Tidbits on February 15, 2010
Bob Jensen
This is a fuzzy photo taken of Will Yancey,
Erika, and Bob in October 2009
Will stayed with us a couple of nights while returning from Alumni Weekend at
Dartmouth
Will's home is in Dallas, but he and Carol had a tremendous summer
home built on
an ocean point overlooking Bar Harbor in Maine
On February 11, 2010 Will was found dead at the desk in his
Dallas home
Our deepest sympathy goes to his wife Carol and son Michael
Michael is a first year student at Trinity University
My tribute to Will written long before his sudden and unexpected death is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Yancey.htm
Looking toward the east at sunset
Franconia Notch as seen from our living room
at sunset
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconia_Notch
The bright light points to the north end of the Notch
These are shots of Mt. Lafayette at sunset
This is a shot of Mt. Lafayette at sunrise
The views are always changing in front of my
desk
The Notch is often fogged in between Lafayette and Cannon
The scar at the bottom of the picture below
is
the highway as it comes out of the north side of Franconia Notch
My camera was zoomed for this fuzzy shot
This was not a retouched photo (I always tell if I retouch a photo)
This is Mt Washington in the northeast at
sunset
before we had our first summer snowfall
The wild cranberry bush in front of my while
awaiting the first snows of summer
Christmas lights and icicles
Our version of Doctor Zhivago
A scene from Doctor Zhivago
These are my parents before they passed on
My father managed the Kossuth County Iowa State Liquor Store
and my mother would not let him bring any demon booze into their house
St Francis beside our garage door seems much
happier in the summertime
Nature gave him this hood of snow
H
The first snowfall of summer as seen on our
back deck
Enough Already
Outhouse in Virginia Forwarded by Paula
Washington DC Snow Capitols as pictured in The
Washington Post
You can see many NYC photos of the snow at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/10/nyregion/user-snow-photos.html?hp
Awesome Things to Do With Snow (Comedy)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/11/awesome-things-to-do-with_n_458103.html
Great
Advice Comes With Great Snow Pictures (slide show) ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SnowPictures.pps
James Martin is Another Accounting Professor Who Loves Photography
"What's New on MAAW?" by hugely open sharing professor James Martin,
MAAW Blog, February 4, 2010 ---
http://maaw.blogspot.com/2010/02/whats-new-on-maaw.html
I took a little time out from building management
and accounting web pages to develop a photo section that includes 12
subsections. Although photos won't help you pass an accounting exam, or
develop a research paper, they can be used in a variety of ways. For
example, you can use them as desktop wallpaper, send them in e-mail
messages, print and send them as (4x6) post cards (particularly to old folks
like mothers and grandmothers that don't use computers), use them in your
screen saver, and even create slide shows and animations. Most of the photos
you'll find on MAAW's photo sections have been or will be used as post cards
to cheer up some of our old relatives stuck in nursing homes. Try it with
your photos, or my photos. I expect the recipients will appreciate your
thoughtfulness.
See
Photos for the various photo sections ---
http://maaw.info/Photos/PhotosMain.htm
Management Accounting and Accounting Web Home Page ---
http://maaw.info/
San Francisco Pictures
Erika and I plan to attend the fabulous American Accounting Association Annual
Meetings in San Francisco (beginning around July 31, 2010)
Here are some pictures of San Francisco ---
http://home.comcast.net/~bzee1b/Zeppelin/Zeppelin.html
I have great memories of the Bay Area since I attended graduate school at
Stanford for six years as a slow learner and two subsequent years in a think
tank for slow learners. It will be great to return to the area for a visit.
I'm warning Erika not to go into to water in San Francisco
Sharks can creep up anywhere, even in the Hilton's swimming pool
Nah! That's just Tiger Woods searching for a lost golf ball on his rehab's golf
course
Top 10 Olympic
Opening Ceremony moments ---
http://www.nbcolympics.com/news-features/news/newsid=413169.html?__source=rss&cid=&asid=151d95d7
Cheer for our hometown hero, Bode Miller ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080331.htm
Tidbits on February 15, 2010
Bob Jensen
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on February 15,
2010
To Accompany the February 15, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/tidbits1000215Quotations.htm
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
This week I added a module on the healthcare system of Germany (thanks to a
close friend in Germany)
Tidbits on December 23, 2009
Bob Jensen
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Modern Science and Ancient Wisdom ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AncientWisdom
"A Wisdom 101 Course!" February 15, 2010 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/a-wisdom-101-course/
"Overview of Prior Research on Wisdom," Simoleon Sense,
February 15, 2010 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/overview-of-prior-research-on-wisdom/
"An Overview Of The Psychology Of Wisdom," Simoleon Sense,
February 15, 2010 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/an-overview-of-the-psychology-of-wisdom/
"Why Bayesian Rationality Is Empty, Perfect Rationality Doesn’t Exist,
Ecological Rationality Is Too Simple, and Critical Rationality Does the Job,"
Simoleon Sense, February 15, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://www.simoleonsense.com/why-bayesian-rationality-is-empty-perfect-rationality-doesn%e2%80%99t-exist-ecological-rationality-is-too-simple-and-critical-rationality-does-the-job/
Great Minds in Management: The Process of Theory
Development ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/GreatMinds.htm
Great Minds in Sociology ---
http://www.sociosite.net/topics/sociologists.php
Also see Also see
http://www.sociologyprofessor.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on theory and
research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
-
- 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
"Climategate's Phil Jones Confesses to Climate Fraud," by Marc
Sheppard, American Thinker, February 14, 2010 ---
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/climategates_phil_jones_confes.html
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
FEI Second Life Video (thank you Edith) ---
If I Were an Auditor ---
http://www.youtube.com/user/feiblog#p/a/u/0/Q-FR_fkTFKY
Five for Fighting (thank you Edith)
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/ThankYouAmerica.PPS
Meteorologist Freakout on the Local News Channel (thank you Bob) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpxiCxO5k0g
Charlie Bit Me (thank you Herta) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM
NOVA: Riddles of the Sphinx ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sphinx/
VetPulse (Veterinary Medicine and
Surgery) ---
http://www.vetpulse.tv/
University of California; Science Today
(Radio News, Audio) ---
http://www.ucop.edu/sciencetoday/index.php
Check out Britain's Jenny Jones winning a snowboard gold at
the X Games ---.
http://bit.ly/aySA43
Murray Hill Incorporated is Running for Congress ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHRKkXtxDRA
I'm not a fan of Steven Colbert's slap
stick humor as a rule, but you might enjoy the following video
Stephen Colbert uses an iPad at the 2010 Grammy Awards ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKFBMSLFe4E
Also see
http://www.engadget.com/podcast/
WSJ subscribers can get a more serious review (mostly negative) from Walt
Mossberg's first impressions (video) ---
http://online.wsj.com/video/mossbergs-first-impressions-of-the-apple-ipad/FACA3AFE-05BD-46ED-956B-60B964A01225.html
Saturday Night Live's Scott Brown Dance
Party ---
http://www.politico.com/click/stories/1001/snls_scott_brown_dance_party.html
Some of Jon Stewart's more famous
"comedy" clips ---
http://www.associatedcontent.com/topic/26395/jon_stewart.html?cat=9
Not linked are his latest clips portraying a negative image of President Obama
(which surprise me greatly) ---
"Tougher Jon Stewart Obama Jokes May Signal Collapse of Remaining Vestiges of
Obama Support" ---
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2654597/tougher_jon_stewart_obama_jokes_may.html?cat=75
And for More
Laughs at the Party
Video: Jon Stewart Mocks Olbermann (hilarious) ---
http://www.thehopeforamerica.com/play.php?id=2858
Olbermann reduced to name calling
Disemboweler Jon Stewart Eviscerates Blogosphere (VIDEO)
The Blogs Must Be Crazy ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/disemboweler-jon-stewart_n_450715.html
Funniest Super Bowl Adds of All Time
---
Funniest Super Bowl Ads Of All Time (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/the-funniest-superbowl-ad_n_449511.html
Objectivism: friend or foe? Mike Wallace & Ayn Rand in 1959
: 1/3 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XC7l18RIl8
: 2/3 ---
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Mike+Wallace+%26+Ayn+Rand&search_type=&aq=f
: 3/3 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEruXzQZhNI&feature=PlayList&p=04A4E12F230C8163&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=2
"A Rand Revival Understanding the best—and worst—of Ayn Rand's philosophy," by
Cathy Young, Reason Magazine, February 11, 2010 ---
http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/11/a-rand-revival
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
The Crooked Road: Virginia's Heritage Music Trail [iTunes]
http://www.thecrookedroad.org/default.asp
Restful ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Restful.wma
American Trilogy Video (Elvis) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moUifEmOcbU
Fritz Kreisler's Music (And His Violin) At WGBH
---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123065333
Quartet San Francisco: Brubeck On Strings ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123161226
Ahmad Zahir: The Voice Of The Golden Years ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123137188
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
Take Me Back to the 60s (thank
you Jagdish) ---
http://objflicks.com/TakeMeBackToTheSixties.htm
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
A Gallery of Forgotten Hollywood Photos (neat)
---
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/01/baby-boomers-time-machine.html
New 9/11 Aerial Photos Released: Helicopter
Captured Pictures Of World Trade Center After Attack ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/10/new-911-aerial-photos-rel_n_457163.html
Best View Ever of Pluto (video) ---
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/best-view-yet-of-pluto-shows-rapidly-changing-surface/
MoMA: Gabriel Orozco [Interactive Art]
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/gabrielorozco/
History World: History and Timelines ---
http://www.historyworld.net/default.asp?gtrack=mtop1
NOVA: Riddles of the Sphinx ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sphinx/
LSU Photograph Campus Collection ---
http://www.louisianadigitallibrary.org//cdm4/index_LSU_UAP.php?CISOROOT=/LSU_UAP
The Guild of Book Workers ---
http://www.guildofbookworkers.org/index.php
The Atlas of Early Printing (interactive slide show) ---
http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/
Crop Art (Rice Fields in Japan) ===
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/japanese-rice-crop-art.shtml
Never Before Seen Photographs of Marilyn Monroe
(video) ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/marilyn-monroe-the-visit-_n_450712.html
February 2, 2010 message from Montford, Kimberlyn
[KIMBERLYN.MONTFORD@Trinity.edu]
It's astonishing, but they're just models.
You'll see how the hobbyist manages to get such great perspective (to me, at
least).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24796741@N05/sets/72157604247242338/show/with/2346008881
Dr. Kimberlyn Montford
Associate Professor of Music History
Co-Director of African American Studies Trinity University
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
History World: History and Timelines ---
http://www.historyworld.net/default.asp?gtrack=mtop1
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 15,
2010
To Accompany the February 15, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/tidbits1000215Quotations.htm
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
This week I added a module on the healthcare system of Germany (thanks to a
close friend in Germany)
"William Fredrick "Will" Yancey," Dallas Morning
News, February 14, 2010 ---
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dallasmorningnews/obituary.aspx?n=william-fredrick-yancey-will&pid=139699649
Thank you Arnie Barkman
Yancey, William Fredrick "Will"
Will Yancey, PhD, CPA, loving husband and devoted father, resident of Dallas
and Maine, passed away February 11, 2010 at home in Dallas. Will was born
Aug. 30, 1956 in Boston, MA to Marianne and Joel Yancey. He earned a BA from
Dartmouth College, 1978, Master of Forestry from Duke Univ., 1980, a
Bachelor of Accounting, UM Duluth 1983, a Master of Business Taxation, UM
Twin Cities, 1987, and a PhD in Accounting, UT Austin, 1993. He married the
love of his life, Carol Gabriel, on July 5, 1986. Will, a former TCU
professor, was self-employed in accounting, specializing in statistical
sampling. He had many professional
publications and was honored with many awards, including having his website,
www.willyancey.com
being listed as 'Best of the Web' by
Forbes Magazine. Will generously gave
his time in service to the community. An Eagle Scout, Will actively
volunteered as an assistant scout leader in Troops 2150, 86, and 751,
mentoring many boys as they strived for the Eagle Scout rank, including his
son, Michael. He also remained active in the Circle 10 Council, Order of the
Arrow, Mikanakawa Lodge. He served as photographer for the Jesuit/Ursuline
Ranger Band. Will also interviewed undergraduate applicants for Dartmouth
College for 26 years. He is survived by wife, Carol, son, Michael, sister
Julie and husband Kevin, sister Margaret and husband Gordon, and many nieces
and nephews, including Wendy who lived several years with the Yancey family.
Will was loved and admired by many and will be remembered for his love of
the outdoors and kayaking, teaching spirit, generosity, and willingness to
help. A funeral vigil will be held at 7:00 p.m. Sunday February 14, 2010 at
All Saints Catholic Church ( Arapaho @ Meadowcreek ) in Dallas. Friends will
have the opportunity to greet the family in the church following the vigil.
The Funeral Mass will be at 1:00 p.m. Monday at All Saints with Rev. Phil
Postel SJ - Celebrant. A reception will follow in the All Saints Parish
Center. Interment will occur at a later date in Maine. If desired memorial
gifts may be made in Will's name to: Order of the Arrow, Circle Ten Council,
8605 Harry Hines Blvd, Dallas, TX 75235
Now that Will Yancey has passed on, we don’t have any idea
what will become of his very, very open sharing Website at
http://www.willyancey.com/
It might be worth your while to scan over the above site
and jot down the links that might be important in your life. For example, Will
made a lot of money in compliance testing and his expertise on stratified
sampling. If those topics interest you or are of possible interest to your
students, I suggest you look carefully at all the important material (including
hot links) shared by Will.
Will also consulted heavily in
law and litigation support. You might also note those topics.
Will also provides
a lot of helpers for studying family history and genealogy.
I really, really, really hope that Will’s valuable open
sharing page will be carried on by somebody somehow. But in case it is taken
down, you may not want to overlook this chance to record what is most of
interest to you.
My tribute to Will written long before his sudden and unexpected death is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Yancey.htm
February 14, 2010 reply from Francine McKenna
[retheauditors@GMAIL.COM]
Bob,
You raise an interesting issue
with regard to prolific writers, educators who have significant public/web
presence.
http://www.adelemcalear.com/ See her new startup
DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com
fm
View the current front pages of hundreds of daily newspapers ---
The Newseum displays these daily newspaper front
pages in their original, unedited form. Some front pages may contain material
that is objectionable to some visitors. Viewer discretion is advised.
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/
Thanks for the heads up on this one David Albrecht.
Thank You Julie. It appears to be Delicious.
AIS Professor Julie Smith David at Arizona State is the moving force
behind the AAA Commons. She recently posted an enthusiastic tidbit about
software called Delicious ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/b5382ec151
There are so many great tools available that it's
incredibly hard to keep up with them... So I (Julie)
thought I'd share one of my favorites with you - and
ask for your insights into the ones that you find most helpful.
Here's my problem: I find a lot of great web sites
as I'm browsing, but remembering that great site might be more difficult
when I actually need it. I used to try and track sites using my bookmarks,
but then they got LONG, and I'd forget what folder I had stored a site in.
Does that sound like you? If so, the solution I like is delicious, and just
click here to learn more http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/b5382ec151
Jensen Comment
Since many of you do not have access to the Commons, I will take you to directly
to "Delicious Social Bookmarking." I should note that I've not yet tried this
software myself ---
http://delicious.com/
In the top blue rectangle click on the link that reads "Learn more." That will
take you to the following page:
http://delicious.com/help/learn
I suggest that you first go to YouTube and enter the term "Delicious Social
Bookmarking" ---
http://www.youtube.com/
Watch several videos until you get the idea.
Don't necessarily watch the video links starting with the first video.
I suggest that you only consider the five-star videos
in this case, because they do a better job of explaining Delicious.
For example, try
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGXElviSRXM
Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on social networking are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
What is social networking? ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Networking
The main types of social networking services are those which contain
category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to
connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a
recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of
these, with
Facebook widely used worldwide;
MySpace,
Twitter and
LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America;[1]
Nexopia (mostly in
Canada);[2]
Bebo,[3]
Hi5,
StudiVZ (mostly in
Germany),
Decayenne,
Tagged,
XING;[4],
Badoo[5]
and
Skyrock in parts of Europe;[
Orkut and
Hi5 in
South America and
Central America;[7]
and
Friendster,
Mixi,
Multiply,
Orkut,
Wretch,
Xiaonei and
Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands.
There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the
need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the
FOAF standard and the
Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about
privacy.
Google Wave ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
Google Wave is a self-described "personal communication and
collaboration tool" announced by
Google at the
Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a
web-based service,
computing platform, and
communications protocol designed to merge
e-mail,
instant messaging,
wikis, and
social networking.[3]
It has a strong
collaborative and
real-time[4]
focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example,
spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and
numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a "preview
release" of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009,
each allowed to invite twenty to thirty additional users. On the 29th of
November 2009, Google accepted most requests submitted soon after the
extended release of the technical preview in September 2009; these users
have around 25 invitations to give.
Jensen Comment
It may surprise you that I'm really not into professional or social networking
yet. After getting over 700 requests from former students and friends to join
their professional networks (like LinkedIn) and social networks (like Facebook)
I decided that I just do not have enough time in the day to do what I do now
plus join in on so many social and professional networks. And I don't Tweet.
What I like best is sticking with the listservs like the AECM for accounting
educators that I've contributed to actively for years. And I add messages daily
to the AAA Commons and put out my newsletters on a regular basis:
Bob Jensen's 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
But I am seriously considering Delicious Social Bookmarking. Julie is really
an exceptional AIS professional educator, and I highly respect her opinions.
February 11, 2010 reply from Rick Lillie
[rlillie@CSUSB.EDU]
Good morning Bob,
When saving web pages, AECM readers may also wish to check out
Iterasi,
a
browser-based tool for saving web pages
(http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dynamic_bookmarking_with_itera.php).
Iterasi does more than save a web page's location, it also captures the
content of a web page. It is dynamic. If the content of the web page
updates, the saved web page also updates.
Iterasi has a notes feature that allows the user to write comments about the
web page. The notes I write help me remember "why" I saved the web page in
the first place. You can save web pages in folders which makes organizing
information an easy process.
You can tag saved web pages. This makes it possible to quickly search web
pages that you may have saved in various folders.
Iterasi is a great way to do internet research. It is web based so it is
accessible through any web browser. It works with both IE and Firefox.
Rick Lillie
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
February 11, 2010 reply from Lohrke, Cynthia
[cflohrke@SAMFORD.EDU]
I have been using Delicious
for about 2 years and it is wonderful. You can tag bookmarks with numerous
tags. So I tag videos with the “video” tag and then if I found it for a
particular course I tag it with the course number. In addition I also tag
my bookmarks with subject tags. You can also share your bookmarks with
others. If you would like to see mine. Just add me to your network. My
user name is drlohrke.
Cynthia
Cynthia Frownfelter Lohrke,
PhD, CPA, CISA
Brock School of Business
Samford University
800 Lakeshore Drive
Birmingham, AL 35229
205-726-2682 o
Comparing Two Documents for Possible Plagiarism
February 8, 2010 message from Hossein Nouri
[hnouri@TCNJ.EDU]
I am looking for a software
that could compare two documents (pdf files) and tell me percentages of
similarities and differences. In addition, The software could point to
similar sentences, etc. The documents are written by different individuals
and most likely not plagiarized. For example, suppose I want to compare two
chapters of two different managerial accounting books on CVP analysis
written by two different authors. What would be a good software to do this?
Hossein Nouri
February 9, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Hossein,
There are a number of document comparison software
vendors that mostly focus on plagiarism detection in databases of documents.
Most plagiarism detection programs feature enormous databases of articles
and search algorithms for comparing a given document with one that is
already in print in the database. I summarize some of the major vendors at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
The real trick is to catch a plagiarist who has the
good sense not to copy verbatim. Changes made in the plagiarized item can
include substitution of synonyms or changing English letters to Cyrillic
lettering. Sophisticated document comparison is becoming a real science.
But there also software (usually not free) for
document comparison of two or more submitted pieces. I've not used any of
these and cannot make recommendations other than to note they exist.
