Our son Marshall lives in Lewiston, Maine
Below are some pictures he sent to us in 2005 while he still lived in Bangor
When I was on the faculty at the University of Maine we had a summer place on the ocean
On Union River Bay Near Acadia National Park

 


This is son Marshall with his old dad in Lone Rock, Iowa
Years ago this rock was found in a farm field, cut into two pieces, and moved to the small town of Lone Rock
It's a mystery how such a rock got onto Northern Iowa prairie that virtually has no large rocks

Prior to 1900, my grandparents gave a corner of their Seneca, Iowa Farm to Build the Blakjar Church
In 2002, after a decade or more of not having a congregation, the Church was moved to Lone Rock, Iowa
The cemetery where by grandparents are buried remains at the original church site

This is daughter Lisl with her old dad during a visit to Lone Rock

Lisl gave us two grandchildren. Her husband, Chuck Moody, is a microbiology professor.
She holds down two jobs as a high school biology teacher and a EMMC medical lab technician.
The picture below was taken at least six years ago where they live near the University of Maine
CJ is now years older in junior high school and Hilary is in her first year of college in Boston

Below are some pictures sent to me by Auntie Bev in Florida


Please send this one to Senator Boxer

 

Invisible Woman (video for inspiration) --- Click Here
Even if I were an atheist I would be inspired by this video. The reason I’m sharing this video with you is to make you feel good about what it is you do even if nobody seems to really appreciate your tireless efforts. If you think closely about it will inspire some of you to undertake research and/or scholarship on something that will not be appreciated at the time and may in fact never be fully appreciated. But you can “build a great cathedral”
Thank you Dr. Wolff.

Local Hero Bode Miller Ski Champion Video (great skiing on one ski) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__Faa87IQhk
World Cup Ski Champion Bode Miller grew up in poverty (not even running water) deep in the woods about three miles down the hill from our cottage --- where his father still owns a youth camp. Bode Learned to ski on nearby Cannon Mountain where his mother clerked for the ski operation .

My tribute to Bode (with pictures and a Time Magazine Cover) is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080331.htm
He's known as a fearless skier and a very fast racer who does not ski with the most finesse and has a reputation for crashing gates.

"Bode Miller is ready to get back to skiing," by Stephan Nasstrom, The Aspen Times, November 14, 2009 ---
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20091114/SPORTS/911149997/1011&parentprofile=1059

The two-time World Cup overall champion can hardly be considered a favorite this weekend at the circuit's northernmost venue. He has been off for nearly eight months and has been working out for only about four weeks

A year ago, Miller was second in the slalom opener on Levi's Black Course. His first slalom podium since 2004 proved to be his best result of the season. Last season, he failed to win a race for the first time in nearly 10 years.

Miller won the overall title in 2005 and 2008. He cut last season short and skipped the World Cup Finals in Sweden after failing to medal at the world championships — the third straight major championship at which he was unable to make the podium.

Despite his long layoff, the 32-year-old New Hampshire skier believes he can claim a third overall crown during this Olympic season.

"I think I always have a chance," he said last month in Austria before the World Cup giant slalom opener, an event he skipped. "I'm one of the few guys who skis all the events pretty well and that automatically gives me a chance."

For the second straight year, the U.S team undertook its final race preparations at Tarnaby in northern Sweden, the hometown of World Cup great Ingemar Stenmark. Tarnaby has similar light conditions to Levi.

Daylight hours this close to the Arctic Circle are between late morning and early afternoon, but the Americans were able to train at night under the lights at Tarnaby. At Levi, the lights are on for the second slalom run because it gets dark.

Defending overall champion Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway, a speed ski specialist who concentrates in events like the downhill and super-G, will not compete this weekend because of a bruised leg.

Lindsey Vonn notched her first-career slalom win at Levi last year and went on to win the overall title, and the downhill and super-G crowns. The American is hoping to do it again Saturday.

"It's crazy, I love Levi. I'm a downhill skier, not a slalom skier, but maybe things are changing a little bit," Vonn predicted following her win a year ago.

Racing conditions are expected to be near ideal but very cold — the temperature was 3 degrees late Friday. This small ski resort is hosting World Cup slaloms for the fourth time since 2006. About 20,000 fans are expected to see the races, organizers said.

Most will be cheering Tanja Poutiainen, the Finn who won the opening World Cup race last month, a giant slalom in Austria in which Vonn was ninth. Poutiainen is the defending World Cup GS champion, but also skis well in the slalom.

 

Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations Between November 26 and December 7, 2009
To Accompany the December 7, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091207Quotations.htm     

U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/

It is hard to understand how our Sugar Hill Cemetery raised its burial rates
And called it a cost of living adjustment.

I have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator (Obama) has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn't really believe a word that he is saying. He couldn't convey that health-care reform would be somehow cost-free because he knows it won't be. And he can't adequately convey either the imperatives or the military strategy of the war in Afghanistan because he doesn't really believe in it either. He feels colonized by mistakes of the past. He feels trapped by the hand that has been dealt him.
Leftist Leaning former The New Yorker Editor Tina Brown, "Obama's Fog War," The Daily Beast ---
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-03/what-is-obama-talking-about/
Jensen Comment
And President Obama was the dealer.

Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm

 

Tidbits on December 7, 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

Daily News Sites for Accountancy, Tax, Fraud, IFRS, XBRL, Accounting History, and More ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

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
 

 
I see from my house by the side of the road
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife,
But I turn not away from their smiles and tears,
Both parts of an infinite plan-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)

 

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 

 


On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm

Bob Jensen's blogs and various threads on many topics --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
       (Also scroll down to the table at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ )

Global Incident Map --- http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php

If you want to help our badly injured troops, please check out
Valour-IT: Voice-Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops  --- http://www.valour-it.blogspot.com/




Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI




Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Invisible Woman (video for inspiration) --- Click Here

ClimateGate Makes the Daily Show (Jon Stewart) --- Click Here
Also see http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/12/02/jon-stewart-climategate-poor-al-gore-global-warming-debunked-internet
See commentary at http://newsrealblog.com/2009/12/02/shocking-leftist-jon-stewart-talks-about-climategate/

Also watch videos of skeptics ---
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/78488007.html

President's Day --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/PresidentsDay9.wmv

Video
"Crawling on the Bottom." University of North Carolina accounting professor Mark Lang, CPA, analyzes results of the fourth quarter AICPA/UNC Kenan-Flagler Business & Industry Economic Outlook Survey, November 2009 -  
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/ 

Ethics-Challenged John Murtha on Principles of Democracy --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFqN2Kdib3w

Warren Buffett's Secrets To Success --- http://www.businessinsider.com/business-news/nov-24-alice1-2009-11 '

The Physics Classroom: Shockwave Physics Studios [Shockwave] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/shwave/

Center for History of Physics --- http://www.aip.org/history/index.html 

Video: Cambridge Physics: Past, Present and Future ---
http://www-outreach.phy.cam.ac.uk/camphys/

Monroe County Library System: Pathfinders  (American History)
http://www3.libraryweb.org/lh.aspx?id=947&ekmensel=c57dfa7b_12_150_btnlink

Only A Game [iTunes Sports Features] --- http://www.onlyagame.org/

Lincoln Memorial Interactive [Flash Player] http://www.nps.gov/featurecontent/ncr/linc/interactive/deploy/index.htm#/introduction 

Video:  President Obama lectures China on its shortcomings
The Best One Yet from Saturday Night Live --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZorJZ5ixOo


Free music downloads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Boston Symphony Orchestra Podcasts [iTunes] --- http://www.bso.org/bso/mods/toc_01_gen_noSubCat.jsp?id=bcat12650019

Traditional Irish Blessing --- http://www.e-water.net/viewflash.php?flash=irishblessing_en

Tiger by the Tail --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKwbDWJNKjI

President's Day --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/PresidentsDay9.wmv

I ran across this oldie in my Music links page ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm#Humor
Mark-to-market country song (dedicated to the FASB) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFPCztVle7k

Dvorak's Symphony For A 'New World' ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120698678

Horace Clarence Boyer had a profound impact on gospel music over the past 50 years. He rose to fame in the late 1950s as one half of the Boyer Brothers. He later embarked on an equally important career in music education, becoming one of the first scholars to formally study African-American sacred music.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120949810

The Lovell Sisters: Virtuoso Bluegrass --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120965786

Corb Lund: Boot-Kickin' Canadian CowboyListen Now ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120821984

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

Traditional Irish Blessing --- http://www.e-water.net/viewflash.php?flash=irishblessing_en

Princeton University Historical Postcard Collection ---
http://diglib.princeton.edu/xquery?_xq=getCollection&_xsl=collection&_pid=ac045-postcards

Hampton Dunn Postcards Collection ---
http://www.lib.usf.edu/public/index.cfm?Pg=HamptonDunnPostcardsCollection

Delaware Postcard Collection --- http://fletcher.lib.udel.edu/collections/dpc/indexm

Michelangelo --- http://www.michelangelo.com/buon/bio-index2.html

Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti [Flash Player] http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=16554# 

Michelangelo Slide Show --- Click Here 

China's Uygurs --- http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/uygurs/teague-text

The Civil War in America from The Illustrated London News http://beck.library.emory.edu/iln/index.html

Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs --- http://www.bl.uk/pointsofview/ 

