Tidbits on February 23, 2010
Bob Jensen

I did not retouch these inspiring photographs
The first picture below is actually a sunset as it appeared out of our back bedroom window

Can you identify the "baby's cradle" between Mt. Garfield on the left and the start of Lafayette on the right?

Find the latitude and longitude of a point on a map --- http://www.getlatlon.com/
Jensen Cottage --- Latitude, Longitude: 44.2494733, -71.7752079
Paula also recommends
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/12/convert-an-address-to-latitude-and-longitude.html

Our Hometown Hero Bode Miller
Wins Gold, Silver, and Bronze Medals in 2010 Olympics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bode_Miller

My previous tribute to Bode Miller is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080331.htm

These are some of Cannon Mountain's 60 ski slopes
where Bode taught himself to ski
and developed a unique style for added speed

Below are some of my holiday season lights in our front window (to the east)
The candles of on the window sill do not look much like candles in this photograph
And the sparkling stars look like dancing angels above the fiery devels

This is Erika's little Christmas tree
She always puts apples on her tree for a reason I will tell you about sometime
It has to do with being very hungry when she was five years old in a bombed out train station in Regensburg, Germany

I took this shot behind a window screen

In the middle of a nearly all-white day in the heart of mountain winter,
what can I show pictures about?
How about the life of a peony in the heart of summer?
First the bud
Then the opening commencement
Then the growing and unfurling
Then more growing to obesity
That bends the thin stem to a near breaking point
Until the wind and rain drive the obese thing ungraciously to the ground

Then along comes a thunderstorm and it's Sayonara to the fat peonies

The "slim" wild roses of summer can take the wind and rain better than the "obese" peonies
The tiny rose blossoms are visible all summer long and endure all summer weather
And obscure the split rail fence front until first snows flakes flutter down in dancing swirls
And tame the wild roses into surrender until the spring renewal begins once again
to color our lives in another wonderful season of long days and sweet fragrances

It's the snow and cold and sterile white of monotonous winter that makes
The other seasons more appreciated in these hills

Paul Pacter sent me five DVDs containing the latest videos from his world travels
This is his video from Hyderabid, India (slow loading video)
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/PacterHyderabadIndia.VOB
To play this video you may need to install my favorite free media player
VLC Media Player --- http://vlc-media-player.us/

 

A Great Way to Ensure Every Dance is With Me
"Super Velcro," by Prachi Patel, MIT's Technology Review, February 2010
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24539/?nlid=2748&a=f

 

Auntie Bev claims this is the best advertisement in the history of the world (although it would not be allowed during the Super Bowl due to wardrobe malfunctions). It may not indeed be the best in history, but it is one that I'll never forget ---
http://www.m2film.dk/fleggaard/trailer2.swf

Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on February 23, 2010
To Accompany the February 23, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/tidbitsQuotations022310.htm         

Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Last week I added a module on the healthcare system of Germany (thanks to a close friend in Germany)

 

Tidbits on February 23,, 2010
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/.

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

"So you want to get a Ph.D.?" by David Wood, BYU ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=So_you_want_to_get_a_Ph.D.%3F

Do You Want to Teach? ---
http://financialexecutives.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-you-want-to-teach.html

Jensen Comment
Here are some added positives and negatives to consider, especially if you are currently a practicing accountant considering becoming a professor.

Accountancy Doctoral Program Information from Jim Hasselback ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html 

Why must all accounting doctoral programs be social science (particularly econometrics) "accountics" doctoral programs?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong

 




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

How would you like to buy gasoline made from $30 domestic coal versus $75 imported oil?
Arlington scientists find way to make cheap gas from coal ---
http://www.wfaa.com/news/gasoline-84801677.html

The Census is Getting Personal ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsDhkPym01k

"Hugh Hendry' 'Nassim Taleb' Hendry Taleb inflation deflation hyperinflation euro USD dollar forex economy bubble" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ2otZqmNKE&feature=email

FRONTLINE: Digital Nation --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

National Naval Aviation Museum [Flash Player] --- http://www.navalaviationmuseum.org/

The Great Texas Triangle (Dallas, Houston, San Antonio) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC16-4fh-Qc

Beautiful Road Trip Video --- http://www.citizenlink.org/videofeatures/A000010256.cfm

America by Air [multimedia airplane history] http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal102/americabyair/

Entrepreneurship Corner [Stanford University audio] --- http://ecorner.stanford.edu/ 

Minnesota's Greatest Generation [Flash Player] -- http://www.mnhs.org/people/mngg/index.htm

Watch this video in a new window5-year-old Savannah's Calm Call with 911 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDARfDJw80s


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

First Listen: Rafal Blechacz Plays Chopin --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123604975
Hear The Piano Concertos In Their Entirety 

Holly Steel Video (Britain's Got Talent) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHGtUYS3fdE
Also see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmmbH7iGzTw 

Web outfits like Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2

TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.slacker.com/

Gerald Trites likes this international radio site --- http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:  Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
Also try Jango --- http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) --- http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live --- http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note
U.S. Army Band recordings --- http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp

Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials) --- http://www.slacker.com/ 


Photographs and Art

Edward Weston Photographs (photography history) --- http://www.ir.uair.arizona.edu/ccp/item/234 

Reservation Life: Helga Teiwes Photography, Arizona State Museum --- 
http://www.statemuseum.arizona.edu/exhibits/helga/reservation_life.asp?ver= 

The Frick Collection: Multimedia [art history] --- http://www.frick.org/multimedia/

IUPUI Image Collection of Indiana University --- http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/special/collections/uarchives/ua024

Beautiful Road Trip Video --- http://www.citizenlink.org/videofeatures/A000010256.cfm

Maryland Map Collection ---  http://www.lib.umd.edu/sapps/mdmap/?pid=umd:57340

National Naval Aviation Museum [Flash Player] --- http://www.navalaviationmuseum.org/

America by Air [multimedia airplane history] http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal102/americabyair/

Minnesota's Greatest Generation [Flash Player] -- http://www.mnhs.org/people/mngg/index.htm

The Secrets of Tomb10A: Egypt 2000 BC [Flash Player] --- http://www.mfa.org/tomb/

The 17 Most Awesome Lego Creations of All Time ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/19/the-17-most-awesome-lego_n_468640.html
My former colleague Sherry Mills got the 1996 AAA Innovation in Accounting Award for using lego applications in student tasks in cost accounting courses --- http://aaahq.org/awards/awrd6win.htm
I played a role in inspiring Sherry to enter a doctoral program in accounting. Her background before then was mostly engineering.

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

Textbooks: Purchased Hardcopy vs. Downloadable eBook Purchases vs. Non-downloadable eBook Leases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooksDeal.htm

What's lacking in downloaded Kindle eBooks?
Would you believe the chapter exhibits?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooksDeal.htm
 

Online Books Page --- http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
From the University of Pennsylvania
Online Books --- http://onlineBooks.library.upenn.edu/

Online-Literature --- http://www.online-literature.com/

About 800 pages of the world's oldest surviving Christian Bible have been pieced together and published on the Internet for the first time, experts in Britain said Monday --- http://www.physorg.com/news166106367.html

Searchable Bible Online --- http://www.biblegateway.com/ 

Quran online --- http://www.quranexplorer.com/

Scholarly Online Publishing Bibliography --- http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html 

storySouth (showcases top fiction) --- http://www.storysouth.com/

Online Scholarship:  Make a DASH for Harvard
Harvard's leadership in open access to scholarship took a significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. More than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly works in DASH.
Harvard University Library, September 1, 2009 ---
http://hul.harvard.edu/news/2009_0901.html

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of knowledge ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

From MIT
Classics Archive
---
http://classics.mit.edu/

MIT OpenCourseWare: Major European Novels --- http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Literature/21L-472Fall-2008/CourseHome/index.htm

Bartleby's Free Online Books --- http://www.bartleby.com/titles/

Public.Resource.Org --- http://public.resource.org/

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author --- http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/

Authors: The Portrait Photograph File of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/collection=AuthorsPhotographsfr&col_id=155
Over 150 portraits

 

How do scholars search for academic references? --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Scholars

February 1, 2008 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

OVERVIEW OF INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., compiler of SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING BIBLIOGRAPHY (now in its 70th edition), has recently published "Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite", a work "designed to give the reader a very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories and to foster further exploration of this topic though liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites." The document covers definitions of institutional repositories, why institutions should have them, and the issues authors face when contributing to repositories.

"Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite" is available at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/ts/irtoutsuite.pdf. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose in accordance with the license.

You can access all of Bailey's publications on scholarly communication at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/.

LibrarySpot (left column library finder links)  --- http://www.libraryspot.com/

Shmoop is an online study guide for English Literature, Poetry and American history --- http://www.shmoop.com/

JURN (search engine for humanities and social science research) --- http://www.jurn.org/

Free e-book of great thinkers: WHAT MATTERS NOW!  --- http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/what-matters-now-1.pdf
Here, thanks to Seth Godin, are more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about as we head into the new year. From bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert to brilliant tech thinker Kevin Kelly, from publisher Tim O'Reilly to radio host Dave Ramsey, there are some important people riffing about important ideas here. The eBook includes Tom Peters, Jackie Huba and Jason Fried, along with Gina Trapani, Bill Taylor and Alan Webber.