Examples can be found at the following sites
http://www.surfwax.com/technology/plagiarism.htm
http://www.plagiarismdetect.com/features.php
http://checkforplagiarism.net/
http://www.checkforplagiarism.net/mnucompare.html
There are many other such services.
Probably the hardest thing to detect is the
borrowing of ideas or portions of writings by completely rewriting the
passages. What we admire greatly in the academy are expert scholars who can
read a passage and identify earlier points in time where ideas originated.
Indeed the greatest challenge for computer
scientists is to write programs where computing machines can perform as well
or better at detecting earlier patterns than human experts. Much of the
experimenting here as been done with the game of chess when trying to get
computers to identify earlier game patterns that grand masters can somehow
still recall better than the machines --- although Big Blue is getting quite
good at comparing patterns of chess moves with the history of chess play.
Gary Kasperov has a fascinating new book on this subject:
"The Chess Master and the Computer," By Garry Kasparov, New York Books,
February 11, 2010 ---
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592
Sometimes rewriting can be turned into a positive
learning experience and is done with full permission and transparency ---
http://www.white.k12.ga.us/Intervention/Interventions-Written-Expression.html
There are also some interesting group communications
experiments discussed in Duncan Luce's autobiography at
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/imbs/personnel/luce/pre1990/1989/Luce_Book%20Chapter_1989b.pdf
Gadgets For People Who Roam the Hard Copy Stacks Rather Than Google
These gadgets might also be useful for detail tests on audits
"Pint-Size Peripherals Scan or Print at a Price," by Katherine Boehret,
The Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704820904575055321581158304.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_RIGHTTopCarousel
It's often said that less is more. If only this
were true for computer devices like printers and scanners, which take up a
lot of desktop real estate. The reality is that small, stylish, portable
versions of these gadgets are often pricey and not as functional.
This week, I reviewed two products that
unfortunately live up to that reality: a portable printer and mini scanner
that put a premium on good looks at $300 each. I've been using
Fujitsu's newest $295 mini scanner, the ScanSnap
S1300 (fujitsu.com),
and PlanOn System Solutions Inc.'s tiny $300 PrintStik
PS905ME (http://3.ly/6QVS).
There are several good printers, scanners or all-in-ones that cost
significantly less or offer more functionality than these devices.
But boy, do these gadgets look good. The Fujitsu
ScanSnap collapses down to a small, rectangular box with mirrored buttons.
The PlanOn PrintStik resembles a box of aluminum foil in the kitchen
drawer—except more compact.
Both devices are small and lightweight enough to
fit in a bag or briefcase, if necessary. Either one of these could be ported
around without a problem: The PrintStik weighs 1.5 pounds and the ScanSnap
weighs twice as much at 3.08 pounds. Both fit well in a tiny work space or
on the desktops of people like me, who don't print or scan much and don't
want a device taking up a lot of space.
As is usually the case with smaller devices that
lack display screens and extra buttons, one hopes they come with
straightforward software or simply plug in and play. The Fujitsu ScanSnap
meets that requirement with software that installs on Macs or PCs and can be
used without reading complicated instructions.
The PlanOn PrintStik uses thermal printing to
produce images and characters on scrolls of paper. The PlanOn PrintStik
worked adequately as a basic black-and-white printer for Windows PCs (it
isn't Mac compatible), but fell short as a wireless printer for smart
phones. The PrintStik is meant to receive and print documents sent to it via
Bluetooth from BlackBerrys, but I found the BlackBerry program to be clumsy
and in the end, it didn't even work despite at least two dozen attempts.
PlanOn's tech support said they thought my PrintStik's Bluetooth could be
faulty, but couldn't send me a new device in time for this column.
These two devices offer some interesting design
elements. The PlanOn PrintStik PS905ME uses thermal printing—an old
technology that has been around for decades—rather than ink cartridges, to
produce images and characters by applying heat at tiny points.
The PrintStik's thermal printing only works with
special scrolls of thin, slippery paper. It comes in packs of six rolls for
$23; one roll is about 23 feet long and prints roughly 30 sheets of
letter-size paper. You can opt to print only as much as a document requires
to save paper. But a long document prints out in one continuous scroll
rather than separate pages.
The PrintStik has a rechargeable battery that lasts
long enough to print about 30 pages; a wall charger is also included. It can
churn out up to three pages per minute. I can imagine tossing this printer
into my suitcase for business trips; it would also come in handy for
printing boarding passes for use at the airport, among other things.
Documents that are supposed to be printable from
the BlackBerry with a remote-printing app include Web pages, attachments
including PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, JPEGs, and PowerPoint
presentations. PlanOn representatives say an app will be available for
Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones in about four or five months;
they also are working on an iPad application. Though the PrintStik's
remote-printing app for the BlackBerry is currently free, the company
intends to begin charging $30 annually for its remote-printing service this
summer.
Fujitsu's ScanSnap S1300 can suck in 10 pages at
once, and has two cameras that can scan the front and back of printouts.
This process can scan as many as eight dual-sided pages a minute. Item sizes
range from 2x2-inch cards to legal documents.
The ScanSnap comes with a wall charger but also
runs without being plugged into the wall: It uses a USB cord for charging
from a PC in addition to the USB cord that transfers data between the
scanner and computer.
Seconds after I scanned documents into the ScanSnap,
colorful icons appeared on my computer screen. Choosing one of these icons
let me send the documents to one of the following: email, Word, a printer,
Excel, iPhoto or Cardiris—a program that exports contact information from
scanned business cards into Address Book or Entourage; CardMinder on Windows
exports contact information to Outlook and other programs.
If you want to scan old or precious documents, you
may not like using the ScanSnap's sucking method for scanning, in case a
page gets stuck or damaged. For sensitive objects or page scanning, the best
bet is to use a flatbed scanner or all-in-one (that prints, scans, and
faxes) with a lift-up lid that scans items on a flat surface.
Though the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 and PlanOn
PrintStik PS905ME aren't the least expensive or the most functional devices
of their kind, they're easy to move around and take up minimal amounts of
space. For some people, that may be well worth the higher cost.
—Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.
Question
What hand-held device can photograph close up and read aloud from books, price
labels, receipts, and newspapers?
Hint:
This device has far more uses beyond being a helper for sight impaired people.
For one thing, auditors might make use of this when detail testing.
Intel
Reader ---
http://www.intel.com/healthcare/reader/index.htm
The Intel Reader, powered by an Atom processor, is a handheld device with a
five-megapixel camera that can read aloud any printed text it is pointed at,
including product labels, receipts, and pages from books and newspapers.
Previously, visually impaired or dyslexic people required a desktop scanner
connected to a computer to convert print into speech.
"Scan and Listen," MIT's Technology Review, December 17, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24198/?a=f
Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm#Technology
Are we living in the age of Botulism?
I was inspired to read a bit more about Frédéric
Pagès based upon an article by Scott McLemee
"Critique of Impure Reason," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, February
10, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee276
. . .
A friend who has read La vie
sexuelle tells me that the
author’s tongue is very
conspicuously in his cheek. That
BHL cited it as a serious work
of scholarship would strongly
suggest that he has an employee
or two toiling in the erudition
mines for him. If so, it is an
interesting question whether the
person who actually read Botul
misunderstood the nature of the
book -- or passed along the
citation as an act of sabotage.
Either way, it seems like a
fireable offense. (Of course,
nothing like that ever
happens in the academic world.)
Finally,the incident poses an
important question about
intellectual history. Michel
Foucault once said of Gilles
Deleuze that his friend’s work
was so important that one day
the century might be known as
Deleuzean. The convergence of
judgments between Bernard-Henri
Lévy and Jean-Baptiste Botul
regarding Kant has important
implication -- even in the
United States, where BHL has, of
late, been vigorously colonizing
the media system. He is a
regular guest on Charlie Rose,
his articles appear at
The Huffington Post,
and Random
House is publishing
another of his books
in a few months.
Doesn’t BHL’s prominence reveal
something about the nature of
the period? Are we not living,
perhaps, in the age of Botulism?
Frédéric Pagès (1950 - ) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Botul
Pagès
wrote two books of spoof philosophy under the name Jean-Baptiste
Botul:
-
La
Vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant. Éditions Mille et une
nuits. 1999.
ISBN
2842054245.
-
Nietzsche ou le démon de midi. Éditions Mille et une
nuits. 2004.
ISBN
2842058739.
He
founded the "Association of Friends of Jean-Baptiste Botul"
to promote this fictious philosopher and his school of "Botulism".
In 2010, the hoax caught out the well-known philosopher
Bernard-Henri Lévy, whose book
De la guerre en philosophie used Botul as the primary
source for his attack on Kant.]
"What I've Been Reading, Watching, and Listening To," Bill Gates Blog
---
http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?id=111&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
With more than 250 lectures from some of the world’s
leading professors, The Teaching Company provides the opportunity to learn from
great teachers who are true experts in their fields. Bill offers recommendations
for some of the courses that he has enjoyed the most.
Great Lectures from The Teaching Company ---
http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?ID=24
The Teaching Company
is adding lectures at quite a fast rate. I used to be able to say I had seen
almost all of their science courses but they have added new offerings faster
than I can watch them in the past year.
I wrote about some of my favorite lectures in science and in economics
earlier (see
Great Lectures from The Teaching Company).
I am watching
Thinking about Capitalism by Jerry Muller right now which is excellent
but mostly for people who want to know the history of economics. The genius
of Adam Smith was really unbelievable – he foresaw a lot of the things we
still argue about today.
I have not watched
Economics 3rd Edition by Timothy Taylor but he is such a good teacher I
might want to watch it.
In the science realm the best is probably
Physics in Your Life by Richard Wolfson. He explains everything very
clearly and his description of how semiconductor chips work is the best I
have ever seen.
I also loved the courses on geology, starting with John Renton’s course
Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology followed by
How the Earth Works by Michael Wysession.
There is a great biology course (Biology:
The Science of Life by Stephen Nowicki) and a great physics course (Particle
Physics for Non-Physicists: A Tour of the Microcosmos by Steven Pollock)
but those are pretty in-depth and designed more for people who want to learn
the field.
Another great hard-core course is
Understanding the Universe by Alex Filippenko. It is a total of 48 hours
and is more in depth than most people need, but if you want to understand
astronomy, there is no better way to learn it.
There is a six hour course called
Earth’s Changing Climate, also by Richard Wolfson, that I recommend to
people who want to learn about the science of climate change.
In medicine there are two that I like a lot. One is
The Human Body: How We Fail, How We Heal by Anthony Goodman. He explains
the different diseases that people get and the progress we have made on how
to treat them. The other is
Sensation, Perception, and the Aging Process by Francis Colavita. He
takes all the senses and explains how they work and how they change over
time.
There are two lectures on linguistics by John McWhorter that I really loved
–
Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language and the
Story of Human Language. The history of language is far more interesting
than I thought it would be – in fact it is fascinating.
The only religion course I watched was
Comparative Religion by Charles Kimball. It is excellent.
In math, the best general course I’ve seen is
Joy of Thinking: The Beauty and Power of Classical Mathematical Ideas by
Michael Starbird and Edward Burger.
They have a category called
“High School.” I watched the
Chemistry course to see if my son would like it but it ended up being a
good review of the topic for me.
The category which I have not gone into but I expect to someday is
"Fine Arts and Music.”
For a long time their best selling courses were the
Robert Greenberg lectures on understanding music.
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing videos and lectures from prestigious
universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Students from the University of Denver created this video "parody" on
technology in the classroom.
It appears, however, to be a bit more serious critique than what I would call a
humorous parody.
http://www.youtube.com/user/DUinnovations#p/a/u/0/6svk_R_rVhA
What not to
do in PowerPoint (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORxFwBR4smE
PowerPoint and Other Teaching Helpers
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#PowerPointHelpers
Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
"'Melting' Drywall Keeps Rooms Cool Developers think these phase-change
materials could reduce the need for air-conditioning," by Katherine Bourzac,
MIT's Technology Review, February 4, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24476/?nlid=2719
Building materials that absorb heat during the day
and release it at night, eliminating the need for air-conditioning in some
climates, will soon be on the market in the United States. The North
Carolina company National Gypsum is testing drywall sheets--the plaster
panels that make up the walls in most new buildings--containing capsules
that absorb heat to passively cool a building. The capsules, made by global
chemical giant BASF, can be incorporated into a range of construction
materials and are already found in some products in Europe.
The "phase-change" materials inside the BASF
capsules keep a room cool in much the same way that ice cubes chill a drink:
by absorbing heat as they melt. Each polymer capsule contains paraffin waxes
that melt at around room temperature, enabling them to keep the temperature
of a room constant throughout the day. The waxes work best in climates that
cool down at night, allowing the materials inside the capsules to solidify
and release the heat they've stored during the day.
In some southern European climates, for example,
the materials absorb enough heat during the day to save 20 percent of the
electricity needed for air-conditioning. In northern Europe, where nighttime
temperatures are cooler, a building incorporating the materials may not need
an air conditioner at all, says Peter Schossig, an engineer at the
Fraunhofer Institute in Munich, Germany, whose research group worked with
BASF to develop the capsules.
The work is part of a push in the construction
industry toward greener building materials that help maintain comfortable
temperatures without using electricity. According to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration, buildings consume more than 70 percent of the
electricity generated in America, and about 8 percent of that is used for
air-conditioning in homes and offices. Widely used lightweight construction
materials including wooden framing and drywall enable contractors to put up
buildings rapidly, but they don't store much heat, so temperatures inside
fluctuate throughout the day.
Phase-change materials offer a way to add thermal
mass to lightweight building materials, says Leon Glicksman, professor of
building technology and mechanical engineering at MIT. Since the 1950s,
several companies have tried to develop passive cooling systems that take
advantage of phase-change materials. But they had limited success because
it's difficult to incorporate these new materials into existing building
substances.
BASF makes the microcapsules by rapidly beating
melted wax into hot water. Since wax and water repel one another, the wax
forms small droplets. When the researchers add acrylic precursors to the
mix, the repulsion between wax and water drives them to coat the droplets'
surface. Finally, they add a catalyst to form an acrylic polymer shell
around the wax. The resulting wet mixture can then be added to the powder
that's used to make drywall or dried out and incorporated into other
construction materials, including concrete and plasters.
Jensen Comment
In this era, college professors are on the lookout for "green projects" to
assign for course projects such as team projects in cost accounting courses. It
seems cost analysis of the benefits and costs of phase-changing a particular
building might be a possible projects. Increasingly there are Web sites and
other references that provide information on this new energy saving phase-change
technology.
It would be really neat if a case could be developed on an actual
construction project being undertaken for materials testing purposes.
"6 Emerging Technologies That Will Impact College Campuses," by Tonya
Roscorla, Converge Magazine, February 2, 2010 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/edtech/6-emerging-technologies-that-will-impact-college-campuses.html?elq=8cd644f3f9b44e4e93beed8e724a9706
As students increasingly learn on the go, they
demand that their colleges and universities stay up to date on the latest
technology.
"Technology’s like the golden goose, and it’s
improving at this rate that’s unprecedented, but I’m concerned that the
academy will fall behind," said
Adrian Sannier, vice
president, university technology officer and professor of computing studies
at Arizona State
University.
That's where the
2010 Horizon Report
comes in. The annual report of the
New Media Consortium's
Horizon Project describes up and coming
technologies that college campuses will likely mainstream within the next
five years, as well as key trends they are experiencing and critical
challenges that they will face.
6 technologies to track
Time to adoption horizon: One year or less
- Mobile computing
Smart phones,
netbooks,
laptops and other devices that access the
Internet through cellular-based, portable hotspots and mobile broadband
cards have already become mainstream on many campuses.
At Georgetown University, the administration texts short messages to
students, and profesors use screen recording software to create podcasts
of their lectures that can be downloaded onto mobile phones, said
Betsy Page Sigman,
a professor who teaches management information systems, databases and
electronic commerce at the university's
McDonough School of
Business.
- Open content
As textbook prices have soared over the years,
educational resources have popped up online at no cost to the students
and faculty who want to use them.
Open content has had a huge impact on the way
colleges do business, said Brian Parish, the president of
iData Inc,
a higher education technology consulting and software solutions firm
based in Virginia.
However, some educators resist open content because they want to protect
their
intellectual property, not because they don't
like the technology.
“A lot of people want to use open content on the faculty and staff side,
but they don’t want to make their stuff open content,” Parish said.
Time to adoption horizon: Two to three years
- Electronic books
Consumers have already mainstreamed electronic
readers, including the
Kindle,
which was Amazon.com's best selling product in
2009. Campuses have not adapted the readers as quickly, but as more
academic titles become available, they are piloting
e-books.
Eight colleges and universities are currently in
the middle of a pilot program with the
Kindle DX, a larger format version of the
reader that is designed for academic texts, newspapers and journals.
Those schools include Arizona State University, Ball State University,
Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Princeton, Reed
College, Syracuse University and the University of Virginia Darden
School of Business.
And they're not the only ones. Northwest Missouri State University and
Penn State have started pilot programs with the
Sony Reader.
- Simple augmented reality
When Sannier was researching augmented reality eight or nine years ago,
it seemed far flung, but now it's right around the corner. Through
mobile computing and cameras, people can fuse the digital world and the
physical world, which is really cool, he said.
The technology basically allows someone to point a smart phone at an
object and find out information about it. For example, Sigman could take
her smart phone to a place with a lot of plants, hold the camera up to
one of them, and find out what kind of plant she was looking at.
Within a week of seeing a
Droid phone, university President Michael M.
Crow asked Sannier if he could create an augmented reality layer over
the campus so that people could find out what things are, what's going
on inside buildings, find their way around and really melt the walls.
“For a university president to be as in touch with an emerging trend as
that, I think it really speaks to how central technology is becoming on
the academic side,” Sannier said.
Time to adoption horizon: Four to five years
- Gesture-based computing
The iPhone, iPod Touch, Nintendo Wii and
other gesture-based systems have become popular in the consumer industry
because they allow users to control what the device does with their body
movements. Devices with these systems could make the Internet come alive
and "very likely lead to new kinds of teaching or training simulations
that look, feel and operate almost exactly like their real-world
counterparts," the report states.
“it’s clear that people have become more open to interacting with
devices in a lot of different ways,” Sannier said. "I think the
challenge there is less technology than it is practice.”
- Visual data analysis
This technology basically combines advanced
computational methods with sophisticated graphics engines. Oftentimes
when someone looks at a straight list of data, it's hard to see the
outliers, which are the points that are farther away, Sigman said. But
with visual data analysis technology, that person can put the data in a
3-D chart that will make it easy to see where the outliers are.
2 Obstacles to overcome
While universities may have an easier time
replacing pens and notebooks with laptops, they will have a tougher time as
they integrate technologies such as gesture-based computing, which represent
a completely new way of providing information, Sannier said. These
technologies will challenge the existing university structure, and
universities need to respond to by accepting the idea that they don't have
to control or provide these technologies.
At Arizona State University, Sannier is preparing
for this switch by taking the following steps:
- Move away from directly providing the network
and allow an outside company to provide that network at a larger scale.
The university now uses Gmail and is working with
cloud computing providers.
- Make both wired and wireless networks easily
accessible
- Integrate technology in a functional way. The
university is working with Facebook to bring one of its applications
onto the
social networking
site and is also working with Google to offer Google Apps for Education
to their students, which will give them a new way to create and view
material.
- Shift the focus from direct provisioning to
applying commercial technologies to the academy
1. Change the culture
Preparing for the challenges that new technologies bring will require more
than just a change in mindset.
“The real challenge is to
change the culture of the academy," Sannier said.
" We need some lighthouse institutions to do some amazing things with these
technologies in classrooms and change them, and then to propagate those.”
Academies can change their culture by sharing best
practices among each other and looking at how for-profit colleges and
universities are able to succeed, he said. The success of the for-profit
institutions will put competitive pressure on the universities for possibly
the first time, and that could be a powerful change agent for universities.
2. Prepare the faculty and staff
That's not the only change that the universities will have to make. They
also have bring their faculty and staff up to speed on the latest
technologies because students will bring devices to school and already know
how to use them, Sannier said. Parish from iData agreed.