The Becker College: Drawings of the American Civil War Era
http://idesweb.bc.edu/becker/

Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Lincoln Connection ---
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/artfulabe/

Dallas Museum of Art.TV --- http://www.dallasmuseumofart.tv/ 

The Hale Scrapbook (cartoon history) --- http://cartoons.osu.edu/hale/Hale.php

The Opper Project (editorial cartoons) --- http://hti.osu.edu/opper/index.cfm

University of Nebraska Libraries Digital Collections: Government Comics Collection --- 
http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/comics

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

The Digital Locke Project (John Locke) --- http://www.digitallockeproject.nl/ 

John Donne (metaphysics, poetry, philosophy) --- http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/

Monroe County Library System: Pathfinders  (American History)
http://www3.libraryweb.org/lh.aspx?id=947&ekmensel=c57dfa7b_12_150_btnlink

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

Lincoln Memorial Interactive [Flash Player]
http://www.nps.gov/featurecontent/ncr/linc/interactive/deploy/index.htm#/introduction

Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Lincoln Connection ---
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/artfulabe/

Journal of Issues in Collegiate Athletics --- http://csri-jiia.org/

Only A Game [iTunes Sports Features] --- http://www.onlyagame.org/

 

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 November 25 and December 7, 2009
To Accompany the December 7, 2009 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits091207Quotations.htm     

 

The road to wisdom? We’ll it’s plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
Simoleon Sense, December 1, 2009
http://www.simoleonsense.com/

"Why We Grow Large and then Grow Old: Biology, Economics and Mortality (not humor) ---
http://economics.uchicago.edu/download/wwgo.pdf

McJobs
An entire generation's prosperity vanishing, food stamp use exploding. Welcome to the jobless future. This month's jobs numbers drive home the point. The unemployment rate fell at the fastest rate for years — great news, right? Wrong. The vast majority of the gains — 75% — came from (wait for it) "temporary help services." See what just happened? We subtracted thousands of real jobs — and replaced them with low-value, no-future McJobs instead.

"Solve America's Employment Crisis With a Netflix Prize," Harvard Business School, December 4, 2009 ---
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/12/solve_americas_employment_cris.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Jensen Comment
I found it a bit ironic that included in the jobs creation statistics are the hundreds of construction workers temporarily employed in cities like Philadelphia constructing new or improved public housing like there's a real long-term improvement to economic recovery in this type of job creation.


I have come to the conclusion that the real reason this gifted communicator
(Obama) has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn't really believe a word that he is saying. He couldn't convey that health-care reform would be somehow cost-free because he knows it won't be. And he can't adequately convey either the imperatives or the military strategy of the war in Afghanistan because he doesn't really believe in it either. He feels colonized by mistakes of the past. He feels trapped by the hand that has been dealt him.
Leftist Leaning Tina Brown, "Obama's Fog War," The Daily Beast ---
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-03/what-is-obama-talking-about/
Jensen Comment
And he was the dealer.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel, Catch-22, over its whole history. Heller responds, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have: Enough.’ In summary, the best way to “get rich quick” is to be content with “enough.” What greater tragedy can there be than to chase something for one-half to two-thirds of a lifetime that may not be actually acquired by the means for which you have sacrificed?
Kent Thune --- The Greatest Deception in the History of Finance ---
http://valueinvestingworld.blogspot.com/2009/12/greatest-deception-in-history-of_02.html
Related book: Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

 

Some things just do get better with age
If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.
Epicurus

Should Mrs. Woods have used woods on Woods?
Golfer (Swedish Jesper Parnevik ) who introduced Tiger Woods to his wife says she should have used a driver, not a 3-iron
Joe Dwinell --- Click Here

Tiger by the Tail --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKwbDWJNKjI

"Copenhagen mayor to climate scientists: 'Be sustainable – don’t buy sex’," Washington Examiner, December 4, 2009 --- Click Here
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Copenhagen-mayor-to-climate-scientists-Be-sustainable--dont-buy-sex-78550572.html

Did he really mean don't buy sex when you can get it for free?
 
"Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex," by Politiken Staff , December 4, 2009 ---
 http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,665182,00.html

Video:  President Obama lectures China on its shortcomings
The Best One Yet from Saturday Night Live --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZorJZ5ixOo

The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn't statistically significant.
Note that the date of this email was July 5, 2005
Dr. Jones never imagined that his admissions would ever be made public in the 2009 Climategate
Phil Jones, Scientist Suspended in the Climategate Scandal for covering up evidence of planet cooling ---
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=544&filename=1120593115.txt

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there. The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre. In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century [go to the link to see the graphs; the fraud is astonishing] But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result [go to link above to see graphs]
"New Zealand Climate Scientists Faked Data, Too," Evolution News and Views, December 3, 2009 ---
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/12/new_zealand_climate_scientists.html

Here is the text of Newsweek’s 1975 story on the trend toward global cooling. It may look foolish today, but in fact world temperatures had been falling since about 1940. It was around 1979 that they reversed direction and resumed the general rise that had begun in the 1880s, bringing us today back to around 1940 levels. A PDF of the original is available here. A fine short history of warming and cooling scares has recently been produced. It is available here.
Newsweek Magazine, April 28, 1975 ---
http://denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm

Video:  ClimateGate Makes the Daily Show (Jon Stewart) --- Click Here
Also see http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/12/02/jon-stewart-climategate-poor-al-gore-global-warming-debunked-internet
See commentary at http://newsrealblog.com/2009/12/02/shocking-leftist-jon-stewart-talks-about-climategate/ Also see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VRBWLpYCPY


The Loser's Curse: Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft

Cade Massey and Richard Thaler --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=697121

Abstract:     
A question of increasing interest to researchers in a variety of fields is whether the incentives and experience present in many real world settings mitigate judgment and decision-making biases. To investigate this question, we analyze the decision making of National Football League teams during their annual player draft. This is a domain in which incentives are exceedingly high and the opportunities for learning rich. It is also a domain in which multiple psychological factors suggest teams may overvalue the right to choose in the draft - non-regressive predictions, overconfidence, the winner's curse and false consensus all suggest a bias in this direction. Using archival data on draft-day trades, player performance and compensation, we compare the market value of draft picks with the historical value of drafted players. We find that top draft picks are overvalued in a manner that is inconsistent with rational expectations and efficient markets and consistent with psychological research.

Say that again? (not humor)
Russian Military Analysts are reporting to Prime Minister Putin that US President Barack Obama has issued orders to his Northern Command’s (USNORTHCOM) top leader, US Air Force General Gene Renuart, to “begin immediately” increasing his military forces to 1 million troops by January 30, 2010, in what these reports warn is an expected outbreak of civil war within the United States before the end of winter.
Freedom Fighter, November 28, 2009 --- http://freedomfighterradio.net/?p=12655

Jordan has sent several hundred troops from its special operations forces to help the Saudi military with its many Shi'ite units contain the Yemeni Shi'ite rebellion, which has spread deep into the Arab kingdom. Western intelligence sources said Jordan's King Abdullah sent the SOF units to Saudi Arabia in November 2009. The sources said the Jordanian king was acting on an urgent request from his Saudi counterpart for elite soldiers who could hunt for Iranian-backed Shi'ite rebels in both Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen. "The Saudis are in a panic mode and don't have the troops or capabilities to stop the Yemeni Shi'ites," an intelligence source said.
"Saudis 'in a panic mode' as Shi'ite rebels move North from Yemen," World Tribune, December 4, 2009 ---
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2009/me_jordan0940_12_04.asp

 




Especially noteworthy to me since Elizabeth Winkler is a former student in my Trinity University days.
This article also links to a video featuring Elizabeth who is now a Research Associate at UT Austin
"Follow the Tweets By monitoring comments on Twitter, companies can predict where next week's sales are heading," by Huaxia Rulandrew, Andrew Whinston, and Elizabeth Winkler, The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2009 --- Click Here  
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574391102221959582.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

There's a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores.

It's Twitter.

Social-media sites such as Twitter have made it increasingly easy to find out what consumers think and want without the limitations and bias associated with older market-research tools such as surveys and focus groups. With Twitter, users broadcast what they are doing or thinking via "tweets," short messages of 140 characters or less. People can "tweet" about anything at any time—from the long lines at the grocery store to a great sale at the mall to a new restaurant or movie—which allows for word-of-mouth to spread at astonishing speed. Anyone can follow a user's messages, and tweets are easily searchable using keywords.

We believe executives can make accurate predictions about sales trends by analyzing tweets that mention their products or services, and we have created a model based on Twitter's keyword-search function to help them do that.

What's the Buzz? Imagine a company is releasing a new product into the marketplace and has spent a lot of money on advertising to create a "buzz." Our model would allow the company to track the buzz, determine whether the overall opinion is positive or negative and focus on specific areas of the country. The company could track the progression of tweets during and after the product's launch to determine whether there are shifts in opinion, giving the company a chance to react quickly if there is a problem.

What's more, if executives notice a sudden surge of tweets in New York City, signaling that people will go out and buy their product over the weekend, they may want to make sure stores in the area have enough stock. Inversely, if they notice that the buzz about the product is dying out, they may decide to put the product on sale, eliminate inventory and come up with something new.

