Tidbits on February 1, 2010
Bob Jensen
Mt. Washington is in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains
Its summit is the highest point in the Northeastern United States
There's a road and a summer cog railroad
leading up to Mt. Washington summit
The picture below at 5:45 am shows how temperatures vary with altitude on the
road
Our cottage is 1760 feet high and 28 miles from the summit
On January 29, 2010 it was -2 F degrees with wind winds over 40 mph at our cottage
On January 30, 2010 a rare thing happened at 5:30 a.m. before I took the picture
below
It was only -8.8 F on the summit of Mt. Washington and -15 F at our cottage
However, it was much colder on the summit with a wind chill of -45 F
Current weather report from Mount Washington ---
http://www.mountwashington.org/weather/
Winds often exceed 150 mph on the mountain and have reached 231 mph
History of Mt. Washington's High Winds ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071218.htm
I cannot see the skiers on Mt. Washington like I can on Cannon Mountain (only 10
miles away)
Below is a zoomed view of Mt. Washington
I must zoom my camera to get pictures like this 28 miles away
Bretton Woods and the big hotel are best known
in history for the Bretton Woods agreements that were hammered out when heads
of states met to rebuild the advanced economies of the world.
Preparing to rebuild the international economic system as World War II was still
raging, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount
Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire for the United Nations Monetary
and Financial Conference. The delegates deliberated upon and signed the Bretton
Woods Agreements during the first three weeks of July 1944 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
In the summer a cog railroad will chug you to
the top of the mountain, but you may be tossed around a bit and get soot on your
clothes from the steam engine. The ride is not for the faint of heart or people
with spine troubles.
We sometimes dine and even stay in the Mt Washington Hotel
I took this picture in the summer
A great slide show of the Mt. Washington Resort ---
http://www.mtwashington.com/
Mittersill is a small alpine village with a chair lift to the top of Cannon
Mountain
You can read more about the interesting history of Mittersill at
http://www.trinity.edu/%7Erjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070515.htm
This is our view of Lafayette, Lincoln, and
Cannon Mountains
The same view in summer
This is Echo Lake and Cannon Mountain in
another season
This is a sunset in the other direction
(west) taken from out bedroom
I can't recall if I took this picture in
Holland or in Germany
Erika, Mom, and Dad when we still lived in
San Antonio
When we lived in Texas my parents from Iowa
spent a month each year in Donna, Texas
Below is a picture of their very good Ethel and Howard Bring from a ranch near
Fargo
The dude on the right was headed for a New Year's Eve Dance
The picture below was forwarded by Bob Overn
(in Florida)
It's ready for a full load
The pictures below were forwarded to me by
Auntie Bev (in Ft. Lauderdale)
This photograph is from the John Edwards
collection
She might've been our First Lady
Our very close friends Patricia and Bob Every live about five miles down
the hill.
They have one son Daniel in the U.S. Coast Guard and another son David.
David is in the Merchant Marines but is now attending the
U.S. Naval War
College
David gave me permission to serve up a paper he wrote for one of his courses ---
"Killing Unarmed Civilians is Easy," by David P. Every ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DavidEvery-KillingUnarmedCiviliansIsEasy2.pdf
It's Not About the War, It's About the Warriors
Trace Adkins and the West Point Cadet Glee Club, USMA, ACM 2009 ---
http://media.causes.com/611645?p_id=44185871
Thank You America
(slide show) ---
Click Here
If I Die Before You
Wake ---
http://www.andiesisle.com/ifidiebeforeyouwake.html
Thank the
Military (slow loading video) ---
http://media.causes.com/576542?p_id=92681239
Another close
friend up here, Lon Henderson, asked be to pitch in to block the LLC tax in New
Hampshire.
I posted his explanation at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/HendersonTax01.pdf
His protest letter is at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/HendersonTax02.pdf
A Stop the LLC Tax Website ---
http://www.petition.fm/petitions/stopthellctax/0/26/
This tax is definitely dysfunctional to efforts to reducing unemployment.
How
Can We Help Haiti ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/01/15/fitzsimmons
Emergency Fund for Students From Haiti ---
http://www.iie.org//Content/NavigationMenu/Programs7/Haiti-EAS/Haiti-EAS.htm
Tidbits on February 1, 2010
Bob Jensen
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on February 1,
2010
To Accompany the February 1, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/tidbitsQuotations020110.htm
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
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
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
-
- 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
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
- With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting
Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
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
Museum of Animal Perspectives (videos) ---
http://www.sameasterson.com/
Power of Validation ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao&feature=player_embedded
Gladys complains to Ellen on the air
---
http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2007/ellen-gladys-hardy-p1.php
"How does broadcast journalism work?" (tongue in cheek humor, sort of) ---
http://www.brucecarton.com/how-does-broadcast-journalism-work
"Jared Diamond Explains Haiti’s
Enduring Poverty," Open Culture, January 21, 2010 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
http://www.openculture.com/2010/01/jared_diamond_explains_haitis_enduring_poverty.html
Available on MP3
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Whatever Happened to those Old Westerns? ---
http://oldfortyfives.com/thoseoldwesterns.htm
Pink Glove Dance for Breast Cancer Awareness ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEdVfyt-mLw
Exploratorium 40th Anniversary: Speaking of Music
Rewind Podcasts [iTunes]
http://www.exploratorium.edu/40th/podcasts.php
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
Amazing Mouth Art by Disabled Doug
Landis ---
http://www.mouthart.com/mouthart/
Ohio Roller Coaster ---
Click Here
50 Strange Buildings of the World ---
http://villageofjoy.com/50-strange-buildings-of-the-world/
Also see video ---
http://villageofjoy.com/50-strange-buildings-of-the-world/
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service: Birds, Birds, Birds ---
http://birds.fws.gov/
From the University of Pittsburgh
Birds of America (435 birds mounted online) ---
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/a/audubon/
Museum of Animal Perspectives (videos)
---
http://www.sameasterson.com/
African American History (photographs)
Documenting Our Past: The Teenie Harris Archive Project ---
http://www.cmoa.org/teenie/intro.asp
BlackPast: Remembered and Reclaimed (African American History)
---
http://www.blackpast.org/
Daphne Dare Collection (theatre costumes) ---
http://drc.ohiolink.edu/handle/2374.OX/30999
Stage Costumes ---
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/Costume/index.html
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
From the Scout Report on January 22, 2010
More than a century after his creation, Sherlock Holmes
faces a new set of challenges For the Heirs to Holmes, a Tangled Web [Free
registration may be required]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/books/19sherlock.html
British tourism hopes to cash in on Sherlock Holmes
http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/01/18/sherlock.holmes.tourism.london/?hpt=Sbin
The Official Web Site of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Literary Estate
http://www.sherlockholmesonline.org/
The Sherlock Holmes Museum of Baker Street
http://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk/
Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/
The Sherlock Holmes Society of London: Radio Programs
[iTunes]
http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk/world/radio.php
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 on February 1,
2010
To Accompany the February 1, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/tidbitsQuotations020110.htm
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
by Bob Jensen
Table of Contents
- Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and Statistics
- TAR versus AMR
- Introduction to Replication Commentaries
- TAR Versus JEC
- Accounting Research Versus Social Science Research
- Mathematical Analytics in Plato's Cave TAR Researchers Playing by
Themselves in an Isolated Dark Cave That the Sunlight Cannot Reach
- High Hopes Dashed for a Change in Policy of TAR Regarding Commentaries
on Previously Published Research
- Rejoinder from the Current Senior Editor of TAR, Steven J. Kachelmeier
- Conclusion and Recommendation for a Journal Named Supplemental
Commentaries and Replication Abstracts
- Appendix 1: Business Firms and Business School Teachers Largely Ignore
TAR Research Articles
- Appendix 2: Integrating Academic Research Into Undergraduate Accounting
Courses
- Appendix 3: Audit Pricing in the Real World
- Appendix 4: Replies from Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
"Deductive reasoning," Phil Johnson-Laird, Wiley Interscience,
,2009 ---
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123228371/PDFSTART?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
This article begins with an account of logic,
and of how logicians formulate formal rules of inference for the sentential
calculus, which hinges on analogs of negation and the connectives if, or,
and and. It considers the various ways in which computer scientists have
written programs to prove the validity of
inferences in this and other domains. Finally,
it outlines the principal psychological theories of how human reasoners
carry out deductions. 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. WIREs Cogn Sci 2010
1 8–1
50 Supposed Worst Movies Ever ---
http://www.empireonline.com/features/50-worst-movies-ever/
10) THE ROOM
(9) HIGHLANDER 2: THE QUICKENING
(8) THE HAPPENING
(7) SEX LIVES OF THE POTATO MEN
(6) HEAVEN'S GATE
(5) EPIC MOVIE
(4) RAISE THE TITANIC
(3) THE LOVE GURU
(2) BATTLEFIELD EARTH
(1) BATMAN AND ROBIN
Jensen Comment
I think the top 20 worst should be the ones that one Best Picture Oscars in the
past 20 years.
"Laptop Buying Guide," by Jason Cross, PC World via The
Washington Post, January 29, 2010 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/27/AR2010012705531.html?wpisrc=nl_pmtech
Question
Why does Bob Jensen devote so much time to messaging on a listservs and blogs
and the AAA Commons?
Answer
In truth there is a lot of altruism as found in the research of AECM subscribers
by Taylor and Murthy:
"Knowledge Sharing among Accounting Academics in an Electronic Network of
Practice," by Eileen Z. Taylor and Uday S. Murthy, Accounting Horizons
23 (2), 151 (2009) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm#ListServs
But it's common in altruism of all kinds that the giver strangely gets more
than he/she gives when the final scorer comes to write against our names.
I admit that when I give a lot to others on listservs and blogs that, besides
feeling good about helping others to learn, I probably receive more than I give
in return. First there is the learning that I receive searching for answers to
questions raised by others. They inspired be to do the search, and I'm more
knowledgeable for having tried to answer their queries.
Second, there are others on a listserv like the AECM who may also search and
share their answers, thus advancing my knowledge with almost no effort on my
part.
Third there are those who privately expand my knowledge even though they
prefer that I not share their messages with others. I had such a message
yesterday from a former executive partner in a Big Four firm who told me things
about his firm that I never knew before, but he asked that I not broadcast what
he confided. He would never have communicated with me if I had not pursued a
particular path in my public messaging on the AECM.
Fourth it is possible to greatly enhance a professional reputation by being a
blogger and a listserv messenger. I would never have known about Steve Hornik
(Professor Second Life), Rick Lillie (Professor Learning Tech), and Francine
Mckenna (with her stiletto heels in the backs of the Big Four) if these AECM
subscribers did not send out messages to the AECM. Since I'm retired and my
resume is too long for anybody to ever want to read, I'm not reputation
building. Denny Beresford and I are more interested in changing the world than
in building up our reputations and resumes.. But I don't want to play down the
fact that it's possible for younger folks to greatly enhance their reputations
by open sharing their scholarship.
Fifth it's wonderful to watch David Albrecht's scholarship mature in his blog
and messaging to the AECM. At one time David used to put himself down quite
often in messaging to the AECM. After he commenced to blog, I sense a renewal of
his scholarship, leadership, confidence, and enthusiasm. He's risen above being
a follower to becoming that of a leader in this academy. I also admire David
because, like Paul Williams and David Fordham and Richard Sansing, he's willing to
yell out that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
Don't forget that David Albrecht had some advice for a future blogger ---
http://profalbrecht.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/questions-from-a-future-blogger/
I have a lot more to say about advantages and disadvantages of being a
blogger and an active contributor to a listserv at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm#ListServs
I think Scott Rosenberg and Joshua Kim found what I found --- we would
probably blog if we only blogged to our dogs
"Online Education and Blogging," by Joshua Kim. Inside Higher Ed,
January 25, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning
A book that has a big impact on my thinking is
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters,
by Scott Rosenberg. Have you read it? One of
Rosenberg's main arguments is that a blog mostly benefits its author. People
who are able to blog consistently do so for internal motivational reasons,
rather than for extrinsic rewards. Writing a daily blog helps me sort
through all the information around learning technology that crosses my
screens. Any discussion that takes off around a particular blog post is a
wonderful bonus, I always learn more about the issue from reading comments
and other blogs, but the discussion is not the prime motivator. I'd blog if
my only audience was my dog.