“They expect to be able to use their mobile phone, they expect open content,
they expect to use their e-books," Parish said. "It’s the staff and the
organization of the university that needs to be prepared to provide that to
them, and that’s the real challenge.”
At Arizona State University, Sannier is focusing on making the consumer
technologies that are coming on campus easy to use instead of trying to
train people how to use them. The university is also deploying online
resources that allow people to push a button that will make the technology
work.
Back at Georgetown University, Sigman plans on experimenting with any
technology that comes along, and she sees possibilities in these emerging
technologies.
“What an exciting time we live in, and what an
exciting time it is for professors to be teaching," Sigman said. "There’s
just so many wonderful tools that we have at our fingertips.”
Bob Jensen’s threads on education technologies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
"6 Technologies to Watch in Education," heads up by Tracey Sutherland
(Executive Director of the American Accounting Association). Her link is on the
restricted-entry AAA Commons, so I will link directly to the Chronicle of Higher
Education URL.
"'Horizon Report' Highlights 6 Technologies to Watch in Education," by Marc
Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 14, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Horizon-Report-Highlights-6/20525/
The main Horizon report is at
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report.pdf
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
.......................................................................................................................................
3
Key
Trends
Critical
Challenges
Technologies to Watch
The
Horizon Project
Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
Mobile
Computing.....................................................................................................................................
9
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Mobile
Computing in Practice
For
Further Reading
Open
Content..........................................................................................................................................
13
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Open
Content in Practice
For
Further Reading
Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
Electronic
Books......................................................................................................................................
17
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Electronic Books in Practice
For
Further Reading
Simple Augmented
Reality.......................................................................................................................
21
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Simple
Augmented Reality in Practice
For
Further Reading
Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
Gesture-Based
Computing......................................................................................................................
25
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Gesture-Based Computing in Practice
For
Further Reading
Visual Data
Analysis................................................................................................................................
29
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Visual
Data Analysis in Practice
For
Further Reading
Methodology.................................................................................................................................................
33
2010 Horizon Project Advisory Board..........................................................................................................
35
Bob Jensen's threads on education techologies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
I’ve avoided
Dropbox thus far due to the high cost of storage. But others may find this
service to be entirely appropriate.
Dropbox file
synchronization and storage
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(storage_provider)
Dropbox
is a
cross-platform
cloud-based
storage application and service operated by Dropbox,
Inc. The service enables users to store and sync files online and between
computers and share files and folders with others using
file synchronization.There are both free and paid
services, each with varying options.
It is also not
clear to me that Dropbox will always be able to penetrate a campus firewall if
you are updating a desktop PC from your laptop at a remote site.
Dropbox has good
reviews but is not truly a free service unless your college or other employer
subscribes for you. I think it is free service to faculty and staff at the
University of Connecticut.
For me, this
would be very expensive file storage at over $1,000 per year that I instead get
free from Trinity University. 50 Gb will not go far when you are serving up
multimedia files on the Web.
A PC Magazine
Review of Dropbox ---
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343852,00.asp
Dropbox is the simplest, most elegant file-synchronization
tool I've ever used. Dropbox Basic provides 2GB of storage free, and Dropbox Pro
gives you 50GB for $9.95 per month or $99.95 per year. The service stores files
with strong encryption on multiple servers in Amazon's S3 service and works
equally smoothly on Windows, Mac, and
Linux PCs. If you
prefer to synchronize folders you already have on your system, or if you want to
keep several folders fully synchronized between multiple machines, Dropbox may
not be for you. It synchronizes only files stored in a single dedicated folder.
But its smooth and hassle-free operation make it our
Bob Jensen's threads on
archiving and long-term storage ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm#archiving
Bob Jensen's threads on
free services for sending large files over the Internet ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm#SendingLargeFiles
Validity is Easier to Test
in Gaming Tournaments
The major problem in accountics research using statistical inference is the
underlying assumption of stationary-state is the real world where probabilities
on constantly in transition. The major problem in accountics mathematical
analytics is the assumption that the modeled systems are in equilibrium, which
is essentially the same as the dubious assumption of stationary systems. I
discuss these external validity problems in accounting research at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
In real world games such as
poker tournaments, however, the assumption of stationary states is more
relevant. An example is given below.
"Universal statistical
properties of poker tournaments," by Clement Sire, Physics and Society ---
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0703122
We present a simple model of
Texas hold'em poker tournaments which retains the two main aspects of the
game: i. the minimal bet grows exponentially with time; ii. players have a
finite probability to bet all their money. The distribution of the fortunes
of players not yet eliminated is found to be independent of time during most
of the tournament, and reproduces accurately data obtained from Internet
tournaments and world championship events. This model also makes the
connection between poker and the persistence problem widely studied in
physics, as well as some recent physical models of biological evolution, and
extreme value statistics.
YouTube is Not NetFlix: Erika and I would rather fight than switch
"YouTube’s Take From Movie Rentals: $10,709.16," by Miguel Helft,
The New York Times, February 2, 2010 ---
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/youtubes-take-from-movie-rentals-1070916/?hpw
Jensen Comment
Erika and I have the two-disk deal with disk turnaround (in nearby White River
Junction, Vermont) being at most two days after we put a return DVD in the mail.
We thereby watch over 20 Netflix movies per month on the cheap. I love the
vast selections of NetFlix (although we mostly watch PBS and BBC mysteries) and
occasional other movies. We loved watching Grand Torino yesterday in part
because we like clever and unpredictable endings.
Besides the quick turnaround, I love the keep-you-informed email messaging of
Netflix. Netflix keeps you up to date the instant they receive a return disk and
the instant they mail you the next disk at the top of your queue. You can easily
view the entire history of your previous mailings (so you don't accidentally
order something a second time unless you want to do so). And in the rare event
you receive a broken disk, they will mail you a replacement disk the instant you
notify them of the problem (you don't have to wait until the broken disk is
returned). One time I mailed a return disk at a hotel reception desk, and the
disk was most likely stolen before it was put in the mail. Perhaps because I'm
such a good customer I was not billed for the missing disk by NetFlix after I
explained what happened.
I don't download streaming full-feature movies from any vendor. I do not have
HDTV and the other hardware needed for download to a television set.
"What Do Accounting Professors Talk About?," by David Albrecht, The
Summa, February 1, 2010 ---
http://profalbrecht.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/what-do-accounting-professors-talk-about/
… when permitted to leave their offices for
unsupervised free time?
Most questioners ask only rhetorically.
In response to my statement, “What is I do? I’m an
accounting professor,” I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard
__________ (fill in the blank with a much less than flattering comment about
either accounting, accountants, or accounting classes in college).
In response to my statement, “I’m on an e-mail
listserv with 1,000 other accounting professors,” I wish I had a nickel for
every time I heard __________ (fill in blank with a much less than
flattering comment about how little there is to talk about, and what we talk
about must be exceedingly boring).
So, what did the accounting professors really talk
about today?
- “In my opinion the Number 1 disgrace in higher
education is grade inflation.” And student evaluations of teaching are
identified as the causal factor.
- Rankled by Rankings: The problems with the
ranking of best accounting programs, best accounting departments, best
college, best universities in country, best universities in world.
- Stephen Colbert uses an iPad at the 2010
Grammy.
- Designing Corporate Governance Systems
- Canadian Signs of IFRS Transitions to Come in
the United States
- The enduring impact of transient emotions on
decision making – being predictably irrational. I don’t think anyone
believes in EMH (efficient markets hypothesis) anymore, except
economists, economists advising President Obama, and corporate PR
people.
- Could it be that some audit firms take on
fewer clients when risks of negligence lawsuits increase?
- The major problem in accountics research using
statistical inference is the underlying assumption of stationary-state
is the real world where probabilities on constantly in transition.
- Oh, … and how Dave Albrecht uses retesting to
implement mastery learning concepts in his classes. [Hey, I didn’t even
bring it up.]
I love the experience. The discussions are fodder
for the educated mind. It comes at a cost,though. Reading all these
e-mails takes a significant portion of the three hours I daily devote to
e-mail processing. It can take an hour (or more) to craft a reply. My
reply to item #9 will take many hours and be the next blog post (or 2 or 3)
to The Summa
Today test scores are up, charter schools
proliferate and schools have improved to the point that Louisiana is a leading
contender for Race to the Top education grants that the Obama Administration has
set aside for model school systems. As tragic as Katrina was, its destruction
also replaced a failed system of public education and created a political
opening for reform.
"Sorry for What? Team Obama apologizes for being right," The Wall Street
Journal, February 5, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704041504575045460702754550.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Gender Issues
"The New Math on Campus," by Alex Williams, The New York Times,
February 5, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/fashion/07campus.html?hpw
After midnight on a rainy night last week in Chapel
Hill, N.C., a large group of sorority women at the University of North
Carolina squeezed into the corner booth of a gritty basement bar. Bathed in
a neon glow, they splashed beer from pitchers, traded jokes and belted out
lyrics to a Taylor Swift heartache anthem thundering overhead. As a night
out, it had everything — except guys.
“This is so typical, like all nights, 10 out of
10,” said Kate Andrew, a senior from Albemarle, N.C. The experience has
grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just
so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, “because there are
no guys.”
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly
60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel
eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of
enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent
report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several
reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in
disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older
students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.
In terms of academic advancement, this is hardly
the worst news for women — hoist a mug for female achievement. And
certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for
men, but because they want to earn a degree.
But surrounded by so many other successful women,
they often find it harder than expected to find a date on a Friday night.
“My parents think there is something wrong with me
because I don’t have a boyfriend, and I don’t hang out with a lot of guys,”
said Ms. Andrew, who had a large circle of male friends in high school.
Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was
seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates
was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40
percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those
20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10
percent,” she said.
Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to
play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a
commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior
history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started
dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority —
that I know of.”
These sorts of romantic complications are hardly
confined to North Carolina, an academically rigorous school where most
students spend more time studying than socializing. The gender imbalance is
also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and
Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states
like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public
liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at
the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent
female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as “Girlington.”
The gender gap is not universal. The Ivy League
schools are largely equal in gender, and some still tilt male. But at some
schools, efforts to balance the numbers have been met with complaints that
less-qualified men are being admitted over more-qualified women. In
December, the United States Commission on Civil Rights moved to subpoena
admissions data from 19 public and private colleges to look at whether they
were discriminating against qualified female applicants.
Leaving aside complaints about “affirmative action
for boys,” less attention has been focused on the social ramifications.
Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is
often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on
Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza
box.
“I was talking to a friend at a bar, and this girl
just came up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the wrist, spun him around and
took him out to the dance floor and started grinding,” said Kelly Lynch, a
junior at North Carolina, recalling a recent experience.
Students interviewed here said they believed their
mating rituals reflected those of college students anywhere. But many of
them — men and women alike — said that the lopsided population tends to skew
behavior.
“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home
for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said.
“They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next
week?’ And they don’t respond.”
Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than
they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.
Continued in article
"The Revolution in the Economic Empowerment of Women," by Nobel
Laureate Gary Becker, The Becker-Posner Blog, January 4, 2010 ---
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/01/the-revolution-in-the-economic-empowerment-of-women-becker.html
The current issue of the
Economist recognizes that the dramatic change in labor force participation
of women is one of the most important transformations in the economic and
social worlds during the past generation. I will discuss the main forces
behind this change, and also consider whether the United States needs
additional public policies to accommodate women at work.
Several crucial changes have
contributed to transforming the position of women. Perhaps the most
fundamental during the past half century were technological advances, such
as the computer, and the shift in richer countries away from manufacturing
and toward services. These developments put much greater emphasis on
knowledge and information as opposed to physical strength and heavy work,
which in turn greatly increased the importance of higher education.
Women have shown a greater
capacity than men in completing universities and four-year colleges, largely
because women have greater and less variable non-cognitive skills, such as
study habits. While the fraction of men with four-year college degrees in
the United States has stagnated since 1970, the fraction of women with these
degrees has exploded, so that now women receive almost 60% of the four-year
degrees in the United States compared to only 40% in 1970. Similar shifts in
higher education toward women have taken place in European countries.
Related trends are occurring also in developing countries, even in
fundamentalist Iran.
The increased importance of
skills and knowledge has greatly affected parental fertility and investment
decision. As parents have recognized the importance of a good education and
other training to succeed in the modern world, they have opted for fewer
children since giving extensive education to many children would be too
expensive. Therefore, modern parents have lower birth rates than parents did
in the past, and instead invest much more in each child. This has produced
sharply declining birth rates almost everywhere, and below replacement
fertility rates in about 90 countries that include all European nations,
much of Asia, including China, Japan, and South Korea, and even a few mainly
Moslem nations.
The declines in fertility and
shift toward greater investment in children have been accelerated by the
growing education of women, who tend to be particularly concerned about
providing a good education to their children. This helps explain why
educated women have relatively few children and invest more in the schooling
of each child. In addition, the time spent by educated mothers in child
rearing is more expensive since they can earn more in the labor force. This
too helps explain why women who graduate from college have always tended to
have fewer children than other women did.
These trends toward greater
emphasis on knowledge and information, low fertility, and much greater
education of women, have all contributed to the large growth in the labor
force participation of women during the past several decades. For example,
about 80% of American women with a college education are in the labor force
compared to less than 50% for female high school dropouts. Although women
are more likely to work part time than men, the gap in their labor force
participation rates has greatly narrowed.
The recession affected men much
harder than women since men are more likely to work in construction and
manufacturing, two sectors especially hit hard. As a result, in recent
months women have made up about half the labor force in the United States.
This fraction will fall as the economy recovers, but the trend is still
strongly toward gender equality in labor force participation, and perhaps
even toward a majority of participants being women. This is partly because
low skilled men have been withdrawing from the labor force.
Although women still lag by a lot
in their representation in the top managerial positions, they have greatly
narrowed the gap between their full time earnings and that of men. Wives
earn more than their husbands in perhaps 30% of all American families with
two earners, and that percentage continues to grow. American women are
starting new businesses at a much faster rate than they did in the past, and
the number of female heads of large companies, although small in number, has
been growing.
Although the United States has
instituted various policies to help working women, unlike Sweden and other
Scandinavian countries it does not provide extensive public subsidies to
childcare, does not have a system of legislated paid leaves to women that
allow them to care for newborn children, and does not guarantee that they
can get their jobs back when they return to work. Yet, contrary to many
claims, I believe that the less interventionist American approach may not
have impeded, and may even have encouraged, women’s’ progress in the labor
force.
Despite all the subsidies to
childcare in Scandinavian countries, the US still has higher fertility rates
than Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, and also than other European countries.
Moreover, the labor force participation rates of women in the US are not
much below those in Scandinavian countries, especially after considering
that American birth rates are higher, and that some women in Scandinavian
countries are counted as having jobs even when they are on paid child care
leaves.
Married women in the United
States with at least a high school education can “afford” to pay for
childcare, and forego employment for months or even years after having
children, since they are usually married to husbands who have decent to high
earnings. Many of these women do leave work for a while to care for their
children, even when that means they reduce their opportunities to advance
when they return to work. I do not believe there is much of a case for the
government to pay these married women to take leaves from work when they
have children, or guarantee them their jobs when they return to work.
Government policies should be rather neutral about whether women leave work
to care for children or continue to work.
On the other hand, public
policies to help children of poorer women, including children of many
unmarried women, may be justified since these women tend to under invest in
their children because they have limited incomes and often low education
levels. Childcare assistance and other subsidies to investments in the young
children of these women could well have a high social return. The US does
subsidize childcare programs for low-income families, and could increase the
subsidies to various head start programs.
But such interventions would not
justify the Scandinavian approach of generously subsidizing all women,
including well off women, to take paid leaves when they have children.
Despite all their job guarantees after they return to work from childcare
leaves, private sector opportunities for Scandinavian women, and women in
several other European countries, are limited. For example, about
three-quarters of employed women in Sweden work for the government compared
to one-quarter of employed men, and women comprise a much larger fraction of
senior managers of American companies than of Swedish companies.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Southern Cal Signs 13-Year-Old Quarterback," Inside Higher Ed,
February 8, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/08/qt#219541
Need more evidence of the disconnect between
big-time college sports and the institutions to which they are appended? The
University of Southern California's football team has committed one of its
football scholarships for the 2015 entering class to David Sills, a
13-year-old quarterback at a middle school in Delaware, The News-Journal
of Wilmington
reported. Lane Kiffin, the new coach at Southern
Cal,
made a similar signing of a 13-year-old last year
when he was at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and that player is
presumably out of luck now that Kiffin has moved on to USC. Sills
told ESPN that Southern Cal has always been his
"dream school." Reports that USC's admissions office is offering slots in
its 2015 undergraduate class to several very talented middle school
mathematicians are false.
Jensen Comment
Quarterbacks are hard to predict at an early age, but linemen and basketball
players can be signed up before conception if the mother plays for the WNBA and
the father is a veteran lineman in the NFL or play the post in the NBA.
Colleges might work on attracting accounting majors among preschoolers
showing exceptional signs of introversion.
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
The “Professional Judgment” Problem: Do the ends justify the means?
"The “Professional Judgment” Problem," by David Albrecht, The Summa,
February 11, 2010 ---
http://profalbrecht.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/the-professional-judgment-problem/
There’s quite a discussion going on over at AECM
now, centered around whether or not corporate disclosures via XBRL tagged
data will be audited, and therefore receive some sort of assurance blessing.
One professor whom I respect a great deal is
arguing that it is in the best interest of companies to make the best and
most honest disclosures as they seek to raise capital, and it is in the best
interest of auditors to associate themselves with only those companies that
make the best and most honest disclosures via XBRL (and presumably via
financial statements, also).
To which I say: hogwash!
I’ve seen enough corporate reporting shenanigans,
and auditor “nod-and-wink” assurance, that I have concluded that there are
indeed sufficient incentives in place for corporate agents to try to game
the system by mis-reporting financial results. I don’t see why, if there is
substantial non-compliance with GAAP, that XBRL tagging would be a refuge of
purity. Moreover, there are incentives in place for auditors to fail to
object to minor transgressions. Some of the times, the incentives are
sufficiently large so that auditors fail to object to major transgressions.
I guess I don’t see why assurance on XBRL reporting will be any different.
I certainly don’t trust corporate executives or
auditors, as classes, to properly exercise “professional” judgment. Oh,
proper judgment may be exercised more than half the time of the time, but
given the risk averse nature of many investors, it is enough for a few bad
apples to give the rest a bad name. It is the many examples of bad reporting
and bad auditing (while admittedly in the minority) that are enough to
destroy trust.
A spouse only need go wayward one time in order to
destroy any trust the other felt. From that point on, the wayward spouse may
be preceived to be untrustworthy even though a majority of days end without
an unsanctioned hookup.
I believe it is not always in a company’s best
interest to make an honest disclosure, and it is not always in an auditor’s
interest to demand proper accounting. That is because many costs to
misbehaving are long-term, but the rewards for transgressing are short term
in nature. When making certain decisions, sometimes the focus of either
corporate executive or auditor can shift to the short-term on a moment’s
notice.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
David has entered into the very controversial "little white lie" rationalization
of deception. The truth should stand on its own in financial reporting, because
once we start rationalizing little white lies we never no when to stop. Pretty
soon a thousand dollar white lies here and a hundred dollar white lies there
begin to accumulate until we have over a billion dollar accumulation of lies ---
which is exactly what happened in Worldcom.
If you really want to take up the debate of whether the ends justify the
means, then have your students first watch the video of how Worldcom's
Controller, David Meyers, at the time of the infractions justified his illegal
actions on the premise that the ends justified the means --- because investors
and employees in Worldcom would be better off by deceptive rather than honest
accounting in the "short term."
June 15, 2009 message from Dennis Beresford
[dberesfo@TERRY.UGA.EDU]
I apologize if this is
something that has already been mentioned but I just became aware of a very
interesting video of former WorldCom Controller David Meyers at Baylor
University last March -
http://www.baylortv.com/streaming/001496/300kbps_str.asx
The first 20 minutes is
his presentation, which is pretty good - but the last 45 minutes or so of Q&A is
the best part. It is something that would be very worthwhile to show to almost
any auditing or similar class as a warning to those about to enter the
accounting profession.