Movie Tweets vs. Receipts To test our model, we conducted a study in which we used Twitter to predict box-office receipts on given dates for three movies that came out on the same day: "Land of the Lost," "My Life in Ruins" and "The Hangover."

We began by searching Twitter's message stream for tweets containing the names of the movies before, during and after their release on May 5. Keyword searches can get tricky if the name of the product or service contains a word common in conversation, so it is important to monitor results carefully to ensure the right tweets are being collected.

We stored tweets mentioning the movies in a database, along with the time the tweet was sent and the user ID number of the person who tweeted it. The tweets were sorted into three categories: positive word-of-mouth, negative word-of-mouth and neutral, which usually indicated someone was forwarding information such as a link to the movie's trailer or to a review.

There are some challenges inherent in collecting and sorting tweets in "real time," or as they are being sent. Twitter returns only the most recent 1,500 tweets for each keyword-search query, so if there is a sudden surge of tweets containing your keywords, you could miss some messages. To prevent that from happening, we used about 20 servers to collect the data. Each server ran our search at different times throughout the day, and stored the results in one central database.

Observing Patterns Twitter's advanced-search feature is capable of identifying tweets as either positive or negative, though its methodology isn't exactly scientific. Twitter determines whether a tweet has a positive or negative attitude based on "emoticons," signified by the symbols :-) or :-(. If a tweet contains a happy face, it is classified as positive, whereas a sad face denotes negativity. Our methodology is a bit more complex. We carefully selected keywords to define whether the tweet had a positive or negative attitude toward the movie.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Apart from the comments above about Elizabeth, I might note that computer scientist Andy Whinston who, after many years, left Purdue University and joined the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. Andy Whinston in the past has teamed up with our Andy Bailey in AIS research and publications.
Andy Whinston --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Whinston

Andy Bailey has been many places and done many things, including directing the accounting programs at Arizona and Illinois before becoming Deputy Chief Accountant at the SEC ---
http://www.accountingnet.com/x47791.xml

Andy let me post a long (Andy never could be concise) January 31 letter to Arthur Levitt, Jr. and Don Nicolaisen ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bailey2008.htm

Andy is now retired in Arizona, but he still works (I think) on special projects for Grant Thornton. I gave Andy his first faculty job at the University of Maine, and then I promptly abandoned him for two of my post-doctoral think tank years at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on the Stanford Campus. Andy eventually moved on and did very well in various universities, including Queensland in Australia (where he loved the life but not the pay).

Andy is also a former President of the American Accounting Association.

Bob Jensen's threads on social networking and Twitter are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

October 30, 2009 reply from Julie Smith David on the AAA Commons

This is a great article, Bob!

And here's the question for everyone - should auditors now be "listening" to the web to identify issues that an organization may face... potential law suits, warranty claim amounts, A/R doubtful accounts?

If so, are we teaching our students enough about Twitter?  And the rest of the social media suite of tools?

Julie

 


"Swimming in Data? Three Benefits of Visualization," by John Siviokla, Harvard Business School December 4, 2009 ---
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/sviokla/2009/12/swimming_in_data_three_benefit.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Bob Jensen's threads on multivariate data visualization are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm


Expert Wine Tasters versus Coin Flips
"A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion:  They pour, sip and, with passion and snobbery, glorify or doom wines. But studies say the wine-rating system is badly flawed. How the experts fare against a coin toss," by Leonard Mlodinow, The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703683804574533840282653628.html 

Acting on an informant's tip, in June 1973, French tax inspectors barged into the offices of the 155-year-old Cruse et Fils Frères wine shippers. Eighteen men were eventually prosecuted by the French government, accused, among other things, of passing off humble wines from the Languedoc region as the noble and five-times-as-costly wine of Bordeaux. During the trial it came out that the Bordeaux wine merchants regularly defrauded foreigners. One vat of wine considered extremely inferior, for example, was labeled "Salable as Beaujolais to Americans.

It was in this climate that in the 1970s a lawyer-turned-wine-critic named Robert M. Parker Jr. decided to aid consumers by assigning wines a grade on a 100-point scale. Today, critics like Mr. Parker exert enormous influence. The medals won at the 29 major U.S. wine competitions medals are considered so influential that wineries spend well over $1 million each year in entry fees. According to a 2001 study of Bordeaux wines, a one-point bump in Robert Parker's wine ratings averages equates to a 7% increase in price, and the price difference can be much greater at the high end.

Given the high price of wine and the enormous number of choices, a system in which industry experts comb through the forest of wines, judge them, and offer consumers the meaningful shortcut of medals and ratings makes sense.

But what if the successive judgments of the same wine, by the same wine expert, vary so widely that the ratings and medals on which wines base their reputations are merely a powerful illusion? That is the conclusion reached in two recent papers in the Journal of Wine Economics.

Both articles were authored by the same man, a unique blend of winemaker, scientist and statistician. The unlikely revolutionary is a soft-spoken fellow named Robert Hodgson, a retired professor who taught statistics at Humboldt State University. Since 1976, Mr. Hodgson has also been the proprietor of Fieldbrook Winery, a small operation that puts out about 10 wines each year, selling 1,500 cases

A few years ago, Mr. Hodgson began wondering how wines, such as his own, can win a gold medal at one competition, and "end up in the pooper" at others. He decided to take a course in wine judging, and met G.M "Pooch" Pucilowski, chief judge at the California State Fair wine competition, North America's oldest and most prestigious. Mr. Hodgson joined the Wine Competition's advisory board, and eventually "begged" to run a controlled scientific study of the tastings, conducted in the same manner as the real-world tastings. The board agreed, but expected the results to be kept confidential.

There is a rich history of scientific research questioning whether wine experts can really make the fine taste distinctions they claim. For example, a 1996 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that even flavor-trained professionals cannot reliably identify more than three or four components in a mixture, although wine critics regularly report tasting six or more. There are eight in this description, from The Wine News, as quoted on wine.com, of a Silverado Limited Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 that sells for more than $100 a bottle: "Dusty, chalky scents followed by mint, plum, tobacco and leather. Tasty cherry with smoky oak accents…" Another publication, The Wine Advocate, describes a wine as having "promising aromas of lavender, roasted herbs, blueberries, and black currants." What is striking about this pair of descriptions is that, although they are very different, they are descriptions of the same Cabernet. One taster lists eight flavors and scents, the other four, and not one of them coincide.

That wine critiques are peppered with such inconsistencies is exactly what the laboratory experiments would lead you to expect. In fact, about 20 years ago, when a Harvard psychologist asked an ensemble of experts to rank five wines on each of 12 characteristics—such as tannins, sweetness, and fruitiness—the experts agreed at a level significantly better than chance on only three of the 12.

Psychologists have also been skeptical of wine judgments because context and expectation influence the perception of taste. In a 1963 study at the University of California at Davis, researchers secretly added color to a dry white wine to simulate a sauterne, sherry, rosé, Bordeaux and burgundy, and then asked experts to rate the sweetness of the various wines. Their sweetness judgments reflected the type of wine they thought they were drinking. In France, a decade ago a wine researcher named Fréderic Brochet served 57 French wine experts two identical midrange Bordeaux wines, one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle, the other accommodated in the bottle of a cheap table wine. The gurus showed a significant preference for the Grand Cru bottle, employing adjectives like "excellent" more often for the Grand Cru, and "unbalanced," and "flat" more often for the table wine.

Provocative as they are, such studies have been easy for wine critics to dismiss. Some were small-scale and theoretical. Many were performed in artificial laboratory conditions, or failed to control important environmental factors. And none of the rigorous studies tested the actual wine experts whose judgments you see in magazines and marketing materials. But Mr. Hodgson's research was different.

In his first study, each year, for four years, Mr. Hodgson served actual panels of California State Fair Wine Competition judges—some 70 judges each year—about 100 wines over a two-day period. He employed the same blind tasting process as the actual competition. In Mr. Hodgson's study, however, every wine was presented to each judge three different times, each time drawn from the same bottle.

The results astonished Mr. Hodgson. The judges' wine ratings typically varied by ±4 points on a standard ratings scale running from 80 to 100. A wine rated 91 on one tasting would often be rated an 87 or 95 on the next. Some of the judges did much worse, and only about one in 10 regularly rated the same wine within a range of ±2 points.

Mr. Hodgson also found that the judges whose ratings were most consistent in any given year landed in the middle of the pack in other years, suggesting that their consistent performance that year had simply been due to chance.

Mr. Hodgson said he wrote up his findings each year and asked the board for permission to publish the results; each year, they said no. Finally, the board relented—according to Mr. Hodgson, on a close vote—and the study appeared in January in the Journal of Wine Economics.

"I'm happy we did the study," said Mr. Pucilowski, "though I'm not exactly happy with the results. We have the best judges, but maybe we humans are not as good as we say we are."

This September, Mr. Hodgson dropped his other bombshell. This time, from a private newsletter called The California Grapevine, he obtained the complete records of wine competitions, listing not only which wines won medals, but which did not. Mr. Hodgson told me that when he started playing with the data he "noticed that the probability that a wine which won a gold medal in one competition would win nothing in others was high." The medals seemed to be spread around at random, with each wine having about a 9% chance of winning a gold medal in any given competition.