Which brings me back to online learning and
blogging. My hypothesis is that people who enjoy online teaching and online
learning may also enjoy blogging. Teaching and learning in an online format
may be good preparation for blogging, or at least for practicing the art of
brief persuasive writing. On-ground and hybrid classes can also take
advantage of the collaborative LMS tools such as discussion boards and blogs
to provide students with opportunities to practice, and receive feedback on,
short persuasive writing. The advantages teaching online should not be
restricted only to online courses.
I don't want to pretend that there are not costs as well as benefits to
blogging and broadcasting on a listserv. I read fewer books from cover to cover
because of tradeoffs that I choose in terms of time devoted to deep scholarship.
I now spend a lot more time speed reading than deep reading. I'm a mile wide and
an inch deep on a lot of issues that I just don't have time to pursue in deep
scholarship.
Thirty years ago I spent a lot of time wandering the stacks of huge
university libraries. Now I take shortcuts to, gasp, Wikipedia and Google and
Bing and Simoleon Sense.
I also have some advantages over young bucks in this game. After over 40
years in some of my specialties where I used to teach (financial accounting,
statistics, and operations research) and 20 years in newer specialties
(education technology and learning), I can often recall things that the young
bucks never knew about the past. They weren't even born yet and never met people
face-to-face like Abe Briloff, David Solomons, Bill Cooper, and on and on.
I just want to thank all of you who contribute so much to me in private and
in public over the years, including but not limited to Paul Pacter, Denny
Beresford, Paul Williams, Jagdish Gangolly, Scott Bonacker, Amy Dunbar, Richard
Sansing, Pat Walters, David Albrecht, Will Yancey, Ed Scribner, and on and on.
And lately I want to thank Steve Kachelmeier who has taken time out his very
busy schedule to let me in on some things I did not know before. I often do not
agree with Steve but, unlike most current accountics researchers actively
publishing in TAR, JAR, JAE, and CAR, he's willing to go round and round with me in private messaging (most of which he will not allow me to quote for you
because he wants to more carefully word craft his public messaging).
Which leads me up to my last point in this message. Word crafting probably
does more bad than good in terms of scholarship. Our journal editors and
referees are absolutely paranoid about word crafting. The main reason I don't
write articles to submit is that there's just not enough years left in my life
to be wasted on how to word craft my ideas. When I have something I think I
would like to say, I just write it down as a first draft and hit the send
button. To hell with spending another two hours or two days or two months trying
to fancify it.
It 's very easy to revise Web documents time and time again long after they
were released to the public domain at my Web site. For example, at least 20
times in the past 10 days I've revised the document at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Some changes were requested by Steve Kachelmeier and some things were
added because I myself found new things to add.
If I wrote the above article to submit to The Accounting Review, it
would take me months to perfect it to where it might have a ghost of a chance of
being published. And if it was published it would be frozen in time. By having
the above paper at my Website, I can maybe add to and revise it 6,373 times
before I die. It's a living document rather than a dead fish in published in a
journal.
I plan to stick around for quite a few more years --- sorry Steve!
And I apologize to all of you for the many times I've written their when I
meant there, to when I meant too, etc. It probably comes as no surprise that I
despise proof reading.
- 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)
From the Author of "Dilbert"
"Giving Stuff Away on the Internet," by Scott Adams, The Wall
Street Journal, November 1, 2007; Page A19 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119388143439778613.html
I spend about a third of
my workday blogging. Thanks to the miracle of online advertising, that increases
my income by 1%. I balance that by hoping no one asks me why I do it.
As with most of my life
decisions, my impulse to blog was a puzzling little soup of miscellaneous causes
that bubbled and simmered until one day I noticed I was doing something. I
figured I needed a rationalization in case anyone asked. My rationalization for
blogging was especially hard to concoct. I was giving away my product for free
and hoping something good came of it.
I did have a few "artist"
reasons for blogging. After 18 years of writing "Dilbert" comics, I was itching
to slip the leash and just once write "turd" without getting an email from my
editor. It might not seem like a big deal to you, but when you aren't allowed to
write in the way you talk, it's like using the wrong end of the shovel to pick
up, for example, a turd.
Over time, I noticed
something unexpected and wonderful was happening with the blog. I had an army of
volunteer editors, and they never slept. The readers were changing the course of
my writing in real time. I would post my thoughts on a topic, and the masses
told me what they thought of the day's offering without holding anything back.
Often they'd correct my grammar or facts and I'd fix it in minutes. They were in
turns brutal and encouraging. They wanted more posts on some topics and less of
others. It was like the old marketing saying, "Your customers tell you what
business you're in."
At some point I realized
we were collectively writing a book, or at least the guts of one. I compiled the
most popular (mostly the funniest) posts and pitched it to a publisher. I got a
six-figure advance, and picked a title indirectly suggested by my legion of
accidental collaborators: "Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain!"
As part of the book deal,
my publisher asked me to delete the parts of my blog archive that would be
included in the book. The archives didn't get much traffic, so I didn't think
much about deleting them. This turned out to be a major blunder in the "how
people think" category.
A surprising number of my
readers were personally offended that I would remove material from the Internet
that had once been free, even after they read it. It was as if I had broken into
their homes and ripped the books off their shelves. They felt violated. And boy,
I heard about it.
Some left negative
reviews on Amazon.com to protest my crass commercialization. While no one has
given the book a bad review for its content, a full half of the people who
comment trash it for having once been free, as if that somehow mattered to the
people who only read books on paper. In the end, the bad feeling I caused by not
giving away my material for free forever will have a negative impact on book
sales.
I've had mixed results
with giving away content on the Internet. I was the first syndicated cartoonist
to offer a comic on the Internet without charge (www.dilbert.com). That gave a
huge boost to the newspaper sales and licensing. The ad income was good too.
Giving away the "Dilbert" comic for free continues to work well, although it
cannibalizes my reprint book sales to some extent, and a fast-growing percentage
of readers bypass the online ads with widgets, unauthorized RSS feeds and other
workarounds.
A few years ago I tried
an experiment where I put the entire text of my book, "God's Debris," on the
Internet for free, after sales of the hard copy and its sequel, "The Religion
War" slowed. My hope was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the
sequel. According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved
it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free.
For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my
work at zero. Oops.
So I've been watching
with great interest as the band "Radiohead" pursues its experiment with
pay-what-you-want downloads on the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has
inspired lots of people to pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet
that paying a few bucks now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer
similar deals. That's when the market value of music will approach zero.
That's my guess. Free is
more complicated than you'd think.
Mr. Adams is the creator of "Dilbert" and author
of "Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain!" (Portfolio, 2007).
January 26, 2010 reply from Francine McKenna
[retheauditors@GMAIL.COM]
What a great testament this is to
the power of the written word, to sharing, and to how our lives have changed
in the past year, five years, ten years, twenty years due to technology.
I was just telling a brother a
few minutes ago that three years ago, 2007, when I went to my first
Compliance Week Annual conference as "media", no one there admitted to
knowing what a blogger was, except the very supportive publisher Scott
Cohen. This past June, I shared the front row with dedicated bloggers and
Tweeters from the Compliance week publication as well as some others that I
had met along the way on line and was glad to finally meet in person. What
a difference even a few years has made.
I am grateful for the invitation
to share with this group and to learn from you.
One of my favorite poems sums up
how I feel when I dwell too much on this subject.
And Bob...No one wants you to
start writing you thank you notes for a good life just yet... :)
I Have Started to Say
by Phillip Larkin
I have started to say
“A quarter of a century”
Or “thirty years back”
About my own life.
It makes me breathless
It’s like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky.
All that’s left to happen
Is some deaths (my own included).
Their order, and their manner,
Remain to be learnt.
My Outstanding Educator Award Speech ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/AAAaward_files/AAAaward02.htm
Bob Jensen's threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Why smart people can be so stupid Or Rationality, Intelligence, and Levels
of Analysis in Cognitive Science:
Is Dysrationalia Possible?
The sure-thing principle is not the only rule of
rational thinking that humans have been shown to violate. A substantial research
literature–one comprising literally hundreds of empirical studies conducted over
nearly four decades–has firmly established that people’s responses often deviate
from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example,
people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they
test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utility theory, they
do not properly calibrate degrees of belief, they overproject their own opinions
onto others, they display illogical framing effects, they uneconomically honor
sunk costs, they allow prior knowledge to become implicated in deductive
reasoning, and they display numerous other information processing biases.
Keith E. Stanovich, In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Why smart people can be
so stupid (pp. 124-158). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
ISBN-13: 9780300101706, September 2009 ---
http://web.mac.com/kstanovich/iWeb/Site/Research on
Reasoning_files/Stanovich.Sternberg2002.pdf
Jensen Comment
And all of these real-world complications are usually brushed aside by
analytical accountics researchers, because real people mess up the mathematics.
The findings from the reasoning and decision making
literature and the many real-world examples of the consequences of
irrational thinking (e.g., Belsky & Gilovich, 1999; Gilovich, 1991;
Piattelli-Palmarini, 1994; Shermer, 1997; Sutherland, 1992; Thaler, 1992)
create a seeming paradox. The physicians using ineffective procedures, the
financial analysts making costly misjudgments, the retired professionals
managing their money poorly– none of these are unintelligent people. The
experimental literature is even more perplexing. Over 90% of the subjects in
the studies in the literature are university students–some from the most
selective institutions of higher learning in the world (Tversky & Shafir’s
subjects are from Stanford). Yet these are the very people who have provided
the data that indicate that a substantial proportion of people can sometimes
violates some of the most basic strictures of rational thought such as
transitivity or the sure-thing principle. It
appears that an awful lot of pretty smart people are doing some incredibly
dumb things. How are we to understand this
seeming contradiction.
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in
Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
January 25, 2010 reply from Paul Williams
[Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Bob,
Perhaps the problem isn't that humans are irrational -- we have, after all,
managed to survive and evolve for 2-3 million years. Perhaps the problem is
the imperious idea that "rational" means the calculative, expected value
maximizing reason of "rational decision theory." The most irrational among
us are those who proclaim that the way to be "rational" is to act as if
their theory of rational behavior is the correct one. Positive theory is so
presumptuous -- it is a rigidly normative normative theory.
Mind/body problem thinkers -- pretentiously
disinterested but really just passionately cold-blooded. The commitment to
modern finance theory and principal agent theory is certainly not based on a
dispassionate consideration of the evidence -- considering how feeble the
evidence is could only leave one skeptical, at best. The commitment is
emotional -- a visceral belief this is the way the world ought to be
(neoclassical economics is at its foundations utopian). Oh, the irony --
commitment to rational decision theory requires irrationality.
Principal/agent theory and Efficient Market theory
aren't new -- they have been present (perhaps) since the beginning. The
Enlightenment philosopher David Hume commenting on those of his
contemporaries who subscribed to the theory that persons pursue only their
individual private interests said: "What heart one must be possessed of who
professes such principles, and who feels no internal sentiment that belies
so pernicious a theory, it is easy to imagine; And also, what degree of
affection and benevolence he can bear to a species, whom he represents under
such odious colours, and supposes so little susceptible to gratitude or any
return of affection (David Hume, 1983, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals. Indianapolis, IN, Hacckett Publishing: page 88)." Indeed, it is
easy to imagine -- they can actually be observed in all of their
self-important glory every August in a selected city somewhere in the United
States.
Paul
Wow: 97% of Elementary NYC Public Students Get A or B Grades ---
There must be higher IQ in the water!