Denny Beresford
Jensen Comment on Some Things You Can Learn from the Video
David Meyers became a convicted felon largely because he did not say no when his
supervisor (Scott Sullivan, CFO) asked him to commit illegal and fraudulent
accounting entries that he, Meyers, knew were wrong. Interestingly, Andersen
actually lost the audit midstream to KPMG, but KPMG hired the same same audit
team that had been working on the audit while employed by Andersen. David Myers
still feels great guilt over how much he hurt investors. The implication is that
these auditors were careless in a very sloppy audit but were duped by Worldcom
executives rather than be an actual part of the fraud. In my opinion, however,
that the carelessness was beyond the pale --- this was really, really, really
bad auditing and accounting.
At the time he did wrong, he rationalized that he was doing good by shielding
Worldcom from bankruptcy and protecting employees, shareholders, and creditors.
However, what he and other criminals at Worldcom did was eventually make matters
worse. He did not anticipate this, however, when he was covering up the
accounting fraud. He could've spent 65 years in prison, but eventually only
served ten months in prison because he cooperated in convicting his bosses. In
fact, all he did after the fact is tell the truth to prosecutors. His CEO,
Bernard Ebbers, got 25 years and is still in prison.
The audit team while with Andersen and KPMG relied too much on analytical review
and too little on substantive testing and did not detect basic accounting errors
from Auditing 101 (largely regarding capitalization of over $1 billion expenses
that under any reasonable test should have been expensed).
Meyers feels that if
Sarbanes-Oxley had been in place it may
have deterred the fraud. It also would've greatly increased the audit revenues
so that Andersen/KPMG could've done a better job.
To Meyers' credit, he did not exercise his $17 million in stock options because
he felt that he should not personally benefit from the fraud that he was a part
of while it was taking place. However, he did participate in the fraud to keep
his job (and salary). He also felt compelled to follow orders the CFO that he
knew was wrong.
The hero is detecting the fraud was Worldcom's internal auditor Cynthia Cooper
who subsequently wrote the book:
Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower
(Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. ISBN 978-0-470-12429)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0470124296/ref=sib_dp_pt#
Meyers does note that the whistleblower, Cooper, is now a hero to the world, but
when she blew the whistle she was despised by virtually everybody at Worldcom.
This is a price often paid by whistleblowers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#WhistleBlowing
Bob Jensen's threads on the Worldcom fraud are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm#WorldcomFraud
Pete Wilson provides some great
videos on how to make accounting judgments ---
http://www.navigatingaccounting.com/
Other possible source material for ethics, independence, and
professionalism courses is available at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Professionalism
"Behind the Adobe-Apple cold war," by Michael V. Copeland, CNN
Money, January 29, 2010 ---
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/01/29/behind-the-adobe-apple-cold-war/
Trying to Distinguish Causality from Correlation?
It makes more intuitive sense when they retire early versus when they slightly
cut back on patients
Could it be
that some audit firms take on fewer clients when risks of negligence lawsuits
increase?
"Doctors cut back hours when risk of malpractice suit rises, study shows,"
by Joe Hadsfield, Eureka Alert, January 28, 2010 ---
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-01/byu-dcb012810.php
A new study shows that the number of hours
physicians spend on the job each week is influenced by the fear of
malpractice lawsuits.
Economists Eric Helland and Mark Showalter found
that doctors cut back their workload by almost two hours each week when the
expected liability risk increases by 10 percent. The study, published in the
new issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, notes that the decline in
hours adds up to the equivalent of one of every 35 physicians retiring
without a replacement.
"The effect of malpractice risk on hours worked
might seem like a small item compared to physicians moving across state
borders or avoiding high-risk specialties like obstetrics," said Showalter,
an economics professor at Brigham Young University. "However, when you
aggregate that across all physicians, the total effect is quite large."
The analysis combined data gathered by insurers
about medical liability risks in each state and medical specialty with
physicians' responses to surveys about their workload and income.
When something changed the risk of medical
liability – such as an adjustment in the maximum amount a jury could award
in malpractice cases – doctors adjusted their workload. When liability risk
went up, doctors saw fewer patients each week to minimize their chance of a
lawsuit. When liability risk went down, doctors saw more patients each week.
The study also found that doctors over 55 and those
that have their own practices are far more sensitive to changes in liability
risk.
Some state courts are currently considering legal
challenges to existing malpractice caps. Missouri and Georgia, for example,
limit or cap non-economic damages that compensate for pain and suffering to
$350,000. Those caps are being contested by representatives of patients.
Despite the large effects, the research does not
endorse a Republican proposal to place a nationwide cap on the size of jury
awards in malpractice cases, the authors note.
"If the cost of providing medical care varies by
state, why should we have a national, one-size-fits-all approach?" Showalter
said. "The same cap would have very different effects in Kansas than in New
York."
Lead author Eric Helland is an economist at Claremont McKenna College
and RAND's Institute for Civil Justice. Both Helland and Showalter have
previously served on the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers.
When Texas capped its punitive damage awards, specialist physicians moved
to Texas at rates higher than the licensing board could keep up with the influx/
Four years after Texas voters approved a
constitutional amendment limiting awards in
medical malpractice lawsuits, doctors are
responding as supporters predicted, arriving from all parts of the country to
swell the ranks of specialists at Texas
hospitals and bring professional health care to
some long-underserved rural areas. “It was hard to believe at first; we thought
it was a spike,” said Dr. Donald W. Patrick, executive director of the medical
board and a neurosurgeon and lawyer. But Dr. Patrick said the trend — licenses
up 18 percent since 2003, when the damage caps were enacted — has held, with an
even sharper jump of 30 percent in the last fiscal year, compared with the year
before.
Ralph Blumenthal, "More Doctors in
Texas After Malpractice Caps," The New York Times, October 5, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/us/05doctors.html
Bob Jensen discusses the problem of trying to adjust fees on the basis of
lawsuit risks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#Analytics
In my opinion the Number 1 disgrace in higher education is grade inflation
See the grade inflation by individual colleges at
http://www.gradeinflation.com/
And the Number 1 cause is giving students the power to impact their
professors' tenure, promotion, and performance evaluations in a huge way
But the real underlying problem is that we made the C grade a failing grade
as far as careers and graduate school admissions are concerned
At RateMyProfessor the most common issue among students is grading ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#RateMyProfessor
"Type-A-Plus Students Chafe at Grade Deflation," by Lisa Foderaro, The New
York Times, January 29, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/education/31princeton.html?hpw
When Princeton University set out six years ago to
corral galloping grade inflation by putting a lid on A’s, many in academia
lauded it for taking a stand on a national problem and predicted that others
would follow.
But the idea never took hold beyond Princeton’s
walls, and so its bold vision is now running into fierce resistance from the
school’s Type-A-plus student body.
With the job market not what it once was, even for
Ivy Leaguers, Princetonians are complaining that the campaign against
bulked-up G.P.A.’s may be coming at their expense.
“The nightmare scenario, if you will, is that you
apply with a 3.5 from Princeton and someone just as smart as you applies
with a 3.8 from Yale,” said Daniel E. Rauch, a senior from Millburn, N.J.
The percentage of Princeton grades in the A range
dipped below 40 percent last year, down from nearly 50 percent when the
policy was adopted in 2004. The class of 2009 had a mean grade-point average
of 3.39, compared with 3.46 for the class of 2003. In a survey last year by
the undergraduate student government, 32 percent of students cited the
grading policy as the top source of unhappiness (compared with 25 percent
for lack of sleep).
In September, the student government sent a letter
to the faculty questioning whether professors were being overzealous in
applying the policy. And last month, The Daily Princetonian denounced the
policy in an editorial, saying it had “too many harmful consequences that
outweigh the good intentions behind the system.”
The undergraduate student body president, Connor
Diemand-Yauman, a senior from Chesterland, Ohio, said: “I had complaints
from students who said that their professors handed back exams and told
them, ‘I wanted to give 10 of you A’s, but because of the policy, I could
only give five A’s.’ When students hear that, an alarm goes off.”
Nancy Weiss Malkiel, dean of the undergraduate
college at Princeton, said the policy was not meant to establish such grade
quotas, but to set a goal: Over time and across all academic departments, no
more than 35 percent of grades in undergraduate courses would be A-plus, A
or A-minus.
Early on, Dr. Malkiel sent 3,000 letters explaining
the change to admissions officers at graduate schools and employers across
the country, and every transcript goes out with a statement about the
policy. But recently, the university administration has been under pressure
to do more. So it created a question-and-answer booklet that it is now
sending to many of the same graduate schools and employers.
Princeton also studied the effects on admissions
rates to top medical schools and law schools, and found none. While the
number of graduates securing jobs in finance or consulting dropped to 169
last year from 249 in 2008 and 194 in 2004, the university attributed the
falloff to the recession. (Each graduating class has about 1,100 students.)
But the drop in job placements, whatever the cause,
has fueled the arguments of those opposed to the policy. The grading change
at Princeton was prompted by the creep of A’s, which accelerated in the
1990s, and the wildly divergent approaches to grading across disciplines.
Historically, students in the natural sciences were graded far more
rigorously, for example, than their classmates in the humanities, a gap that
has narrowed but that still exists.
Some students respect the tougher posture. “What
people don’t realize is that grades at different schools always have
different meanings, and people at Goldman Sachs or the Marshall Scholarship
have tons of experience assessing different G.P.A.’s,” said Jonathan
Sarnoff, a sophomore who sits on the editorial board of The Daily
Princetonian. “A Princeton G.P.A. is different from the G.P.A. at the
College of New Jersey down the road.”
Faye Deal, the associate dean for admissions and
financial aid at Stanford Law School, said she had read Princeton’s
literature on the policy and continued “to view Princeton candidates in the
same fashion — strong applicants with excellent preparation.”
Goldman Sachs, one of the most sought-after
employers, said it did not apply a rigid G.P.A. cutoff. “Princeton knows
that; everyone knows that,” said Gia Morón, a company spokeswoman,
explaining that recruiters consider six “core measurements,” including
achievement, leadership and commercial focus.
But Princetonians remain skeptical.
“There are tons of really great schools with really
smart kids applying for the same jobs,” said Jacob Loewenstein, a junior
from Lawrence, N.Y., who is majoring in German. “People intuitively take a
G.P.A. to be a representation of your academic ability and act accordingly.
The assumption that a recruiter who is screening applications is going to
treat a Princeton student differently based on a letter is naïve.”
Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired professor at Duke who
maintains a Web site dedicated to exposing grade inflation, said that
Princeton’s policy was “something that other institutions can easily
emulate, and should emulate, but will not.” For now, Princeton and its
students are still the exception. “If that means we’re out in a leadership
position and, in a sense, in a lonelier position, then we’re prepared to do
that,” Dr. Malkiel said. “We’re quite confident that what we have done is
right.”
February 2, 2010 reply from Patricia Walters
[patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]
Bob:
I agree with everything you are saying.
I also know profs who have been threatened
physically by a student because of a potential grade.
Even if someone doesn't want to have such
circumstances you describe affect their grading policies, it is next to
impossible that these concerns won't subtly affect grading decisions.
My experience at the grad school is that if you
give a student anything less than a B (for Exec MBA students often a B+),
they won't get reimbursed for their tuition for that course.
Without some support from the university (like
Princeton), I understand how difficult it is for someone to hold the line.
NYU's undergraduate business school also has
grading guidelines similar to Princeton's. When a prof posts grades in the
online system, it requires an active override to exceed the recommended
percentages for each letter grade. The prof can do it, but he/she will end
up on a report to the dean and dept chair.
Regards
Pat at Fordham
February 1. 2010 reply from James Martin ---
http://maaw.info/
I believe the main problem is how student
evaluations are used to evaluate faculty. Briefly, the thrust of the
argument is that student opinions should not be used as the basis for
evaluating teaching effectiveness because these aggregated opinions are
invalid measures of quality teaching, provide no empirical evidence in this
regard, are incomparable across different courses and different faculty
members, promote faculty gaming and competition, tend to distract all
participants and observers from the learning mission of the university, and
insure the suboptimization and further decline of the higher education
system. See the following for the full text of the paper.
Martin, J. R. 1998. Evaluating faculty based on
student opinions: Problems, implications and recommendations from Deming’s
theory of management perspective. Issues in Accounting Education
(November): 1079-1094.
In a second reply:
Thanks Bob,
I was going to put a note here but you beat me
to it. The paper is at:
http://maaw.info/ArticleSummaries/ArtSumMartinSet98.htm
I do agree with David. Student opinions should
not be referred to as evaluations. I think Wanda Wallace referred to
them as a happiness index or something like that. I think that's about
right.
Jim
February 1, 2010 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Bob, thanks for continuing to point this out. And
I'm really glad you included a note about grade inflation's cause.
But I'd like to point out to everyone that what
everybody always calls "teaching evaluations" are actually *not* teaching
evaluations. The more we call them by an improper name, the more we
contribute to the problem.
When I was department chair, I tried to make a big
deal about this, but no one listened:
"They are NOT teaching evaluations. They are not
evaluating teaching. They are measures of *STUDENT PERCEPTIONS*."
Yes, I know I'm shouting, and I mean to be. And
I'll continue to shout until the world recognizes the error in terminology.
(... or I kick the bucket, which will undoubtedly come first.)
They are merely "Student Perceptions". It really
bugs me when we are in a meeting and someone starts talking about "teaching
evaluations", when what they were really referring to was a measure of
*student perceptions*. Let's call them what they really are.
It is my contention that student perceptions of
teaching should be ONE (1) of MANY factors which enter into a true teaching
evaluation.
It's not really a valid teaching evaluation if you
only use the one input (student perceptions) and not the many others.
Alas, I was a voice crying in the wilderness.
David Fordham
(But crying makes me feel better...)
JMU
February 1, 2010 reply from Leslie Kren
[lkren@UWM.EDU]
This discussion reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon
in which the pointy-haired boss says that he knows their data is inaccurate
but they'll use it anyway because it’s the only data they have.
Students are unable to evaluate teaching simply
because they don't know the body of knowledge for a course. They don’t know
if content is missing or poorly presented. In my advanced course, students
are often surprised when I bring up content that should have been taught in
their first course.
During the faculty evaluation exercise, an
instructor who scores 4.2/5.0 is often presented as a better teacher than
one who scores 4.0/5.0. Yet student evals are clearly not linear. At best,
student evals are merely a hurdle. Very low scores probably indicate that
students are so dissatisfied that the instructor is interfering with
learning. But once the hurdle is met, I don’t believe there is a linear
relation (statistical or conceptual) between quality of teaching and student
evals.
It is also difficult to be a champion for change.
In my experience, observers too often assume that critics of the teaching
eval system must be critics because they get lousy evals. In fact, the most
ardent critics of the system often get the best evals. Nonetheless, this
attitude probably mutes support for change. It is easier to 'play the game',
even though we fail to teach students that they share responsibility for
their own learning.
****************************************
Leslie Kren, PhD, CPA
Associate Professor
Lubar School of Business
University of WI - Milwaukee
3202 N. Maryland office N326G Milwaukee, WI 53201
414 229-6075 fax: 414 229-6957
lkren@uwm.edu
http://www.uwm.edu/~lkren
February 1, 2010 reply from Ed Scribner,NMSU
[escribne@NMSU.EDU]
Leslie, et al.,
You may have run across the work of Raoul Arreola, (http://www.cedanet.com/info.html)
(retired from U. of Tenn. In 2009, I believe). He wrote a great deal about
student evaluations and insisted on calling them “student ratings” because,
he said, students aren’t qualified to evaluate instruction. I heard him
make a pretty persuasive case that student ratings can provide reliable
input for the faculty performance evaluation process, but it wasn’t
particularly easy to design them to do that (although I understand there are
some off-the-shelf services you can buy). There are ways to design student
ratings instruments so that the responses are highly correlated with student
learning.
One interesting claim Raoul made was that no one except the
instructor should be allowed access to the student comments because those
tend to lead to various information processing foibles among administrators,
such as weighting one negative comment more heavily than a ton of positive
ones. The argument one of our administrators gave for seeing the comments
was that this is the only formal mechanism we have for learning about any
abusive practices or incidents that might occur.
Ed
Ed Scribner
New Mexico State
Las Cruces, NM, USA
February 1, 2010 reply from Paul Williams [Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Bob, What you are really saying is that the number
one disgrace is the use of student evaluations by deans, department heads,
colleagues, etc. to make substantive judgments about faculty members. We are
old enough to remember when students didn't have the opportunity to fill out
evaluations. This practice began in the late 1960s (I recall I filled out my
first one at my alma mater WVU in either 1966 or 1967; my freshman year I
did not get the chance to evaluate any professors).
When I was a TA at UNC, the only persons who saw
the evaluations were you and the dean, who was only interested to see if
someone was a disaster (the only thing the evaluations are really good for
is identifying those who are clearly struggling in the classroom). Given
that student evaluations are now an industry (just look at the volume of
research that exists about them) yet, after nearly 50 years, we still don't
have confidence in what they mean. Perhaps it is time to simply get rid of
them. I just finished a term on the NC State Faculty Senate. During that
time NC State went from paper and pencil evaluations to on-line evaluations
and the average evaluations changed.
I was involved with the on-line assessment
committee that advised on implementation and interpretation issues and I
finally concluded the best thing would be to just eliminate student
evaluations. They are expensive and always misused. In faculty evaluations
for pay and P&T the evaluators invariably focus on only the means and
completely ignore the variances. Thus, someone with a score of 4.3/5 is
deemed "better" than someone with a score of 4.0/5 when, considering the
variances, those two means are not different.
Hairs are split that have real consequences. We as
faculty are also culpable since we tend to disparage our colleagues who
don't get scores as high as we do. All of us have colleagues with swelled
heads because they get extremely high evaluations from students. My
suggestion to eliminate them was not summarily dismissed, particularly by
the University Research and Analysis director who has the responsibility for
administer the thing. Since there are now private, on-line evaluations (Rate
my Professor) and, here at NC State, a student administered independent
rating system, there is no longer any necessity for universities to do them.
The great disadvantage of student evaluations is
the homogenization of the classroom experience. Professors I had at UNC with
nicknames like "Black Jack" and "The Bulldog" are now literally verboten by
student evaluations. Though the bulldog style may not be one I warmed to, I
learned from these fellows. I can honestly say I never had a prof. from whom
I didn't learn something of value. It was the diversity and variety of
personalities that enriched the experience.
In my undergraduate major of Forestry, I had a
mensuration professor (that is forest measurement with a heavy dose of
statistics) with a patch on one eye who glared at the class with the one
good eye and stated that, "If your reports aren't on my desk by Monday
morning, your asses are grass and I'm the lawnmower." He was a "bad ass" but
most of us (there were no women in my class) adored him. Can you imagine any
professor making such a threat today?
There are enumerable ways to care about students
and preparing them to become adults (which they aren't yet). Students are
not customers, they are students and we have a responsibility to them that
must be fulfilled regardless of what they think of us. Parents don't have
their children fill out a form asking them to rate them as parents, because
children are not their parents customers.
What student evaluations have done that is the most
damaging is to fundamentally change the social relationship between
professor and student to one of service provider and customer. The market
analogy at work where it doesn't belong.
Paul
February 1, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Paul,
Perhaps the ideal world in relatively large classes
are evaluations that are private and anonymous communications to instructors
that instructors are not supposed to use in outside communications of any
kind, i.e., no self-selected quotations please. I can recall the years that
I received such “private” evaluations, but those times go way back. I did on
occasion get useful feedback, sometimes critical feedback that made me stop
and think.
After student evaluations became public, I began to
wonder how sincere many of them were, especially those coming from students
who anticipated low grades. They sometimes took out their frustrations with
themselves on me.
This sort of thing will not work for "parent
evaluations" because the classes are too small in the home.
I think that home school children should be allowed
to send anonymous "instructor" evaluations to a central Website where
parent-instructors can go to read anonymous evaluations (not knowing which
ones came from their own students/children). This might help improve how
some parents teach in home schools.
The RateMyProfessor site is becoming a bit like the
idea above for home schoolers. I cannot resist following the trend in the
RMP site. Early on it was primarily a gripe site for students disgruntled
about grades. Lately, however, there tends to be a rising trend in positive
evaluations, many of which are more along the lines of the Wanda Wallace
"Happiness Evaluations." However, now there are often discussion comments
that might be of help to virtually all instructors.