Soon to be the largest scholarly library in the world:
Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

June 6, 2008 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

GOOGLE BOOK SEARCH BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. recently published the second version of "The Google Book Search Bibliography." The resource provides citations and links to over a hundred English-language references to scholarly papers and newspaper articles. The bibliography presents a comprehensive examination of the Google service and the "legal, library, and social issues associated with it." The bibliography is available at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm

Bailey is a prolific compiler of scholarly communication bibliographies, notably the "Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" (now in its 70th edition). You can access all his publications at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/

Jensen Comment
Also see
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3069&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Film Literature Index ---  http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/fli/index.jsp

One Million University of Illinois (Free) Books to be Digitized by Google --- http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/CenterForLibraryInitiatives/Archive/PressRelease/LibraryDigitization/index.shtml
Google Digitized Books ---
http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search?q=Accounting
For example, key in the word "accounting"
Then try "Accounting for Derivative Financial Instruments"
Then try "Robert E. Jensen" AND "Accounting"
Update on December 31, 2007
Million Book Project Reaches 1.5 Million Book Mark
From the Carnegie Mellon newsletter...
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/November/nov27_ulib.shtml 

Forgotten Books --- http://www.forgottenbooks.org/catalog/index.php

The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online. For the first time since the project was initiated in 2002, all of the books ... are available through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org), said Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon's dean of libraries.
The University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communications Blog, November 30, 2007 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

"Million Books Scanned at U. of Michigan -- and Counting," Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2008 ---  Click Here

Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5-million to go.

Most of the scanning has been done as part of the library’s controversial deal with Google. The search giant is working with dozens of major libraries around the world to scan the full text of books to add to its index. But Michigan is one of the only institutions to agree to scan every one of its holdings — even those that are still covered by copyright. Some publishers have sued Google for copyright infringement over the scanning effort, though officials from Google say their effort is legal because they are not making the full text of copyrighted books available to the public.

The University of Pittsburgh’s University Library System (ULS) and University Press have formed a partnership to provide digital editions of press titles as part of the library system’s D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program. Thirty-nine books from the Pitt Latin American Series published by the University of Pittsburgh Press are now available online, freely accessible to scholars and students worldwide. Ultimately, most of the Press’ titles older than 2 years will be provided through this open access platform.
The University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communications Blog, December 5, 2007 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Generation of online libraries is born --- http://physorg.com/news81346069.html

Institute of Museum and Library Services: Primary Source http://www.imls.gov/news/source.shtm

Open Library --- http://www.openlibrary.org/
For a good review, see
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/08/mclemee

Open Humanities Press --- http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/

The Digital South Asia Library --- http://dsal.uchicago.edu/

Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts --- http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/

From the American Library Association
Library Support Staff Resource Center ---
Click Here

The Electronics Books Page --- http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/

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 23, 2010
To Accompany the February 23, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/tidbitsQuotations022310.htm         

Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Last week I added a module on the healthcare system of Germany (thanks to a close friend in Germany)




Textbooks: Purchased Hardcopy vs. Downloadable eBook Purchases vs. Non-downloadable eBook Leases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooksDeal.htm

What's lacking in downloaded Kindle eBooks?
Would you believe the chapter exhibits?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooksDeal.htm

New Tool for Rewriting E-Textbooks:  It's the "Wikipedia of Textbooks"
Macmillan, a major textbook publisher, is today introducing a new service that will let faculty members to customize digital textbooks, adding and subtracting chapters, and to rewrite individual sentences and paragraphs, The New York Times reported. While coursepacks that allow faculty members to build customized digital or print materials for courses are common, this system may go further in allowing professors to overhaul a single existing work.
Inside Higher Ed, February 22, 2010 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/22/qt#220816 
"Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally," by Motoko Rich, The New York Times, February 21, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/business/media/22textbook.html?ref=education

Readers can modify content on the Web, so why not in books?

In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.

While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years — allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher.

“Basically they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the content right there and make whatever changes they want,” said Brian Napack, president of Macmillan. “And we don’t even look at it.”

In August, Macmillan plans to start selling 100 titles through DynamicBooks, including “Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight,” by Peter Atkins and Loretta Jones; “Discovering the Universe,” by Neil F. Comins and William J. Kaufmann; and “Psychology,” by Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert and Daniel M. Wegner. Mr. Napack said Macmillan was considering talking to other publishers to invite them to sell their books through DynamicBooks.

Students will be able to buy the e-books at dynamicbooks.com, in college bookstores and through CourseSmart, a joint venture among five textbook publishers that sells electronic textbooks. The DynamicBooks editions — which can be reached online or downloaded — can be read on laptops and the iPhone from Apple. Clancy Marshall, general manager of DynamicBooks, said the company planned to negotiate agreements with Apple so the electronic books could be read on the iPad.

The modifiable e-book editions will be much cheaper than traditional print textbooks. “Psychology,” for example, which has a list price of $134.29 (available on Barnes & Noble’s Web site for $122.73), will sell for $48.76 in the DynamicBooks version. Macmillan is also offering print-on-demand versions of the customized books, which will be priced closer to traditional textbooks.

Fritz Foy, senior vice president for digital content at Macmillan, said the company expected e-book sales to replace the sales of used books. Part of the reason publishers charge high prices for traditional textbooks is that students usually resell them in the used market for several years before a new edition is released. DynamicBooks, Mr. Foy said, will be “semester and classroom specific,” and the lower price, he said, should attract students who might otherwise look for used or even pirated editions.

Instructors who have tested the DynamicBooks software say they like the idea of being able to fine-tune a textbook. “There’s almost always some piece here or some piece there that a faculty person would have rather done differently,” said Todd Ruskell, senior lecturer in physics at the Colorado School of Mines, who tested an electronic edition of “Physics for Scientists and Engineers” by Paul A. Tipler and Gene Mosca.

Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart, said he expected that some professors would embrace the opportunity to customize e-books but that most would continue to rely on traditional textbooks.

“For many instructors, that’s very helpful to know it’s been through a process and represents a best practice in terms of a particular curriculum,” he said.

Even other publishers that allow instructors some level of customization hesitate about permitting changes at the sentence and paragraph level.

“There is a flow to books, and there’s voice to them,” said Don Kilburn, chief executive of Pearson Learning Solutions, which does allow instructors to change chapter orders and insert material from other sources. Mr. Kilburn said he had not been briefed on Macmillan’s plans.

Mr. Ruskell said he did not change much in the physics textbook he tested with DynamicBooks. “You don’t just want to say, ‘Oh, I don’t like this, I’m going to do this instead,’ ” he said. “You really want to think about it.”

Mr. Comins, an author of “Discovering the Universe,” a popular astronomy textbook, said the new e-book program was a way to speed up the process for incorporating suggestions that he often receives while revising new print editions. “I’ve learned as an author over the years that I am not perfect,” he said. “So if somebody in Iowa sees something in my book that they perceive is wrong, I am absolutely willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

On the other hand, if an instructor decided to rewrite paragraphs about the origins of the universe from a religious rather than an evolutionary perspective, he said, “I would absolutely, positively be livid.”

Ms. Clancy of Macmillan said the publisher reserved the right to “remove anything that is considered offensive or plagiarism,” and would rely on students, parents and other instructors to help monitor changes.

Textbooks: Purchased Hardcopy vs. Downloadable eBook Purchases vs. Non-downloadable eBook Leases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooksDeal.htm

What's lacking in downloaded Kindle eBooks?
Would you believe the chapter exhibits?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooksDeal.htm

 


Data Visualization and Twitter

"Four Ways of Looking at Twitter," by Scott Berinato, Harvard Business School Publishing Blog, February 18, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/02/visualizing-twitter.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Data visualization is cool. It's also becoming ever more useful, as the vibrant online community of data visualizers (programmers, designers, artists, and statisticians — sometimes all in one person) grows and the tools to execute their visions improve.

Jeff Clark is part of this community. He, like many data visualization enthusiasts, fell into it after being inspired by pioneer Martin Wattenberg's landmark treemap that visualized the stock market.

Clark's latest work shows much promise. He's built four engines that visualize that giant pile of data known as Twitter. All four basically search words used in tweets, then look for relationships to other words or to other Tweeters. They function in almost real time.

"Twitter is an obvious data source for lots of text information," says Clark. "It's actually proven to be a great playground for testing out data visualization ideas." Clark readily admits not all the visualizations are the product of his design genius. It's his programming skills that allow him to build engines that drive the visualizations. "I spend a fair amount of time looking at what's out there. I'll take what someone did visually and use a different data source. Twitter Spectrum was based on things people search for on Google. Chris Harrison did interesting work that looks really great and I thought, I can do something like that that's based on live data. So I brought it to Twitter."