To test that idea, Mr. Hodgson restricted his attention to wines entering a certain number of competitions, say five. Then he made a bar graph of the number of wines winning 0, 1, 2, etc. gold medals in those competitions. The graph was nearly identical to the one you'd get if you simply made five flips of a coin weighted to land on heads with a probability of 9%. The distribution of medals, he wrote, "mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be awarded by chance alone."

Mr. Hodgson's work was publicly dismissed as an absurdity by one wine expert, and "hogwash" by another. But among wine makers, the reaction was different. "I'm not surprised," said Bob Cabral, wine maker at critically acclaimed Williams-Selyem Winery in Sonoma County. In Mr. Cabral's view, wine ratings are influenced by uncontrolled factors such as the time of day, the number of hours since the taster last ate and the other wines in the lineup. He also says critics taste too many wines in too short a time. As a result, he says, "I would expect a taster's rating of the same wine to vary by at least three, four, five points from tasting to tasting."

Continued in article

"Luck Versus Skill in the Cross Section of Mutual Fund Returns," by Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French Dartmouth College," SSRN, November 1, 2009 --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1356021

The aggregate portfolio of U.S. equity mutual funds is close to the market portfolio, but the high costs of active management show up intact as lower returns to investors. Bootstrap simulations suggest that few funds produce benchmark adjusted expected returns sufficient to cover their costs. If we add back the costs in expense ratios, there is evidence of inferior and superior performance (non-zero true alpha) in the extreme tails of the cross section of mutual fund alpha estimates.

Alpha Coefficient --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(investment)

Bob Jensen's threads on the Efficient Market Hypothesis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#EMH

Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies in academe ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

Problems in rating vegetables ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews


Question
What other ways can I use my cool sunglasses with a built-in Camcorder?

Here are a few starting thoughts:

Unfortunately and truthfully, my wife's favorite cable TV channel is QVC ---
http://www.qvc.com/
QVC generally has high quality merchandise. Erika mostly buys clothes, gifts, and gadgets for me that I can never find on those rare occasions where a gadget might be useful.

Her latest purchase is four pairs of sunglasses with a built-in camcorder --- Click Here
She intends to give them away as gifts this holiday season.
Here is a site with a picture and the following description ---
http://nugossips.com/eagle-i-built-in-videoaudio-recording-camera-sunglass

Eagle-I Built-in Video/Audio Recording Camera
Sunglass is designed with polarized lenses that provide UV protection. The Eagle-I Camera Sunglass comes with built-in video camera to record video and audio content for up to three hours on the internal memory. The camera is positioned over the bridge of the nose for minimal visibility, while still providing a wide recording range. It is very easy to use, just push a button to start recording. A slot on the arm of the glasses allows you to input your own MicroSD memory card for more recording time up to eight hours with a 2GB MicroSD card, not included. QVC offers Eagle-I Built-in Video/Audio Recording Camera Sunglass for $79.20

Interestingly, the price above is stated as $79 whereas the QVC site has them with a crossed out $96 price that makes you think you're getting a special deal for $87. Erika falls for that every time. What's worse is that the QVC site also claims the "retail value" is $192. That's stimated the same way banks are now estimating the value of poisoned loan portfolios.

My cool sunglasses plug into a USB port for battery recharging and video downloading. Video playback works on either Quicktime software or my favorite free video software called VLC Media Player --- http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
My favorite would be Camtasia Producer if this software was not so limited with respect to what codecs it will play.

Here is my first and only video capture, to date, with my cool sunglasses ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/VideoCoolSunglasses/Vid0000.3gp

To be honest I would probably use my cool sunglasses more if they only captured still photos since it's a bit more convenient for me to put still photos on the Web, and readers of things like Tidbits probably prefer viewing pictures rather than having to download my home videos.

But now I'm watching each and every day for Lon to drive across my lawn and crash into a tree. Actually its more likely to be a partying golfer in a golf cart on Lon's golf course behind my back lawn. The Sunset Hill House golf course is owned and operated by Lon and Nancy Henderson. Fortunately, the golf course was placed into a New Hampshire Conservatancy so that it can never be developed into anything other than a golf course. The golfers are really friendly folks.

We have a son Mike in Yuba City, California who owns a pro shop. He sent me a sign that reads as follows:

"When I die bury my balls beside my old bag."  
(His mother doesn't care for that sign.)

I nailed the sign to the side of my barn so that golfers can read it while moving toward the third tee.
Erika has not yet discovered that I tacked it on the barn.

December 3,  2009 reply from Dennis Beresford [dberesfo@TERRY.UGA.EDU]

  • Bob,

    This cool new product reminds me of a GAAP issue of many years ago. I was in the national office of E&Y and we were discussing the amortization of film costs for one of the major movie studios. Those costs are amortized based on total expected revenue per film. At that time, domestic revenues were still the major part of a film's total expected gross, but foreign revenues were also quite large and sales to both broadcast and cable television were becoming larger. More importantly, video rentals were becoming a much larger source of revenue and the client in question was predicting that this would increase substantially in estimating future revenue. Our practice office auditors were naturally skeptical and asked for advice from "national." As we discussed this issue, I observed that if we had had the same conversation several years earlier we wouldn't have even thought of sales to broadcast television, much less video rentals, so perhaps it was reasonable to assume expanding sources of revenues. Then I went on to speculate that sometime in the future there could even be a product where individuals could watch movies on the backs of their glasses while commuting on trains into New York City, for example! It turns out that my prediction came true!

    Denny Beresford


    "Public Option Campus Revolt The federal student-loan takeover gets booed in academia," The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574572361244800246.html


    After booking a tour of Hollywood history you can also book a tour of gang history
    A group of civic activists, united by faith and a belief that the poor economy in the interior of Los Angeles is a social injustice, is preparing to offer bus tours of some of the grittiest pockets of the city, including decayed public housing, sites of deadly shootouts and streets ravaged by racial unrest. After a VIP preview last weekend, L.A. Gang Tours expects to open to the public in January, giving tourists a look at the cradle of the nation's gang culture -- the birthplace of many of the city's gangs, including Crips and Bloods, Florencia 13 and 18th Street. "This is ground zero for a lot of the bad in this city. It could be ground zero for a lot of the good too," said Alfred Lomas, a former Florencia member who has become a leading gang intervention worker in South Los Angeles and is spearheading the tours. "This is true community empowerment." . . .
    The concept appears to have no equal in L.A. -- for good reason, some might argue. It seems to echo, more than anything, the "slum tours" of such sites as India's Dharavi township and Rio de Janeiro's favelas. Those operations have been lauded as innovative economic tools and mechanisms for humanizing poverty -- and also attacked as exploitative and voyeuristic.

    "Giving tourists a look at gang culture," Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2009 ---
    http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-southla-tours5-2009dec05,0,6167426.story


    "This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises," by Carmen M. Reinhart, University of Maryland and NBER and Kenneth S. Rogoff, Harvard University and NBER, April 16, 2008 ---  http://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/51_This_Time_Is_Different.pdf

    This link was forwarded on December 3, 2009 by Scott Bonacker [lister@BONACKERS.COM]

  • Recently I received a copy of the new book "This Time is Different" by Reinhart and Rogoff as a gift. The paper of the same name that preceded it can be found here:

    http://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/51_This_Time_Is_Different.pdf

    Is anyone else here reading that?

    As I work my way through it, I am reminded of a commentator on national news reporting that "there is growing concern that employment won't pick up as soon as hoped." According to the book, it takes an average of 4.8 years for employment to return to previous levels.

    It's curious that there isn't more reporting on what people should really expect, as opposed to either feeding expectations that things will improve right away or scaring them into hoarding food and buying guns.

    Scott Bonacker CPA
    Springfield, MO

    Bob Jensen's threads on the financial crisis are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


    "Blood, Sweat, and Beers: Harvard Lampoon Pens Its First Parody Novel in 40 Years," by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 29, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/article/Blood-SweatBeers-/49288/ 

    It took Hollywood more than three years and $37-million to turn Stephenie Meyer's bloodsucking romance Twilight into a movie. It took the 12 members of the Harvard Lampoon three months, about 50 six-packs of beer, and 30 large cheese pizzas to turn it into a farce.

    Nightlight, which came out this month, is the social organization-cum-humor publication's first parody novel since Bored of the Rings 40 years ago.

    It's a simple story, really: Girl meets boy, girl blindly assumes boy is a vampire and therefore "unconditionally, irrevocably, impenetrably, heterogeneously, gynecologically, and disreputably wished he had kissed" her.

    In the book, Belle Goose (instead of Bella Swan) falls for Edwart Mullen (instead of Edward Cullen), thinking that his odd behavior is representative of the supernatural. Could it be, however, that Edwart acts strange not because he lusts for human blood but because he is a dweeb?

    Belle refuses to believe that Edwart is just poorly socialized. (He only "went through a biting stage for a while because, you know, he can't exactly hit back," her friend tells her.) And, to her defense, Edwart does order his blood sausage "easy on the sausage."

    The writers say their aim was not to tear down Twilight, but rather to poke gentle fun at the characters and the plot.

    "Isn't it weird how girls are 50 times more attracted to men with razor-sharp canines than soft, cuddly ones?" Belle ponders. "I mean, how is that evolutionarily beneficial?" A few pages later she tries to find out whether Edwart is a vampire by offering to sell him tooth sharpeners over the phone.