For example, here are a few RTM comments about one
of our AECM actives:
Albrecht is a great prof. Personally I think
his tests are hard because they are completely written, but like he says, as
long as you know your stuff there is no reason why you shouldn't get an A.
He also lets you retake tests if you have good attendance, and he sends out
3 or 4 semesters worth of previous tests as study guides. GREAT PROF!
Albrecht is a great professor. I learned a lot
more from him than my 221 teachers due to the fact that we could retake
exams. It took the edge off of the first exam knowing that you could retake
it if you didn't like your grade. I think Albrecht is an innovative teacher
and I would recommend everyone to take him.
Jensen Comment
As I look back, I never gave much thought to allowing students to retake
examinations. This could be a good thing and it could be a bad thing in
terms of fairness to other students. But it appears that David pulls it off
in some good ways.
Thanks for the interesting reply Paul
.Bob Jensen
February 2, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
One means of mitigating grade inflation somewhat is used at Trinity
University. The truckload (literally) of support materials used to support a
tenure or promotion application must include the final grading distribution
of each course ever taught in addition to the packet of hard copy student
evaluation forms for each course. There are no established criteria for
grading distributions, but from the time a faculty member joins the
University he/she is informed that grading distributions will accompany
tenure and promotion documentation.
Not all departments allow the head of the department to see the
year-by-year grading distributions in years where tenure and/or promotion
are not under consideration. However, by then the professors who tend to be
more lenient graders are widely known among faculty (of course they're
always identified by students no matter what).
But grading distributions can be misleading. For example, we had one
Professor X in our department who had a reputation for assigning low grades
at the end of each course. However, Professor X also had a reputation of
being very lenient right up to the point where a killer final examination
destroyed many A and B grades going into the final exam. Of course students
fill out course evaluation forms before final exam so that students were
feeling pretty good about their grades when they evaluated Professor X ---
before they sat down for the bowel-vacating final examination.
Professor X, now fully retired, was considered an excellent classroom
teacher as well as a teacher who changed a final grade about as often as
George W. Bush used his veto pen --- which was virtually never ,unlike
Ronald Reagan, even when a Democratic Party-controlled Congress was
forwarding legislation to the Bush Oval Office. In the weeks following the
end of a course Professor X always had a sign on his office door that read
"No!" in enormous letters.
It’s funny how we remember some of the little incidents about a friend years
after seeing or corresponding with that friend. One of the things I remember
about Professor X is the morning he arrived at the office wearing one brown
shoe and one black shoe. Most instructors would’ve made a joke about it when
standing in front of class --- like some joke about absent minded
professors. However, Professor X was so embarrassed that he called off class
in order to drive home and change his shoes. He was always dressed in a suit
and tie for every class.
Bob Jensen
February 2, 2010 reply from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]
I’ve been reading these emails, and have two
comments…
First, what is the alternative to the student
evaluations? In addition to student evaluations, for milestones (first-year
review, 3-year review, tenure, etc.), we have peer reviews where two
professors sit in the instructor’s class. They have to stay for the whole
class (75 minutes) and they can’t visit the same class. But the problem with
the peer reviews is that we stuffer the Lake Wobegone syndrome in that the
performance of all faculty is above average. The peer review memos are
essentially boilerplate. So, the student evaluations have a much wider
distribution of opinions then you are ever going see in peer reviews. And
yes, the negative student evaluations can be painful and yes the negative
student evaluations can reflect the student’s revenge for a
lower-than-expected grade you gave the student, but you can’t just write-off
the negative comments.
Second, maybe I shouldn’t bring this up, but nobody
has talked about how to manipulate the student evaluations. If they are here
to stay, what can you do to improve your evaluations without really doing
anything to improve your teaching? BTW I’m not encouraging these activities.
And I’m not saying I do any of these activities. Let’s start with a simple
one: don’t do the student evaluations the same day you return a midterm
where the average grade was 53 out of 100. I know a professor who carries
the evaluation forms with him to class, he quickly judges the general mood
of the class, check to see if the regular troublemakers are there and if all
looks good, he distributes the evaluations forms. If not, he does not and
brings the forms with to the next class meeting. At his school there is a 2
week window to do the student evaluations.
Take the direct approach (don’t pussyfoot around):
When I was a graduate student, the professor simply asked us to give him
good evaluations. He said he was going to be up for tenure in two years and
any negative evaluations would make it difficult for him to get tenure and
he and his wife really wanted to stay in Los Angeles, they had a house, etc.
etc….
The list goes on—bring a puppy to class, bring
cookies, have pizza delivered to class (requires some planning, but does put
students in a good mood), put your arm in a sling and use a crutch (creates
a lot of sympathy), if you can get a wheelchair, that’s even better, bring
your cute kids to class (if you don’t have cute kids, borrow some)…
Think out the box…
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
February 2, 2010 reply from Patricia Walters
[patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]
Richard:
You hit a few of my "hot" buttons and, of course, I
can't not respond.
My university is considering changing the title of
all clinical professors (regardless of rank) to lecturer. I am opposed for
precisely the general view of this title aspejorative...somehow we are less
qualified and/or do a poorer job or have less requirements than tenured or
tenure track professors. I decline to agree.
We have 4 clinical faculty in the Accounting
department. We generally teach upper level courses (and more of them) than
tenured or tenure track faculty. On the financial accounting topics that
means: Intermediate and Auditing (both 1 & 2) (both grad and undergrad),
sometimes Advanced, International and Financial Statement Analysis (to
undergrads). Two of the three full-time tax profs are clinicals. These
courses are not trivial and I must keep current with both FASB and IASB
pronouncements otherwise I do a disservice to my students.
I also publish (although not in referred journals
to date). I am considering a blog, but truthfully, don't know how to fit it
in.
I believe that universities need faculty like me. I
don't believe most (not all) tenure track faculty can afford to spend the
amount of time I do keeping current or they jeopardize the time they need to
spend doing research and struggling to get published in AR, JAR, etc.
Sorry if I "sound" defensive on this issue.
Pat
Hi Patricia,
To my
knowledge nearly all of those top accounting programs use full-time clinical
accounting faculty these days in part because so many of the newer faculty
are accountics scholars with little interest in teaching what students need
to learn for professional careers (although there certainly are exceptions
where accountics faculty can also teach top-of-the line professional
courses). In some ways these top programs that also have accountancy
doctoral programs keep their best accountics faculty pretty well occupied
with doctoral program duties (that entail a lot more than teaching classes).
The most
difficult thing is for clinical teaching faculty to be distinguished as top
notch versus not-so-great teachers. Often former executive partners are
neither great teachers nor great accountants if their duties were primarily
executive management and client relations.
As I
mentioned yesterday, if you take RateMyProfessor negative comments with an
enormous grain of salt (allowing for a few students disgruntled about grades
and the small number of responses in many cases), you can sometimes learn a
few things about both clinical and research faculty. As a rule the students
do not know the difference or care about the difference between a clinical
versus a research professor.
Interestingly students often make comments about whether the course is
easy/difficult and whether grading is easy/masochistic.
Clinical Professor Illustration
1
Student 1
If you want to really learn accounting, you have no other choice but
to take Walters - she is one of the best! Her exams are very
difficult, but she is a fair grader and her only mission is to make
sure you learn the material - not to screw you over like other
accounting professors at Fordham - you will work very hard but is it
worth it! 5/3/08 ACGB7120 2 4 4 3
Student 2
Finally, an accounting professor at Fordham who likes to teach and
is good at it. Goes over the problems in detail in class and then
posts everything from the class session on blackboard. Exams are
take home - NOT EASY and very time consuming, but a very fair
grader. Very dedicated and highly recommend , one of the best at
Fordham.
Clinical Professor Illustration 2
E&Y Executive
Professor (Beresford) of Accounting at UGA. Excellent in stimulating
student's interest in accounting matters. Very intelligent and
dynamic. Good class to take for improving research, critical
thinking, and communication skills. I highly recommend it.
Research Professor Illustration 1
---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=17622
Read these yourself (I like
Dick's "awesome" reviews) ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=17622
God bless the clinical professors as well as
the research professors in accountancy who are truly outstanding at their
crafts.
Bob Jensen
Concluding Jensen Comment
What puts me off most when students evaluate teachers is that they want what I
wanted most of my college life. I wanted a teacher to have a very structured
course that spelled out what you were expected to learn and then made the
learning much easier inside class and with handouts
that could be memorized or reasoned out with memorized rules. Time and time
again I've seen "textbook teachers" get stellar evaluations.
Sadly, the
unstructured courses tend to get hammered.
The teachers that made me learn on my own probably did me the biggest favors
in life but at the time I would not have given them high marks on evaluation
forms. The extreme case is a BAM instructor who really guides learning without
teaching ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
I love a teaching evaluation that one of my heroes, Tony Catenach, reported.
The discussion part of the evaluation simply said "Everything I learned in this
course I had to learn on my own." To which Tony replied: "Case closed!"
What impressed me most about his BAM approach across two semesters of
Intermediate Accounting at the University of Virginia is the marked, I mean
really marked, improvement of UVA graduates on CPA examinations after students
had to start doing most of the learning on their own. Case closed!
There are also those lessons from the Dead Poets Society ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm#UVA080
Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
In particular note the module entitled "Where
Highest Ranked Colleges Don't Excel." ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DoNotExcel
Partly because of the clinical accounting faculty, I don't think accountancy
programs in these highest-ranked colleges are as bad off as most of the other
departments.
Grade Inflation: The Biggest Scandal in Higher Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
His lawyer, Murray Richman, told reporters in the courthouse hallway that
the councilman’s conduct did not constitute a crime.
That must've been one big bagel!
Excuse me. I was
just distracted by the new 66-page federal indictment of Larry Seabrook, a New
York City councilman who, along with multitudinous other charges, is accused of
altering a receipt from a deli so he could get a $177 reimbursement for a bagel
and diet soda.
Gail Collins, The
Biggest Losers, The New York Times, February 10. 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/opinion/11collins.html?hpw
But his attorney says that no crime was committed. This is acceptable behavior
of elected officials.
"Councilman Charged With Money Laundering," by Ray Rivera and William K.
Rashbaum, The New York Times, February 9, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/nyregion/10seabrook.html
City Councilman Larry B. Seabrook, a fixture in
Bronx Democratic politics for more than two decades, was charged on Tuesday
with money laundering, extortion and fraud in a series of schemes that
included helping a close associate win a contract to install boilers in the
new Yankee Stadium and siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars in city
money to himself, friends and family members.
Most of the charges in the 13-count federal
indictment revolve around Mr. Seabrook’s use of Council discretionary funds,
known as earmarks, to finance a string of nonprofit groups that city and
federal authorities say ultimately did little for the communities they were
supposed to aid.
Prosecutors say Mr. Seabrook closely controlled the
groups’ budgets and personnel decisions, helping them to win city contracts
and using the money to pay more than $500,000 in salaries and consulting
fees to his female companion, his brother, two sisters and other family
members.
Mr. Seabrook, 58, and others were able to do this,
prosecutors contend, in part by repeatedly inflating expense claims to the
city on the part of the nonprofit groups, including rent costs. From 2002 to
2009, Mr. Seabrook directed more than $1 million to the groups while never
disclosing his close affiliation with them.
The conduct alleged in the indictment ranges from
the ambitious to the nearly silly: from extorting payments from a close
associate to help win the boiler contract to altering a $7 receipt for a
bagel sandwich and diet soda so that Mr. Seabrook was reimbursed $177 for
the purchase.
Mr. Seabrook, a former assemblyman and state
senator who in November won re-election for his third Council term, pleaded
not guilty. He is the second councilman charged in recent months with
stealing city money through the discretionary process. In July, former
Councilman Miguel Martinez, a Democrat who represented Upper Manhattan,
pleaded guilty to three felony counts involving the theft of $106,000, some
of which was intended for nonprofit organizations. He was sentenced in
December to five years in prison.
Mr. Seabrook, who over a 26-year political career
has survived scares and scrapes with a variety of investigations and audits,
could face considerably more time if he is found guilty on all or some of
the charges in the indictment, most of which carry a maximum sentence of 20
years.
In Federal District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday,
Mr. Seabrook, wearing gray suit pants, a matching vest and a white shirt
buttoned to the neck with no tie, pleaded “not guilty” in a loud voice
before United States Magistrate Judge Henry B. Pitman.
He was released on a $500,000 personal recognizance
bond.
His lawyer, Murray Richman, told reporters in the courthouse hallway that
the councilman’s conduct did not constitute a crime
“We have no hesitation in saying that we don’t
perceive that a crime was committed,” Mr. Richman said, adding, in reference
to a check that was issued to reimburse the councilman for what he said were
legitimate expenses, “That’s laundering? I question that.”
At a news conference, Preet Bharara, the United
States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said that through the
use of discretionary funds, Mr. Seabrook “basically operated his own
corrupted City Council-funded friends and family plan.”
Rose Gill Hearn, the city’s investigations
commissioner, described the fraudulent schemes alleged in the indictment as
“breathtaking.” Even after one of the nonprofit groups was flagged by city
auditors for financial impropriety, she said, Mr. Seabrook “found ways to
dodge scrutiny and keep the money flowing.”
The allegations are another blow to the embattled
City Council, which over the course of a two-year investigation by federal
prosecutors and the city’s Department of Investigation has been forced to
take several steps to bring more transparency to the way it distributes
millions of dollars in discretionary funds each year.
Speaker Christine C. Quinn said in a statement on
Tuesday that all of the members of the Council “take the deeply troubling
allegations” against Mr. Seabrook “very seriously,” adding that the matter
was immediately referred to the body’s Standards and Ethics Committee, which
will convene as early as next week.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declined to comment on
the specifics of the allegations on Tuesday, saying he had not read them. At
the same time he defended the Council and the administration’s efforts to
clean up its discretionary financing process.
Four of the 13 counts in the indictment are based
on what prosecutors allege was Mr. Seabrook’s successful lobbying effort to
help his close associate win the nearly $300,000 subcontract to install two
boilers at the new Yankee Stadium and his direct solicitation of $50,000 in
payments from the man, much of which Mr. Seabrook then funneled through his
political committee.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudUpdates.htm
The Mother Father of Moral Hazards
"School creep's detention haul," by Susan Edelman and Cyntia R. Fagen,
New York Post, January 31, 2010 ---
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/queens/school_creep_bQL5kouK80obW5MhZRyq7J
A Queens teacher who collects a $100,000 salary for
doing nothing spends time in a Department of Education "rubber room" working
on his law practice and managing 12 real-estate properties worth an
estimated $7.8 million, The Post found.
Alan Rosenfeld hasn't set foot in a classroom for
nearly a decade since he was accused in 2001 of making lewd comments to
junior-high girls and "staring at their butts," yet the department still
pays him handsomely for sitting on his own butt seven hours a day.
In 2001, six eighth-graders at IS 347 in Queens
accused Rosenfeld, a typing teacher who filled in for an absent dean, of
making comments like "You have a sexy body," asking one whether she had a
boyfriend and making others feel uncomfortable with creepy leers.
Read more:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/queens/school_creep_bQL5kouK80obW5MhZRyq7J#ixzz0eIVOq8eD
Because the Department of Education could not
produce all the students as witnesses, he was found guilty in only one case.
A girl testified that Rosenfeld stopped at her locker, where she was
standing with a friend, and "said I love him because I talk to him so much."
A DOE hearing officer gave him a slap on the wrist
-- a week off without pay -- for "conduct unbecoming a teacher." He was
cleared to return to teaching.
Instead, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has kept the
scruffy 64-year-old in a Brooklyn rubber room, deeming him too dangerous to
be near kids, officials said.
The DOE can't fire him.
"We have to abide by the union contract,"
spokeswoman Ann Forte said.
So Rosenfeld simply collects his $100,049 salary --
top scale for teachers -- plus full health benefits and the promise of a fat
pension, about $82,000 a year if he were to retire today.
His pension will grow by $1,700 each year he
remains. He could have retired at age 62, but he stays.
He has also accumulated about 435 unused sick days
-- and will get paid for half of them when he retires.
With city teachers trying to negotiate a 4 percent
pay hike, Rosenfeld stands to get the raise.
All this largesse comes as Mayor Bloomberg
threatens to cut 2,500 teachers to help close a $4 billion budget gap.
Meanwhile, the multimillionaire Rosenfeld lords
over the rubber room, where he is the oldest and most veteran of 100
teachers.
He reports promptly at 7:30 a.m. to the cavernous
"reassignment center" on Chapel Street and spreads out at a table cluttered
with used paper cups, plastic utensils, bags of food, news clippings and
files.
He "smells like he hasn't taken a shower in
months," an insider said.
Read more:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/queens/school_creep_bQL5kouK80obW5MhZRyq7J#ixzz0eIVSuucQ
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
"The enduring impact of transient emotions on decision making," by
Eduardo B. Andrade and Dan Ariely, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes 109 (2009) 1–8 ---
http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/papers/AndradeAriely2009.pdf
People often do not realize they are being
influenced by an incidental emotional state. As a result, decisions based on
a fleeting incidental emotion can become the basis for future decisions and
hence outlive the original cause for the behavior (i.e., the emotion
itself). Using a sequence of ultimatum and dictator games, we provide
empirical evidence for the enduring impact of transient emotions on economic
decision making. Behavioral consistency and false consensus are presented as
potential underlying processes.
"The Science Behind
Exercise Footwear," MIT's Technology Review, January 5,
2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=355&bpid=24614&nlid=2647
A few
weeks ago Reebok unveiled a walking shoe purported to tone
muscles to a greater extent than your average sneaker. All you
had to do was slip on a pair of EasyTone and the rest would take
care of itself.
Exercise without exercise? Great!
Considering the abracadabra-like quality of the shoe, it’s no
surprise that it’s been selling like hotcakes. The question of
course is “ does it work”?
According to a
recent New York Times article on the topic
Reebok has accumulated “15,000 hours’ worth of wear-test data
from shoe users who say they notice the difference.” (The
company also quotes a study as support, but it’s one they
commissioned themselves and only carries a sample size of five.)
The two women quoted in the article further echo this sentiment.
Reebok’s head of advanced innovation (and EasyTone mastermind),
Bill McInnis, says the shoe works because it offers the kind of
imbalance that you get with stability balls at the gym. Unlike
other sneakers, which are made flat with comfort in mind, the
EasyTone is purposely outfitted with air-filled toe-and-heal
“balance pods” in order to simulate the muscle engagement
required to walk through sand. With every step, air shifts from
one pod to the other, causing the person’s foot to sink and
forcing their leg and backside muscles into a workout.
But as
the Times article proposes at the end (without explicitly using
the term), the shoe’s success could instead come from the
placebo effect. Thanks to Reebok’s marketing efforts, buyers
pick up the shoes already convinced of their success, a mind
frame that may then cause them to walk faster or harder or
longer, thereby producing the expected workout – just not for
the expected reason.
And
there are some reasons to suspect this kind of placebo effect:
In a paper by Alia Crum and Ellen Langer. Titled “Mind-Set
Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect.” In their research
they told some maids working in hotels that the work they do
(cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the
Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. Other
maids were not given this information. 4 weeks later, the
informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly
more exercise than before, their weight was lower and they even
showed a decrease in blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip
ratio, and body mass index.
So,
maybe exercise affects health are part placebo?
Irrationally Yours
Dan
A One-Hour Video on What
it Means to Be Predictably Irrational (July 25, 2008) ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
The video is also at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZv--sm9XXU
This is quite interesting!
From the Financial Rounds
Blog on January 25, 2008 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
"Dan Ariely (Duke
University) - Predictably Irrational
Here's a video of Dan Ariely (author of "Predictably
Irrational") in his recent talk for the Google Authors
program. Ariely has written a fascinating book about some of the
cognitive and behavioral biases that most of us exhibit. If you
listen carefully, you'll find that he even gives a hint about
how to increase your student evaluations ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Summary of what it means to
be "predictably irrational" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational
New York Times Book
Review
"Emonomics," by David Berreby, The New York Times,
March 16, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/books/review/Berreby-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
For
years, the ideology of free markets bestrode the world, bending
politics as well as economics to its core assumption: market
forces produce the best solution to any problem. But these days,
even Bill Gates says capitalism’s work is “unsatisfactory” for
one-third of humanity, and not even Hillary Clinton supports
Bill Clinton’s 1990s trade pacts.