His tools are definitely early stages, but even now, it's easy to imagine where they could be taken.

Take TwitterVenn. You enter three search terms and the app returns a venn diagram showing frequency of use of each term and frequency of overlap of the terms in a single tweet. As a bonus, it shows a small word map of the most common terms related to each search term; tweets per day for each term by itself and each combination of terms; and a recent tweet. I entered "apple, google, microsoft." Here's what a got:

Continued in article (note the Venn diagram)

Bob Jensen's threads on multivariate data visualization (a favorite topic of mine)
Visualization of Multivariate Data (including faces) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm 

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

 


Questions
How can you search for text embedded in stored images, especially books and articles downloaded as images rather than text?

What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more?

Evernote ---  http://www.evernote.com/
Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images.
(there are free and fee options)

Features for Windows

  • Create notes containing text, webclips, snapshots, to-dos, PDFs, and more
  • Take photos of everything from whiteboards to wine labels and Evernote will make them searchable
  • Premium users can attach any type of file to their notes
  • Windows User Guide | PDF

 

From the Scout Report on February 12, 2010

Evernote 3.5.1.1410 --- http://www.evernote.com/ 

Looking to remember an image you found? Or perhaps a helpful email link? Evernote makes this all possible, and it can be used with a range of mobile devices as well. The program works as a note-taking application as well, and everything a user does with the program is automatically synchronized to their Evernote account. Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images. This version of Evernote is compatible with computers running Windows XP and Vista or Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6.

"Digital File Cabinet You Can Bring With You Anywhere," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2010 ---
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20100120/evernote-review/

What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones?

Well, such a service exists. And it’s free. It’s called Evernote. I’ve been testing it for about a week on a multiplicity of computers and phones, and found that it works very well. Evernote is an excellent example of hybrid computing—using the “cloud” online to store data and perform tasks, while still taking advantage of the power and offline ability of local devices.

The idea behind Evernote is to be a sort of digital file cabinet. It allows you to create “noteBooks” containing items called notes. These notes can range from text to photos to many kinds of attached files. You can locate, group and peruse them quickly, without having to dig through a computer’s file system. When I first reviewed the product, back in 2005, Evernote was a Windows-only, purely local information organizer. Now it’s a multi-platform, Internet-savvy, synchronized place for your ideas.

You can sign up for Evernote free at evernote.com, and use it entirely as a Web-based application, through any of the major Web browsers. But Evernote also comes in customized versions for a staggering array of devices: Windows and Macintosh computers, and for all the major smart phones, including the iPhone; the BlackBerry; phones running Google’s Android operating system; the latest Palm (PALM) phones; and Windows Mobile phones.

This week, Evernote, which is made by a small Silicon Valley company of the same name, is introducing a totally revamped Windows version that brings the platform into parity with the company’s previously more advanced Macintosh version.

I tested Evernote on two Macs and two Windows PCs, as well as an iPhone, a Palm Pre phone and the new Nexus One phone from Google (GOOG). I also tried free plug-ins the company offers that make it easy to insert all or part of a Web page or email into an Evernote note. These are available for the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome Web browsers, and for the Outlook email program. There are also system-wide Evernote buttons, which make capturing notes quicker, for Windows and the Mac.

I found Evernote works well for gathering ideas for business or personal projects, hobbies, or events you’re planning. When you see something or think of something you want to add, you can do it from whatever computer or phone is handy, and it will shortly appear on all of them.

Here are a few examples of how I used Evernote. I typed notes to myself on my desktops and laptops. I dictated a reminder to myself using the Evernote app on my iPhone. I used the Nexus One’s camera to take a picture of a person’s business card. I also copied text from Web pages, emails, and Word documents, and pasted them as notes. I even attached whole files to notes.

Within a few minutes, all of these notes were available on my personal Evernote Web site and from within all the Evernote apps on my computers and phones. I could search through them, email them, print them, group them with related items, or edit and annotate them.

Every Evernote user also gets a unique Evernote email address, and anything you email to that address goes into your repository as a new note. You also can use Twitter to get a note into Evernote.

The program has a few extra-cool features. If you create a note from a photo that includes printing, Evernote’s servers will try to figure out the words and make them searchable. This worked well in my tests with photos of business cards. And some smart-phone apps can save items directly into Evernote notes. One example I tested successfully was the Associated Press news app on the iPhone.

There are a few minor downsides to Evernote. While there’s no overall limit to the amount of data you can store, you can only upload 40 megabytes a month with the free version, attach certain types of files to notes, and you are forced to view ads. A premium version, which costs $5 a month, or $45 a year, increases the quota to 500 megabytes monthly, removes the ads, allows attaching any file type, and adds more features.

Also, I found the Evernote programs and apps, while similar, differ slightly depending on the capabilities of the platform they run on. Among the phone versions, for instance, the iPhone app is by far the most full-featured, and is currently the only one that can store whole noteBooks offline, though the Android version is due to get that feature soon. Finally, the Evernote plug-in crashed Outlook on one of my Windows computers.

But, all in all, I found Evernote to be a valuable, easy-to-use tool that simplified my work and made good use of both the Internet and all my devices.

Jensen Comment
The video video introduction and links to a video library are at http://www.evernote.com/about/video/
This is a product that I am probably going to install.

Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm

Bob Jensen's links to free electronic literature (some of which download as images rather than text) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/electronicliterature.htm

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm


February 20, 2010 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

The future of publishing:

http://vook.com/vook.php 

Richard J. Campbell
mailto:campbell@rio.edu

Vook --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vook

A Vook is a digital book type that combines video, links to the internet and text into one application that's available both on the Web and as a mobile application.

Vook officially launched October 1, 2009 with four debut titles, published in partnership with Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster: Promises, a romance by Jude Deveraux; The 90 Second Fitness Solution, a fitness book by Pete Cerqua; Embassy, a thriller by Richard Doetsch; and Return to Beauty, a health book by Narine Nikogosian. Vook followed up these titles with a Vook version of Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It!, released in late 2009. The company has since released a CookVook for Woman's Day, as well as numerous public domain titles, as well as moving into production on a Vook with author Seth Godin. On February 10th, 2010, the company announced a forthcoming Vook with Anne Rice.

Vook was founded by serial Internet entrepreneur Bradley Inman and came to public attention after being featured in an article in the New York Times in April, 2009.

Here's a really informative link:
Comparison of eBook formats
--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats

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


Question
In their book Valuing Wall Street published in early 2000, Andrew Smithers and Stephen Wright claim that the q ratio popularized by Nobel laureate James Tobin reliably identifies periods of extreme overvaluation and undervaluation in stock prices. Can investors use this indicator to implement a successful market timing strategy?

Answer from Fama and French on February 10, 2010 ---
http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/qa/

This proposition has been tested in several papers, and the answer is no. The market-to-book ratio for the market (a proxy for q) shows some ability to predict stock returns during the 1930s, but not thereafter.  

Question
A prominent money management firm has recently launched several mutual funds that seek to exploit the positive momentum effect in stock prices. Why does this well-publicized anomaly persist and under what circumstances can investors expect to profit from it?

Answer from Fama and French on February 3, 2010 ---
http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/qa/

EFF/KRF: The momentum anomaly has been observed in most major markets (Japan is the exception). Many academics claim that trading costs will wipe out any benefits of trying to trade actively on momentum. This will now be tested by live funds. The results will be interesting.
(Read the full entry)

Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_Inflation-Protected_Securities#TIPS

Question
How do TIPS and one-month Treasury bills compare as inflation hedges?

Answer from Fama and French on January 22, 2010 ---
http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/qa/

TIPs are obviously a great hedge against inflation, but there is still uncertainty about the short-term real return on long-term TIPS. A long-term TIPS is a long-term loan to the Government at a fixed real interest rate. Variation through time in the expected real return that investors require to make this long-term commitment leads to capital gains and losses that affect short-term real returns.
(Read the full entry)

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


"Highest-Paid Bachelor’s Degrees: 2010," CNBC, February 2010 ---
http://www.cnbc.com/id/29408064/

01. Petroleum Engineering Average starting salary: $86,220

02. Chemical Engineering Average starting salary: $65,142

03. Mining & Mineral Engineering (incl. Geological) Average starting salary: $64,552

04. Computer Science Average starting salary: $61,205

05. Computer Engineering Average starting salary: $60,879

06. Electrical/Electronics & Communications Engineering Average starting salary: $59,074

07. Mechanical Engineering Average starting salary: $58,392

08. Industrial/Manufacturing Engineering Average starting salary: $57,734

09. Aerospace/Aeronautical/ Astronautical Engineering Average starting salary: $57,231

10. Information Sciences & Systems Average starting salary: $54,038

Jensen Warning
I always warned students that the highest starting salary is not the most important consideration.
Always ask where you will likely be after ten years from the start of the job!