    "At first I had much more of an antagonistic attitude to Twilight, but in the end I found it was a really fun book, kind of my guilty pleasure," says one of the writers, Cora F. Frazier. "We ended up taking a much more playful attitude with it."

    Ms. Frazier and the Lampoon's president, Matthew K. Grzecki, say what they really wrote was a joke book.

    "It's not a line-by-line parody of the story," Mr. Grzecki says. "We just took all the vampire jokes we know, ranked them, and worked the best ones into the book around the plot that was already laid out for us."

    Many of the jokes seem to be written with 13-year-old boys in mind (for they are really the ones surrounded by rabid Twilight fans), but there is also plenty of room for Harvard erudition to shine through.

    For that, look no further than Belle's fear that an approaching vampire may not be familiar with Peter Singer's The Ethics of What We Eat, and her realization that she cannot be bitten because, as Zeno's paradox states, as long as he "kept moving towards [her] throat in half integrals, he could never reach it."

    Formed in 1876, the Lampoon has produced such talents as Conan O'Brien, John Updike, and George Plimpton, but no full-length parody novel since Douglas C. Kenney and Henry N. Beard took on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy in 1969. (Along with a fellow Harvard Lampoon editor, Robert K. Hoffman, the pair would subsequently found the influential humor magazine National Lampoon.) This year's staff had what would appear to be a more difficult task: working as a group of 12 rather than as a pair. Mr. Grzecki says that wasn't a problem.

    "We do everything together anyway, so we were really thinking with a hive mind," he says. The relative ease of the creative process allowed for the book to come out at a fortuitous time: Last month New Moon, the second movie in the Twilight series, hit theaters.

    Continued in article


    Questions
    Do pathetic (professor) plagiarists want to be caught?
    Are they playing a high-risk, borderline psychotic game in which they dare the world to catch them out and destroy them?

    These questions are raised but not answered UD at
    "PLAGIARISM, HIGH AND LOW," By UD, Inside Higher Ed, November 21, 2009 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university_diaries

    Jensen Comment
    In my opinion, most plagiarists are desperate for a publication or a speech and too hurried to even rewrite the material to better disguise the plagiarized ideas. Like many students, Ted Kennedy plagiarized to get a better grade in college. Martin Luther King plagiarized to complete a doctoral dissertation. Vladimir Putin plagiarized straight out of a well known management textbook for an in-your-face doctoral degree ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#Celebrities

    In one of the rare surveys conducted about plagiarism, two University of Alabama asked 1,200 of their colleagues if they believed their work had been stolen.  A startling 40 percent answered yes.
    Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood, "Professor Copycat," The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2004, Page A8.
    The number of articles in this particular issue of the Chronicle make it a must reference for anybody studying plagiarism by college faculty.

    In Germany and other parts of Europe, professors get credit for passages or even entire works written by their students citing the original author and, in most cases, without giving any form of credit whatsoever.  The work of the student, including that student's writing, is deemed the property of his or her professor.  Although this practice is not ver botten in Europe, it is considered unethical in North America.  But is does happen on this side of the globe and is sometimes not punished as heavily as plagiarism if the original writer is a student assistant.  
    See Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood, "Mentor vs. Protégé," The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2004, Page A14

    Professors Who Cheat ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize


    "Stop Insuring Mortgages:  The folly of government intervention in the housing market," by John Stossel, Reason Magazine, December 3, 2009 ---
    http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/03/stop-insuring-mortgages

    The Federal Housing Administration announced this week that it wants tougher rules on mortgage lenders. It's about time.

    Maybe FHA got spooked by the recent New York Times story titled "Easy Loans to Wealthier Areas," which said: "In its efforts to prop up a shattered housing market, the government is greatly extending its traditional support of real estate, including guaranteeing the mortgages of middle-class and even upper-class buyers against default."

    The Times explained that San Francisco, one of the priciest real estate markets in the country, had no government-insured mortgages two years ago, but now "the government is guaranteeing an average of six mortgages a week here. ... The Federal Housing Administration is underwriting loans at quadruple the rate of three years ago even as its reserves to cover defaults are dwindling."

    And some of those loans are surely questionable.

    The Times explains that 27-year-old Mike Rowland and his friends were able to buy a two-unit apartment building for almost a million dollars. "They had only a little cash to bring to the table but, with the federal government insuring the transaction, a large down payment was not necessary."

    "It was kind of crazy we could get this big a loan," Rowland said.

    Yes, it was crazy. Such policies do not end well. Young Rowland gets that. Even the Times does: "With government finances already under great strain, the policy expansions are creating new risks for American taxpayers."

    But our leaders plunge ahead, with your money. Has the administration forgotten that today's financial mess was precipitated in part by government's moves to encourage mortgage lending to unqualified or at best unproven borrowers? In the 1990s, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, concerned that blacks and Hispanics were "underserved," issued guidelines to banks stating: "Policies regarding applicants with no credit history or problem credit history should be reviewed. Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor...."

    Soon, the lower standards spilled into the prime-mortgage market. The risk to lenders seemed small because government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac happily bought the dubious loans. An entire financial edifice was built on these securitized mortgages and derivatives based on them.

    Then the good times ended. Interest rates rose. Home prices flattened and then declined. Then those AAA mortgage-backed securities became "toxic."

    After all that, it's crazy that government still subsidizes housing rather than letting the market work. The economy will recover from recession only when it is allowed to discover the real value of assets like houses. But the government refuses to allow this to happen. FHA has been blowing air into another bubble, while other agencies do everything they can to boost prices.

    This includes leaning on and bribing banks to ease mortgage terms for people in default. The Obama administration announced that it would increase that pressure because "the banks are not doing a good enough job," said Michael S. Barr, assistant treasury secretary for financial institutions. Some Democrats want to go further. They demand that the government compel mediation over defaulted mortgages or empower judges to change the terms.

    This sounds humane, but it is typical political shortsightedness. When government helps delinquent borrowers to get easier loan terms, it simultaneously makes it harder for marginal borrowers to get loans in the first place. That's because lenders must now factor in the likelihood of a judge changing the terms.

    The know-it-alls in Washington "help" Americans by hurting them.

    Why won't the government let housing prices seek their own level? After a Washington-inflated bubble, that would seem to be the wise thing to do. Sure, some people get hurt when prices fall, but others—prospective home-buyers—are helped. By artificially raising prices, the Realtor-Construction-Banking-Big Government Complex cheats honest low-income people who would otherwise have been able to afford a first home without begging the government for help.

    Bob Jensen's threads on the sub-prime frauds ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


    The two messages below provide some benchmarks for David Albrecht’s self-study (in process) of two weeks in his life as an accounting professor (at his new post) in Minnesota’s Concordia College near the Nord Dakota state line. Perhaps he will also reflect on aspects of changing colleges in terms of time spent teaching and preparing for class.

    Question
    How much time do you spend teaching, including preparation time?

    Jensen Comment
    I find "preparation time" to be a misleading and confounding variable in the equation. In a sense, some professors have spent a lifetime preparing for some classes. The amount of updating is also quite variable by discipline. For example, there may be very little updating for selected courses in classics, language, mathematics, statistics, and related courses for which the initial preparation may be years of study. But selected medicine, accounting, finance, business, law, and social science courses the updating time may be considerable due to the constant influx of new events that sometimes change the underlying content of what should be taught. Certainly in financial accounting the new standards and interpretations keep pumping out daily.

    There are also huge advantages in courses where where professors can teach on topics that they must also keep up on for their research. For example, research professors who teach doctoral seminars have some time savings relative to professors who must teach topics less related to their research such as when a history professor is doing research an obscure Italian monk in the 13th Century but is assigned to teach a section of world history since the Viet Nam War.

    Time spent teaching is also heavily influenced by the quality of available textbooks and supplemental teaching materials such as videos, cases, and course projects. I don't recommend it, but there truly are many instructors who teach straight out of the textbook. By "by straight out" I do not mean reading paragraphs aloud. But "straight out" can be almost entirely focused on solving (in class) the questions and problems at the end of each chapter with little or no inclusion of outside content not inside the chapter. This, however, is a pedagogy often preferred by risk-averse students because they can learn all of what they need to know from the textbook even though they missed it in class.

    Time spent teaching is also heavily influenced by other types of pedagogy. The BAM pedagogy of intermediate financial and managerial accounting entails virtually no lecturing or assigned textbook readings. Instead BAM has a year-long ambiguous case (full of lots of accounting errors) that is much like life on the job with pressures placed upon students to learn on their own as if they really were already practicing professionals. Yet the BAM pedagogy tends to burn out instructors much faster than traditional lecture and textbook courses. Sounds easier for instructors, but it's not really easier to refrain from teaching --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
    Yet from the grumbling and complaining student's standpoint it is a better way to learn in intermediate and advanced courses (not usually introductory courses).

    There is also the huge problem of intense time versus normal time. For example, sometimes there are periods of intense concentration that are far more efficient and effective than longer periods of "normal time" subject to interruptions (telephone, email, a knock on the door, a walk to the water cooler or coffee pot, etc.