Another
sign that times are changing is “Predictably Irrational,” a book
that both exemplifies and explains this shift in the cultural
winds. Here, Dan Ariely, an economist at M.I.T., tells us that
“life with fewer market norms and more social norms would be
more satisfying, creative, fulfilling and fun.” By the way, the
conference where he had this insight wasn’t sponsored by the
Federal Reserve, where he is a researcher. It came to him at
Burning Man, the annual anarchist conclave where clothes are
optional and money is banned. Ariely calls it “the most
accepting, social and caring place I had ever been.”
Obviously, this sly and lucid book is not about your
grandfather’s dismal science. Ariely’s trade is behavioral
economics, which is the study, by experiments, of what people
actually do when they buy, sell, change jobs, marry and make
other real-life decisions.
To see
how arousal alters sexual attitudes, for example, Ariely and his
colleagues asked young men to answer a questionnaire — then
asked them to answer it again, only this time while indulging in
Internet pornography on a laptop wrapped in Saran Wrap. (In that
state, their answers to questions about sexual tastes,, violence
and condom use were far less respectable.) To study the power of
suggestion, Ariely’s team zapped volunteers with a little
painful electricity, then offered fake pain pills costing either
10 cents or $2.50 (all reduced the pain, but the more expensive
ones had a far greater effect). To see how social situations
affect honesty, they created tests that made it easy to cheat,
then looked at what happened if they reminded people right
before the test of a moral rule. (It turned out that being
reminded of any moral code — the Ten Commandments, the
non-existent “M.I.T. honor system” — caused cheating to
plummet.)
These
sorts of rigorous but goofy-sounding experiments lend themselves
to a genial, gee-whiz style, with which Ariely moves comfortably
from the lab to broad social questions to his own life (why did
he buy that Audi instead of a sensible minivan?). He is
good-tempered company — if he mentions you in this book, you are
going to be called “brilliant,” “fantastic” or “delightful” —
and crystal clear about all he describes. But “Predictably
Irrational” is a far more revolutionary book than its
unthreatening manner lets on. It’s a concise summary of why
today’s social science increasingly treats the markets-know-best
model as a fairy tale.
At the
heart of the market approach to understanding people is a set of
assumptions. First, you are a coherent and unitary self. Second,
you can be sure of what this self of yours wants and needs, and
can predict what it will do. Third, you get some information
about yourself from your body — objective facts about hunger,
thirst, pain and pleasure that help guide your decisions.
Standard economics, as Ariely writes, assumes that all of us,
equipped with this sort of self, “know all the pertinent
information about our decisions” and “we can calculate the value
of the different options we face.” We are, for important
decisions, rational, and that’s what makes markets so effective
at finding value and allocating work. To borrow from H. L.
Mencken, the market approach presumes that “the common people
know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
What
the past few decades of work in psychology, sociology and
economics has shown, as Ariely describes, is that all three of
these assumptions are false. Yes, you have a rational self, but
it’s not your only one, nor is it often in charge. A more
accurate picture is that there are a bunch of different versions
of you, who come to the fore under different conditions. We
aren’t cool calculators of self-interest who sometimes go crazy;
we’re crazies who are, under special circumstances, sometimes
rational.
Ariely
is not out to overthrow rationality. Instead, he and his fellow
social scientists want to replace the “rational economic man”
model with one that more accurately describes the real laws that
drive human choices. In a chapter on “relativity,” for example,
Ariely writes that evaluating two houses side by side yields
different results than evaluating three — A, B and a somewhat
less appealing version of A. The subpar A makes it easier to
decide that A is better — not only better than the similar one,
but better than B. The lesser version of A should have no effect
on your rating of the other two buildings, but it does.
Similarly, he describes the “zero price effect,” which marketers
exploit to convince us to buy something we don’t really want or
need in order to collect a “free” gift. “FREE! gives us such an
emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as
immensely more valuable than it really is,” Ariely writes. None
of this is rational, but it is predictable.
What
the reasoning self should do, he says, is set up guardrails to
manage things during those many, many moments when reason is not
in charge. (Though one might ask why the reasoning self should
always be in charge, an assumption Ariely doesn’t examine too
closely.)
For example, Ariely writes, we know our irrational self falls
easily into wanting stuff we can’t afford and don’t need. So he
proposes a credit card that encourages planning and
self-control. After $50 is spent on chocolate this month — pfft,
declined! He has in fact suggested this to a major bank. Of
course, he knew that his idea would cut into the $17 billion a
year that American banks make on consumer credit-card interest,
but what the heck: money isn’t everything.
An Experiment With Toilet
Paper and Other Messages ---
http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
Other videos on being
Predictably Irrational
Great Minds in
Management: The Process of Theory Development ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/GreatMinds.htm |
"Stanford finds cheating — especially among computer science students — on
the rise," by Lisa M. Krieger, San Jose Mercury News, February 7,
2010 ---
http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_14351156?nclick_check=1
Allegations of cheating at Stanford University have
more than doubled in the past decade, with the largest number of violations
involving computer science students.
In 10 years, the number of cases investigated by
the university's Judicial Panel has climbed from 52 to 123.
Stanford, one of only 100 U.S. campuses with an
"honor code," established its code in 1921 to uphold academic integrity by
prohibiting plagiarism, copying work and getting outside help. Penalties for
violations include denied credit for a class, a rejected thesis or a
one-quarter suspension from the university. Students also pledge to report
cheaters and do honest work without being policed.
"There's been a very significant increase,"
although the vast majority of the school's 19,000 students are honest, said
Chris Griffith, chief of the Judicial Panel. More men are reported than
women, and more undergraduates than graduates.
"Some of it is due to an increase in dishonesty,"
she said, "while some is due to an increase in reporting by faculty."
The findings came from new data presented by
Griffith at a meeting of Stanford faculty at the academic senate. Although
computer science students represent 6.5 percent of Stanford's student body,
last year those students accounted for 23 percent of the university's honor
code violators.
"My feeling is that the most important factor is
the high frustration levels that typically go along with trying to get a
program
to run," said computer science professor Eric
Roberts, who has studied the problem of academic cheating. He noted that
most violations involve homework assignments rather than exams.
"The computer is an unforgiving arbiter of
correctness," he said. "Imagine what would happen if every time you
submitted a paper for an English course, it came back with a red circle
around the first syntactic error, along with a notation saying: 'No credit —
resubmit.' After a dozen attempts all meeting the same fate, the temptation
to copy a paper you knew would pass might get pretty high. That situation is
analogous to what happens in computing courses."
A common computer science violation occurs when
students work as a team to complete an assignment, even though the rules
stipulate that work must be done individually.
Also common: students obtaining someone else's code
and submitting that version, after making simple edits to disguise the work.
They find copies by rooting through discarded program listings taken from a
recycling bin, or checking machines in public clusters to see whether
previous students left solutions lying around.
"People know exactly what they're doing," Roberts
said. "One student took code out of the 'recycle bin' of a laptop, changed
the name of the original author and used it in six of the seven files that
were submitted."
As for the problem of cheating, Stanford is by no
means alone. Roberts noted that the largest cheating episode in the history
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took place in a 1991 course
titled "Introduction to Computers and Problem Solving," when 73 of 239
students were disciplined for "excessive collaboration."
Today, to reveal similarities in code, Stanford
computer professors use a program called MOSS (Measure Of Software
Similarity). That software is boosting the number of discovered violations.
Other violations, although fewer, were found in the
departments of biology and Introduction to the Humanities. Art history had
only one violation.
Universitywide, 43 percent of violations at
Stanford involved "unpermitted collaboration," where students submit work
that was not done independently. About 31 percent involved plagiarism, using
Internet-based work that was not cited. Another 11 percent involved copying
work; 5 percent, receiving outside help; 5 percent, representing others'
work as their own and 5 percent, assorted violations.
The Judicial Panel's report also noted that
cheating was uncommon in professional schools, such as law and medicine.
"When you're in professional school at Stanford, it
is foolish to cheat. If you pass, there will be good job opportunities,"
said law student Eric Osborne.
"That is not as true for undergraduates in the
engineering and computer science fields," said Osborne, "where in this
economy, there is a lot of drive to get into grad school."
"Admissions Weakness Exposed at Oxford University in the United Kingdom,"
Inside Higher Ed, February 8, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/08/qt#219531
The case of a first-year student at the University
of Oxford, apparently admitted courtesy of a high school and testing record
he didn't earn, has led to increased scrutiny of the admissions system
there,
Times Higher Education reported. The student
in question reported 10 A-grade A-level exams, a notable accomplishment in
the British system -- except that it was false. A teacher's recommendation
was also forged. The Times Higher reported that the student, who has
been suspended, was admitted through a program for applicants who are not
sponsored by schools, and that questions have been raised by critics about
whether such applicants' materials receive enough scrutiny.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
This UCLA court challenge could have very wide-reaching implications for the
Fair Use safe harbor of the DMCA.
It will, however, not affect the many UCLA lecture videos available to the
public on YouTube.
I'm really surprised that we've not had more challenges like this before now.
The Fair Use safe harbor does not equate to permission to use copyrighted
materials for free after they are "readily available" for a fee.
It does apply to relatively short periods of time before such materials are
"readily available" such as the day after a PBS broadcast.
But when that PBS or other video can be easily purchased, it no longer falls
under Fair Use.
The huge gray zone concerns what copyrighted material that students must
purchase individually as opposed to using the college's purchased copy.
The DMCA law is one huge mess in the gray zones.
Before you read this tidbit you may want to scan my threads on Fair Use
ambiguities and the dark side of the DMCA at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
"UCLA Pulls Videos From Course Sites After Copyright Challenge," by
Jill Laster, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/UCLA-Pulls-Videos-From-Course/21013/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The University of California at Los Angeles has
stopped posting copyrighted videos on course Web sites after complaints from
an educational-media trade group, leaving other colleges worried about
repercussions.
The Association for Information and Media Equipment
contacted the university in the fall, alleging that it had violated
copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, which were accessible
only to students then enrolled in specific courses. The university
temporarily stopped using online videos beginning this semester and is
negotiating with the trade group.
Current copyright laws allow "fair use" exceptions
for teaching and research, and one specific exception in copyright law lets
instructors use legally made audiovisual material in face-to-face teaching
activities. The university argues that posting the material to
password-protected sites falls under these exceptions and that technology is
"a critical component of our instructional mission here and at a lot of
other universities," according to a spokesman, Phil Hampton.
But Allen Dohra, president of AIME, said posting
those videos isn't protected and hurts the people who produce them. Mr.
Dohra said his organization had three other institutions it needed to look
into, although he declined to give their names.
"Every time there is a format change, the film
producer has to make large capital expenditures to bring his collection up
to date," Mr. Dohra said. "The customers want our product, enough of them
prove that by stealing it, but they seem to have a problem with the
companies recovering those capital expenditures. That is exactly the case in
the UCLA matter."
The university could also cite the Teach Act, which
allows limited use of copyrighted materials for online education, said
Steven J. McDonald, general counsel for the Rhode Island School of Design.
Mr. McDonald said that although the act constricts how much of a video can
be posted, institutions could argue that using 100 percent of the video is
necessary for the course. Mr. Dohra disputes the applicability of the Teach
Act, in part because UCLA used some full-length films.
Steven L. Worona, director of policy and networking
programs at Educause, said the higher-education-technology organization had
already fielded calls from universities concerned by the UCLA case. He said
institutions should wait to see what happens at UCLA before they take any
action.
Mr. Worona said that posting class materials online
was fairly common in higher education and that stopping institutions from
posting online without paying more money could have broad implications.
"If it becomes a requirement nationwide for
streaming media to be limited to face-to-face synchronous presentation, it
will be more expensive for campuses, more expensive for students, and lose
many of the benefits that digital networking offers to classroom
instruction," he said.
Patricia Aufderheide, director of American
University's Center for Social Media, disagrees with what she says is UCLA's
decision to negotiate instead of fight, but understands why the institution
did that. Universities have not joined together to find a way to deal with
similar claims from media companies, she said.
Ms. Aufderheide, a professor of film and media
studies who uses film clips for all of her classes, worries about challenges
to universities' ability to post videos.
"I think this is something that really sends chills
down your spine as a teacher," she said.
Instructors at UCLA are finding alternatives to
using copyrighted videos online, said Robin L. Garrell, a chemistry
professor and chair of the Academic Senate there. Some tell students to use
Netflix or Amazon for movies, and others have modified their curricula based
on what material is easily available.
Ms. Garrell and Patricia O'Donnell, manager of the
university's Instructional Media Collection and Services, declined to give
their opinions on the case. But Ms. O'Donnell did say that the discussion
about posting videos has been beneficial.
"I think it's definitely on everyone's mind," Ms.
O'Donnell said. "I think the challenge [by AIME] has just sort of brought it
to the forefront."
Mr. Dohra said he felt that his group had been
accused of bullying the university, and that a number of professors and
librarians had been unfairly critical in online comments.
"The copyright laws were attacked as antiquated,
and AIME was castigated for standing up for its members' rights," Mr. Dohra
said. "I find it all strange, especially coming from those who should
consider intellectual-property rights the most sacred of rights."
Jensen Comment
The bad news is that most faculty members in the U.S. are probably relying on
Fair Use safe harbors that are really not safe.
The good news is that tradition generally entails first receiving a warning
to "cease and desist" from the copyright holder.
Then if faculty comply with the "cease and desist" request there usually is no
lawsuit or monetary damages except in unusual circumstances where the copyright
holder claims to have incurred enormous damages for a first-time violation such
as pirating and widely distributing a video to the public in general. The fact
that UCLA password protected the videos in question greatly reduces the damages
to the copyright owner.
So breathe easier if you've not yet received a "cease and desist" order,
although this does not resolve the ethical issues for faculty who suspect they
are not in compliance with the Fair Use law. In this case ignorance is bliss.
Another ethical issue is where a faculty member requests students to view a
YouTube or other online video that is itself suspect even if it's on YouTube.
For example, it's perfectly all right to assign a clip from CBS Sixty Minutes if
it is served up on the Sixty Minutes Web site. However, after it is no longer
free from CBS it probably is a violation if you assign the same clip still being
served up on YouTube. Personally, however, I would probably still assign the
clip as long as it's still on YouTube. I'm not particularly upset by using
anything in the public domain. But just because Bob Jensen is not concerned does
not make it perfectly all right!
Only one time did I get a complaint that I served up, on a Website, a
quotation that was too long under Fair Use guidelines. I removed the entire
tidbit. Afterwards the copyright owner asked me to reinstate the tidbit. Another
time a student at the University of Oklahoma complained that I made an AAA
teaching note available for an IAE Case. That was a total oversight mistake on
my part when I had lumped a bunch of my files I make available to my FAS 133
audiences. I quickly removed the teaching note that truly should never have been
served to the public by me. I featured this AAA PDF file to point out errors in
the teaching note, but I really only intended to share it with my live
audiences. It should never have been made available to the world, although I'm
totally amazed that the OU student even found it since I never once made the URL
available to the public. To me this shows the amazing power of Web crawlers like
Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You can't hide anything on the Web.
February 3, 2010 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Bob Jensen wrote: (abridged heavily)
This UCLA court challenge could have very
wide-reaching implications for the Fair Use safe harbor of the DMCA. ... ...
... Only one time did I get a complaint that I served up, on a Website, a
quotation that was too long under Fair Use guidelines. ...
----
Bob, there are two very distinct and separate
issues here, and I'm amazed that the AAUP isn't getting involved in one of
them.
Your latter statement applies to placing content on
the web, available to the public, even if under the auspices of education.
That is indeed a valid issue and does deserve some discussion and
clarification of an honest gray area.
The former, however, is not as much a gray area; in
fact, if seen from the correct perspective, the UCLA situation can be
interpreted as a case falling *completely outside* the intent, if not the
scope, of copyright law.
The UCLA situation deals with content within a
"locked" course, limited only to legitimate students, legimately enrolled in
an educational course, being taught by a legitimate educator, where all
parties are unquestionably involved in education, not entertainment. In
other words, it is an educational environment without question. Here's the
rub: The media companies are an outsider trying to control content of a
course in which a student is enrolled, at a bonafide educational
institution, being taught by a bonafide educator.
It is this perspective that needs some attention,
as I see the situation as falling completely outside the scope of copyright.
Why? Because the UCLA situation is the epitome of the fundamental, indeeed
primary, purpose why the "fair use" provision is there in the first place.
Something that astounds me is that the AAUP, in its
often overzealous and frequently fanatical pursuit of unlimited and
unfettered academic freedom, is here letting the media companies, lawyers,
etc. tell professors what they can and cannot include in their course. That
the AAUP is either silent, taking a sidelines spectator approach to these
proceedings, or not filing a countersuit is completely out of character for
the organization's leadership.
The AAUP is quick to bally 'round the bandwagon at
the slightest infringement of a professor's rights to do what he pleases in
the classroom, even when such infringement is tiny and inconsequential in
the overall scheme of things -- the old camels-nose-under-the-tent or
foot-in-the-door claims -- and even when the professor is obviously outside
the bounds of rationality, social mores, cultural acceptability, or any
other boundaries.
Yet here we have an infringement that could
potentially destroy an entire (what some call an) educational paradigm and
the AAUP is not weighing in on the matter.
Not that I'm a fan of the AAUP by a long shot, it
just seems that they are so adamant about protecting professor's rights to
the extreme and they generally so vocally and vehemently object to laws,
regulations, rules, policies, constraints, even proposals and all other
forms of interference which in any way try to govern opr restrict
professors' activities in the classroom. And yet here is a blatant
in-your-face example of where someone is trying to tell professors,
specifically and explicitly, what they can and cannot include in their
course. But the AAUP is not filing its own countersuit. (?)
(I'm being my usual exaggerating self here; I
readily admit I don't know enough about this particular case to reach a
valid judgment or to judge the AAUP's response or lack thereof with any
validity whatsoever... I just like to stir the pot. The AAUP may have
evaluated the situation and have good reason for avoiding comment... )
So... is there anyone else who sees this as a
blatant attempt to restrict course content when protected behind locked
classroom walls -- whether made of brick-and-mortar or enrollment-authorized
passwords -- as an infringement on professor's rights to determine what is
and is not taught in those classrooms?
Put another way: Does this boil down to a conflict
of rights between educators who are in good faith trying to improve society
and mankind, versus media moguls simply trying to protect their way of
making a buck?
David Fordham
(intending discussion stimulation rather than espousing my personal
position. As usual.)
James Madison University
"Big government's business cronies," by John Stossel, WorldNetDaily,
February 3, 2010 ---
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=123960
Many window-making companies struggle because of
the recession's effect on home building. But one little window company,
Serious Materials, is "booming,"
says Fortune.
"On a roll," according to Inc. magazine, which put Serious' CEO on its
cover, with a story titled:
"How to Build a Great
Company."
The
Minnesota Freedom
Foundation tells me that this same little window
company also gets serious attention from the most visible people in America.
Vice President Joe Biden appeared at the opening of
one of its plants. CEO Kevin Surace thanked him for his "unwavering
support." "Without you and the recovery ("stimulus") act, this would not
have been possible," Surace said.
Biden returned the compliment: "You are not just
churning out windows; you are making some of the most energy-efficient
windows in the world. I would argue the most energy-efficient windows in the
world."
Gee, other window-makers say their windows are just
as
energy
efficient, but the vice president
didn't visit them.
Biden laid it on pretty thick for Serious
Materials: "This is a story of how a new economy predicated on innovation
and efficiency is not only helping us today but inspiring a better
tomorrow."
Serious doesn't just have the vice president in his
corner. It's got President Obama himself.