I always warned my students to look first to career opportunities and externalities
Externalities include compensation growth, high pressure, tension, and extensive travel (which can be positive or negative)
Externalities include opportunities for continued training, education, and free time to pursue varied interests

Accounting graduates often want to start in the largest CPA firms for training and experience with the intention of eventually joining one of the
clients after five or ten years of auditing for the Big Four firm. The client may offer more exciting challenges and executive management to experienced new   hires.

Among the most important career considerations is opportunity for advancement and opportunity to shift career tracks
For example, accounting graduates have opportunities to become accounting professors, in turn, are often the highest paid professors on campus

Other disciplines such as engineering offer much lower probabilities (relative to accounting PhDs) of landing tenure track job offers in top universities because there is such a huge supply of new engineering PhD graduates relative to a huge shortage of new accounting PhD graduates

"All Big Four Firms Are Best Companies To Work For In 2009," Big Four Blog, January 22, 2010 ---
http://bigfouralumni.blogspot.com/2010/01/all-big-four-firms-are-best-companies.html

All the Big Four firms recently made Fortune’s 2009 “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, though not at the very top as we have become very accustomed to seeing in BusinessWeek or Diversity or Working Mothers magazine. Nonetheless a very creditable performance against a tough crowd of equally impressive and quality peers. 2009 sported tougher competition as three of the five firms dropped rank from the 2008 listing.

In addition, we are seeing a varied picture with firms actively cutting positions to some minor increases at Deloitte and PwC from 2008 to 2009, in line with the general decrease in business for these firms in the Americas.

Check out our January 2009 blog post on the 2008 rankings


However, tough external conditions appear to have created some welcome bonuses for employees, either through additional holidays, a sabbatical program or less travel.

Fortune has a rigorous process to select these top companies, and with a large chunk of the selection process based on true employee responses, its hard to game this list, so makes the results reliable. It conducts the most extensive employee survey in corporate America with 347 companies in the overall pool. Two-thirds of a company's score is based on the results of survey sent to a random sample of employees from each company with questions on attitudes management's credibility, job satisfaction, and camaraderie. The other third of the scoring is based on the company's responses on pay and benefit programs, hiring, communication, and diversity.

Continued in article

An Upbeat Accounting Recruitment Message in a Down Economy
December 10, 2009 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

Francine, Ed, Bob, et al:

Also completely anecdotal but on the other side of the coin:

I have no knowledge or evidence about audit fees, firm profits, or even demand for audit services, since I've been way too busy to spend time with recruiters this semester. But based on what my colleagues are telling me, the cold air has not seeped down to us yet.

We had more firms at our "meet the firms" night last month than we've ever had before (56). The number of organizations who recruited accounting majors here set a new school record (66). Our percentage of May grads who have job offers already (74%)is exactly the same as it was this time last year, which was up about 5% before the year before and up 8% from the year before. The actual COUNT of grads who are graduating and who have jobs is up about 5% over last year. We haven't yet run our salary survey (to my knowledge) but from the scuttlebutt in talking with students, the starting salaries for our grads haven't dropped noticeably, if at all. I still have firms calling me begging to be guest speakers for my classes, which means they apparently still have time to spend a day driving over here to class, and still have money enough to spend the night and go to a basketball game or something.

We graduate around 120 accounting BBA's per year, and about 75-80 MSA grads each year (almost all of whom were accounting BBA's the year before). The bachelor number has been relatively steady the past few years, but the MSA enrollment has quadrupled over the last 3-4 years as the Virginia 150-hr kicked in a couple years ago.

Regarding curriculum, we too have moved several courses from the undergrad to the grad level, and our undergrad accounting degree no longer has sufficient accounting hours to meet the 30-hour minimum to sit for the exam in Virginia. Students not going for the MSA have to add the CIS minor to get their 150 hours -- and that minor includes an accounting technology course which puts them over the 30-hour accounting hurdle. But those who can get in (minimum GPA, GMAT hurdles, etc.) all go into the Masters program.

The masters program not only has some accounting courses that used to be undergrad, it also has the original pioneering Becker Boot-Camp (totally non-credit) starting the week after graduation. With the Becker boot camp, we are now in the top ten first-time pass-rates on the Exam. Since practically all our MSA's go into public accounting, the arrangement has been a boon to the students. Practically all of them have the course paid for by their employer after passing the exam.

Again, we are probably not typical. The only way we know the economy is down is that our salaries remain frozen after several years, our travel was frozen and while unfrozen now, remains under heavy restrictions, and my computer is now more than five years old. Fortunately, donations are up, so I still plan to be at the AAA-IS next month.

Of course, I have to admit, about 2/3rds of our market is Big Four in the Washington/Baltimore area which may be totally atypical to the rest of the world. But most (>90%) of our grads start in public accounting (Big 4, second tier, and a sprinkling of smaller firms), with almost all of the remainder going to government (the GAO, Secret Service, DoD, and Dept of Justice all have more offers out to our students this year than last, and are far more aggressive about trying to get their reps in front of the students than they have ever been in the past).

Purely anecdotal, and quite likely atypical, but from our unusual vantage point, accounting is still strong. We have no shortage of students wanting to major in accounting. Because we remain under a hiring freeze, we have had to manage enrollments by increasing our minnimum GPA to declare the major, and are implementing an entrance exam to enroll in intermediate.

David Fordham
James Madison University

Accounting Majors in Demand
Even when the economy is down, there is room for top students in the profession.   The National Association of Colleges and Employers’ 2009 Student Survey found that, even though students in the class of 2009 were graduating with fewer jobs available, accounting majors are still in high demand. Accounting and engineering graduates were among those majors most likely to have already found jobs.   Accounting majors expect to earn an average starting salary of about $45,000, while engineering grads expect to earn $58,000.
Journal of Accountancy, July 2009 --- http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2009/Jul/AccountingMajors.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#careers


"Google Voice Launches A Series Of Videos To Explain Its "Awesomeness," Gibberish," by MG Sieler, The Washington Post, February 18, 2010 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021802975.html?wpisrc=nl_tech

 Google Voice is a great service, one of the best things Google has released in a long time. Unfortunately, most casual web users have no idea what it is. Or more specifically, what it's purpose is. And in fact, there's even still some confusion amongst heavy web users about whether Voice is VoIP, for example (it's not ? yet). So Google has today launched a series of videos to explain the service. The first (embedded below) is a simple overview, "What is Google Voice." The 11 others go into more detail about actual features such as the mobile app (as in, the one that actually works on the iPhone), how to block callers, sharing voicemails, personalized greetings, and connecting all your numbers to your one Google Voice numbers, among other things.

You can find them all on this new YouTube page that Google has created (just in case you thought Microsoft were the only ones using YouTube for product promotion).There is also a video describing voicemail transcription. My favorite part of this video is how Google skirts around how the vast majority of the voice transcriptions are in absolute gibberish. "Transcriptions aren't perfect, but we hope they're good enough to save you from listening to the message." I have yet to experience that. Instead, here are some of my favorites that I've gotten just in the past couple of weeks:With that fun. It's but but. Thank you. Thanks Hello yeah, I don't think you got the right number.It's important to you 8 technical alright. Call me.

 Troubleshooting just to okay.Hi Angie, This is mcKayla I we met at the crash, 50 calling friends and I'd like for a check start.Hands down, the best way to experience Google Voice is to let it take over the phone controls on your mobile device. Unfortunately, that only works on Android devices right now ? and likely never will for the iPhone. Those of us with iPhones will have to settle for the web app version (which is still pretty nice). CrunchBase InformationGoogle VoiceInformation provided by CrunchBase

Jensen Comment
When I was in grammar school, my teachers insisted repeatedly that alright was all wrong, all right was all right. And already was slightly better than all ready in most contexts. But I keep seeing alright in the media, so I guess this is another grammar standard that's gone by the boards already.


Free and Fee Storage on Web Servers

February 17, 2010 message from Rick Lillie [rlillie@CSUSB.EDU]

Hi Bob,

I use an outside web hosting service called Webhost4life for all of my online course materials. I've used the service for about eight years and have had few problems. I subscribe to the premium hosting service. I currently use FrontPage 2003. Although, I will change to an updated software program in the near future.

The fees are extremely reasonable. They give me 300GB of storage space. There are no traffic charges. Overall, tech support is quite good (but not perfect) and is available 24/7.

I upload all videos (Camtasia, TokBox, SightSpeed, etc.). They stream without any problem.

I use Blackboard for my blended and online courses at my university (CalState San Bernardino). I also teach online courses for UCLA Extension. I use Blackboard as a web portal and hyperlink to my materials hosted on my Webhost4life server. I purchase my domain name (drlillie.com) through GoDaddy.com. I've never encountered any domain issues with GoDaddy.com

I am also playing around with a new hosted web service called Weebly. This will not replace what I am doing through Webhost4life, but it is an interesting way to create mini websites quickly and easily.