    Often pressure leads to extremely productive intense times. When I first arrived for two years as a "Fellow" in a think tank we were warned by veterans not to be depressed if we were less productive than normal in spite of being in ideal "thinking" circumstances with no telephones, no desktop computers (in those days there were only main frame computers), and no students. What's missing in a think tank is the element of intense pressure to be productive at each moment of free time, because in a sense the entire day of every day is "free time." Two Nobel Prize winners who had nearby offices (one in genetics and another in physics) concluded after a time that they would never earned their Nobel Prizes if their entire careers were spent in the think tank.

    "For a Full-Time Lecturer, All in a Semester's Work," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 18, 2009 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/For-a-Full-Time-Lecturer-A/48850/

    Charitianne Williams is a senior lecturer in the English department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is paid about $30,000 (about $4,000 more than a lecturer, for supervisory and committee duties) to teach three English-composition courses each semester during the academic year. Here is her estimate of the time she spends, per course, for that money:

    Class time: 45 hours

    Prep time: 90 hours (two hours of preparation for every hour of class)

    Office hours: At least 48 (although only 32 are required)

    E-mail: At least 32 hours

    Grading: At least 110 hours (22 students whose assignments include five papers)

    Copying and scanning: 16 hours (about an hour each week)

    Program and department-type meetings: 5 hours

    Putting together syllabus: 10 hours per class (sometimes less)

    Total hours: About 356*

    *Plus extra hours on: Students who may need extra attention, reading and studying in her discipline, experimenting with a new syllabus, or attending conferences. (Illinois at Chicago gives $200 to defray expenses if lecturers present work at conferences, but not if they only attend.)

    November 29, 2009 reply from Robert V. Iosue ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/How-Much-Time-Do-Professors/49270/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    It was instructive to read Charitianne Williams's journal of a semester's efforts as a senior lecturer at the University of Illinois ("For a Full-Time Lecturer, All in a Semester's Work," The Chronicle, October 18). Let's just see what a typical high-school teacher does (although I must admit that no higher-education institution likes to be compared to our secondary system).

    Apples to apples, I doubled Ms. Williams's semester so we could compare the academic year of both college and high school. English Teacher A teachers three high-school classes of 85 minutes each for 185 days for a total of 786 hours. Two hours of prep for 185 days is 370. One hour per day of office hours is 185. Add 50 hours of e-mail. Two hours of grading for 185 days is 370. And 30 hours of incidentals. Grand total of 1,791 hours, compared with 712 hours for Ms. Williams.

    For Typical Teacher B, we have six classes for 50 minutes each, which comes to 925 hours for the academic year. Since the prep and grading and others are the same as Teacher A, the total for Teacher B is 1,930 hours.

    Both Teacher A and Teacher B make about $45,000 to $55,000, which is much more than Ms. Williams, but both have more than double the hours, and both have to deal with student bullying, disruptions, and rudeness.

    The important point is not so much this comparison but, rather, what are the full, associate, and assistant professors at the University of Illinois (and every other major university and college in the country) doing in the classroom? It might surprise many to learn that this entitled class spends little time teaching students. Wouldn't it be instructive to perform even a cursory review of professors' teaching time, as Ms. Williams has reviewed hers? Add to it other liberties not available to Ms. Williams, such as paid sabbaticals and reductions in teaching for individual reasons.

    Kudos to Ms. Williams for her efforts on behalf of students, and to our high-school teachers who prepare them. How about reversing the downward trend of our entitled professors?

    Robert V. Iosue
    President Emeritus
    York College of Pennsylvania York, Pa
    .

    December 1, 2009 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

    The series "Two Weeks in the Life of an Accounting Professor" (the word boring goes in there somewhere). You can access at my blog's front page: http://profalbrecht.wordpress.com . There's a link up top to a listing of all the stories.

    I've learned quite a bit from taking this journey. Perhaps the most important thing I've learned is that there is so much for me to do, being organized is absolutely essential. Personal organization isn't my strong suit. I think I am going to have to use some project management aids to help me get everything done. I'll reflect on lessons learned, later.

    However, to answer your questions.

    At 12:03 PM 12/1/2009, you wrote:

    These messages provide some benchmarks for David Albrecht’s self-study (in process) of two weeks in his life as an accounting professor (at his new post) in Minnesota’s Concordia College near the Nord Dakota state line. Perhaps he will also reflect on aspects of changing colleges in terms of time spent teaching and preparing for class.

    Question How much time do you spend teaching, including preparation time?

    Bob, this is my 31st year in the college classroom, so I'm hardly new at it. This semester, I'm teaching two classes that I've taught many times during my career. And it's accounting, right? What is so new that should cause me to need preparation time.

    (1) Switching from very large class sizes and 3-hour courses to very small class sizes and 4 hour classes has all of a sudden left me very exposed. Moving to small classes has led to me having to bring materials to class for students to work on in groups and I must do a better job of observing. Moving to 4-hour classes has forced me to expand what I do. I cover a few more topic, but everything is covered in more depth. I was unprepared for how well students would do on my tests and projects. I had tests and projects from Bowling Green that enough students had difficulty with that I had to offer do-over opportunities. At Concordia 2/3 of my the students do Solid A work on everything. It has left me wondering how much more they can do. So, the move has presented several problems from the perspective of instructional course design. I might have been a master teacher at my previous school, but I'm going to have my work cut out for me to adapt to Concordia. I wonder if I can make it here.

    (2) Another factor in preparation time is the conversion to digital. With CMS and Internet communications, students expect more material from professors. Traditionally, this took place in the form of lectures. Now, all lectures get transcribed to word-processed files. This doesn't happen overnight. Getting a semester's worth of lectures down on paper is like writing a book. It doesn't happen overnight. I work incrementally, each time through a course I add another file or two.

    (3) Financial accounting has changed, so has Managerial and Cost, the courses I teach. Also, the understanding of how to teach these courses has changed. This forces me to get prepared in ways I never had to before. For example, in Managerial Accounting, I apply more of a strategic perspective to the course. I start the course with discussions on mission, goals, strategies, and whether the company has decided to be a product leader, customer intimacy or operational excellence type company. I then add a seven-step value-chain. Then throughout the rest of the course, everything covered can be tied back to company model and/or the value chain. This is a much different approach to teaching Managerial Accounting than from what I did ten years ago. Textbooks are of little help, as they still provide just the traditional chapter orientations. So, I must do a lot of development of class activities. When doing CVP, HW problems can be cast in different contexts: product leadership, customer intimacy, or operational excellence. Of course, so can relevant costs/benefits. Instructional materials that take all these into account simply don't exist.

    Same thing in Intermediate Accounting. I shifted to more of a financial statement perspective (from a focus on specific SFAS). I must come up with new explanations, new HW problems and cases, new tests and papers. Good students like it and respond, which is perhaps why 18/32 are getting an A.

    In the final analysis, I'm spending 30-40 hours per week on teaching, and I'm unsatisfied with what I'm doing. I should go through more reinvention before I teach these classes again.

    This is at least a start of an answer.

    Dave Albrecht

     

    For those that can access the AAA Commons (lately I'm not even asked for a login or a password), there are some ideas for time management provided by professors of accountancy ---
    http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/d9eeb9cd78

    Bob Jensen's threads on Tricks and Tools of the Trade ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on Asynchronous Learning ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on metacognitive learning ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm




    Iomega Prestige 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 34275 by Iomega Buy new: $170.99, Used $98.95
    Amazon --- Click Here
    TB = Terabyte
    Thank you Orrallia!

    December 4, 2009 reply from Jim McKinney [jim@MCKINNEYCPA.COM]

  • I bought this a few days ago when it was only 109.99 1.5-terabyte external drive for $109.99 http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=A3098103&cs=04&c=us&l=en&dgc=BF&cid=7421&lid=197378&acd=10549103-552179-1071518-2-0-ARTICLE-0 


    Say that again?
    "Iranian-American Scholar Faces New Spying Charges," by Nazila Fathi, The New York Times, November 25, 2009 ---
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/world/middleeast/26iran.html?_r=1

    An academic who holds both American and Iranian citizenship and was already serving a 15-year prison sentence for spying against the Iranian government now faces additional charges, according to The New York Times. Kian Tajbakhsh told his wife that he was taken last week before a Tehran court, where a judge read new charges that accused him of "spying for the George Soros foundation," a reference to the Open Society Institute, a pro-democracy group founded by Mr. Soros, a prominent financier and philanthropist. Mr. Tajbakhsh, an urban planner with a doctorate from Columbia University, was arrested in June  after protests broke out over that month’s disputed presidential election, which the opposition says was fraudulent. He is in solitary confinement and suffering under “huge psychological and physical pressure,” according to the Times.

    Jensen Comment
    This is a bit ironic since most in Israel view Geroge Soros about as anti-Semitic as it can one can get short of violence.

    Also see "118 Days, 12 Hours, 54 Minutes," Newsweek Magazine Cover Story ---
    http://www.newsweek.com/id/223862


    "Creating Lives in the Classroom," by Edith Sheffer, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 22, 2009 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-Matters-Creating/49211/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


  • At the beginning of my course on German history at Stanford University last fall, each student drew an identity at random that he or she would keep throughout the quarter—creating a unique historical character who was born in 1900 and lived through Germany's tumultuous 20th century. Through weekly posts to individual pages on the course Web site, students researched the texture of everyday life, untangled pivotal events, and weighed questions of humanity. Although fictional, the lives that the students developed offered a unique entree into the past, stimulating their curiosity and critical thinking about history.