"City Schools May Get Fewer A’s," by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times,
January 28, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/education/30grades.html?hpw
Months after handing out A’s and B’s to 97 percent
of New York City elementary schools, education officials plan to change
their methods for grading the city’s public schools, making it harder to
receive high marks.
Under the proposed changes, schools would be
measured against one another, with those where students show the most
significant improvements getting the top grades. There would be set
grade-distribution guidelines, with 25 percent of schools receiving A’s, 30
percent B’s, 30 percent C’s, 10 percent D’s, and the bottom 5 percent of
schools getting F’s.
Currently, the progress reports measure
improvements, but an unlimited number of schools can receive high grades.
The Department of Education plans to hold several
sessions with principals on the proposed changes to get their views. In a
memo to principals, Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief accountability
officer, acknowledged Friday that the department’s “accountability tools
aren’t perfect,” and said that it would continue to do more to improve them.
“We want to be able to really show how much value a
school is actually adding,” he said in an interview.
While the department is responding to criticism
that the report cards rely too heavily on year-to-year changes on state
tests, the new process could be more confusing to parents. Rather than
simply measuring how many students improved on state exams, the new system
would use what researchers call a “growth percentile model.”
Students would be compared with others who scored
at the same level on the previous year’s test, and improvement would be
measured on a percentile basis. So a student who scored a 3 on the test in
the third grade and 3.7 in the fourth grade could be in the 95th percentile,
while a student who did not improve might be in the 35th percentile.
Mr. Polakow-Suransky said the department expected
to have several meetings with parents to explain the changes and would
revise the progress reports given to parents to make them easier to
understand.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United
Federation of Teachers, criticized the decision to reduce the number of
schools that receive top grades.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Must be tough getting an A in the fourth grade and an F on the uniform
achievement examination.
This does not seem to embarrass the United Federation of Teachers.
This is a little like those
universities (no names mentioned) that graduate accounting majors almost never
take and/or pass the CPA examination even though they had all A or B grades in
accounting.
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
January 30, 2010 reply from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]
Why are you surprised? NYC school system spends the
most money per student of any school district. Doesn’t high dollars per
student = high achievement? In California, we spend the highest dollars per
prisoner of any state, so we have the “best” prisoners. At least we have the
healthiest prisoners because we spend more dollars per prisoner for health
care than any other state.
Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
College of Business & Economics
|California State University,
Northridge 18111 Nordhoff ST Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f
Exacting Print Outs of Web Pages
David Albrecht wanted hard copies of some pages in his blog --- for example
see the page at
http://profalbrecht.wordpress.com/
As with most blogs and many other Web pages, the File, Print commands on a Web
browser does not generate the desired facsimile when printed.
David asked AECMers to suggest ways to get printed facsimiles of his Web pages.
The thread drifted a bit into screen capturing of video frames.
Capturing Web Pages and Other Windows Screen Images (including
scrollable images)
In particular note Shari Thompson's answer message
below.
January 27, 2010 message from Rick Lillie
[rlillie@CSUSB.EDU]
I use a relatively
simple screen capture program called "CaptureWizPro" by Pixelmetrics (
http://www.pixelmetrics.com/
) for capturing screen content. I like it much better than other capture
programs. I went to "The Summa" web page and used CaptureWizPro to capture
the web page and saved it in .pdf format. . . .
I
used the "auto scroll down" feature to capture the entire web page. I saved
the page as a .pdf file and clicked the option to "fit to page."
When you open the attached .pdf file, you may need to use the +/- option at
the top of the Adobe Acrobat screen to adjust the size of your blog page. I
was able to increase the page size to file most of the screen which made
your content very readable.
People have individual preferences for screen capture. Of all that I have
used, I CaptureWizPro the best. It makes capturing/printing/saving blog
pages very easy to do.
Want to take this
one step further? Try WebNotes (
http://www.webnotes.net/
). With WebNotes, you can annotate (highlighting and sticky notes) web
pages and .pdf documents. WebNotes is a Web 2.0, hosted service. I use it
to annotate web pages and .pdf documents that I include in my course
materials. WebNotes provides an easy way to guide students through
articles.
Hope this helps.
Rick Lillie, MAS, Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Email:
rlillie@csusb.edu
Telephone: (909) 537-5726
Skype (Username): ricklillie
January 28, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Rick,
This is very interesting software, I notice that there are some Websites
that offer free downloads, but I don’t trust those sites. I have already
ordered the professional version from PixelMetrics, but since I like to buy
software on a mailed CD it will be a couple of weeks before the CD is
delivered up here. I like a mailed CD because I can install the software on
multiple computers and do not have to be online for the installation. Also
if the vendor goes bankrupt I still have the installation CD.
Question 1 I just read where this will also capture video frames from
YouTube. Have you tried a YouTube screen capture?
Question 2 Have you tried to capture a picture of a Windows Media Player
screen of paused video using CaptureWizPro?
One of the most difficult things to capture perfectly is a Windows Media
Player screen. I’ve never had any luck using SnagIT with on Windows Media
Player screens. SnagIT captures what looks like an image, but you really
cannot save the image as a bmp or other picture file.
Thanks for telling us about the CaptureWizPro software.
Bob Jensen
PS: Some Blog Printing Considerations
The Problem of Frames in Blogs ---
http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/11/27/hp-blog-printing
Scrapbook Blogger ---
https://www.scrapbookblogger.com/
January 28 2010 reply from Rick Lillie
[rlillie@CSUSB.EDU]
Hi Bob,
About Question #1
The CaptureWizPro
does capture video. I saves files in a variety of formats. I have not
tried to capture a YouTube video file. When I include a YouTube video in my
course materials, I either include the URL link to the video or use the html
code to embed the Flash player in the web page.
Video and audio capture
Record screen activity and/or sound to AVI, WMV, or GIV movie files of
WAV audio files.
About Question #2
Yes, you can
capture screenshots from Windows Media Player. I've had the experience with
getting nothing but a black screen. Below is the explanation from
CaptureWizPro.
Rick Lillie
January 28, 2009 reply from Shari Thompson
[shari.thompson@PVPL.COM]
Hi David
I think a relatively hassle-free way would be to use Adobe Acrobat (either
Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Pro). Albeit somewhat more costly than other
software suggested, you can try Acrobat for free by downloading it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
I’ve found Acrobat to be the most convenient way to
quickly convert a document—in any software format—into a good quality pdf
that prints the way it displays. I use Acrobat almost daily at work. It
makes document distribution a heck of a lot easier.
Acrobat samples: • I converted a section of your
blog to an 8-pg pdf in about a minute (see “The Summa” pdf, attached)
Someone earlier mentioned want if you want just the
blog text without the ads in the margins. I know of a couple ways to do
this:
o One way: Start with the originally converted
pdf, and then use the crop tool to take off the right margin. Acrobat
displays a pop-up that visually shows how much of the actual image will
be cropped. (see “The Summa cropped ”)
o Or use the browsers print feature and select
“Adobe PDF” in place of your printer: Select “text only” from your
browser’s print button and choose “adobe PDF” as the printer. Adobe then
converts the selected text (and images, if selected) into a pdf. (see
“The Summa - just the text”)
Email or give me a call if you have any questions.
My employer paid $300 for it a few years ago, but looks like you could buy
it at academic pricing for $160:
http://www.adobe.com/education/purchasing/education_pricing.html
Shari Thompson CIA
Internal Auditing Manager
Professional Veterinary Products
Direct 402.829.5248 Fax 402.829.5322
www.pvpl.com
January 28, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Shari,
What a
great idea.
Thanks so
much.
Just to
make it easier for readers, I linked your facsimile
files as follows:
The software below looks interesting:
Scrapbook Blogger ---
https://www.scrapbookblogger.com/
Bob Jensen
January 28, 2010 reply from Richard Campbell
[campbell@RIO.EDU]
Bob: That limitation of file types is by design.
Some of the myriad of codecs out there are very bad actors, and Camtasia has
a filter to exclude potentially bad actors from causing harm to your system.
Indiscrimate use of codecs can cause fatal implications for your computer.
However there are programs out there that will
convert one file format to a format importable into Camtasia - the Nero
suite has one for example and
http://www.cucusoft.com/
has some more.
Richard J. Campbell
mailto:campbell@rio.edu
The Zero-Tuition
Online University of the People (now working on gaining accreditation) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_the_People
"Tuition-Free University Gains a Following: A
year since its formation, the online University of the People has attracted
several hundred students, a team of top academic advisers, and growing support
worldwide," by Alison Damast, Business Week, January 21, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jan2010/bs20100121_194827.htm?link_position=link1
One of the higher education world's boldest
experiments began in September when 180 students from nearly 50 countries around
the world logged on to their computers for their first day of school at the
University of the People. At first glance, the school has many of the trappings
of a modern university: a provost, department heads, even an admissions
committee. Yet there are glaring differences—namely, a the lack of a campus or
physical classroom and just a handful of paid staff—that set it apart from its
bricks-and-mortar counterparts.
Those are shortcomings the students, most of them
from developing countries and without the means to pay for college, are willing
to overlook, says Shai Reshef, an Israeli entrepreneur and founder of the
school, the world's first global tuition-free online university.
"Education has become so expensive that not that many
people can afford it, and in some parts of the world it just doesn't exist or
there isn't a big enough supply," says Reshef, who has more than two decades'
experience with Internet-based educational ventures and is chairman of
Cramster.com, an online study community. "This is exactly why the Internet was
invented. I thought: What can be done better with the Internet than helping
people get an online education for free?"
Backed by the U.N. It was just about a year ago that
Reshef made headlines in the distance learning community with his announcement
that he intended to start an online college program using open-source software
that would be free to students all over the world, one of just a handful of
tuition-free universities. The nonprofit venture, which he named University of
the People, attracted attention not only because of its tuition-free mission but
also because it had the backing of the U.N., a leadership team made up of
academics from top educational institutions like Columbia University and New
York University, and an innovative approach to distance education, with an
emphasis on peer-to-peer learning.
Today, the online university is fully operational,
with 300 students, a growing array of course offerings, and even a recently
announced research partnership with Yale University. The school is tapping into
a growing market: Nonprofit institutions account for 68% of the more the more
than 2 million students enrolled in online education, according to the latest
estimates from Eduventures, a higher education consulting firm.
There are still many trials ahead for the fledgling
university, which is struggling to make inroads in the competitive online global
education market. To stay afloat, the school will need to raise several million
dollars in startup costs this year and introduce new admission and application
testing fees, which could pose difficulties for students from developing
countries. But perhaps its greatest challenge—and the one its success will hinge
on—will be gaining accreditation, a step toward the school's goal of conferring
bachelor's degrees to students. This would also allow the school to carve out a
niche as a major player in a space that has so far been primarily dominated by
schools like the for-profit Apollo Group's (APOL) University of Phoenix and
Washington Post Co.'s (WPO) Kaplan University, both of which have broad online
degree offerings, says Roger C. Schonfeld, the manager of research at ITHAKA S+R,
a higher education strategy and research organization.
Business and Computer Science "What the University of
the People is offering to do is make education time- and space-neutral. They
have a lot of ingredients there to be successful, and they certainly have quite
a few superstars on their advisory board," Schonfeld says. Among them: a former
dean at INSEAD and the current U.S. Ambassador to Bangladesh. "I think that
their success from a business perspective may turn on their ability to become
accredited," Schonfeld notes. "With accreditation, they have a good chance of an
innovative model that might see some success."
For now, the school's academic offerings are limited.
Students can pursue an associate's-degree or bachelor's-degree track in business
or a bachelor's track in computer science. Those subject areas were chosen
because they are professions that "are in high demand and areas where students
will most likely be able to find a job," Reshef says. (A notice on the school's
Web site reads: "These programs may in the future lead towards undergraduate
degrees. However, no degrees will be granted until the university obtains proper
authorization from relevant authorities.")
Obtaining accreditation is a top priority for the
school, says Reshef, noting that the school is incorporated in Pasadena, Calif.,
making it easier for the school to work with American accreditation agencies.