Milton Friedman's classic "Capitalism and Freedom" explains how individual
liberty can only thrive when accompanied by economic liberty
Company board member Paul Holland had the rare of
honor of introducing Obama at a "green energy" event. Obama then said:
"Serious Materials just reopened ... a manufacturing plant outside of
Pittsburgh. These workers will now have a new mission: producing some of the
most energy-efficient windows in the world."
How many companies get endorsed by the president of
the United States?
When the CEO said that opening his factory wouldn't
have been possible without the Obama administration, he may have known
something we didn't. Last month, Obama announced a new set of tax credits
for so-called green companies. One window company was on the list: Serious
Materials. This must be one very special company.
But wait, it gets even more interesting.
On my Fox
Business
Network show on
"crony capitalism,"
I displayed a picture of administration officials and
so-called "energy leaders" taken at the U.S. Department of Energy. Standing
front and center was Cathy Zoi, who oversees $16.8 billion in stimulus
funds, much of it for weatherization
programs that benefit Serious.
The interesting twist is that Zoi happens to be the
wife of Robin Roy, who happens to be vice president of "policy" at Serious
Windows.
Of all the window companies in America, maybe it's
a coincidence that the one that gets presidential and vice presidential
attention and a special tax credit is one whose company executives give
thousands of dollars to the Obama campaign and where the policy officer
spends nights at home with the Energy Department's weatherization boss.
Or maybe not.
There may be nothing illegal about this. Zoi did
disclose her marriage and said she would recuse herself from any matter that
had a predictable effect on her financial interests.
But it sure looks funny to me, and it's odd that
the liberal media have so much interest in this one company. Rachel Maddow
of MSNBC, usually not a big promoter of corporate growth, gushed about how
Serious Materials is an example of how the "stimulus" is working.
When we asked the company about all this, a
spokeswoman said, "We don't comment on the personal lives of our employees."
Later she called to say that my story is "full of lies."
But she wouldn't say what those lies are.
On its website, Serious Materials says it did not
get a taxpayer subsidy. But that's just playing with terms. What it got was
a tax credit, an opportunity that its competitors did not get: to keep money
it would have paid in taxes. Let's not be misled. Government is as
manipulative with selective tax credits as it is with cash subsidies. It
would be more efficient to cut taxes across the board. Why should there be
favoritism?
Because politicians like it. Big, complicated
government gives them opportunities to do favors for their friends.
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudUpdates.htm
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
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
"Taliban make children plant IEDs to thwart Army snipers," by
Christopher Leake, Daily Mail, February 7, 2010 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249044/Taliban-makes-children-plant-IEDs-thwart-Army-snipers.html
Boys as young as 12 are being used by the Taliban
to plant bombs designed to kill and maim British troops in Afghanistan. Army
commanders say insurgents are forcing children to lay improvised explosive
devices (IEDs) because they know they will not be shot by British snipers.
Senior military sources say the children’s parents and families are likely
to have been threatened by the Taliban to allow their sons to carry out the
dangerous task.
Details of the new tactic were revealed last night
in Sangin, Helmand Province, where soldiers of the 3 Rifles Battle Group
have been fighting the Taliban for the past four months. Troops say they
have seen insurgents sending out boys to lay IEDs, sometimes only 150 yards
from British positions. A senior Army source said: ‘The Taliban know that if
they get caught in the sights of our snipers, they don’t last long, so they
have resorted to hiding behind compound walls and directing children to
plant bombs for them. ‘Lots of home-made IEDs detonate before they have even
been laid, but the Taliban don’t seem to care whether a child gets killed or
maimed. Some boys are as young as 12.’
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249044/Taliban-makes-children-plant-IEDs-thwart-Army-snipers.html#ixzz0ext43SRI
The Number 1 Ranked University in France Comes in at Rank 40 in the World
"Rankled by Rankings: Criticism of global university rankings
prompts major changes and new players," by Aisha Labi, Chronicle of
Higher Education, January 31, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Criticism-of-Global-Rankings/63786/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
International university rankings have
become a major force in higher education over the past decade. Institutions
now highlight their standing in their advertising campaigns. Students turn
to the lists for ideas on where to apply to graduate school. Some
governments have even invested more in higher education when their
universities' rankings don't satisfy expectations.
Yet it's hard to find anyone who believes
that the assessments themselves are sufficiently substantive.
In response to growing criticism about
ranking methodologies, several key players have pledged to shake things up
by offering new or improved versions of these tables.
Last month, for example, the European
Union began moving ahead in the development of a more nuanced and complex
rankings system, one they say that academics will actually approve of. And
the partners behind one of the two most influential systems of rankings had
an acrimonious split, with each now promising to produce a superior product.
The development of rankings and their
growing influence have both paralleled and fueled the internationalization
of higher education, as universities have sought to benchmark themselves and
compete with their counterparts around the world. A Russian ranking,
compiled for the first time in 2009, that placed Moscow State University
fifth in the world—ahead of Harvard and, Cambridge, and Stanford, among
other universities—drew derision even from Russian academics, and little
attention elsewhere. (The two main international rankings have never placed
Moscow State higher than 66th.)
Mobile Students The pressure to measure up
is driven by a number of factors. Key among them: Worldwide enrollments in
higher education have jumped by more than 50 percent in the past decade, and
the number of internationally mobile students seeking information about
institutions in foreign countries has soared. The growing number of
universities looking to forge international ties has also driven rankings
fever, as they vie for partners of similar international repute.
Thus the 27-nation European Union's
decision to create a ranking system has gained worldwide attention.
Similarly, news that the London-based Times Higher Education has severed
ties with the company with which it has produced its compilation for the
past six years is also generating quite a bit of buzz.
"There's a lot going on right now" in the
realm of international rankings, and a great deal of interest in "what it is
that the European rankings are trying to do," says Philip G. Altbach,
director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.
Thomas D. Parker, a senior associate at
the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit
group that studies college accountability, is intrigued as well. "It is
clear that the Europeans are proposing something considerably more complex"
than the two main existing compilations, he says.
As recently as 2003, there was just one
international enumeration, the "Academic Ranking of World Universities," put
out for the first time that year by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's
Institute of Higher Education. Its impact and influence were immediate—and
it stirred controversy from the outset, especially over the relatively poor
showing of continental European universities compared with those in the
United States and Britain.
Competition soon followed, in the form of
rankings produced the following year by The Times Higher Education
Supplement, as the British publication was then known. The table is now so
highly anticipated that on the day the updated list was posted online in
October, it generated more than one million hits to the publication's site.
International rankings carry so much heft
that they help shape higher-education policy in many countries. But as their
influence has grown, so has dissatisfaction in many quarters with how the
best-known tables are compiled. And the rankers themselves have come under
increased scrutiny.
Ellen Hazelkorn of the Dublin Institute of
Technology studies the impact of rankings on higher-education policy.
"There's no such thing as an objective ranking," she saynotes, so people end
up arguing about which are the best indicators to use.
The International Observatory on Academic
Rankings and Excellence, a nonprofit group that was set up last year with
headquarters in Warsaw, is among the growing number of organizations seeking
to track, evaluate, and, yes, rank, the rankers.
The organization, which was spun off by
the International Ranking Expert Group of Unesco's European Centre for
Higher Education, is working on a questionnaire that will be used to make
certain that rankers are meeting certain "minimal standards," says Kazimierz
Bilanow, the managing director. Those standards are meant to reflect the
"Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions," which were
endorsed in 2006 by many of the international educators, higher-education
experts, and publishers who compose the observatory's membership.
The rankers have taken note.
"They all understand they're very
vulnerable to criticism," says Mr. Parker. "All of them are aware that they
started out with pretty simple tools, and that if they're going to satisfy
anybody, they need to get a bit smarter."
Listening to Critics Last year Times
Higher Education ended its relationship with Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd., with
which it had published the tables. Phil Baty, the editor who oversees the
project, describes the rankings that had been published with the company as
"no longer fit for purpose" and said the newspaper was "starting from
scratch." It will publish new rankings in conjunction with the media
conglomerate Thomson Reuters.
Quacquarelli Symonds will continue to
publish its own World University Rankings.
"We retain the intellectual property for
the existing methodology, and we also own all the data for the past six
years of the rankings," says Ben Sowter, head of the company's intelligence
unit. "The only difference, from our point of view, is that they will no
longer be published with Times Higher Ed."
Despite Times Higher Education's name
recognition, especially in academic circles, Mr. Sowter says that "their Web
site has consistently underperformed in comparison to our own in terms of
tracking page views and visitors to look at the results." The rankings on
Quacquarelli Symonds's site generated 4.8 million visits last year, he adds.
For its part, Time Higher Education is
focusing on producing what it says will be a much more "robust, transparent,
and balanced" set of rankings. "The final methodology is still not set,"
says Mr. Baty, but two key improvements are under way.
One involves the rankings' peer-review
component, which has been sharply criticized. Although there were fewer than
4,000 responses to last year's global survey of academics, the peer-review
element was still heavily weighted, contributing around 40 percent to the
rankings.
"This just is not good enough." Mr. Baty
says in an e-mail exchange with The Chronicle. "For the new world rankings,
we have decided to retain an element of 'peer review,' but we are going to
ensure we have a much better sample, which will be properly targeted and
properly representative of world higher-education demographics, and which
will have a much higher response rate."
The target is for a representative
selection of 25,000 academics to respond to the survey. And the peer-review
element is likely to be weighted much less heavily than before in the new
Times Higher Education rankings.
Although academics and administrators have
long been skeptical of how effectively the input of independent academics
was solicited, the inclusion of a peer-review dimension, which does not
factor into the Shanghai rankings, had been one of the central selling
points of the British tables.
Peer Review Questioned However, a paper to
be published next month in the American Journal of Education argues that,
far from being an effective independent gauge of institutional reputation,
peer review is highly susceptible to manipulation. The main culprits, the
authors say, are previous rankings.
"Over time, the primary driver of changes
in the reputation scores used by U.S. News & World Report are the U.S. News
& World Report rankings themselves, even when controlling for academic and
financial indicators, as well as prior reputation scores," says Michael N.
Bastedo, an associate professor of education at the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, who is one of the paper's co-authors. The effect is even more
pronounced in international rankings, he says, because academics'
familiarity with foreign institutions is often even more attenuated and
dependent on prior rankings.
Mr. Sowter, of Quacquarelli Symonds,
defends its continuing emphasis on a peer-review component, adding that it
seeks increased input from academics and aims to increase response numbers
through measures such as translated surveys for academics in
non-English-speaking institutions.
"Of all the measures that different
rankings are using at a global level, from my perspective peer review is the
one that is fairest to universities with different disciplines," he says.
The use of peer reviews "enables institutions with great strengths in the
arts and humanities to shine in a way that they are not able to in other
measures."
This year's retooled Times Higher
Education rankings will also adjust how research excellence is measured, by
reconfiguring how citations are calibrated.
"The social and economic sciences have
much lower citation rates than the natural sciences, so institutions with
big medical schools, for example, received a massive and unfair advantage
under the old method," to the detriment of institutions like the London
School of Economics and Political Science, Mr. Baty says. The new
collaboration with Thomson Reuters, which owns a large research-citation
database, he notes, will allow Times Higher Education to "draw on much more
sophisticated data, and we are confident that we can get this right."
Shanghai Jiao Tong's rankings, too, have
been criticized for their heavy reliance on research citations and Nobel
Prizes as measures of excellence.
Nian Cai Liu, director of the university's
Institute of Higher Education, was the force behind the original
international rankings. Its methodology will stay the same, he says in an
e-mail exchange, but other changes have been made.
"New rankings have been introduced" in
chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering, and
economics that augment the institutional lists, says Mr. Liu, who is a
professor of engineering.
The research center that he heads is part
of Shanghai Jiao Tong, but, as of last year, the rankings have been
officially published by the separate Shanghai Ranking Consultancy and have
no official relationship with the university.
In response to rumors that pressure from
the Chinese government—which supposedly had fielded angry questions from at
least one foreign government about the performance of its country's
institutions on the high-profile assessment—had prompted Shanghai Jiao Tong
to officially distance itself from the rankings, Mr. Liu says the university
itself never sponsored them. He declines to comment on the rumored pressure.
Politically Driven Politics is, in fact, a
prime motivator behind the newest entrant in the global rankings market.
Frans van Vught, a former rector of the
University of Twente, in the Netherlands, is one of the leaders of the
European project, and he is frank about the fact that the new endeavor "is
very much a politically driven thing."
The $1.6-million budget is being paid for
by the European Union, which solicited competitive bids before awarding the
contract to a German-Dutch-Belgian-French consortium for "developing a
ranking system that goes beyond the research performance of universities, to
include elements such as teaching quality and community outreach."
But, as Mr. van Vught emphasizes, the new
project is more than just a riposte to Shanghai and Times Higher Education.
"We are trying to do something very different," he says, by steering the
emphasis away from research intensity and toward a handful of other
indicators.
The project will build upon a recently
concluded European classification project, known as U-Map, that developed
profiles of institutions in six categories: teaching and learning; the
student body; research; disseminating research knowledge; international
orientation; and regional engagement.
Mr. van Vught likens the resulting
classification of each institution to a sunburst, with each category
contributing a ray. The European ranking project will use that approach to
develop a consumer-driven ranking system.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
A New Anti-Semitic British Movie
An Education and A Serious Man represent either vile
throwbacks to Jewish stereotypes in Nazi propaganda movies or creative works of
art that show Jews, like other ethnicities, as multidimensional human beings.
The first attitude is expressed more often by “ordinary” moviegoers, while film
critics and academics have rallied to the movies’ defense. So, surprisingly, has
the Anti-Defamation League, usually the first to protest perceived slights
against Jews. The British import An Education centers on the not unwilling
mental and physical seduction of Jenny, a bright 16-year-old English schoolgirl,
by suave and unscrupulous David, a Jewish real-estate speculator in his 30s.
Tom Tugend, Jerusalem Post,
February 5, 2010 ---
http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Entertainment/Article.aspx?id=167801
From the Scout Report on January 29, 2010
SyncBack Freeware 3.2.20 ---
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html
So what do you do if you need to back up and
synchronize your files? Many options come to mind, but you might want to
first look over this latest free edition of SyncBack. SyncBack allows users
to save their files anywhere, and it also offers a convenient restore tool.
The application gives the users the option to define multiple scheduled
backup jobs, and also control the way files are compared and selected for
backup. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and
newer.
Omek 1.1 ---
http://omeka.org/
Interested in creating your own digital archive?
Look no further than Omeka 1.1. Created by the Center for History and New
Media at George Mason University, Omeka gives individuals and institutions
the freedom to create an online exhibition in a matter of minutes. Visitors
can view the "What is Omeka" video for more information, check out their
blog, and also look at projects that have used Omeka thus far. This version
is compatible with web servers with a Linux operating system, Apache, MySQl
version 5.0 or greater, PHP 5.2.4 or greater, and ImageMagick
Ban on playing Dungeons & Dragons in prisons upheld Appeals Court Upholds
Prison Ban on Dungeons and Dragons [Free registration may be required]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/27dungeons.html
Court upholds ban on inmate playing Dungeons & Dragons ---
Click Here
The Volokh Conspiracy: 7th Circuit Upholds Prison Rule Forbidding Inmates
to Play Dungeons and Dragons ---
http://volokh.com/2010/01/25/7th-circuit-upholds-prison-rule-forbidding-inmates-to-play-dungeons-and-dragons/
Dungeons & Dragons: Timeline
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnDArchives_History.asp
GameSpy: Gary Gygax Interview
http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538817p1.html
What Kind of D&D Character Would You Be?
http://www.easydamus.com/character.html
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
"Children's Book Series The Caring Kids Series," by Dr. Irma Ghosn ---
http://www.caringkidsbooks.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
University of California; Science Today (Radio News, Audio) --- http://www.ucop.edu/sciencetoday/index.php
VetPulse (Veterinary Medicine and Surgery) --- http://www.vetpulse.tv/
Northwest Architectural Archives --- http://special.lib.umn.edu/manuscripts/architect.html
U.S. Department of Transportation: Federal Highway Administration:
Geotechnical Engineering ---
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/engineering/geotech/pubs/century/index.cfm
Full-Length BBC Video (I had an annoying problem with buffering of this
production, but it was did not stop me from watching most of this)
"Full Documentary: The Secret Life Of Chaos," Simoleon Sense,
February 3, 2010 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/full-documentary-the-secret-life-of-chaos/
“Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images
of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there
is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now
beginning to understand. It turns out that chaos theory answers a question
that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here? In this
documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great
mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up
with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder? It’s a
mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea.
But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and
structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or
an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics.
Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and
why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern. The natural world is
full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into
complexity. From trees to clouds to humans – after watching this film you’ll
never be able to look at the world in the same way again.”
"What I've Been Reading, Watching, and Listening To," Bill Gates
Blog ---
http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?id=111&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
With more than 250 lectures from some of the
world’s leading professors, The Teaching Company provides the opportunity to
learn from great teachers who are true experts in their fields. Bill offers
recommendations for some of the courses that he has enjoyed the most.
Great Lectures from The Teaching Company ---
http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?ID=24
The
Teaching Company is adding lectures at quite a fast rate. I used to be able
to say I had seen almost all of their science courses but they have added new
offerings faster than I can watch them in the past year.
I wrote about some of my favorite lectures in science and in economics earlier
(see
Great Lectures from The Teaching Company).
I am watching
Thinking about Capitalism by Jerry Muller right now which is excellent but
mostly for people who want to know the history of economics. The genius of Adam
Smith was really unbelievable – he foresaw a lot of the things we still argue
about today.
I have not watched
Economics 3rd Edition by Timothy Taylor but he is such a good teacher I
might want to watch it.
In the science realm the best is probably
Physics in Your Life by Richard Wolfson. He explains everything very clearly
and his description of how semiconductor chips work is the best I have ever
seen.
I also loved the courses on geology, starting with John Renton’s course
Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology followed by
How the Earth Works by Michael Wysession.
There is a great biology course (Biology:
The Science of Life by Stephen Nowicki) and a great physics course (Particle
Physics for Non-Physicists: A Tour of the Microcosmos by Steven Pollock) but
those are pretty in-depth and designed more for people who want to learn the
field.
Another great hard-core course is
Understanding the Universe by Alex Filippenko. It is a total of 48 hours and
is more in depth than most people need, but if you want to understand astronomy,
there is no better way to learn it.
There is a six hour course called
Earth’s Changing Climate, also by Richard Wolfson, that I recommend to
people who want to learn about the science of climate change.
In medicine there are two that I like a lot. One is
The Human Body: How We Fail, How We Heal by Anthony Goodman. He explains the
different diseases that people get and the progress we have made on how to treat
them. The other is
Sensation, Perception, and the Aging Process by Francis Colavita. He takes
all the senses and explains how they work and how they change over time.
There are two lectures on linguistics by John McWhorter that I really loved –
Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language and the
Story of Human Language. The history of language is far more interesting
than I thought it would be – in fact it is fascinating.
The only religion course I watched was
Comparative Religion by Charles Kimball. It is excellent.
In math, the best general course I’ve seen is
Joy of Thinking: The Beauty and Power of Classical Mathematical Ideas by
Michael Starbird and Edward Burger.
They have a category called
“High School.” I watched the
Chemistry course to see if my son would like it but it ended up being a good
review of the topic for me.
The category which I have not gone into but I expect to someday is
"Fine Arts and Music.”
For a long time their best selling courses were the
Robert Greenberg lectures on understanding music.