    Each student had one sentence to go on with his or her character's birthplace, gender, religion, and parents' occupations. Characters were born into all walks of life: the son of a prostitute in Berlin, the daughter of Jewish banker in Munich, the son of East Prussian nobility. The rest was up to students to decide. I gave weekly assignments to help structure their posts, requesting diary entries for key dates or eyewitness responses to certain events, and would note any historical inaccuracies in their writings. But I did not interfere with individual choices as to how the avatars would feel, live and act, placing just three restrictions on them: The characters could not die or be otherwise incapacitated, leave Germany permanently, or change the course of history.

    That open-endedness engendered a sense of ownership, fostering seriousness and self-correction. Students showed humility in their approach to the material; in the words of one senior, "I kept asking myself, Is this realistic?" Perhaps more than anything, the high standards of the class Web site helped sustain the quality of the work and a productive exchange of ideas.

    Over the quarter, the avatars lived through two world wars and the cold war, experiencing monarchy, democracy, fascism, and communism. They each saw Hitler at the Beer Hall Putsch and had to decide whether to vote for him a decade later. They were at the Berlin Wall when it went up in 1961 and came down in 1989. Building upon course readings, they had conversations with the writer Joseph Roth in Weimar Berlin, with the Holocaust perpetrators of Police Battalion 101, and with estranged family and friends on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. They witnessed and, in some cases, participated in the violence of Germany's 20th century, even as they lived at the pinnacle of Germany's cultural and economic achievements. The characters also reflected upon the meaning of it all as they met together at the close of the century.

    As the avatars became increasingly three-dimensional, the project resonated beyond the classroom. Students endowed them with personality quirks, discussed them with friends and family, and incorporated their own histories. One based his character's persecution and emigration from Nazi Germany on his own family's experience; another wrote his grandfather into his story. They also explored individual interests. A history major, prompted by election campaigning over Proposition 8 in California, had her character outed as gay in the Third Reich; she researched the treatment of homosexuals in Germany's successive regimes, integrating details like the number of gay bars in East and West Berlin into her weekly updates.

    Students sent their characters on divergent paths. Some plunged head long into radical events and ideologies; others "took the path of least resistance" and "just let history pass [them] by." Some characters' values and personalities stayed consistent; others took "fluctuating, elastic political positions." Some characters spent their whole lives in one place; others ranged far and wide—a colonist to Southwest Africa, Jewish émigrés to Britain and America (they had to return to Germany), a priest to counsel killers in Poland, a resisting factory worker to Auschwitz, and a POW to Siberia.

    The project inspired an unusual level of academic commitment. Students often went well beyond the required material in developing their avatars. Their research included Internet searches for images, period-appropriate children's names, and food specialties as well as reading scholarly works on particular topics of interest. They wrote an average of 1,120 words per post, equivalent to four and a half pages a week, in addition to their regular work. Most important, the students integrated all of the information into a coherent whole and uncovered their own historical lessons along the way.

    Students said they gained a greater appreciation for everyday complexities—how ordinary people adjusted to extraordinary times, and how adaptations propelled new social and political realities. Their simple vignettes expressed complicated ideas. One farm woman from Dachau supported but had visceral misgivings about the local concentration camp: "I dislike the communists as much as anyone else, but smelling [their ashes] on the wind turned my stomach." Students felt that they came to understand how history makes individuals and individuals make history. A sophomore reflected: "The project forced us to see the situation as much from within as a student can, years later and thousands of miles away. Oskar, to whom I grew attached, had a past, a family, thoughts, ideas. There were justifications for his actions that were intricately tied in with all of these, ones that I would never have considered without a specific persona in mind."

    The project also underscored how bound the characters' perceptions and opinions were to the circumstances of the moment—and how decisions made in one decade reverberate in the next. One character, an armaments-manufacturer-turned-democratic-leader, observed that "the only way to begin to make sense of the five very different Germanys I have lived in is to understand the malleable nature of the human mind and human society."

    Creating lives can be an effective way to develop individual interests within the bounds of a survey course, as a complement to traditional lectures, exams, and papers. Students commented that it provided a sense of freedom rare in their course work, allowing space for imagination, authorship, and identification. The personal narratives were more work than traditional weekly papers, yet students agreed it was a rewarding way to expand upon the standard approach. As one said, "It was more than worth it. It allowed us to fuse the course material with our own creativity and take away so much more than a typical survey of history."

    Although the experience involved a small group of motivated Stanford students, mostly history majors, the basic method can be adapted to different fields and classroom environments. The core concept—creating continuing lives within a Web-based community forum—could have broad appeal. In turn, the personal investment fosters enthusiasm and lasting learning.

    Edith Sheffer is an Andrew W. Mellon fellow in the humanities at Stanford University. Her book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain will be published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

    Jensen Comment
    It struck me that this might be a good way to teach the Enron/Andersen Scandal by letting assigning students to play the parts of David DuckIt, Carl BassFishing, Ken LayLie, Jeff StirFry, Andy FasToad, Bob JaedickeSleepAlot, and the rest ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm

    The Enron Home Video (in praise of HFA, Hypothetical Future Accounting at Enron)
    This is a home movie played by the real players, not actors
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/enron3.wmv

    Bob Jensen's threads on virtual worlds and Second Life ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife


    "Child porn cases take toll on investigators:  Job exposes team to images of abuse few can comprehend," Del Quentin Wilber, The Washington Post, December 1, 2009 --- Click Here

    D.C. police detective Timothy Palchak spends his days trawling the Internet for people willing to send him child pornography. It isn't easy work, pretending to be a pedophile. in online chats, instant messages and telephone calls, Palchak must enter the psyche of men he describes as "the scum of the Earth."

    He tells his targets that he molests children, even infants, and describes his deranged sexual desires. He feigns anxiety at being caught by police and expresses sympathy for a suspect's fetishes. Before long, Palchak is bombarded with vile photographs and videos, all depicting sexual abuse of children. The investigator scrutinizes the images to build his case and, he hopes, to rescue victims.

    Palchak is one of hundreds of police officers and FBI agents who are leading the federal government's war on child pornography, a priority of the Justice Department. The government's tactics have sparked intense debate. The plight of victims, who live with the knowledge that their abuse endures in cyberspace, has been well documented. But little attention has been focused on the toll such cases take on investigators, who loiter in the Internet's seediest places and are required to study images that are too graphic to describe in a newspaper. The abuse is so disturbing that investigators rarely talk about it, even with their families.

    "Those sounds -- the crying, the screaming on the videos, are embedded in your brain forever," said Palchak, 38, who has been investigating child pornography since 2005. "The screams are complete terror. They are bad. But you have to battle through it and listen to it. The eyes, they are just like death. There is just no life in those eyes."

    Experts say the job is one of the most arduous in law enforcement, and it has changed the agents and officers in profound and subtle ways. When they see children on the street, they wonder whether they are recognizing someone from a video or photo. They regularly run long distances to sweat away the images. They fret about Web cameras in the homes of relatives, thinking that nothing good comes from them. On commutes home, they cleanse their minds before embracing their children.

    Not everyone can handle the assignment. Local police and the FBI sometimes have difficulty filling slots on a task force of about 20 agents and officers that investigates child pornography for the bureau's Washington Field Office. Before joining, agents and officers are carefully screened. They must pass a battery of psychological assessments, which continue once they are on the job.

    Some investigators burn out. One agent cried during a presentation, and another left after investigating just one case. A prosecutor recalled how a stoic FBI agent broke down in tears after reviewing hundreds of brutal videos and images of children being raped. Prosecutors openly worry that their best investigators are running out of steam.

    Continued in article


    Taxpayers shell out for judges' frivolous expenses
    State judges are using taxpayer money to buy everything from spa trips to self-portraits to electronics, The Post has learned. On Nov. 1, New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman doubled the expense allowances for his judges to $10,000 a year each. But the special compensation -- which now costs $12.6 million annually and is intended to reimburse judges for work-related costs -- isn't always spent judiciously. Meditation retreats, framed photographs of themselves, and a $233 Apple iPod Touch are among the expense claims reimbursed this year by the New York Office of Court Administration, a Post analysis found.
    James Fanelli, "Reproach the Bench," New York Post, November 28, 2009 ---
    http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/reproach_the_bench_PrfXlzPRJwaMo3RF72IbXI

    Bob Jensen's threads on Fraud Updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


    "Did Harvard (and then President Larry Summers) Ignore Warnings on Harvard's Investments?" Inside Higher Ed, November 29, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/30/qt#214304

    Senior Harvard University officials -- especially then-president Lawrence Summers -- repeatedly ignored warnings that the university's investment strategies were placing far too much cash (needed for short-term spending) in risky investments, The Boston Globe reported. The placement of the cash in risky investments has been a key reason why Harvard, which even after investment losses is by far the wealthiest university in the world, has been forced to make many cuts in the last year; such cash reserves, had the advice been followed, would have been easily accessible. Summers declined to comment for the article, but a friend of his familiar with the Harvard investment strategy noted that conditions changed after Summers left the presidency and that the university had the time to change its strategy prior to last year's Wall Street collapse.