"We intend to apply for accreditation as soon as we can," Reshef says, though he
declined to specify which accreditation body the school planned to work with.
The school's unaccredited status does not appear to
be a stumbling block for students like Deema Sultan, 27, who lives in Syria and
was among the first cohort of students to matriculate at the University of the
People this fall. She came across the school through a news story run on a
Syrian Web site last summer and immediately became intrigued. "I thought, "Oh,
this is a great idea, but I doubt it is true,"" says Sultan.
Her doubts were assuaged when she found the school's
Web site and saw that she met the eligibility requirements. Now in her second
semester, she is pursuing a business administration track. When not in school,
she helps run her family's textile business. She hopes her education will help
the business grow and help her become a more astute entrepreneur.
"This is a great opportunity for me because, even
though I'm working, I could not afford to study in Syria or the U.S.," says
Sultan, who takes classes from a computer in her parent's home or at Internet
cafés, when the family's connection is down. "I'm very impressed by it so far
and the level of education they are offering. I've been telling my friends all
about it."
The University of the People has not launched an
official marketing campaign, but word appears to be spreading quickly. In its
first two semesters, the school received 3,000 applications from all over the
world, the school says. Students enrolled in the current class range in age from
18 to 63; the vast majority have opted for the business program. To gain
admission, students have to submit a high school diploma, have Internet access,
be proficient in English, and be able to pass two mandatory courses in English
and computer skills. The school has so far attracted students from 70 countries,
including Afghanistan, Thailand, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Zambia, and expects to
enroll several hundred more students when its third semester begins in February,
Reshef says.
Peer-to-Peer Learning Admitted students are placed in
a class of 15 to 20 of their peers and given access to free online materials and
social networking tools. There are five semesters throughout the school year,
each lasting 10 weeks. The school is using Moodle, an open sourceware e-learning
software platform, to deliver lectures, reading material, homework assignments,
and tests to students, who work together in groups.
Every class is overseen by an instructor, but the
school's educational model is based on peer-to-peer learning, meaning that
students are expected to learn by interacting with their peers, posting and
responding to questions on lessons and reading in their online classrooms. If
students can't find the answer to a question through their classmates, they can
reach out for help to an online volunteer community of university professors,
graduate students, retired academics, and computer specialists.
The model appears to be working, the school says. A
survey of students conducted in November by the school indicated that 90% of the
class was satisfied with the classroom experience and would definitely or likely
recommend the school to peers and family.
Continued in article
University of the People ---
http://www.uopeople.org/
Course Catalogs ---
http://www.uopeople.org/ACADEMICS/CourseCatalog/tabid/197/Default.aspx
-
Business
Administration Course Catalog
-
Principles
of Business Management
-
Basic
Accounting
-
Microeconomics
-
Macroeconomics
-
Principles
of Marketing
-
E-Commerce
for Business Administration
-
Principles
of Finance 1
-
Personal
Finance
-
Financial
Accounting
-
Consumer
Behavior
-
Entrepreneurship 1
-
Managerial
Accounting
-
Business
Law 1
-
Business &
Society
-
Multinational Management
-
Entrepreneurship 2
-
Organizational Behavior
-
Business
Policy & Strategy
-
Computer
Science Course Catalog
-
General
Studies Course Catalog
Bob Jensen's threads on
online training and education alternatives ---
http://www.uopeople.org/ACADEMICS/tabid/194/Default.aspx
"Turnitin Begins Crackdown on Plagiarism in Admissions Essays," by
Louis Lavelle, Business Week, January 20, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2010/01/turnitin_begins.html?link_position=link5
For a long time, b-school applicants have had it
good. Submit an MBA application to Harvard, and who’s going to know if you
send the same one to Wharton? And Columbia? And Yale? Turn in an essay with
a few well-chosen words lifted from an online source, or a friend’s essay,
and who’s the wiser? Well, those days are over my friends. O-V-E-R, over.
Turnitin.com, the web site that professors have
been using for years to check student research papers for plagiarism, is now
turning it’s attention to admissions essays, with Turnitin for Admissions.
The new service, which was announced in December, checks admissions essays
submitted by participating schools against a massive database that contains
billions of pages of web content as well as more than 100 million student
works previously submitted to Turnitin and millions of pages of proprietary
content, including journals and books. It’s capable, the company says, of
flagging instances of “plagiarism, recycled submissions, duplicate
responses, purchased documents, and other violations of academic standards.”
No b-schools have signed up for the service yet,
but it seems only a matter of time. The service was started by popular
demand from colleges and universities, and b-school admissions directors are
as vocal as any in their complaints about duplicate essays and similar
problems.
And they don’t even know the half of it. Back in
2007, in anticipation of the new service, Turnitin undertook a study of
every single undergraduate admissions essay submitted over the course of a
year in a large (unnamed) English-speaking country, all told, about 453,000
“personal statements” received by more than 300 institutions of higher
education. About 200,000 of them were found to include text that matched
sources in the Turnitin database.
In all, more than a million matches were found (5
for each of the 200,000 essay). Half the matches were from online sources,
with 29% coming from student documents (research papers, etc.) and 20%
coming from other admissions documents. Turnitin’s conclusion: that 36% of
the matches it found were suspected plagiarism. Here’s an excerpt from the
Turnitin report:
Personal statements attached to university
applications should be the work of that applicant and help the university
know more about the perspective applicant. It is safe to assume that more
that 70,000 applicants that applied though this system did so with
statements that may not have been their own work. The number of Internet
sites that matched personal statement/essay providing services leads one to
question the additional 100,000 applicants whose personal statement
contained a significant match (they may have borrowed or purchased all or
part of their personal statement). The list of internet sites where most of
this poaching went on includes Wikipedia, the BBC, the Guardian newspaper,
as well as numerous sites designed specifically to help students with their
essays, including Peterson’s Essayedge.com. A few of the sites belonged to
admissions consultants, including Accepted.com and EssayEdge.com, and few
others, if you can believe this, actually belong to schools themselves,
including online writing labs at Purdue University and Ohio State.
I really don’t know where to begin. If the Turnitin
study is at all representative of the current state of college admissions,
it seems safe to assume that more than a few current MBAs, and quite a few
MBA alumni who have gone on to bigger and better things, started out their
academic lives committing the cardinal sin of the academy, and a serious
breach of ethics. If they stammered through the essays on their own, without
the benefit of cutting and pasting, would they have been admitted?
Impossible to say. Did not getting caught encourage them to go on to bigger
and better lies? Again, nobody knows.
I’m willing to entertain any opposing viewpoint
that makes a modicum of sense, but I’m not sure there is one. Is duplicating
your admissions essay okay? Is plagiarizing someone else’s work in an essay
ever permissable?
Continued in article
I wonder if admissions officers are puzzled when two or more essay
submissions look suspiciously alike?
"B-Schools Take on Essay Consultants," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside Higher
Ed, February 6, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/07/bschool
“Vault is collecting successful admissions essays
for top MBA programs, including Wharton — and will pay $40 for each main
essay (main personal statement greater than 500 words), and $15 for each
minor essay (secondary essay answering a specific question less than 500
words) that we accept for our admissions essay section.”
That message, recently sent out from a top company
that helps students get into business schools, is enough to irk even the
most experienced admissions officers at some the nation’s leading business
schools.
“Some of our admissions counselors have gotten
outraged,” says Thomas R. Caleel, director of MBA admissions at the Wharton
School at the University of Pennsylvania. “We want students to be giving
their real stories, not some ‘polished’ or even ‘over-polished’ versions of
themselves.”
“Essays have to be meaningful per person,” he adds.
“It might be helpful to see some successful essays, but in my mind, it might
also be limiting. Someone might read one [of the consultant-produced essays]
and think that their essays have to read the same way, in order to get in.”
Those sentiments are being expressed by an
increasing number of business school officials who say that students
shouldn’t have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to make themselves appear
different than who they really are. While some officials plan to go on the
offensive against firms that they find particularly egregious, others want
to work more closely with consultants. Still others say that there is little
they can do to prevent the phenomenon.
Deans at seven of the top American business schools
are expected to address such issues at an upcoming gathering, according to a
Monday report in The Boston Globe. In an effort to “remove the possibility
of outside interference,” Derrick Bolton, director of admissions at the
Stanford Graduate School of Business, told the paper that deans are
considering making students complete their essays under supervision,
providing different essays to students in the same applicant pool, and
conducting more interviews and follow-up with references.
While the proliferation of admissions consultants
of various sorts has frustrated officials in undergraduate admissions as
well, especially at elite institutions, the steps being considered by
business schools could amount to a much more aggressive stance against the
application-consulting industry.
“Part of getting the best candidates is for them to
be themselves during the admissions process,” says Caleel. “We really want
to get to know the real person who is applying.” Wharton’s business school
dean, Patrick Harker, is expected to be part of the group that will meet to
discuss consultant issues.
While Vault officials could not be reached for
comment on Monday, Alex Brown, a senior admissions counselor at ClearAdmit,
in Philadelphia, says that not all consulting firms function the same way.
“Some businesses are bad,” he says, “but the bulk of us, that’s not the way
we operate.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Fascinating History
"The Chess Master and the Computer," By Garry Kasparov, New York
Books, February 11, 2010 ---
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592
In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two
different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a
simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my
moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer
manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from
the electronics firm Saitek.
It illustrates the state of computer chess at the
time that it didn't come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect
32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment.
At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against
one of the "Kasparov" brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a
draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for
the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to
trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human
perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days
of man vs. machine chess.
Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the
supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its
efforts—and doubled Deep Blue's processing power—and I lost the rematch in
an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with
astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind's
submission before the almighty computer. ("The Brain's Last Stand" read the
Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that
humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power
that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world.
It was the specialists—the chess players and the
programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts—who had a more
nuanced appreciation of the result. Grandmasters had already begun to see
the implications of the existence of machines that could play—if only, at
this point, in a select few types of board configurations—with godlike
perfection. The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of
one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases
matching the mainstream media's hyperbole. The 2003 book Deep Blue by
Monty Newborn was blurbed as follows: "a rare, pivotal watershed beyond all
other triumphs: Orville Wright's first flight, NASA's landing on the
moon...."
The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and
the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their
predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a
machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that
thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition,
they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200
million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute
number-crunching force. As Igor Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks
pioneer, explained in his 2000 book, How to Build a Mind:
By the mid-1990s the number of people with some
experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than
in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a
great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the
human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.
It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a
human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was
only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not
that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.
My hopes for a return match with
Deep Blue were dashed, unfortunately. IBM had the publicity it wanted and
quickly shut down the project. Other chess computing projects around the
world also lost their sponsorship. Though I would have liked my chances in a
rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer
superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time.
Today, for $50 you can buy a home PC program that will crush most
grandmasters. In 2003, I played serious matches against two of these
programs running on commercially available multiprocessor servers—and, of
course, I was playing just one game at a time—and in both cases the score
ended in a tie with a win apiece and several draws.
Inevitable or not, no one understood all the
ramifications of having a super-grandmaster on your laptop, especially what
this would mean for professional chess. There were many doomsday scenarios
about people losing interest in chess with the rise of the machines,
especially after my loss to Deep Blue. Some replied to this with variations
on the theme of how we still hold footraces despite cars and bicycles going
much faster, a spurious analogy since cars do not help humans run faster
while chess computers undoubtedly have an effect on the quality of human
chess.
Another group postulated that the game would be
solved, i.e., a mathematically conclusive way for a computer to win from the
start would be found. (Or perhaps it would prove that a game of chess played
in the best possible way always ends in a draw.) Perhaps a real version of
HAL 9000 would simply announce move 1.e4, with checkmate in, say, 38,484
moves. These gloomy predictions have not come true, nor will they ever come
to pass. Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any
technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin,
checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work
of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable
program Chinook.