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing videos and lectures from prestigious
universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
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
Money Matters (international economic data) ---
http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/center/mm/eng/mm_cc_01.htm
HUD User [Housing Data] ---
http://www.huduser.org/portal/index.html
Reform in an Age of Networked Campaigns: How to Foster Citizen Participation
Through Small Donors and Volunteers ---
http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0114_campaign_finance_reform.aspx
Pete Wilson provides some great videos on how to make accounting judgments
---
http://www.navigatingaccounting.com/
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
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
NOVA: Riddles of the Sphinx ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sphinx/
History World: History and Timelines ---
http://www.historyworld.net/default.asp?gtrack=mtop1
A cleverly-constructed timeline on the history of the
world's great religions ---
http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/Religion.swf
Northwest Architectural Archives ---
http://special.lib.umn.edu/manuscripts/architect.html
America's Favorite Architecture ---
http://www.favoritearchitecture.org/
African-American Religion: A Documentary History Project ---
http://www3.amherst.edu/~aardoc/
The Crooked Road: Virginia's Heritage Music Trail [iTunes]
http://www.thecrookedroad.org/default.asp
LSU Photograph Campus Collection ---
http://www.louisianadigitallibrary.org//cdm4/index_LSU_UAP.php?CISOROOT=/LSU_UAP
The Guild of Book Workers ---
http://www.guildofbookworkers.org/index.php
The Atlas of Early Printing (interactive slide show) ---
http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/
MoMA: Gabriel Orozco [Interactive Art]
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/gabrielorozco/
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
Objectivism: friend or foe? Mike Wallace & Ayn Rand in 1959
: 1/3
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XC7l18RIl8
: 2/3 ---
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Mike+Wallace+%26+Ayn+Rand&search_type=&aq=f
: 3/3 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEruXzQZhNI&feature=PlayList&p=04A4E12F230C8163&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=2
Ayn Rand
25 videos
·
Ayn Rand Mike Wallace
Interview 1959 part 2
(9:45)
·
Ayn Rand Mike Wallace
Interview 1959 part 3
(7:52)
·
Ayn Rand
in her first television interview, Part one
(9:30)
"A Rand Revival Understanding the best—and
worst—of Ayn Rand's philosophy," by Cathy Young, Reason Magazine,
February 11, 2010 ---
http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/11/a-rand-revival
A Professor of History at the University of Virginia Weighs in on Ayn Rand
"Ayn Rand and America’s new culture war: From Rush Limbaugh to President
Obama, Ayn Rand and her book 'Atlas Shrugged' are recalibrating America," by
Jennifer Burns, Christian Science Monitor, December 11, 2009 ---
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/1211/Ayn-Rand-and-America-s-new-culture-war
From Fox News to the passenger sitting next to you
reading “Atlas Shrugged” on your commute to work, Ayn Rand seems to be
everywhere.
Since the economic collapse of 2008, the
controversial novelist and philosopher has emerged as a leading intellectual
on the right – and she’s been dead for nearly 30 years.
Rush Limbaugh touts Rand as a prophet of sorts.
“Ayn Rand, she wrote ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ ” he told his listeners. “The sequel,
‘Atlas Puked,’ we’re in the middle of it.” At the tea parties that swept the
nation last spring, protesters waved signs claiming “Ayn Rand was right” and
warning “Read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ before it happens.”
The fresh appeal of 'Atlas Shrugged'
Consider this: “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s most famous
novel, is set in a dystopian future America, where a socialist government
has brought the country to the brink of ruin. Fleeing punitive regulations
and crushing taxation, the country’s top industrialists and executives have
gone on strike, virtually shutting down the economy.
For American conservatives, the significance of
Rand’s message is clear. “Atlas Shrugged” is prophetic, they say, and it
warns us all of the coming collapse.
It wasn’t always so. In her day, leading
conservatives denounced Rand for her atheism and immorality, and her
economic ideas were scarcely mentioned.
Conservative author Whittaker Chambers attacked
Rand as a godless authoritarian in his famously brutal review of “Atlas
Shrugged,” printed in an early issue of William F. Buckley’s seminal
conservative magazine, National Review. The book’s message, according to
Chambers, was “to a gas chamber – go!” Anti-ERA crusader Phyllis Schlafly
stopped reading Rand’s other novel, “The Fountainhead,” as soon as she
reached the infamous rape scene, horrified at the immorality and violence of
what Rand once described as “rape by engraved invitation” and condoned.
But Rand did not have much patience for
conservatives, calling herself instead a “radical for capitalism.” She
intended her individualistic philosophy, objectivism, to be a guide to the
future, not the past.
Rand identified four basic components to her
philosophy: objective reality, the supremacy of reason, the virtue of
selfishness, and the importance of laissez faire capitalism. She celebrated
the virtue of selfishness and attacked religion for being irrational.
These aspects of Rand made her alien to an earlier
generation of religious conservatives who gleefully launched a “culture war”
against secular America. In the 1980s and ’90s, the culture war was waged
over issues of gender and sexuality, and religious values were central.
Those religious conservatives cited biblical
authority to attack controversial artists like Andres Serrano and Robert
Mapplethorpe who challenged traditional gender roles. Such a conservative
movement had no room for Rand, with her condemnation of all forms of
“mysticism,” including religious belief, and her open support of abortion
rights.
Today, these passions over culture have cooled and
been replaced by an equally intense struggle over economic policies like the
bailout of the financial sector, the rescue of the auto industry, and reform
of healthcare.
In this current political world, even the
hot-button issue of gay marriage has been sidelined for the new bogeyman of
socialism.
Though she’s not religious, Rand brings a strong
sense of good and evil to the debates over economic policy. Rand’s books
bring the battles over government spending away from wonkdom and back to the
familiar, easy terrain of culture, where there is a virtuous “us” and a
conniving, evil “them.”
Two types of people
In her world, there are two types of people:
producers and looters, or those who work for themselves and those who take
government handouts.
Richard Nixon made a similar division when he
talked about the “silent majority,” as does Sarah Palin when she praises
“real Americans.” It’s a distinction that makes sense to many conservatives,
particularly those who feel they are being punished for their success.
That many of Rand’s fictional heroes were far from
paragons of Christian virtue is beside the point in the current struggle.
What matters is the ammunition she provides and the outrage she stokes
against the dreaded looters.
Does Rand’s popularity mean religion is no longer
paramount to the conservative worldview? Of course not. But her ubiquity
should tell us that tectonic plates are shifting under the surface of
American politics. Even President Obama seems to understand Rand’s newfound
influence, criticizing the “virtue of selfishness” in a recent speech.
Rand’s prominence is a change from the Bush years when paleocons and
libertarians like Ron Paul who stressed the evils of government spending
were ignored.
Today is their moment in the sun, and it is the
religious right that is being swept to the side by the rush of events. The
balance of power between religious fundamentalism and market fundamentalism
is being recalibrated, a development that could have far-reaching
consequences for how we understand the very categories of the political
left, right, and center.
Jennifer Burns, a professor of history at the University of Virginia
is the author of “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.”
She offers history podcasts and blogs at jenniferburns.org .
What does Amazon claim are the first and second most
influential books in the world?
The book at Rank 2 will probably be a surprise!
AIG Shrugged by Ayn Rand
For Jim Mahar's Finance Professor Blog on March 25, 2009 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
Ok, I can't make this stuff up.
Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged is so life like that it is now as
if reading (or in my case ristening) to a script.
Background:
Atlas Shrugged
is a novel written in 1957 by Ayn Rand. In it, in
response to a largely governmental caused "emergency" the top leaders of the
business world give up and just walk away in response to taxes, regulation,
and other confiscatory governmental policies. Indeed, it seems that whoever
is in the hottest spotlight, is the next to go.
So without further comment, a letter from Jake DeSantis announcing his
resignation from AIG.
From
the NY Times
"The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an
executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial
products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G."
"DEAR Mr. Liddy,
It is with deep regret that I submit my notice
of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time
to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my
decision, I want to offer some context:"
later:
"After 12 months of hard work dismantling the
company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be
rewarded in March 2009 — we...have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being
unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will
now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to
those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep
none of the money myself.
.... I can no longer effectively perform my duties
in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like
you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of
a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come
to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify
spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of
those who have let me down."
The only difference now between now and then, is that
DeSantis (unlike Galt, Wyatt, Dannager, et al) left an explanation.
BTW if you have not
read the book, I can not give it a higher
recommendation except to say it is in my Top Ten (maybe top five) of all
time.
Jensen Comment
A lot of scholars, especially liberal scholars, despise Ayn Rand. But Atlas
Shrugged ranks second behind The Bible in terms of influence
according to a U.S. Library of Congress survey.
Library of Congress Survey: Most Influential Books ---
http://www.amazon.com/Library-Congress-Survey-Influential-Books/lm/133GLJVXVIBLN
Link forwarded by Richard Sansing
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
The Crooked Road: Virginia's Heritage Music Trail [iTunes]
http://www.thecrookedroad.org/default.asp
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/
February 1, 2010
February 2, 2010
February 3, 2010
February 4, 2010
February 5, 2010
February 6, 2010
February 8, 2010
February 9, 2010
February 10, 2010
February 11, 2010
February 12, 2010
February 13, 2010
"Addictions, Bad Habits Can 'Highjack' Brain Clinically Obese, Cocaine
Addicts Have Similar Brain Scans," by Christina Fiore, ABC News,
January 31, 2010 ---
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/MindMoodNews/addictions-hardwired-brain/story?id=9699738
By the end of January, many New Year's resolutions
have been tossed out with leftover holiday cookies and unwanted gifts. It's
been nearly impossible to deny that slice of cake after dinner, or to hit
the treadmill instead of surfing the Internet.
Change, especially changing bad habits, is hard --
and rightly so, as any neuroscientist will tell you.
Advances in neuroimaging have enabled researchers
to peer inside the brains of addicts and patients with addictive behaviors.
They can see, in real-time, what gets patients hooked: how the brain's
reward system -- based largely on the neurotransmitter dopamine -- thirsts
for more, while inhibitory control centers experience a system failure.
The pattern is similar across all kinds of
behaviors -- from cocaine and tobacco addiction to overeating. That's why
changing your mind may be the first step toward breaking a habit, but
altering the brain's neural machinery is the real challenge.
Highjacked Pathways
Drugs and addictive behaviors "highjack" the brain's reward system, says Dr.
Petros Levounis, director of the Addiction Institute of New York at St.
Luke's and Roosevelt Hospitals in Manhattan.
In normal patients, dopamine plays a major role in
motivation and reward, surging before and during a pleasurable activity --
say, eating or sex -- to make patients want to repeat a behavior that's
crucial to the survival of the species.
Dopaminergic pathways connect the limbic system,
which is responsible for emotion, with the hippocampus, which is responsible
for memory. This combination etches rewarding behaviors into the brain with
strong, even seductive, memories.
The problem arises when the memory and the craving
to recapture it take over a person's life.
"Imagine what a stronghold these highjacked
pleasure reward pathways take on our brains and our whole existence when
they're so closely connected geographically and anatomically speaking with
our memories and our emotions," Levounis says.
Then, as the dopamine surge gains speed, the brakes
fail. Normal function in the brain's frontal lobes, which are responsible
for inhibitory control and executive functioning, or will power, tends to
decrease in addicts.
"Ultimately," Levounis says, "the war on drugs is a
war between the highjacked pleasure reward pathways that push the person to
want to use, and the frontal lobes, which try to keep the beast at bay. That
is the essence of addiction."
Continued in article
Top 100 Cities Ranked in Terms of Drunken Behavior ---
http://guyism.com/2010/02/fresno-named-americas-drunkest-city-according-to-study.html
Men's Health
has compiled a list of America's drunkest cities based on
data such as death rates from alcoholic liver disease,
booze-fueled car crashes, frequency of binge-drinking in the
past 30 days, number of DUI arrests, and severity of DUI
penalties.
The Top 10
1. Fresno, CA
2. Reno, NV
3. Billings, MT
4. Riverside, CA
5. Austin, TX
6. St. Louis, MO
7. San Antonio, TX
8. Lubbock, TX
9. Tucson, AZ
10. Bakersfield, CA
And the
Bottom 10:
90. Portland, ME
91. Manchester, NH
92. Fort Wayne, IN
93. New York, NY
94. Durham, NC
95. Newark, NH
96. Miami, FL
97. Salt Lake City, UT
98. Rochester, NY
99. Yonkers, NY
100. Boston, MA
|
"Blacks with MS have more severe symptoms, decline faster than whites."
PhysOrg, February 5, 2010 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news184599513.html
Fewer African Americans than Caucasians develop
multiple sclerosis (MS), statistics show, but their disease progresses more
rapidly, and they don't respond as well to therapies, a new study by
neurology researchers at the University at Buffalo has found.
Magnetic resonance images (MRI) of a cohort of 567
consecutive MS patients showed that blacks with MS had more damage to brain
tissue and had less normal white and grey matter compared to whites with the
disease.
Results of the study were published ahead of print
on Jan. 20 at http://www.neurology.org and appear in the Feb. 16 issue of
the journal Neurology.
Bianca Weinstock-Guttman, MD, UB associate
professor of neurology in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences,
is first author on the study. Weinstock-Guttman directs the Baird Multiple
Sclerosis Center in Kaleida Health's Buffalo General Hospital.
"Black patients showed more brain tissue damage and
accumulated brain lesions faster than whites, along with rapid clinical
deterioration," confirms Weinstock-Guttman. "The results provide further
support that black patients experience a more severe disease, calling for
individualized therapeutic interventions for this group of MS patients."
"White matter" refers to the parts of the brain
that contain nerve fibers sheathed in a white fatty insulating protein
called myelin. The white matter is responsible for communication between the
various grey matter regions, where nerve cells are concentrated and where
cognitive processing occurs.
"Initially, multiple sclerosis was considered
primary a white-matter disease," says Weinstock-Guttman, "but today we know
that the gray matter may be more affected than white matter."
In general, black MS patients tend to have more
severe and more frequent attacks, followed by an incomplete recovery even
after the first episode. Studies on signs and symptoms of MS among
populations have shown that blacks experience gait problems sooner after
their diagnosis, show faster cognitive decline than whites with MS, and
become dependent on a wheelchair sooner, she notes.
The study's MRI scans were conducted at the Buffalo
Neuroimaging Analysis Center (BNAC), part of the Jacobs Neurological
Institute/UB Department of Neurology. Robert Zivadinov, MD, PhD, a UB
associate professor of neurology, is director of the center.
Continued in article
Forwarded by Paula
During a recent PASSWORD
AUDIT at the Bank of Ireland it was found that Paddy O'Toole was using the
following password: MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofyDublin
When Paddy was asked why he had such a long
password: he replied ''Bejazus! are yez feckin' stupid? Shore and Oi was told me
password had to be at least 8 characters long and include one capital!
Forwarded by Auntie Bev
The Sack Lunches
I put my carry-on in the luggage compartment and sat down in my assigned
seat. It was going to be a long flight. 'I'm glad I have a good book to read.
Perhaps I will get a short nap,' I thought.
Just before take-off, a line of soldiers came down the aisle and filled all
the vacant seats, totally surrounding me. I decided to start a conversation.
'Where are you headed?' I asked the soldier seated nearest to me. 'Petawawa.
We'll be there for two weeks for special training, and then we're being deployed
to Afghanistan
After flying for about an hour, an announcement was made that sack lunches
were available for five dollars. It would be several hours before we reached the
east, and I quickly decided a lunch would help pass the time...
As I reached for my wallet, I overheard a soldier ask his buddy if he planned
to buy lunch. 'No, that seems like a lot of money for just a sack lunch.
Probably wouldn't be worth five bucks. I'll wait till we get to base.'
His friend agreed.
I looked around at the other soldiers. None were buying lunch. I walked to
the back of the plane and handed the flight attendant a fifty dollar bill. 'Take
a lunch to all those soldiers.' She grabbed my arms and squeezed tightly. Her
eyes wet with tears, she thanked me. 'My son was a soldier in Iraq ; it's almost
like you are doing it for him.'
Picking up ten sacks, she headed up the aisle to where the soldiers were
seated. She stopped at my seat and asked, 'Which do you like best - beef or
chicken?' 'Chicken,' I replied, wondering why she asked. She turned and went to
the front of plane, returning a minute later with a dinner plate from first
class.
'This is your thanks..'
After we finished eating, I went again to the back of the plane, heading for
the rest room. A man stopped me. 'I saw what you did. I want to be part of it.
Here, take this.' He handed me twenty-five dollars.
Soon after I returned to my seat, I saw the Flight Captain coming down the
aisle, looking at the aisle numbers as he walked, I hoped he was not looking for
me, but noticed he was looking at the numbers only on my side of the plane. When
he got to my row he stopped, smiled, held out his hand and said, 'I want to
shake your hand.' Quickly unfastening my seatbelt I stood and took the Captain's
hand. With a booming voice he said, 'I was a soldier and I was a military pilot.
Once, someone bought me a lunch. It was an act of kindness I never forgot.' I
was embarrassed when applause was heard from all of the passengers.
Later I walked to the front of the plane so I could stretch my legs. A man
who was seated about six rows in front of me reached out his hand, wanting to
shake mine. He left another twenty-five dollars in my palm.
When we landed I gathered my belongings and started to deplane. Waiting just
inside the airplane door was a man who stopped me, put something in my shirt
pocket, turned, and walked away without saying a word. Another twenty-five
dollars!
Upon entering the terminal, I saw the soldiers gathering for their trip to
the base. I walked over to them and handed them seventy-five dollars. 'It will
take you some time to reach the base.. It will be about time for a sandwich. God
Bless You.'
Ten young men left that flight feeling the love and respect of their fellow
travelers.
As I walked briskly to my car, I whispered a prayer for their safe return.
These soldiers were giving their all for our country. I could only give them a
couple of meals. It seemed so little...
A veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made
payable to 'The United States of America ' for an amount of 'up to and including
my life.'
That is Honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no
longer understand it.'
May God give you the strength and courage to pass this along to everyone on
your email buddy list....
I JUST DID
Also forwarded by Auntie Bev
HOW TO
STAY YOUNG
1.
Throw out nonessential numbers.
This includes
age, weight and
height.
Let the doctors worry about them. That is why you pay 'them'.
2.
Keep only cheerful friends.
The grouches
pull you down..
3.
Keep learning.
Learn more about the computer, crafts, gardening,
whatever. Never let the brain idle. 'An idle mind is the devil's workshop.'
4..
Enjoy the simple things.
5..
Laugh
often, long
and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath.
6. The
tears happen.
Endure, grieve, and move on. The only person,
who is
with us our entire life, is ourselves. Be ALIVE while you are alive.
7.
Surround yourself with what you love
, whether it's family, pets, keepsakes, music, plants, hobbies, whatever.
Your home is your
refuge.
8.
Cherish your health:
If it is good,
preserve it.. If it is unstable,
improve it. If it is beyond what you can improve, get
help.
9..
Don't take guilt
trips.
Take a trip to the mall, even to the next
county;
to a foreign country but NOT to where the guilt is.
10.
Tell the people you love that you love them,
at every
opportunity.
AND ALWAYS REMEMBER
:
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,
but
by the
moments
that take our breath away.
Forwarded by Maureen
Little Melissa comes home from 1st grade & tells her father that they learned
about the history of Valentine's Day.
'Since Valentine's Day is for a Christian saint, and we're Jewish,' she asks,
'Will God get mad at me for giving someone a valentine?
Melissa's father thinks a bit, then says: 'No, I don't think God would get
mad... Whom do you want to give a Valentine to?'
'Osama Bin Laden,' she says.
'Why Osama Bin Laden?' her father asks in shock.
'Well,' she says, 'I thought that if a little American Jewish girl could have
enough love to give Osama a Valentine, he might start to think that maybe we're
not all bad, and maybe start loving people a little bit.
And if other kids saw what I did and sent Valentines to Osama, he'd love
everyone a lot. And then he'd start going all over the place to tell everyone
how much he loved them, and how he didn't hate anyone anymore.'
Her father's heart swells and he looks at his daughter with new found pride.
'Melissa, that's the most wonderful thing I have ever heard..'
'I know, ' Melissa says, 'and once that gets him out in the open, the Marines
could shoot the fucker.'
Forwarded by Paula
A group of 45-year-old guys discusses where they should meet for dinner.
Finally, they agree to meet at the Kelley's Restaurant because the waitresses
have low-cut blouses and nice breasts.
10 years later, at age 55, the group agrees to meet at Kelley's because the
food is good and the wine selection is excellent.
10 years later, at age 65, the group agrees to meet at Kelley's because they
can eat there in peace and quiet and the restaurant is smoke free.
10 years later, at age 75, the group agrees to meet at Kelley's because the
restaurant is wheel chair accessible and they have an elevator.
10 years later, at age 85, the group agrees to meet at Kelley's because they
have never been there before.
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/
Shielding 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