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

I added Rick's message to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm#archiving


"Suddenly Concerned About Historical Accuracy, Leftists Attempt to Kill JFK (History Channel) Miniseries," by John Nolte, Big Hollywood, February 19, 2010 --- http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2010/02/19/suddenly-concerned-about-historical-accuracy-leftists-attempt-to-kill-jfk-miniseries/

This is America and leftist filmmaker Robert Greenwald and his ilk have every right to wage a propaganda war to pressure the History Channel to kill their upcoming JFK miniseries. The miniseries’ script might not be done yet, but that’s how we roll in this country and until Senator Harry Reid steps in and threatens to put the History Channel out of business, like he did ABC in order to muscle a “Path to 9/11″ edit to his and the Clintons’ liking, Greenwald and Co. can all knock themselves out. And knocking themselves out they are: a website, petition, videos, and an all-too expected personal attack against “24″ co-creator Joel Surnow, an openly conservative producer and creator of “The Kennedys.”

The New York Times reports that Greenwald appears to have gotten his hands on an early draft of the script for the 10-hour miniseries and found parts of it objectionable. According to a video Greenwald put together — where he has bad actors recreate the “offensive” scenes — JFK was some kind of serial adulterer. Who knew, right? Then there’s longtime Kennedy friend and counsel Ted Sorenson who appears in the video with a not very subtle threat to sue the History Channel should they proceed. He claims the screenplay contains Oval Office conversations that never happened. Who do you think is more worried about Sorenson winning a lawsuit against dramatic license? Surnow or Oliver Stone?

The most important fact in this dust up is that it’s occurring over a project that’s still in the development stage. The script is still being written and will be vetted:

Mr. Kronish, the “Kennedys” screenwriter, said that the History channel’s standards for producing its mini-series are more rigorous than the broadcast networks’, and that his finished scripts will require bibliographic annotations and legal vetting before filming proceeds. He also said that he was drawing upon nonfiction works, including books by Seymour Hersh, Robert Dallek, David Talbot and others. “If I’m wrong,” he said, “I guess all of them are wrong.”

Mr. Kronish acknowledged that some factual details, like the date that the Peace Corps was established, were changed for concision or dramatic license, but not with malicious intent.

“This is not a documentary,” he said. “It is a dramatization.” As its author, Mr. Kronish said, it was his job to “take these people off the dusty pages of history and make them come alive.”

“We do not go into this with an agenda other than to be factually accurate and entertaining,” he said. “The rest of it, let the chips fall where they may.”

David McKillop, the senior vice president of programming and development for the History channel, said that Mr. Kronish had already begun submitting annotated drafts of his scripts, and that the channel stands by their accuracy.

Keep in mind, however, that we’re talking about the History Channel and the irony of The History Channel suddenly getting all worked up over historical accuracy is rich and, not surprisingly, completely lost on Greenwald (and the New York Times):

“Anyone has a right to do whatever they want,” Mr. Greenwald said. “I would never suggest that History channel doesn’t have a right. What I’d suggest is something called the History channel should not be doing political propaganda.”

You have to stop and savor nine of Greenwald’s words: “The History Channel should not be doing political propaganda.”

Does he mean, this History Channel…? Because I Googled and Googled and Googled searching for Robert Greenwald’s Stop ‘The People Speak’ website and came up empty.

Maybe Surnow should cast Matt Damon as JFK and all this “political propaganda” will stop being a problem.

But is it really propaganda? Pulling a few scenes out of the early draft of what must be a 500-plus page screenplay isn’t a very convincing argument. Truth is found in context not cherry-picking.

The Left will point to the conservative uproar over the 2003 CBS Reagan miniseries as some sort of cover for their History Channel assault. But that miniseries was already completed when conservatives started their campaign to have it pulled, and it did eventually air on Showtime. Also, unlike “The Path to 9/11,” the trashing of Ron and Nancy enjoyed a DVD release. I know this because there’s still a copy of it in the used 5 for $20 bin at my local Hollywood Video store — right next to “Welcome to Mooseport.”

Overall, this new uproar from our friends on the left should be looked at as a positive change. Now that they and the History Channel have discovered and embraced the idea of historical accuracy, those of us on the right who have grown disgusted and tired of these awful Hollywoodists and their decades-long smear campaign against our country, beliefs, heroes, religion, and troops, can now rest easy that those days are over.

Right?

 


Question
If you are using some commercial test bank for examinations in your course, can students down load them here?
http://www.e-junkie.com/

At a minimum, perhaps you should conduct a search in the same manner as Professor Krause?

Note that when I enter "Spiceland" at http://www.e-junkie.com/ there are zero hits.
Instructors must be more creative in their searches.

February 16, 2010 message from Paul Krause [Paul@PAULKRAUSE.COM]

In a recent discussion someone mentioned they use questions from an author's test bank. A student has told me of the very readily available answer manuals and test banks, and walked me through a real transaction. The example he used was Spiceland's Financial Accounting text. Both manuals were available for purchase, and payment was quite easy through PayPal.

Maybe I'm naive, but I was not aware of the ease of obtaining this material.

The site is http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/product/335909.php which I got to by typing into a Google search "Financial Accounting  Spiceland answer manual". The test bank procedure was essentially the same, I typed in "financial accounting spiceland test bank" and got
http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/product/337857.php

The answer manual was an exact copy of what instructors can download or get on a CD.

I tried "Financial accounting horngren" and got a reply "either the listing or the payment method has been removed"

For a listing of all products at this site and to see if your text is available there, try http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/ I'm sure there are other sites also, I didn't bother to go any deeper.

So what? We must assume that all answers and all test questions are available to any computer literate accounting major (that is all accounting majors). If we feel test banks are a good study guide for students, if they review all questions in a test bank, then I suppose it is OK. However, if we want to maintain integrity of tests, forget about using test banks.


Paul Krause
Chico, CA, USA

Paul@PaulKrause.com

February 17, 2010 reply from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]

Here is the flip side—I periodically teach the capstone course for the management department. The book I use was published by Houghton Mifflin. Sometime in the recent past, Cengage acquired Houghton Mifflin. When I asked Cegage for the test bank (which is an instructor resource listed in the book), first I was told there wasn’t one. Then I was told, if there was one, it must have “fell into a crack” during the acquisition. I told my students that if I couldn’t get the test bank I would have to make up my own exam from scratch. That put fear into my students, so several of them said they could get a copy of the test bank for me! Ultimately, after much complaining by me, Cengage looked into the crack and found the CD, so I didn’t have to rely on my students to provide the test bank.

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 17, 2010 reply from Paul Krause [Paul@PAULKRAUSE.COM]

I just went out there to check the links, and lo and behold the prices have increased dramatically for Spiceland. My student paid $15 at PayPal for an instant download.

I see the prices now are $29 for the Solutions Manual and $41 for the Test Bank. The market works! Wait until mid-terms come around to see how much the Test Bank goes for then.

Paul

February 17, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Paul,

Lest we make an assumption that the buyers are all students, I think that your posting on the AECM inspired a boat load of instructors to order the Spiceland test bank, e.g., the instructors who adopted Kieso might want to confuse their students who all bought the Kieso test bank for courses requiring the Kieso textbook.

In other words, we can attribute much of the increase in test bank demand to you Paul.

Don Ramsey also says to look for test banks and solutions manuals via
  http://www.sbooks4sale.com/

Bob Jensen

February 20, 2010 reply from Malcolm McLelland [mjmclell@INDIANA.EDU]

In either case--electronic or hard copy--my Asian students tell me you can buy pretty much whatever you want in Hong Kong (pirated texts, test banks, solutions manuals); Kieso Weygandt Warfield, Spiceland Seppe Tomassini , etc. And not only can you buy them, they're cheap too (i.e., often on the order of $20 to $30 US as I recall).

MMc

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm


An interesting article on forced performance rankings (might be read as grading) ---
Olympics 1, AIG 0: Why Forced Ranking Is a Bad Idea --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/02/olympics-1-aig-0-why-forced-ra.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Jensen Comment
I think some readers fail to see the importance of just what the title means when it reads “Olympics 1, AIG 0."

They're apt to look for some relationship between the Olympics and AIG. There may well be some very obscure relationship, but that’s not the point.

 

February 19, 2010 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

Bob,

This is one of the most interesting stories you've passed along in quite a while. I especially like the part of the article that says once a ranking criterion is selected, all other tasks an employee might perform (such as learning/training) are counter productive. I think this is a situation very present in academe. GPA becomes an important metric for students quest for either employment or graduate school after graduation with a BSBA. If GPA is the primary criterion for awarding entry and scholarships, than any activity a student takes that could result in a lower grade is to be avoided at all costs.

Moreover, learning within a course is a multivariate activity. I can think of memorization, application, affectation and personal growth. If a professor is untrained in education (and most biz profs are), professor selection of inappropriate grading criteria can place a huge cost on students.

David Albrecht

February 19, 2010 reply from James R. Martin/University of South Florida [jmartin@MAAW.INFO] (I combined two replies)

According to Deming:
Annual reviews and ranking employees indicates the absence of a knowledge of variation and an absence of an understanding of the system. A manager who understands variation would not rank people because he or she would understand that ranking people merely ranks the effect of the system on the people. This causes tampering & destroys motivation and teamwork.

See http://maaw.info/DemingMain.htm for Deming's theory of management.