The number of legal chess positions is 1040,
the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have
attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the
few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book
Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking
eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there
are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used
by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the
number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the
casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can't solve this
ancient board game. They are also handy, and I am not above doing this
myself, for impressing people with how complicated chess is, if only in a
largely irrelevant mathematical way.
This astronomical scale is not at all irrelevant to
chess programmers. They've known from the beginning that solving the
game—creating a provably unbeatable program—was not possible with the
computer power available, and that effective shortcuts would have to be
found. In fact, the first chess program put into practice was designed by
legendary British mathematician Alan Turing in 1952, and he didn't even have
a computer! He processed the algorithm on pieces of paper and this "paper
machine" played a competent game.
Rasskin-Gutman covers this well-traveled territory
in a book that achieves its goal of being an overview of overviews, if
little else. The history of the study of brain function is covered in the
first chapter, tempting the reader to skip ahead. You might recall axons and
dendrites from high school biology class. We also learn about cholinergic
and aminergic systems and many other things that are not found by my
computer's artificially intelligent English spell-checking system—or
referenced again by the author. Then it's on to similarly concise, if
inconclusive, surveys of artificial intelligence, chess computers, and how
humans play chess.
There have been many unintended
consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of
powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so
it's no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and
computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became
possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of
need ing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by
way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies.
I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus
Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played.
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the
game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or
patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values
of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again.
(A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in
order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of
prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of
players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they
train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or
because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works
and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of
intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more
like computers.
The availability of millions of games at one's
fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and
younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves
used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000
hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book
Outliers. (Gladwell's earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more
creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in
Chess Metaphors.) Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can
accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess
information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to
retain it all. In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities
and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby
Fischer's 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was
broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the
current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest
title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is
among the world's best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he's no
Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough
above the rest of the chess world as well.
Excelling at chess has long been
considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect
assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be. But for the purposes of
argument and investigation, chess is, in Russkin-Gutman's words, "an
unparalleled laboratory, since both the learning process and the degree of
ability obtained can be objectified and quantified, providing an excellent
comparative framework on which to use rigorous analytical techniques."
Here I agree wholeheartedly, if for different
reasons. I am much more interested in using the chess laboratory to
illuminate the workings of the human mind, not the artificial mind. As I put
it in my 2007 book, How Life Imitates Chess, "Chess is a unique
cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human
mind and are then refined and improved by experience." Coincidentally the
section in which that phrase appears is titled "More than a metaphor." It
makes the case for using the decision-making process of chess as a model for
understanding and improving our decision-making everywhere else.
This is not to say that I am not interested in the
quest for intelligent machines. My many exhibitions with chess computers
stemmed from a desire to participate in this grand experiment. It was my
luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the
critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess
players. Before 1994 and after 2004 these duels held little interest. The
computers quickly went from too weak to too strong. But for a span of ten
years these contests were fascinating clashes between the computational
power of the machines (and, lest we forget, the human wisdom of their
programmers) and the intuition and knowledge of the grandmaster.
In what Rasskin-Gutman explains as Moravec's
Paradox, in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where
humans are weak, and vice versa. This gave me an idea for an experiment.
What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild
saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it
"Advanced Chess." Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of
his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of
chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.
Although I had prepared for the unusual format, my
match against the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov, until recently the world's
number one ranked player, was full of strange sensations. Having a computer
program available during play was as disturbing as it was exciting. And
being able to access a database of a few million games meant that we didn't
have to strain our memories nearly as much in the opening, whose
possibilities have been thoroughly catalogued over the years. But since we
both had equal access to the same database, the advantage still came down to
creating a new idea at some point.
Having a computer partner also meant never having
to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the
consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and
countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us,
we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time
on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these
conditions. Despite access to the "best of both worlds," my games with
Topalov were far from perfect. We were playing on the clock and had little
time to consult with our silicon assistants. Still, the results were
notable. A month earlier I had defeated the Bulgarian in a match of
"regular" rapid chess 4–0. Our advanced chess match ended in a 3–3 draw. My
advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.
This experiment goes unmentioned by Russkin-Gutman,
a major omission since it relates so closely to his subject. Even more
notable was how the advanced chess experiment continued. In 2005, the online
chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a "freestyle" chess
tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or
computers. Normally, "anti-cheating" algorithms are employed by online sites
to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with computer
assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ diagnostic
analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less "intelligent"
than the playing programs they detect.)
Lured by the substantial prize money, several
groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same
time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The
teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The
chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue,
was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human
strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was
overwhelming.
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event.
The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC
but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the
same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to
look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess
understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational
power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was
superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a
strong human + machine + inferior process.
Continued in article
"A Bold Opening for Chess Player," by Magnus Carlsen, Time Magazine,
January 11, 2010, Page 43 ---
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1950683,00.html
Vladimir Kramnik, former world chess
champion and current No. 4, is playing in the first round of the London
Chess Classic, the most competitive chess tournament to be played in the
U.K. capital in 25 years. Tall, handsome and expressionless, he looks
exactly as a man who has mastered a game of nearly infinite variation
should: like a high-end assassin. Today, however, he is getting methodically
and mercilessly crushed.
His opponent is a teenager who seems to be
having difficulty staying awake. Magnus Carlsen yawns, fidgets, slumps in
his chair. He gets up and wanders over to the other games, staring at the
boards like a curious toddler. Every now and then, he returns to his own
game and moves one of his pieces, inexorably building an attack so fierce
that by the 43rd move Kramnik sees the hopelessness of his position and
resigns.
Genius can appear anywhere, but the
origins of Carlsen's talent are particularly mysterious. In November,
Carlsen, then 18, became the youngest world No. 1 in the game's history. He
hails from Norway — a "small, poxy chess nation with almost no history of
success," as the English grand master Nigel Short sniffily describes it —
and unlike many chess prodigies who are full-time players by age 12, Carlsen
stayed in school until last year. His father Henrik, a soft-spoken engineer,
says he has spent more time urging his young son to complete his schoolwork
than to play chess. Even now, Henrik will interrupt Carlsen's chess studies
to drag him out for a family hike or museum trip. "I still have to pinch my
arm," Henrik says. "This certainly is not what we had in mind for Magnus."
Even pro chess players — a population
inured to demonstrations of extraordinary intellect — have been electrified
by Carlsen's rise. A grand master at 13 (the third youngest in history) and
a conqueror of top players at 15, he is often referred to as the Mozart of
chess for the seeming ease of his mastery. In September, he announced a
coaching contract with Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest player of all
time, who quit chess in 2005 to pursue a political career in Russia. "Before
he is done," Kasparov says, "Carlsen will have changed our ancient game
considerably."
In conversation, Carlsen offers only
subtle clues to his intelligence. His speech, like his chess, is technical,
grammatically flawless and logically irresistible. He dresses neatly but
shows a teenager's discomfort with formality. (He rarely makes it through a
game without his shirt coming untucked.) He would seem older than 19 but for
his habit of giggling and his coltlike aversion to eye contact.
Carlsen joins chess's élite at a time of
unprecedented change. He is one of a generation of players who learned the
game from computers. To this day, he's not certain if he has an actual board
at home. "I might have one somewhere. I'm not sure," he says. Powerful chess
programs, which now routinely beat the best human competitors, have allowed
grand masters to study positions at a deeper level than was possible before.
Short says top players can now spend almost an entire game trading moves
that have been scripted by the same program and that such play by rote has
removed some of the mystique of chess. He likens chess computers to
"chainsaws chopping down the Amazon." (Read a Q&A with Carlsen.)
But Kasparov says Carlsen's mastery is
rooted in a "deep intuitive sense no computer can teach" and that his pupil
"has a natural feel for where to place the pieces." According to Kasparov,
Carlsen has a knack for sensing the potential energy in each move, even if
its ultimate effect is too far away for anyone — even a computer — to
calculate. In the grand-master commentary room, where chess's clerisy gather
to analyze play, the experts did not even consider several of Carlsen's
moves during his game with Kramnik until they saw them and realized they
were perfect. "It's hard to explain," Carlsen says. "Sometimes a move just
feels right."
Not that Carlsen lacks computational prowess,
though. He often calculates 20 moves ahead and can comfortably play several
games simultaneously while blindfolded simply by hearing each move in
notation. The fear surrounding any such beautiful mind is that a life spent
probing the edges of the infinite — the possible permutations of a chess
game outnumber the estimated number of atoms in the universe — will
eventually lead to madness. Grand masters say Carlsen's precociousness is
reminiscent of Bobby Fischer's. The great American player spent his later
years in isolation, reappearing only to spout anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories. "It's easy to get obsessed with chess," Carlsen says. "That's what
happened with Fischer and Paul Morphy," another prodigy lost to madness. "I
don't have that same obsession." (Read: "Fischer
vs. Spassky: Battle of the Brains.")
Although firmly atop the chess rankings,
thanks in part to his victory in London, Carlsen must now fight his way
through a series of qualifying competitions in order to earn a chance to
play for the world-championship title — the game's highest prize, which is
contested every two or three years. His father says he is more concerned
about "whether chess will make him a happy person." It seems to be doing
just that. "I love the game. I love to compete," Carlsen says. Asked how
long he will continue to enjoy chess and where the game will take him,
Carlsen pauses to ponder the variables. "It's too difficult to predict," he
concludes. So far, at least, he's been making all the right moves.
Bob Jensen's threads on critical thinking, including "beyond critical
thinking" --
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
"Did McGraw-Hill CEO spill Apple's tablet secret?" by Jesicca Mintz,
The Washington Post, January ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/26/AR2010012603493.html?wpisrc=nl_tech
SAN FRANCISCO -- The McGraw-Hill Cos. Inc.'s CEO
spoke on CNBC Tuesday and appeared to confirm speculation that Apple Inc.
will indeed unveil a tablet computer running on iPhone software during a
highly anticipated media event Wednesday.
Harold McGraw, the company's chief executive, was
discussing his company earnings on the cable business news channel. When
asked about the tablet, McGraw said Apple will "make their announcement
tomorrow on this one" and that "the tablet is going to be based on the
iPhone operating system."
His comments, though brief, sounded authoritative
and several Apple-themed blogs reported the incident as if McGraw had
accidentally beaten Apple CEO Steve Jobs to the punch.
McGraw-Hill spokesman Steven Weiss would not
confirm that the CEO was describing Apple's actual product.
"There has been lots of speculation and we are as
eager as anyone to see how the new device can be used to advance education
and business information platforms," Weiss said.
McGraw's comments on CNBC appeared to be an
abbreviated version of remarks made during a conference call with Wall
Street analysts earlier in the day. According to a transcript supplied by
Weiss, McGraw sounded confident that the tablet would soon become a reality.
But as for technical details, he said only that "many expect that the Apple
device will use the iPhone operating system."
McGraw-Hill is a major developer and publisher of
educational materials and textbooks, and some of its college texts are
already available for reading on Apple's iPhone. If Apple's tablet is based
on the iPhone system, the investments McGraw-Hill and other publishers have
already made in e-books would still be relevant on the new device.
"Awaiting the Tablet," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed,
January 27, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/27/tablet
It has many names — the
iTablet, the iSlate, the iTab, the iGuide — but if there is one thing people
seem to agree on regarding Apple’s new computing tablet, expected to be
unveiled today in San Francisco, it’s that it will
change the way people consume media. And many
observers believe the impact will be particularly notable on college
campuses.
Media prognosticators have
been buzzing for months about how higher education might be affected by the
arrival of the Apple tablet, which is
reported to have a 10-inch color display — about
the same size as the screen on Apple’s smallest laptop and larger than the
screens of the three-and-half-inch iPhone and iPod touch, the six-inch
Amazon Kindle, or the five- to seven-inch
Sony Reader
Ars Technica writer Jeff
Smykil
recently wrote that the addition of e-textbooks to
the iTunes Store could precipitate new ways of supplying students with
course materials, possibly based on selling subscriptions and bundling books
and other resources by major. Joshua Kim, a senior learning technologist at
Dartmouth College and Inside Higher Ed technology blogger,
posited that the tablet could combine course
materials and collaboration tools, bringing the futuristic vision of a
“cloud-based, disaggregated, open educational experience” one step closer to
realization. Brand expert Brian Phipps
put it more bluntly, writing that the tablet
“could replace the conventional classroom.”
