food Timeline ---
http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html
University of Washington Digital Collections: Menus Collection
http://content.lib.washington.edu/menusweb/index.html
University of Wisconsin Digital Collections: Marinette County Local History
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/WI/subcollections/MarinetteLocHistAbout.html
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
September
24, 2009
September
26, 2009
September
28, 2009
September
29, 2009
September
30, 2009
October 1,
2009
October 2,
2009
A Dubious Honor: San Antonio ranks number 12 out of the top 100
"McAllen, Texas, Tops the Asthma and Allergy Foundation's 2009 List of Fall
Allergy Capitals," by Miranda Hitti, WebMD, October 2, 2009 ---
http://www.webmd.com/allergies/news/20091002/100-worst-cities-for-fall-allergies
- McAllen, Texas
- Wichita, Kan.
- Louisville, Ky.
- Oklahoma City
- Jackson, Miss.
- Dayton, Ohio
- Augusta, Ga.
- Tulsa, Okla.
- Knoxville, Tenn.
- Little Rock, Ark.
- Madison, Wis.
- San Antonio, TX
- Dallas
- New Orleans
- Baton Rouge, La.
- Charlotte, N.C.
- St. Louis
- Birmingham, Ala.
- El Paso, Texas
- Virginia Beach, Va.
- Memphis, Tenn.
- Chattanooga, Tenn.
- Des Moines, Iowa
- Austin, Texas
- Greensboro, N.C.
"A Brighter Future for Retinal Implants: Implants may be commonplace
in only a couple of years," by Duncan Graham-Rowe, MIT's Technology
Review, September 29, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23539/?nlid=2389
Forwarded by Paula
Did you ever wonder why there are no dead penguins on the ice in Antarctica -
where do they go?
Wonder no more!!! It is a known fact that the penguin is a very ritualistic
bird which lives an extremely ordered and complex life. The penguin is very
committed to its family and will mate for life, as well as maintaining a form of
compassionate contact with its offspring throughout its life. If a penguin is
found dead on the ice surface, other members of the family and social circle
have been known to dig holes in the ice, using their vestigial wings and beaks,
until the hole is deep enough for the dead bird to be rolled into and buried.
The male penguins then gather in a circle around the fresh grave and sing:
"Freeze a jolly good fellow."
Forwarded by Debbie Bowling
History Exam... Everyone over 40 should have a pretty easy time with this
exam.
If you are under 40 you can claim a handicap.
Get paper & pencil & number from 1 to 20. Write the letter of each answer &
score at the end.
Then before you pass this test on, put your score in the subject line...Send
to friends so everyone can HAVE FUN!
1. In the 1940s where were automobile headlight dimmer switches located? a.
On the floor shift knob. b. On the floor board to the left of the clutch. c.
Next to the horn.
2. The bottle top of a Royal Crown Cola bottle had holes in it. For what was
it used? a. Capture lightning bugs. b. To sprinkle clothes before ironing. c.
Large salt shaker.
3. Why was having milk delivered a problem in northern winters? a. Cows got
cold and wouldn't produce milk. b. Ice on highways forced delivery by dog sled.
c. Milkmen left deliveries outside of front doors and milk would freeze
expanding and pushing up the cardboard bottle top.
4. What was the popular chewing gum named for a game of chance? a. Blackjack
b. Gin c. Craps
5. What method did women use to look as if they were wearing stockings when
none were available due to rationing during WW II. a. Suntan b. Leg painting c.
Wearing slacks
6. What postwar car turned automotive design on its ear when you couldn't
tell whether it was coming or going? a. Studebaker b. Nash Metro c. Tucker
7. Which was a popular candy when you were a kid? a . Strips of dried peanut
butter. b. Chocolate licorice bars. c. Wax coke-shaped bottles with colored
sugar water inside.
8. How was Butch wax used? a. To stiffen a flat-top haircut so it stood up.
b. To make floors shiny and prevent scuffing. c. On the wheels of roller skates
to prevent rust.
9. Before inline skates how did you keep your roller skates attached to your
shoes? a. With clamps tightened by a skate key. b. Woven straps that crossed the
foot. c. Long pieces of twine.
10. As a kid what was considered the best way to reach a decision? a.
Consider all the facts. b. Ask Mom. c. Eeny-meeny-miney-MO.
11. What was the most dreaded disease in the 1940s and 1950s? a. Smallpox b.
AIDS c. Polio
12. "I'll be down to get you in a ________, Honey" a. SUV b. Taxi c.
Streetcar
13.. What was the name of Caroline Kennedy's pony? a. Old Blue b. Paint c.
Macaroni
14. What was a Duck-and-Cover Drill? a . Part of the game of hide and seek.
b. What you did when your Mom called you in to do chores. c. Hiding under your
desk and covering your head with your arms in an A-bomb drill.
15. What was the name of the Indian Princess on the Howdy Doody show? a.
Princess Summerfallwinterspring b. Princess Sacajawea c. Princess Moonshadow
16. What did all the really savvy students do when mimeographed tests were
handed out in school? a. Immediately sniffed the purple ink as this was believed
to get you high. b. Made paper airplanes to see who could sail theirs out the
window. c. Wrote another pupil's name on the top to avoid their failure.
17. Why did your Mom shop in stores that gave Green Stamps with purchases? a.
To keep you out of mischief by licking the backs which tasted like bubble gum.
b. They could be put in special books and redeemed for various household items.
c. They were given to the kids to be used as stick-on tattoos..
18. Praise the Lord & pass the _________? a. Meatballs b. Dames c. Ammunition
19. What was the name of the singing group that made the song "Cabdriver" a
hit? a. The Ink Spots b. The Supremes c. The Esquires
20. Who left his heart in San Francisco ? a. Tony Bennett b. Xavier Cugat
c. George Gershwin -----------------------------
------------------------------
ANSWERS
1. (b) On the floor to the left of the clutch. Hand20controls popular in
Europe took till the late '60's to catch on.
2. (b) To sprinkle clothes before ironing. Who had a steam iron?
3. (c) Cold weather caused the milk to freeze and expand popping the bottle
top.
4 . (a) Blackjack Gum.
5. (b) Special makeup was applied followed by drawing a seam down the
back20of the leg with eyebrow pencil.
6. (a) 1946 Studebaker.
7. (c) Wax coke bottles containing super-sweet colored water.
8 (a) Wax for your flat top (butch) haircut.
9. (a) With clamps tightened by a skate key which you wore on a shoestring
around your neck.
10. (c) Eeny-meeny-miney-mo.
11. (c) Polio.. In beginning of August swimming pools were closed movies and
other public gathering places were closed to try to prevent spread of the
disease.
12. (b) Taxi . Better be ready by half-past eight!
13. (c) Macaroni.
14. (c) Hiding under your desk and covering your head with your arms in an
A-bomb drill.
15. (a) Princess Summerfallwinterspring. She was another puppet.
16. (a) Immediately sniffed the purple ink to get a high.
17. (b) Put in a special stamp book they could be traded for household items
at the Green Stamp store.
18. (c) Ammunition and we'll all be free.
19. (a) The widely famous 50's group The Inkspots.
20. (a) Tony Bennett and he sounds just as good today.
_______________________ SCORING:
17- 20 correct: You are older than dirt and obviously gifted with mental
abilities. Now if you could only find your glasses. Definitely someone who
should share your wisdom!
12 -16 correct: Not quite dirt yet but you're getting there.
0 -11 correct: You are not old enough to share the wisdom of your
experiences.
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
— Steve Foerster Nov 11, 05:52 PM
— Born to teach Nov 11, 06:03 PM