 This hit one of my buttons. The point: There is nothing wrong with ranking people in games. Some one wins and someone losses. But life, business, and education are not games. Everyone can win if they cooperate and work together. Ranking people prevents them from doing that and causes winners and losers in the short run. In the long run, everyone losses.

February 20, 2010 reply from Francine McKenna [retheauditors@GMAIL.COM]

Bob/Dave  
Agree wholeheartedly.  I've written a lot about forced ranking for partners on down and the negative effect it's had on professionalism and morale in the Big 4.  They've followed their big ideal client GE into the abyss.

http://retheauditors.com/2009/11/05/live-our-values-demonstrate-our-behaviors-support-our-strategy/

http://retheauditors.com/2009/08/12/goingconcern-ratings-raises-and-promotions-forced-ranking-in-the-big-4/

http://retheauditors.com/2007/06/26/when-is-a-layoff-not-a-layoff/

Francine

February 19, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

And I forgot to cringe properly when remembering all the times I thought I was making the job easier when I had students rank each other’s term papers --- because I thought ordinal-scale ranking would be easier for them than assigning a letter grade or ratio-scaled score. Ratio scales differ from interval scales by having a common zero point, which is what makes correlations different from covariances.

In small graduate classes I thought it would be a learning exercise for students to both read each others’ papers and rank them. Students were asked not to rank their own papers in the set of submitted rankings.

However, for grading purposes I graded the papers before I read the student rankings. I reserved the right to only mark a paper’s grade upward after reading the student commentaries that accompanied their rankings. I suspect I would’ve graded downward as well if plagiarism was detected by student rankers, but not once in my career did a student ranker ever disclose a case of plagiarism.

Still, I’m now wondering about the propriety of making students rank papers.

Bob Jensen

February 20, 2010 reply from Dennis Beresford [dberesfo@TERRY.UGA.EDU]

Bob,

This isn't quite your point but is somewhat related. Earlier this week I completed grading the first case reports for my Masters of Accountancy classes. I make up the cases and I always tell the students there is no formal answer code. I just read all of the reports and make a judgment on how good of a job each team has done of researching the authoritative literature and writing up their work in a manner that would be similar to how it would be presented in public accounting or the corporate world. I also expect them to go beyond the minimum financial reporting requirements and discuss things like audit and tax issues that might be suggested by the case.

In preparation for the first case, on the class web site I provide the students some pretty general guidelines on how case reports might be structured including some of the common spelling and other errors I've encountered in the past. I also provide an example of an excellent report on a case from an earlier semester. Further, at one of the first class sessions, I have one of my former students who is now a research accountant with American Express demonstrate the Codification. I'm also able to provide the students at my expense with access to one of the firms' electronic research tools.

The first case reports were pretty good overall and three were outstanding. But another three or four were mediocre at best. While they didn't necessarily come up with the "wrong answer" in a GAAP sense, the quality of their reports was fairly poor in my estimation and I made a number of suggestions on their reports telling them where they could have improved. I also offered to meet with the students individually or in their teams (no takers so far).

Notwithstanding my fairly detailed notes suggesting ways in which the reports could be improved and my offers to meet, my experience has been that those who start off with the less well written reports generally stay at about that level through the semester and those with the excellent reports at the beginning also stay consistent. So I decided to try something a little different. I told the class that I was going to ask one of the highest performing teams if they be willing to share a clean copy of their report (with the names removed) that I could then make available to any of the other students who wanted to see what an excellent report really looks like. My theory is that the ones with the poorer reports really aren't sure what I'm looking for and maybe if they see an example of an excellent report on that exact case they will get the point better.

Well, the team with the excellent report was very gracious and immediately sent me a clean copy of their report and I now have it available to share with anyone who asks. So far no one has. This may be because no one works on the cases until a week or so until they are due and the next one isn't due for about four weeks. In any event, I've tried to help and it will be interesting to see if (1) anybody takes advantage and (2) it does any good.

I'd be interested in hearing if others have ideas on how to improve case reports beyond what I've suggested.

Denny Beresford

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm


"More than 75,000 computer systems hacked in one of largest cyber attacks, security firm says," by Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post, February 18, 2010 --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/17/AR2010021705816.html?wpisrc=nl_tech

More than 75,000 computer systems at nearly 2,500 companies in the United States and around the world have been hacked in what appears to be one of the largest and most sophisticated attacks by cyber criminals discovered to date, according to a northern Virginia security firm.

The attack, which began in late 2008 and was discovered last month, targeted proprietary corporate data, e-mails, credit-card transaction data and login credentials at companies in the health and technology industries in 196 countries, according to Herndon-based NetWitness.

News of the attack follows reports last month that the computer networks at Google and more than 30 other large financial, energy, defense, technology and media firms had been compromised. Google said the attack on its system originated in China.

This latest attack does not appear to be linked to the Google intrusion, said Amit Yoran, NetWitness's chief executive. But it is significant, he said, in its scale and in its apparent demonstration that the criminal groups' sophistication in cyberattacks is approaching that of nation states such as China and Russia.

The attack also highlights the inability of the private sector -- including industries that would be expected to employ the most sophisticated cyber defenses -- to protect itself.

"The traditional security approaches of intrusion-detection systems and anti-virus software are by definition inadequate for these types of sophisticated threats," Yoran said. "The things that we -- industry -- have been doing for the past 20 years are ineffective with attacks like this. That's the story."

The intrusion, first reported on the Wall Street Journal's Web site, was detected Jan. 26 by NetWitness engineer Alex Cox. He discovered the intrusion, dubbed the Kneber bot, being run by a ring based in Eastern Europe operating through at least 20 command and control servers worldwide.

The hackers lured unsuspecting employees at targeted firms to download infected software from sites controlled by the hackers, or baited them into opening e-mails containing the infected attachments, Yoran said. The malicious software, or "bots," enabled the attackers to commandeer users' computers, scrape them for log-in credentials and passwords -- including to online banking and social networking sites -- and then exploit that data to hack into the systems of other users, Yoran said. The number of penetrated systems grew exponentially, he said.

"Because they're using multiple bots and very sophisticated command and control methods, once they're in the system, even if you whack the command and control servers, it's difficult to rid them of the ability to control the users' computers," Yoran said.

The malware had the ability to target any information the attackers wanted, including file-sharing sites for sensitive corporate documents, according to NetWitness.

Login credentials have monetary value in the criminal underground, experts said. A damage assessment for the firms is underway, Yoran said. NetWitness has been working with firms to help them mitigate the damage.

Among the companies hit were Cardinal Health, located in Dublin, Ohio, and Merck, according to the Wall Street Journal. A spokesman for Cardinal said the firm removed the infected computers as soon as the breach was found.

Also affected were educational institutions, energy firms, financial companies and Internet service providers. Ten government agencies were penetrated, none in the national security area, NetWitness said.

The systems penetrated were mostly in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Mexico, the firm said.

Google Chrome --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome

Google Chrome Browser Blues
"Google's Chrome OS Cited as Likely Hacker Vehicle:  The HTML 5 technology intended to power Google's forthcoming computer operating system can access a PC online or off, warns security vendor McAfee," by Aaron Ricadela, Business Week, December 29, 2009 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc20091228_112186.htm?link_position=link2

Bob Jensen's threads on computer and networking security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection


"NY Times probes reporter's lifting from other news sources," Breitbart, February 15, 2010 ---
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.4e9dabc2cc4c91405b490a1b8900b36d.e1&show_article=1

The New York Times is conducting an investigation after a Wall Street and finance reporter was found to have improperly used wording and passages from other news organizations. Zachery Kouwe, who joined the Times in 2008 from the New York Post, "reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgement," the Times said in an editors' note.

The Times said Kouwe appeared to have "improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations" in a number of business articles over the past year and in posts on NYTimes.com's DealBook blog.

According to his biography on the Times website, the New York-based Kouwe worked from 2005 to 2008 at the New York Post, where he was chief mergers and acquisitions reporter.

The Wall Street Journal alerted the Times to similarities between a Journal story and a Times story of February 5, the newspaper said.

"A subsequent search by The Times found other cases of extensive overlap between passages in Mr. Kouwe?s articles and other news organizations,'" the Times said.

"Copying language directly from other news organizations without providing attribution -- even if the facts are independently verified -- is a serious violation of Times policy and basic journalistic standards," the newspaper said.

"It should not have occurred. The matter remains under investigation by The Times, which will take appropriate action consistent with our standards to protect the integrity of our journalism."

According to the Times website, Kouwe covers hedge funds, mergers and acquisitions, private equity, investment banking and other subjects.

Nearly seven years ago, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair resigned over what the newspaper at the time called "widespread fabrication and plagiarism."

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 later on in this module.