Of course, most people
won’t know until later today what the tablet can do; and they won’t know
what it will do to traditional higher education for a long time after
that. “At the moment we’re just sort of reading digital tea leaves,” said
Kenneth C. Green, director of the campus computing project.
A Boost for E-Books?
Electronic textbook
publishers, for one, are hoping that the release and anticipated popularity
of the tablet
will be a windfall for e-textbooks — which, though
they have been available for several years, so far have failed to catch on
with students. E-textbooks accounted for only 2 percent of total textbook
sales last fall, according to data from the market research firm
Student Monitor.
CourseSmart,
a consortium of five major textbook publishers (at
least
one of which has been talking to Apple), made a
video in anticipation
of the tablet’s release, in which it superimposes its iPhone application on
a tablet-like device and touts the many ways it could make students' lives
easier. Frank Lyman, the consortium’s president, has said the tablet offers
features far beyond what is offered by the Kindle and the Sony Reader,
including color graphics, video, and other media.
In an interview yesterday
with Inside Higher Ed, Lyman said he believes the Apple product will
give e-textbooks a boost by combining a brand that is widely popular among
college students with a platform that is oriented to reading. “At the level
of general enthusiasm and interest for e-textbooks, it has sort of captured
the imagination of another part of the market,” he said.
Eric Weil, managing
director of Student Monitor, agreed that Apple’s brand power could help push
e-textbooks into the mainstream. The problem for e-textbooks is not that
students don’t know that they exist, it’s that they don’t find them
appealing, Weil said. Apple’s involvement could change that, he said, the
same way it popularized the MP3 player with the iPod.
Price Points
But the aspect about the
Apple tablet that could provide the deepest insight into how much it stands
to affect higher education — at least initially — is perhaps the
hardest to pin down: the price tag. While
some analysts predict that Apple would need to
price the tablet at $600 or lower in order to market it successfully,
rumors
abound that the product could run as high as
$1,000 — as much as a regular MacBook.
While CourseSmart claims
that its e-textbooks cost half the price of a new, printed textbook, Lyman
acknowledged that, depending on the tablet’s price tag, it could take all
four years to break even on the initial hardware investment. But he said he
hopes the additional value tablet’s many rumored features will persuade
students to buy it. After all, given everything the tablet is supposed to
do, students might regard cheaper, less cumbersome e-textbooks as a
peripheral benefit rather than a main selling point.
Green said the tablet’s
penetration on college campuses will turn largely on what current
technologies it is capable of replacing. If the features of the Apple tablet
are redundant with the functions students use on their iPod touches — or
smartphones, or laptops — then they can subtract from the cost of the tablet
the money they would have spent on those other technologies, he said. The
more gadgets the tablet makes obsolete, the cheaper the investment.
But Weil said he thinks
all this accounting is moot. College students don’t generally think in such
calculating terms when it comes to technology, he said. “At the end of the
day,” he said, “students spend more on their cell phone service than they do
on their textbooks.”
The tablet is expected to
hit the shelves in March.
"iPad and the Risk of 'Sustaining Innovations'," by Joshua Kim,
Inside Higher Ed, January 28, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning
iPad and the Risk of 'Sustaining Innovations' By
Joshua Kim January 28, 2010 11:30 am The risk of the iPad for higher
education is that the device will prove a "sustaining innovation" in
learning technology.
Sustaining innovations, as explained by Michael
Horn in his amazing talk at the 2009 EDUCAUSE ECAR Symposium, increase the
quality of the service or product but also drive up the cost. Higher
education has been moving through cycles of sustaining innovation, where
improvements in facilities, amenities and technology have increased the
fidelity of the campus experience while simultaneously driving costs (and
tuition) faster than inflation.
The iPad could drive a new round of sustaining
innovation as institutions seek to design specialized campus and educational
apps for the new platform. We will want to design these learning and campus
apps, and invest in tools that allow our university content to be accessed
by the iPad, for the best of reasons. These reasons include the desire to
stay relevant to our students' experience, to compete for their scarce
attention, and to use the iPad to reach multiple learning styles.
We will see the ability of the iPad to digitize
curricular texts and aggregate curricular media as progress. We will be
excited that students will be able to easily sync up a syllabus' worth of
course content, consuming the materials via the iPad's gorgeous interface.
We will be excited by the possibilities of students engaging in formative
assessments and collaborative work (wikis/blogs/discussions) through the
browser, without the need to sacrifice the fidelity of reading (iBooks) or
media viewing.
The possibilities for learning, student interaction
and enhanced campus services that the iPad unleashes will all come at a
price. Nothing about a tool as wonderful as the iPad will lower the cost of
constructing or delivering education. We will need to invest in buying iPads,
developing apps for iPads, and experimenting with new pedagogies and
training around iPads. Perhaps the iPad will be a disruptive force for
lifelong learners, as they will be able to sync up the lecture content from
iTunesU, pair it with book content, and than engage in discussions of the
material (through the browser) with other autodidacts.
It might be unpopular to say right now (and I'm
sympathetic to the Edupunk movement), but an argument can be made that the
LMS was a disruptive innovation for higher education. The LMS allowed, for
the first time, hybrid and online learning to scale. Prior to the LMS any
pedagogical innovation enabled by technology required custom development and
a high degree of faculty technical proficiency. Faculty could make course
Web pages, but they needed to know HTML. Assessment and collaboration tools
could be built, but they were built one-by-one and by hand. The low
technical threshold necessary to maintain and utilize and LMS opened the
door to pedagogical innovation and a disruption of the status quo higher ed
model. We are still struggling to walk through that door. (And yes, we can
and should be debating if Web 2.0 tools have supplanted or complemented the
LMS as catalysts for disruption -- but that is the topic of another
discussion).
How can something as uncool and unsexy as the LMS
be disruptive for higher ed, while something as cool, sexy and elegant as
the iPad only be sustaining? And what do we do with the recognition that no
matter how wonderful a sustaining innovation can be, the end result is to
increase costs as quality also rises?
Do we stop adopting sustaining innovations?
Do we only innovate with learning technologies that
can increase quality (active learning) while decreasing costs?
I have no idea, but while we figure all this out
I'm totally excited to get my hands on a shiny new iPad. How about you?
iPad or iPoop?
January 30, message from Richard Campbell
[campbell@RIO.EDU]
A special thanks to the FCC - why? They have not
approved the Apple Ipad, and they can not be sold (or ordered) until
approved. I might have ordered one without fully considering the pitfalls of
owning one.
Here are some of the issues: 1. Both the Iphone and
Ipad do not handle flash files. So much of the richness of the web will be
lost to Ipad owners. I have been digging around for the answer to the lack
of flash, and the major reason is that that ATT network - already straining
from the success of the Iphone - will come crashing down if the huge surge
of Flash downloads would clog the ATT network. There are other technical
reasons, but that is the major one.
2. If I bought the Ipad with the 3G capability,
there would be ANOTHER $39 per month access fee paid to ATT. Currently I pay
$30 per month for my Iphone, and the ATT assurances about being able to
"tether" my Iphone to my laptop have not come into being yet. The ATT System
is straining under the weight of its success in selling Iphones.
3. Creation of Ipad content - You really can't -
the operating system - Iphone 3.3? is proprietary and if I wanted to create
content, I need a separate Mac with the free Software Development Kit. BUT
if I do create something, I have to kick over 30% to Steve Jobs.
4. Readabilty - The Kindle is superior to the Ipad
here, but the current Kindle does not do color. Incidentally, Amazon just
pulled Macmillan books from their store - a HUGE move with potential
antitrust implications. It seems that Macmillan is very upset with Amazon
about the heavy discounting of their ebooks. I have talked to an author
friend who has self-published on Amazon and the "cut" that Amazon takes
makes it difficult for anyone else to make money from their site, "unless
you are an Oprah author" as he said.
I have more concerns, but later.
Richard J. Campbell
mailto:campbell@rio.edu
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
Note that over the XMAS season Amazon sold more Kindle
books than hard copy books. However, many of the most popular textbook
publishers are still avoiding electronic versions of any kind except for limited
editions of books for special needs students.
Report Outlines 'Educational Crisis' for Minority Men
The College Board released a report Tuesday,
"The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color," outlining
current research and important research questions that explore key gaps in
educational attainment. The report highlights "undeniable challenges among
minority students, including a lack of role models, search for respect outside
of education, loss of cultural memory, poverty challenges, language barriers,
community pressures and a sense of a failing education system," according to the
announcement of the study. The report is
the second this week to focus on gaps in
enrollments between minority males and other students.
Inside Higher Ed, January 27, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/27/qt#218571
Bob Jensen's threads on affirmative action are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicStandards
"Colleges See 17 Percent Increase in Online Enrollment," by Marc
Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Colleges-See-17-Percent/20820/
Colleges saw a 17 percent increase in online
enrollment, with more than one in four students taking at least one online
course in the fall of 2008, according to the
findings of an annual survey published on Tuesday
by the Sloan Consortium.
The growth rate eclipsed
last year's 12-percent increase and dwarfed the
1.2 percent growth rate of the overall higher-education student population.
The report, which has become a widely cited benchmark of distance learning,
found a total of more than 4.6-million online students overall. That's up
from about 3.9 million the previous year.
Despite this surge, the data suggest that not
enough institutions have taken online education into account as they conduct
planning around issues like how to deal with budget cuts and space
shortages, says A. Frank Mayadas, a special adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation.
"They have to wake up and begin to think about this
as a strategic item," Mr. Mayadas says.
The report found that public institutions are by
far the most likely to believe that online education is key to their
long-term strategy. That reflects the striking demand for online couses at
institutions like the University of Central Florida, where more than half of
the 53,500 students take at least one online course each year.
The university's online efforts stem from its
mission of providing access and its budget realities. All new construction
money is "basically frozen at the state level," says Tom Cavanagh, assistant
vice president for distributed learning.
"For us to grow, it’s going to be online until that
money is freed up again," he says.
The Sloan report is based on data collected from
more than 2,500 colleges and universities by the Babson Survey Research
Group and the College Board. Among the study's other key findings:
* Bad economic times, which traditionally drive
more people back to school, are having a particularly strong impact on
demand for online courses. Seventy-three percent of institutions report
increased demand for existing online courses, compared with 54 percent
for face-to-face. Sixty-six percent report increased demand for new
online courses. And students are clamoring for distance education at
colleges that don't offer it; 45 percent of institutions in that
category report growing demand for new online courses and programs.
* Fewer than one-third of chief academic
officers think that their faculty members accept the "value and
legitimacy" of online education, a perception that hasn't change much in
the past six years. (Another survey, released in 2009, also reflected
broad faculty suspicion
about the quality of online courses.)
* More than two-thirds of institutions have a
contingency plan to deal with a disruption from the H1N1 flu, and
substituting online for face-to-face classes is an element in 67 percent
of those plans.
* The overwhelming majority of the 4.6 million
online students — over 82 percent — are undergraduates.
Bob Jensen's threads for online training and education alternatives are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Bait and Switch: Henry Adams on Graduate School
Chronicle of Higher Education, January
27, 2010
The behavior of assistant professors teaches graduate students some
unintentional lessons about academic life.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"A Russian University Gets Creative Against Corruption: With
surveillance equipment and video campaigns, rector aims to eliminate bribery at
Kazan State," by Anna Nemtsova, Chronicle of Higher Education, January
17, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Russian-University-Gets/63522/
A student walks down the hallway of a university
building and, in a stroke of luck, finds a 1,000-ruble bill lying on the
floor. As he bends down to grab it, an idea crosses his mind.