    Jensen Comment
    There were advanced warnings before the fall, especially those of Peter Schiff ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schiff
    But he missed the early timing and thus is still not a billionaire.
    Larry Summers resigned from Harvard in a clash with feminists and is now the chief economic advisor to President Obama.

    Video:  Peter Schiff was right 2006-2007 (CNBC edition) ---
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0YTY5TWtmU


    What caused the great depressions in stock market listings, especially new listings?
    Grant Thornton has a strong argument that the underlying reason for “The Great Depression in Listings” is not Sarbanes-Oxley, but what they call “The Great Delisting Machine,” an array of regulatory changes that were meant to advance low-cost trading, but have had the unintended consequence of stripping economic support for the value components (quality sell-side research, capital commitment and sales) that are needed to support markets, especially for smaller capitalization companies. GT cautions that today, capital formation in the U.S. is on life support. Within the venture capital universe, the average time from first venture investment to IPO has more than doubled.
    David Weild and Edward Kim, "A Wake Up Call for America," Grant Thornton LLC, November 2009 ---
    http://www.gt.com/staticfiles/GTCom/Public%20companies%20and%20capital%20markets/gt_wakeup_call_.pdf


    From the Scout Report on November 25, 2009

    Apple Safari 4.0.4 --- http://www.apple.com/safari/ 

    Not all web browsers are made equal, and this latest iteration of Safari makes that quite clear. This version includes the cover flow feature, which allows users to flip through their site history much like a photo album. Also, the top sites feature creates a preview of favorite websites that?s viewable as a grid. PC users will appreciate the fact that there's a native look and feel when using Safari. This version is compatible with computers running Windows Vista and XP or Mac OS X 10.5 and newer.  


    WeatherMate 3.4 --- http://www.ravib.com/wm/

    From Petaluma to Phnom Phem, WeatherMate 3.4 keeps track of the >weather, whether it is in the form of hail, rain, or clear skies. This tiny program includes a system tray icon which displays the temperature of the users' primary city, and users can add additional locations as well. Visitors can tweak the program to include seven-day forecasts and even a radar image. The weather details are updated from the Weather Channel and this version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer.

     


    Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance, economics, and statistics --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks


    Education Tutorials

    Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch


    Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

    The Physics Classroom: Shockwave Physics Studios [Shockwave] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/shwave/

    Center for History of Physics --- http://www.aip.org/history/index.html 

    Video: Cambridge Physics: Past, Present and Future ---
    http://www-outreach.phy.cam.ac.uk/camphys/

    NOAA's Aquarius [includes lesson plans] --- http://www.uncw.edu/aquarius/

    Ocean Flowers: Anna Atkins’s 19th Century Cyanotypes of British Algae --- Click Here

    Science of Sound in the Sea --- http://www.dosits.org/science/intro.htm  

    American Society of Limnology and Oceanography --- http://aslo.org/index.html

    MassTransitMag --- http://www.masstransitmag.com/

    Integrating U.S. Climate, Energy, and Transportation Policies --- http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/2009/RAND_CF256.pdf

    My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.
    Phil Jones, Head ("scientist") of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, November 24, 2009
    http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate
    Jensen Comment
    "colloquialisms frequently used" = "only publish outcomes consistent with funding and political goals"
    Or in other words "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don't mess with Mr. Inbetween."

    Climate Science Video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk&feature=player_embedded

    Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full.The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, "stolen" by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics. In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.
    Robert Mendick, "Climategate: University of East Anglia U-turn in climate change row Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full," London Telegraph, November 28, 2009 --- Click Here

    The Economist believes that global warming is a serious threat, and that the world needs to take steps to try to avert it. That is the job of the politicians. But we do not believe that climate change is a certainty. There are no certainties in science. Prevailing theories must be constantly tested against evidence, and refined, and more evidence collected, and the theories tested again. That is the job of the scientists. When they stop questioning orthodoxy, mankind will have given up the search for truth. The skeptics should not be silenced.
    "A Heated Debate," The Economist, November 25, 2009, Page 15 --- Click Here

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science


    Social Science and Economics Tutorials

    The National Security Archive: The Soviet Origins of Helmut Kohl's 10 Points ---  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB296/index.htm

    Journal of Issues in Collegiate Athletics --- http://csri-jiia.org/

    Only A Game [iTunes Sports Features] --- http://www.onlyagame.org/

    Human Security Gateway --- http://www.humansecuritygateway.info/index.php

    China's Uygurs --- http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/uygurs/teague-text

    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 National Security Archive: The Soviet Origins of Helmut Kohl's 10 Points ---  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB296/index.htm

    Human Security Gateway --- http://www.humansecuritygateway.info/index.php

    Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law


    Math Tutorials

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics


    History Tutorials

    The Civil War in America from The Illustrated London News http://beck.library.emory.edu/iln/index.html

    Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs ---
    http://www.bl.uk/pointsofview/  

    The Becker College: Drawings of the American Civil War Era
    http://idesweb.bc.edu/becker/

    Monroe County Library System: Pathfinders  (American History)
    http://www3.libraryweb.org/lh.aspx?id=947&ekmensel=c57dfa7b_12_150_btnlink

    Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Lincoln Connection ---
    http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/artfulabe/

    The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

    Lincoln Memorial Interactive [Flash Player] http://www.nps.gov/featurecontent/ncr/linc/interactive/deploy/index.htm#/introduction

    Michelangelo --- http://www.michelangelo.com/buon/bio-index2.html

    Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti [Flash Player] http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=16554# 

    Michelangelo Slide Show --- Click Here 

    Princeton University Historical Postcard Collection ---
    http://diglib.princeton.edu/xquery?_xq=getCollection&_xsl=collection&_pid=ac045-postcards

    China's Uygurs --- http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/uygurs/teague-text

    Princeton University Historical Postcard Collection ---
    http://diglib.princeton.edu/xquery?_xq=getCollection&_xsl=collection&_pid=ac045-postcards

    Hampton Dunn Postcards Collection ---
    http://www.lib.usf.edu/public/index.cfm?Pg=HamptonDunnPostcardsCollection

    Delaware Postcard Collection --- http://fletcher.lib.udel.edu/collections/dpc/indexm

    The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress --- http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/hurston

    The Hale Scrapbook (cartoon history) --- http://cartoons.osu.edu/hale/Hale.php

    The Opper Project (editorial cartoons) --- http://hti.osu.edu/opper/index.cfm

    Dallas Museum of Art.TV --- http://www.dallasmuseumofart.tv/ 

    Thanksgiving
    From the Scout Report on November 25, 2009

    In the realm of Pilgrim lore, legend, and history, Provincetown makes a bid for more recognition On this rock, a myth was built http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/11/22/an_animated_history_of_the_pilgrims_voyage/ 

    At Plimoth Plantation, feasting as the Pilgrims did http://www.philly.com/philly/travel/20091122_Getting_the_Pilgrim_Experience.html

    Plymouth Rock Foundation http://www.plymrock.org/ 

    US Census Press Releases: Thanksgiving [pdf]
    http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/014332.html  

    Plimoth Plantation http://www.plimoth.org/ 

    First "National Day of Mourning" http://massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=340

    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/


    Patients are having their eyes fitted with an artificial lens that allows them to see in high definition
    with an option to focus much like camera users focus their cameras

    "Op Lets People Upgrade Their Eyes To HD," by Thomas Moore, Sky News, December 3, 2009 --- Click Here

  • Surgeons begin the process by implanting the lens into the eye using the standard procedure for cataracts. Then, for the first time in Britain, they can fine-tune the focus of the lens several days later. The technique gives patients vision so sharp that it is even better than 20/20 - the best an adult can usually hope for.

    Bobby Qureshi, the first ophthalmic surgeon in the UK to use the lens, described it as "a hugely significant development". It can correct both cataracts and the long-sightedness that usually comes with age.

    The lens is made from a special light-sensitive silicone. By shining ultraviolet light on specific parts of the lens, surgeons can change its shape and curvature, sharpening the image seen by the patient. Mr Qureshi told Sky News: "We have the potential here to change patients' vision to how it was when they were young. "The change is so accurate that we can even make the lens bifocal or varifocal, so as well as giving them good vision at distance we can give them good vision for reading.

    "They won't need their glasses at all." The technique can overcome tiny defects in the eye that cause visual distortions. The lens can be adjusted several times over a period of days until patients have perfect vision. A final blast of light then permanently fixes the lenses' shape.

    Gill Balfour was one of the first patients to be fitted with the new lens at the Spire Gatwick Park Hospital. She had the first signs of cataracts and other vision problems.

    She said: "It's absolutely incredible. To think it's been tailor-made for you, matching any imperfections. It's the way forward, isn't it?"


  • Oh! Oh!
    "New Endoscope Sees What Lies Beneath," by Jennifer Chu, MIT's Technology Review, December 3, 2009 ---
    New Endoscope Sees What Lies Beneath




    Video:  President Obama lectures China on its shortcomings
    The Best One Yet from Saturday Night Live --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZorJZ5ixOo




    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

     

    Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social Networking ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

    Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.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

    Some Accounting History Sites

    Bob Jensen's Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
     

    Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
    The above libraries include international accounting history.
    The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

    MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

    Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
    http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

    Sage Accounting History --- http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269

    A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
    "The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
    Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm 

    A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

    From Texas A&M University
    Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

    Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

    History of Fraud in America --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
    Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.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