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

February 16, 2010 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@BONACKERS.COM]

Caveat Emptor, Law Students Seeking Outlines 

The title of this post isn’t designed to demonstrate any sort of proficiency in Latin but to alert law students to the dangers of relying on outlines received from other students. The risks posed by using passed-down outlines have been threatening law students for almost as long as there have been law schools, but digital technology coupled with the internet has multiplied the risk by orders of magnitude. Ten or fifteen years ago, students could get their hands on outlines for courses taught in the law school they were attending. In almost every instance the outline was from a previous semester offering of the course, taught by the same professor presently teaching the course.

Now, students at any law school can obtain outlines for just about any course taught at any law school. Recently, my attention was drawn to
Outline Depot, which claims to be “the most comprehensive source of law school outlines anywhere.” (emphasis in the original). Perhaps it is, and I’ve not researched that point. Students earn the right to download outlines by accumulating credits, which can be obtained by uploading outlines or by purchasing the credits.

The point to which students are desperate to get their hands on outlines is apparent from what one finds on the site. There are all sorts of red flags and warning bells.

http://mauledagain.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html#2661520804417965026

This is primarily about law schools, and is a blog by a tax law professor no less, but if there is one there surely is another. Outlines are useful, but in my case mainly when I make one from material I am reading.

Scott Bonacker CPA
Springfield, MO

February 16, 2010 reply from Bender, Ruth [r.bender@CRANFIELD.AC.UK]

Thanks Bob, that was useful, as ever.

And you might like this piece, just published, about what we are doing re plagiarism in UK universities.

How schools beat the net cheats http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/355597/how-schools-beat-the-net-cheats/4 

Kind regards
Ruth

"How schools beat the net cheats," PC Pro, February 20, 2010 ---
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/355597/how-schools-beat-the-net-cheats/4

Dr Fintan Culwin, professor of software engineering education and the head of the department of informatics at London’s South Bank University, is working on a different approach altogether. He’s developing a technique called Stylometrics, which can be used as a complement to Turnitin by detecting if a student’s writing style changes drastically, suggesting plagiarism or contract cheating.

“If routinely, every single piece of output of every single student in an institution was retained and analysed, then you’d have the statistical basis to say that the stylometric differences between this piece of writing by this student compared with their previous bits of writing is so extreme that it starts to become evidential,” Dr Culwin claimed.

Stylometrics “has promise”, according to Dr Lancaster, but both he and Dr Culwin are quick to admit it’s early days. It’s hard to analyse data when a student has only previously handed in one or two essays, for example. Even with a larger body of work to compare, Dr Culwin points out that a change of writing style would need to be dramatic in order to be reliable evidence.

“You’d hope that a student’s writing style would change as they were educated,” he said. “That means the most likely conclusion you’re ever going to get is going to be on the balance of probability,” as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt, he added.

But Dr Culwin swiftly dismisses the doomsayers who say such technology will never work. “If an elderly and distinguished professor says that a technology isn’t possible, they’re almost certainly wrong.”

The war against plagiarism has, clearly, only just begun.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm


Something to Think About as Our State Universities Expand Their Online Programs

"New data: 40 percent in US lack home broadband," MIT's Technology Review, February 16, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/24553/?nlid=2751&a=f

Roughly 40 percent of Americans do not have high-speed Internet access at home, according to new Commerce Department figures that underscore the challenges facing policymakers who are trying to bring affordable broadband connections to everyone.

The Obama administration and Congress have identified universal broadband as a key to driving economic development, producing jobs and bringing educational opportunities and cutting-edge medicine to all corners of the country.

"We're at a point where high-speed access to the Internet is critical to the ability of people to be successful in today's economy and society at large," said Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an arm of the Commerce Department that released the data Tuesday.

The NTIA and the Rural Utilities Service, part of the Agriculture Department, are in the middle of handing out $7.2 billion in stimulus funding for broadband. Most of that money will be used to build networks in parts of the country that lack high-speed Internet access.

And next month, the Federal Communications Commission will deliver policy recommendations to Congress on how to make universal broadband a reality. Among other things, the FCC is expected to propose expanding the fund that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural communities, finding more airwaves for wireless broadband services and modernizing the FCC's rural telemedicine program to bring thousands of health clinics online.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Tuesday he wants 100 million U.S. households to have access to ultra high-speed Internet connections, with speeds of 100 megabits per second, by 2020. That would be several times faster than the download speeds many U.S. homes with broadband get now -- 3 megabits to 20 megabits per second.

Genachowski also wants the U.S. to test even higher broadband speeds. One such testbed network could come from Google Inc., which said last week it plans to build a few experimental fiber-optic networks that would deliver 1 gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 Americans. That would be 10 times faster than a 100 megabit-per-second connection.

The NTIA report released Tuesday offers a snapshot of the current broadband landscape. It stems from a Census Bureau survey of about 54,000 households conducted in October of last year.

The statistics show that U.S. broadband usage continues to grow, with 64 percent of U.S. households subscribing to high-speed Internet as of October, up from 51 percent two years earlier.

But the results also highlight remaining hurdles, particularly in rural America. While 66 percent of urban households subscribed to broadband in October, that was true for only 54 percent of rural households, the survey found.

That is partly because broadband is not as widely available in rural areas. The phone and cable companies that provide the bulk of broadband connections in the U.S. have been slower to build high-speed systems in places that are too sparsely populated to justify the costly network investments.

Lack of broadband availability is only part of the challenge for Washington, however -- because even in places where broadband is available, not everyone subscribes. Among households that do not have broadband, the survey found, 38 percent said they don't need it or are not interested. Twenty-six percent said it is too expensive. Only 3.6 percent said they do not subscribe because it is not available where they live.

For policymakers, Strickling said, this means that helping people see "what they are missing" is another important piece of the puzzle. Last year's stimulus bill set aside at least $250 million for broadband adoption programs to teach people computer and Internet skills and ensure they have the equipment to get online.

Other key survey findings include:

-- 89 percent of Americans with an annual household income greater than $150,000 used a broadband connection at home in October, compared with 29 percent of Americans with a household income less than $15,000.

-- 67 percent of Asian Americans and 66 percent of Caucasians used broadband at home in October, compared with 46 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics.

-- Home broadband usage was highest among people aged 18 to 24, at 81 percent, and lowest among people 55 and older, at 46 percent.

Jensen Comment
There are different levels of problems up here in the mountains.


"Modern Science and Ancient Wisdom," Simoleon Sense,  February 15, 2010 --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/modern-science-and-ancient-wisdom/

Pure Munger……must read!!!!!!
This is by Mortimier Adler the author of How to read abook, which as profiled in Robert Hagstrom’s Investing The Last Liberal Art and Latticework of Mental Models.

Full Excerpt (Via Mortimier Adler)

The outstanding achievement and intellectual glory of modern times has been empirical science and the mathematics that it has put to such good use. The progress is has made in the last three centuries, together with the technological advances that have resulted therefrom, are breathtaking.

The equally great achievement and intellectual glory of Greek antiquity and of the Middle Ages was philosophy. We have inherited from those epochs a fund of accumulated wisdom. That, too, is breathtaking, especially when one considers how little philosophical progress has been made in modern times.

This is not say that no advances in philosophical thought have occurred in the last three hundred years. They are mainly in logic, in the philosophy of science, and in political theory, not in metaphysics, in the philosophy of nature, or in the philosophy of mind, and least of all in moral philosophy. Nor is it true to say that, in Greek antiquity and in the later Middle Ages, from the fourteenth century on, science did not prosper at all. On the contrary, the foundations were laid in mathematics, in mathematical physics, in biology, and in medicine.

It is in metaphysics, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy that the ancients and their mediaeval successors did more than lay the foundations for the sound understanding and the modicum of wisdom we possess. They did not make the philosophical mistakes that have been the ruination of modern thought. On the contrary, they had the insights and made the indispensable distinctions that provide us with the means for correcting these mistakes.

At its best, investigative science gives us knowledge of reality. As I have argued elsewhere, philosophy is, at the very least, also knowledge of reality, not mere opinion. Much better than that, it is knowledge illuminated by understanding. At its best, it approaches wisdom, both speculative and practical.

Precisely because science is investigative and philosophy is not, one should not be surprised by the remarkable progress in science and by the equally remarkable lack of it in philosophy. Precisely because philosophy is based upon the common experience of mankind and is a refinement and elaboration of the common-sense knowledge and understanding that derives from reflection on that common experience, philosophy came to maturity early and developed beyond that point only slightly and slowly.

Science knowledge changes, grows, improves, expands, as a result of refinements in and accretions to the special experience — the observational data — on which science as an investigative mode of inquiry must rely. Philosophical knowledge is not subject to the same conditions of change or growth. Common experience, or more precisely, the general lineaments or common core of that experience, which suffices for the philosopher, remains relatively constant over the ages.

Descartes and Hobbes in the seventeenth century, Locke, Hume, and Kant in the eighteenth century, and Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth century enjoy no greater advantages in this respect than Plato and Aristotle in antiquity or than Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Roger Bacon in the Middle Ages.

How might modern thinkers have avoided the philosophical mistakes that have been so disastrous in their consequences? In earlier works I have suggested the answer. Finding a prior philosopher’s conclusions untenable, the thing to do is to go back to his starting point and see if he has made a little error in the beginning.