"That is going to be just enough to pay for my
exam!" he exclaims.
Then the figure of a man in a suit blocks the light
over the squatting student.
"No it won't!" the man says, shaking his head.
In the next moment, the student is literally kicked
out of the university, his official file flying down the stairs behind him.
This bit of melodrama is not an exam-time
nightmare, but a video by students at Kazan State University. They are part
of an unusual campaign to stamp out corruption on the campus. Too many
students and professors have a "pay to play" mentality, reformers say, in
which grades and test scores are bought and sold.
Anticorruption videos are shown daily. Students
participate in classroom discussions about the problem. Kazan State's
rector, Myakzyum Salakhov, has installed video cameras in every hallway and
classroom, so that the security department can watch students and professors
in every corner of the university to catch any bribes as they are made.
"Our job is to change the attitude to corruption at
our university, so all students and professors realize that corruption is
damaging our system of education, that corruption should be punished," says
Mr. Salakhov, who is outspoken, both on campus and off, about the challenges
that Russian higher education faces on this front.
"We are working on creating a new trend on our
campus," he says. "Soon every student giving bribes or professor making
money on students will feel ashamed."
Across Russia, bribery and influence-peddling are
rife within academe. Critics cite a combination of factors: Poor salaries
lead some professors to pocket bribes in order to make ends meet. Students
and their families feel they must pay administrators to get into good
universities, if only because everyone else seems to be doing it. And local
government officials turn a blind eye, sometimes because they, too, are
corrupt.
"Corruption has become a systemic problem, and we
therefore need a systemic response to deal with it," Russia's president,
Dmitry Medvedev, said last June.
Last fall a federal law-enforcement operation
called Education 2009 reported that law-enforcement officials had uncovered
3,117 instances of corruption in higher education; of those, 1,143 involved
bribes. That is a 90-percent increase over the previous year.
Law-enforcement agencies prosecuted 265 university employees for taking
bribes.
But while many Russians shrug their shoulders over
this news—reports on corruption in higher education are hardly new—Kazan
State decided to do something about it.
The 200-year-old institution in southwestern
Russia, which educated Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Lenin, among others, is
considered among the best universities in Russia. It enrolls 14,000
full-time students, most of whom come from the nearby Volga River region of
the country.
Grades for Sale Students and administrators alike
say that bribery is rampant on the campus, and that it includes everyone
from students to department chairs.
"Corruption is just a routine we have to deal
with," says Alsu Bariyeva, a student activist and journalism major who
joined the campaign after a professor in the physical-culture department
suggested that she pay him to get credit for her work that semester. She
paid.
Several students said they once saw a list of
prices posted in the hallway of the law department. The cost of a good grade
on various exams ranged from $50 to $200. Students from other departments
report similar scenarios.
Many people on the campus identify the arrest last
March of the head of the general-mathematics department as a turning point.
Police, tipped off by students and parents, charged in and arrested Maryan
Matveichuk, 61, as he was pocketing thousands of rubles from a student for a
good mark on a summer exam.
The police investigation concluded that in at least
six instances Mr. Matveichuk, a respected professor, had accepted bribes of
4,000 to 6,000 rubbles, or about $135 to $200, from students in other
departments for good grades on their math exams and courses.
Last September a court in Kazan found the math
professor guilty of accepting a total of 29,500 rubles, or $1,000, in
bribes, issued a suspended sentence of three years in prison, and stripped
him of his teaching credential.
Mr. Matveichuk's arrest inspired Mr. Salakhov, the
rector, to form an anticorruption committee, including administrators and
students.
"I personally believe that corruption sits in our
mentality," Mr. Salakhov says. "With students' help, I found three
professors taking bribes and asked them to leave. The committee's job is to
crack down on corruption within these walls."
Constant Surveillance Mr. Salakhov's right-hand man
in his fight against corruption is Gennady Sadrislamov, the deputy rector
responsible for campus security. A large computer screen on his desk
displays images from the cameras placed around the campus.
A former police colonel whose heavy figure appears
in the campus anticorruption videos, Mr. Sadrislamov says students are
crucial to the campaign's success.
"Matveichuk brought shame to our university, but
unfortunately, he was not the only one making money on the side," the deputy
rector says. "Corruption sits in everybody's head. We cannot eliminate the
idea of bribing and cheating without students' help."
With information provided by students and
professors, Mr. Sadrislamov goes to the rector to get investigations under
way. At least one professor volunteered to quit after he was confronted by
Kazan State's anticorruption council, which comprises the rector, his
deputies, the security department, and some students. The group meets
monthly to discuss the anticorruption campaign.
The security chief says it will take awhile to rid
the campus of corruption, because it is so ingrained.
"I do not believe that professors commit crime
because of their low salaries," he says. "They take bribes because it has
gone unpunished. That is the real picture in every Russian university all
across the country."
Russian professors' salaries are very low. At Kazan
State, they make 20,000 to 25,000 rubles a month, or about $667 to $833.
"That is not enough to feed the family. People
break the law out of need—they have no option," says one professor at the
university, who did not want his name to be used.
Students have mixed views about the corruption
campaign. In a conversation among a group of students from the law
department, considered to be among the most corrupt, many scoffed at talk of
reform.
"Law-enforcement agencies should reform first,"
said one student, who declined to give his name but said he was the son of
an agent in the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the KGB.
"Russia is rotten of corruption. Even the president admits that. I do not
believe somebody could put the end to it on our campus."
The reformers seem undeterred by such skepticism.
"Some say we are too naïve to believe that the old
traditions can be changed; some avoid even talking to us. But there are
students who agree the disease can be treated," says Dmitry Modestov, a
third-year student who works with classmates on developing pens, fliers, and
other materials with anticorruption slogans.
"We are trying to change the mind-set on our
campus. We say, Knowledge is worth more than bribes."
A Reform Effort Backfires Efforts to combat
corruption on a national scale have so far failed to have much of an effect.
In 2001, Russia introduced an SAT-like test known
as the Unified State Exam. It was created in large measure to eliminate
corruption in the college-entrance process. Colleges were to rely primarily
on exam results in determining who should be admitted. Last year was the
first in which testing became obligatory nationally.
But instead of reducing corruption, the exam
apparently has fostered it. Claims arose that exam results were being
tampered with by local officials whose job it is to administer the test.
Another avenue of abuse is the so-called "discount"
for students with special needs and children of state employees.
Universities are obliged to accept lower scores on
the Unified State Exam from members of those groups, which comprise 153
categories, including handicapped students, children of Chernobyl victims,
and orphans.
The fixed price for obtaining the needed papers to
be labeled as a member of a discount group is 70,000 rubles, or $2,300, says
Deliara Yafizova, a first-year student at Kazan State.
"I entered without a bribe, but I heard that there
was a price for making life easier," she said one recent morning in the
campus cafe.
Mr. Salakhov, the rector, saw the problem firsthand
when he looked at the applicants for this year's first-year class. "All of a
sudden we had crowds of handicapped students applying to our university," he
says. "At one department I had 36 handicapped students per 30 available
seats. We tried to check every case, especially the cases where it said that
the disability expired in two to three months. Many of these disabled
children turned out to have parents working as hospital managers. Their
papers turned out fake."
Of the 1,358 full-time students admitted to Kazan
State this academic year, more than 250 were from discount categories.
"That is a tiny little opportunity for universities
to stay corrupt," says Mr. Salakhov. "If a big bureaucrat from, say, the
ministry of education sends his son with a letter of support to a rector,
the university might have to admit that son. But not at this university. We
do not let in students with just any score, no matter how high-rank their
parents are."
As for reporting scores themselves, state-exam
corruption has taken on absurd proportions, driven by regional bureaucrats'
desire to ensure that the scores of students admitted to local colleges are
better than average.
For example, students in Kabardino-Balkaria and
Ingushetia, areas of economic hardship and low-level insurgency near
Chechnya, achieved record scores last summer in the Russian-language exam.
Yet Russian is not the native language of most residents there.
In another instance, Lyubov Glebova, head of the
Federal Service for the Oversight of Education and Science, flew to
Voronezh, in the southern part of the country, as soon as she found out that
students' scores in the city were the highest on most of the seven parts of
the national exam.
"You are the country's leaders on Unified State
Exam results," she announced at the regional meeting of school and
higher-education authorities in Voronezh. Unaware that she was about to
accuse them of tampering with test scores, the crowd of local bureaucrats
applauded her statement.
Ms. Glebova fired the head of the regional
education authority, and several exam organizers will not be allowed to
continue in those roles this year.
Russia still lives with the Soviet mentality of
keeping information secret and presenting fake pictures of life, says
Yevgeny Yasin, director of research at the State University Higher School of
Economics, in Moscow. Even so, in a country where people tend to follow the
signals given by authorities, he is hopeful.
"It will take a little longer," he says, "but the
time of transparency will eventually come to the Russian education system,
as it did to many Western countries."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
A more reliable and probably much cheaper alternative would be instead adopt
competency-based grading and degree awarding. Two North American universities
using competency-based courses are the accredited online undergraduate Western
Governors University (WGU) and
the Canadian masters degree program at Chartered Accounting School of Business (CASB).
Both programs have a reputation for integrity and toughness.
Competency-Based Learning ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University#Competency-Based_Learning
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
I think it’s neat how avid bird
watchers get so excited about such things.
I have an accounting professor
friend in Canada named Jack who would fly anywhere in the world for such a
unique sighting. Sometimes bird watchers will endure some primitive and almost
shocking accommodations just to see a rare bird.
My friend raced out to a bird
watching site in South America one time and had a room in what turned out to be
a pretty seedy hotel. Late in the night he discovered by the sounds about that
he really was booked in a brothel.
What on earth would an accounting professor do who finds himself in a brothel?
Worse yet try explaining it to Jack’s wife and mother of his six children.
Below is a message from my
friend Jerry at Trinity University.
From:
Hernandez, Jerry [mailto:GHernan1@Trinity.edu]
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 12:11 PM
To: TIGERTALK
Subject: Rare bird sighting in Laredo
This is a very rare, rare
find ! First documented sighting for the U.S. I will probably head out to
Laredo on Saturday. If you need directions to the Kingfisher I will email
them to you.
By Zach Lindsey - Laredo Morning Times
LAREDO — This border city could be home to a female Amazon kingfisher, a
species of bird never reported in the United States.
Alan Wormington of Leamington, Ontario, and his friend Robert Epstein were
on their way to the Rio Grande Valley when they made a stop in Laredo.
Wormington caught sight of the bird and photographed it.
“He immediately posted it from his hotel room (Sunday) night,” local birder
Tom Miller said. “Already, people drove up (Monday) morning.”
Bill Maynard of the American Birding Association blogged about the
kingfisher, noting that it's typically found no farther north than southern
Tamaulipas and Sinaloa states in Mexico.
The sighting must be confirmed with the birding association before it can be
considered official.
Birders from at least eight states and two Canadian provinces reportedly
have come to Laredo to catch a glimpse of the bird. The appearance of the
kingfisher coincides with a recent sighting of the bare-throated tiger heron
in the Valley.
Of
nine species of water kingfisher, three of them already call Laredo home —
the green, ringed and belted kingfishers — and many of them can be seen in
the area along Zacate Creek where the Amazon kingfisher was spotted.
No
males, or even a second female, have been spotted.
February 1, 2010 reply from Linda A Kidwell, University of
Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
Anyone who really enjoys bird
watching should do what I did and take a sabbatical in a country university
in Australia! Sure, there was a flock of cockatoos in my tree and numerous
gullahs in town, but I also saw some incredibly diverse parrots on campus as
well as crimson rosellas. Also saw wedge-tail eagles, kookaburras, rainbow
lorikeets, emus of course, even the bizarre cassowary on my trip north.
Linda
From the Scout Report on January 22, 2010
Transmute 1.67 ---
http://www.gettransmute.com/
As January turns into February, some people may be
in the market for a new web browser. Of course, some may be wondering: What
do I do about my bookmarks? That's easy enough to solve by making use of
Transmute 1.67. This tiny program transfers bookmarks from one browser to
another. The program is compatible with seven different browsers, including
Google Chrome, Opera, and Chromium. The program provides automatic backups
and the support site includes screen shots and support suggestions. This
version is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.
STOIK Imagic 5.0.4 ---
http://www.stoik.com/imagic/
Persons looking for a free graphics editor to brush
up their New Year's celebration videos and photos should give STOIK Imagic
5.0.4. their full consideration. The application gives users the ability to
preview and organize images, and it also indexes video files into a variety
of collapsible folders that can be manipulated in numerous ways. The video
editor allows users to mix various media files and transform sounds to
create their own artistic (or more pragmatic) vision. This version is
compatible with computers running Windows 2000, XP or Vista.
More than a century after his creation, Sherlock Holmes faces a new set
of challenges For the Heirs to Holmes, a Tangled Web [Free registration may
be required]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/books/19sherlock.html
British tourism hopes to cash in on Sherlock Holmes
http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/01/18/sherlock.holmes.tourism.london/?hpt=Sbin
The Official Web Site of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate
http://www.sherlockholmesonline.org/
The Sherlock Holmes Museum of Baker Street
http://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk/
Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/
The Sherlock Holmes Society of London: Radio Programs [iTunes]
http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk/world/radio.php
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
Science Friday ---
http://www.sciencefriday.com/
Fun and Educational Science Videos
Sixty Symbols (in physics and astronomy) ---
http://www.sixtysymbols.com/
Video: Cambridge Physics: Past, Present and Future
---
http://www-outreach.phy.cam.ac.uk/camphys/
Magnetic Resonance Online Texts ---
http://www.ebyte.it/library/refs/MROnlineTexts.html
NOVA: Absolute Zero ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/
Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse ---
http://www.ethicslibrary.org/
Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics ---
http://bioethics.stanford.edu/
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service: Birds, Birds, Birds ---
http://birds.fws.gov/
From the University of Pittsburgh
Birds of America (435 birds mounted online) ---
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/a/audubon/
Museum of Animal Perspectives (videos) ---
http://www.sameasterson.com/
Utah's Cambrian Life (paleontology) ---
http://www.kumip.ku.edu/cambrianlife/
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
Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse ---
http://www.ethicslibrary.org/
Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics ---
http://bioethics.stanford.edu/
"Notre Dame OpenCourseWare: Border Issues Seminar [US-Mexico Border]
---
http://ocw.nd.edu/center-for-social-concerns/border-issues-seminar
Bob Jensen's threads on open courseware are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
London Datastore ---
http://data.london.gov.uk/
Exploring 20th Century London ---
http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk
Science Friday ---
http://www.sciencefriday.com/
In Asia: Weekly Insights and Features From Asia ---
http://asiafoundation.org/in-asia/
UNdata ---
http://data.un.org/
Other data ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
African American History (photographs)
Documenting Our Past: The Teenie Harris Archive Project ---
http://www.cmoa.org/teenie/intro.asp
Independent Lens: Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings ---
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/banished/
URBZ: User Generated Cities ---
http://urbz.net/
World Bank: News & Broadcast [iTunes, pdf] ---
http://www.worldbank.org/news
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
London Datastore ---
http://data.london.gov.uk/
UNdata ---
http://data.un.org/
Other data ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse ---
http://www.ethicslibrary.org/
Independent Lens: Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings ---
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/banished/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Google's Kevin McCurley on the Mathematics of
Online Search [iTunes]---
http://maa.org/news/120309mccurley.html
To illustrate the complexities of search, McCurley
showed the results of a Google search on "mathematics." He noted the two
success criteria for information retrieval: precision, returning documents
relevant to the original query, and recall, presenting all documents
relevant to the query. Of the two, precision is the more important
criterion, he said. With the glut of information available online, providing
a user with hundreds of thousands of documents to search through is not
helpful.
Google and other search engines are successful if
researchers can develop and continually improve algorithms that quickly
pinpoint relevant material and eliminate irrelevant skewing factors. Indeed,
a variety of mathematical procedures, going well beyond Google’s original
PageRank algorithm, go into “Google’s secret sauce,” McCurley said.
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Palace of the Governors Library and Archives Digital Collection ---
http://econtent.unm.edu/cdm4/indexpg.php
After Columbus: Four-Hundred Years of Native American Portraiture ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/?collection=AfterColumbusFourhun&col_id=182
National Museum of the American Indian: Beauty Surrounds Us ---
http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/beauty_surrounds_us/flash8.html
U.S. Department of the
Interior: Bureau of Indian Affairs ---
http://www.doi.gov/bia/
London Datastore ---
http://data.london.gov.uk/
Exploring 20th Century London ---
http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk
Museum of London ---
http://www.museum-london.org.uk/
UNdata ---
http://data.un.org/
Other data ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
Wisconsin County Histories ---
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wch/
Wisconsin Magazine of History Archives ---
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wmh/archives/search.aspx?area=basic
Utah's Cambrian Life (paleontology) ---
http://www.kumip.ku.edu/cambrianlife/
African American History (photographs)
Documenting Our Past: The Teenie Harris Archive Project ---
http://www.cmoa.org/teenie/intro.asp
Independent Lens: Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings ---
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/banished/
Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed (African American History)
---
http://www.blackpast.org/
She's Game: Women Making Australian Sporting History ---
http://www.womenaustralia.info/exhib/sg/sport-home.html
Uncommon Lives (Australia) ---
http://uncommonlives.naa.gov.au/default.asp
Daphne Dare Collection (theatre costumes) ---
http://drc.ohiolink.edu/handle/2374.OX/30999
Exploratorium 40th Anniversary: Speaking of Music Rewind Podcasts [iTunes]
http://www.exploratorium.edu/40th/podcasts.php
Stage Costumes ---
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/Costume/index.html
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
"Notre Dame OpenCourseWare: Border Issues Seminar [US-Mexico Border]
---
http://ocw.nd.edu/center-for-social-concerns/border-issues-seminar
Bob Jensen's threads on open courseware are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Ernest Bloch Legacy ---
http://www.ernestbloch.org/
Exploratorium 40th Anniversary: Speaking of Music Rewind Podcasts [iTunes]
http://www.exploratorium.edu/40th/podcasts.php
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/
January 25, 2010
January 26, 2010
January 27, 2010
January 28, 2010
January 29, 2010
January 30, 2010 (identify the good news items below)
Science versus Accountics Validity Challenges
I wish academic accounting researchers would work harder to weed out bad
research reported in top academic accounting research journals.
I can't recall a single accounting research study in history being judged so
harshly.
Academic accountics researchers rarely examine whether other accountics
researchers broke the rules or made innocent mistakes.
"Study Linking Vaccine to Autism Broke Research Rules, U.K. Regulators Say
MMR/Autism Doctor Acted 'Dishonestly,' 'Irresponsibly'," by Nicky Broyd,
WebMD, January 29, 2010 ---
http://children.webmd.com/news/20100129/mmr-autism-doctor-acted-dishonestly-irresponsibly
The British doctor who
led a study suggesting a link between the
measles/
mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine and
autism acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly," a
U.K. regulatory panel has ruled.
The panel represents the U.K. General Medical Council
(GMC), which regulates the medical profession. It ruled only on whether
Andrew Wakefield, MD, and two colleagues acted properly in carrying out
their research, and not on whether
MMR vaccine has anything to do with autism.
In the ruling, the GMC used strong language to
condemn the methods used by Wakefield in conducting the study.
In the study, published
12 years ago, Wakefield and colleagues suggested there was a
link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Their
study included only 12 children, but wide media coverage set off a panic
among parents. Vaccinations plummeted; there was a subsequent increase in
U.K. measles cases.
In 2004, 10 of the study's 13 authors disavowed the
findings. The Lancet, which originally published the paper, retracted
it after learning that Wakefield -- prior to designing the study -- had
accepted payment from lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers for causing
autism.
Fitness to Practice
The GMC's Fitness to Practise panel heard evidence
and submissions for 148 days over two and a half years, hearing from 36
witnesses. It then spent 45 days deciding the outcome of the hearing.
Besides Wakefield, two former colleagues went before the panel -John
Walker-Smith and Simon Murch. They were all found to have broken guidelines.
The disciplinary hearing found Wakefield showed a
"callous disregard" for the suffering of children and abused his position of
trust. He'd also "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant."
He'd taken blood samples from children attending
his son's birthday party in return for money, and was later filmed joking
about it at a conference.
He'd also failed to disclose he'd received money
for advising lawyers acting for parents who claimed their children had been
harmed by the triple vaccine
Continued in article
"U.S. Finds Scientific Misconduct by Former Nursing Professor,"
Inside Higher Ed, January 29, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/29/qt#218825
A former nursing professor at Tennessee State
University falsified data and results in federally sponsored research on
sexual risk behaviors among mentally ill homeless men, the Office of
Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
announced Thursday. The agency, in a statement in
the Federal Register, said that James Gary Linn, who was a professor
of nursing at Tennessee State, had provided falsified data to the university
and to a journal that published an article on his research in Cellular
and Molecular Biology. He will be barred from involvement in any federal
studies for three years.
Professors Who Cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's threads on the absence of replication and validity studies in
accountics research are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Epilogue
Jensen Question to Steve Kachelmeier, Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR)
Have you ever considered an AMR-type (“Dialogue”) invitation to comment?
These are commentaries that do not have to extend the research findings but may
question the research assumptions.
Steve's Reply
I have not considered openly soliciting comments on a particular article
any more than I have considered openly soliciting research on “X” (you pick the
X). I let the community decide, and I try to run a fair game. By the way, your
idea regarding an online journal of accounting replications may have merit – I
suggest that you direct that suggestion to the AAA Publications Committee.
My guess, however, is that such a journal would receive few submissions, and
that it would be difficult to find a willing editor.
Jensen Comment
In other words, the accounting research academy purportedly has little interest
in discussing and debating the external validity of the accountics research
papers published in TAR. Most likely it's too much of a bother for accountics
researchers to be forced to debate external validity of their findings.
The :"Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave" will remain in
place long after Bob Jensen has departed from this earth.
That's truly sad!
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Forwarded by Maureen
Stoopid IQ Test ---
http://www.flashbynight.com/test/
Auntie Bev forwarded her lovemaking trips (at her
age)
1. Wear your glasses to make sure your partner is actually in the bed.
2. Set timer for 3 minutes, in case you doze off in the middle.
3 Set the mood with lighting. (Turn them ALL OFF!)
4. Make
sure you put 911 on your speed dial before you begin.
5. Write partner's name on your hand in case you can't remember.
6. Use extra polygrip so your teeth don't end up under the bed.
7. Have Tylenol ready in case you actually complete the act..
8. Make all the noise you want...the neighbors are deaf, too.
9. If it works, call everyone you know with the good news!!
10. Don't even think about trying it twice.
..
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . ... . . . . . . . . . . ..
'OLD' IS WHEN...
Your sweetie says, 'Let's go upstairs and make love,' and you answer, 'Pick one;
I can't do both!'
'OLD' IS WHEN...
Your friends compliment you on your new alligator shoes and you're barefoot.
'OLD' IS WHEN...
Going bra-less pulls all the wrinkles out of your face.
'OLD' IS WHEN....
You don't care where your spouse goes, just as long as you don't have to go
along.
'OLD' IS WHEN...
You are cautioned to slow down by the
doctor instead of by the police .
'OLD' IS WHEN..
'Getting a little action' means you don't need to take any fiber today.
'OLD' IS WHEN....
'Getting lucky' means you find your car in the parking lot.
'OLD' IS WHEN....
An
'all nighter' means not getting up to use the bathroom.
'OLD' IS WHEN...
You're not sure if these are facts or jokes.
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/
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
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.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
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/
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
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
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
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
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