A striking example of the failure to follow this rule is to be found in Kant’s response to Hume. Hume’s skeptical conclusions and his phenomenalism were unacceptable to Kant, even though they awoke him from his own dogmatic slumbers. But instead of looking for little errors in the beginning that were made by Hume and then dismissing them as the cause of Humean conclusions that he found unacceptable, Kant thought it necessary to construct a vast piece of philosophical machinery designed to produce conclusions of an opposite tenor.

The intricacy of the apparatus and the ingenuity of the design cannot help but evoke admiration, even from those who are suspicious of the sanity of the whole enterprise and who find it necessary to reject Kant’s conclusions as well as Hume’s. Though they are opposite in tenor, they do not help us to get at the truth, which can only be found by correcting Hume’s little errors in the beginning, and the little errors made by Locke and Descartes before that. To do that one must be in the possession of insights and distinctions with which these modern thinkers were unacquainted. Why they were, I will try to explain presently.

What I have just said about Kant in relation to Hume applies also to the whole tradition of British empirical philosophy from Hobbes, Locke, and Hume on. All of the philosophical puzzlements, paradoxes, and pseudo-problems that linguistic and analytical philosophy and therapeutic positivism in our own century have tried to eliminate would never have arisen in the first place if the little errors in the beginning made by Locke and Hume had been explicitly rejected instead of going unnoticed.

How did those little errors in the beginning arise in the first place? One answer is that something which needed to be known or understood had not yet been discovered or learned. Such mistakes are excusable, however regrettable they may be.

The second answer is that the errors are made as a result of culpable ignorance — ignorance of an essential point, an indispensable insight or distinction, that has already been discovered and expounded.

It is mainly in the second way that modern philosophers have made their little errors in the beginning. They are ugly monuments to the failures of education — failures due, on the one hand, to corruptions in the tradition of learning and, on the other hand, to an antagonistic attitude toward or even contempt for the past, for the achievements of those who have come before.

Ten years ago, in 1974-1975, I wrote my autobiography, and intellectual biography entitled Philosopher at Large. As I now reread its concluding chapter, I can see the substance of this work emerging from what I wrote there.

I frankly confessed my commitment to Aristotle’s philosophical wisdom, both speculative and practical, and to that of his great disciple Thomas Aquinas. The essential insights and the indispensable distinctions needed to correct the philosophical mistakes made in modern times are to be found in their thought.

Some things said in the concluding chapter of that book bear repetition here in this work. Since I cannot improve upon what I wrote ten years ago, I shall excerpt and paraphrase what I said then.

In the eyes of my contemporaries the label “Aristotelian” has dyslogistic connotations. It has had such connotations since the beginning of modern times. To call a man an Aristotelian carries with it highly derogatory implications. It suggests that his is a closed mind, in such slavish subjection to the thought of one philosopher as to be impervious to the insights or arguments of others.

However, it is certainly possible to be an Aristotelian — or the devoted disciple of some other philosopher — without also being a blind and slavish adherent of his views, declaring with misplaced piety that he is right in everything he says, never in error, or that he has cornered the market on truth and is in no respect deficient or defective. Such a declaration would be so preposterous that only a fool would affirm it. Foolish Aristotelians there must have been among the decadent scholastics who taught philosophy in the universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They probably account for the vehemence of the reaction against Aristotle, as well as the flagrant misapprehension or ignorance of his thought, that is to be found in Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon, in Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.

The folly is not the peculiar affliction of Aristotelians. Cases of it can certainly be found, in the last century, among those who gladly called themselves Kantians or Hegelians; and in our own day, among those who take pride in being disciples of John Dewey or Ludwig Wittgenstein. But if it is possible to be a follower of one of the modern thinkers without going to an extreme that is foolish, it is no less possible to be an Aristotelian who rejects Aristotle’s error and deficiencies while embracing the truths he is able to teach.

Even granting that it is possible to be an Aristotelian without being doctrinaire about it, it remains the case that being an Aristotelian is somehow less respectable in recent centuries and in our time than being a Kantian or a Hegelian, an existentialist, a utilitarian, a pragmatist, or some other “ist” or “ian.” I know, for example, that many of my contemporaries were outraged by my statement that Aristotle’s Ethics is a unique book in the Western tradition of moral philosophy, the only ethics that is sound, practical, and undogmatic.

If a similar statement were made by a disciple of Kant or John Stuart Mill in a book that expounded and defended the Kantian or utilitarian position in moral philosophy, it would be received without raised eyebrows or shaking heads. For example, in this century it has been said again and again, and gone unchallenged, that Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions has been crucially pivotal in the philosophy of language; but it simply will not do for me to make exactly the same statement about the Aristotelian and Thomistic theory of signs (adding that it puts Russell’s theory of descriptions into better perspective than the current view of it does).

Why is this so? My only answer is that it must be believed that, because Aristotle and Aquinas did their thinking so long ago, they cannot reasonable be supposed to have been right in matters about which those who came later were wrong. Much must have happened in the realm of philosophical thought during the last three or four hundred years that requires an open-minded person to abandon their teachings for something more recent and, therefore, supposedly better.

My response to that view is negative. I have found faults in the writings of Aristotle and Aquinas, but it has not been my reading of modern philosophical works that has called my attention to these faults, nor helped me to correct them. On the contrary, it has been my understanding of the underlying principles and the formative insights that govern the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas that has provided the basis for amending or amplifying their views where they are fallacious or defective.

I must say one more that in philosophy, both speculative and practical, few if any advances have been made in modern times. On the contrary, must has been lost as the result of errors that might have been avoided if ancient truths had been preserved in the modern period instead of being ignored.

Modern philosophy, as I see it, got off to a very bad start — with Hobbes and Locke in England, and with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz on the Continent. Each of these thinkers acted as if he had no predecessors worth consulting, as if he were starting with a clean slate to construct for the first time the whole of philosophical knowledge.

We cannot find in their writings the slightest evidence of their sharing Aristotle’s insight that no man by himself is able to attain the truth adequately, although collectively men do not fail to amass a considerable amount; nor do they ever manifest the slightest trace of a willingness to call into council the views of their predecessors in order to profit from whatever is sound in their thought and to avoid their errors. On the contrary, without anything like a careful, critical examination of the views of their predecessors, these modern thinkers issue blanket repudiations of the past as a repository of errors. The discovery of philosophical truth begins with themselves.

Proceeding, therefore, in ignorance or misunderstanding of truths that could have been found in the funded tradition of almost two thousand years of Western though, these modern philosophers made crucial mistakes in their points of departure and in their initial postulates. The commission of these errors can be explained in part by antagonism toward the past, and even contempt for it.

The explanation of the antagonism lies in the character of the teachers under whom these modern philosophers studied in their youth. These teachers did not pass on the philosophical tradition as a living thing by recourse to the writings of the great philosophers of the past. They did not read and comment on the works of Aristotle, for example, as the great teachers of the thirteenth century did.

Instead, the decadent scholastics who occupied teaching posts in the universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fossilized the tradition by presenting it in a deadly, dogmatic fashion, using a jargon that concealed, rather than conveyed, the insights it contained. Their lectures must have been as wooden and uninspiring as most textbooks or manuals are; their examinations must have called for a verbal parroting of the letter of ancient doctrines rather than for an understanding of their spirit.

It is no wonder that early modern thinkers, thus mistaught, recoiled. Their repugnance, though certainly explicable, may not be wholly pardonable, for they could have repaired the damage by turning to the texts or Aristotle or Aquinas in their mature years and by reading them perceptively and critically.

That they did not do this can be ascertained from an examination of their major works and from their intellectual biographies. When they reject certain points of doctrine inherited from the past, it is perfectly clear that they do not properly understand them; in addition, they make mistakes that arise from ignorance of distinctions and insights highly relevant to problems they attempt to solve.

With very few exceptions, such misunderstanding and ignorance of philosophical achievements made prior to the sixteenth century have been the besetting sin of modern thought. Its effects are not confined to philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are evident in the work of nineteenth-century philosophers and in the writings of our day. We can find them, for example, in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, for all his native brilliance and philosophical fervor, stumbles in the dark in dealing with problems on which premodern predecessors, unknown to him, have thrown great light.

Modern philosophy has never recovered from its false starts. Like men floundering in quicksand who compound their difficulties by struggling to extricate themselves, Kant and his successors have multiplied the difficulties and perplexities of modern philosophy by the very strenuousness — and even ingenuity — of their efforts to extricate themselves from the muddle left in their path by Descartes, Locke, and Hume.

To make a fresh start, it is only necessary to open the great philosophical books of the past (especially those written by Aristotle and in his tradition) and to read them with the effort of understanding that they deserve. The recovery of basic truths, long hidden from view, would eradicate errors that have had such disastrous consequences in modern times.

"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

Bob Jensen's threads on theory and research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm


Creative Destruction:  When are you being helped and when are you being screwed?

Do you wonder if retail store managers grumble about having to take up multiple shelves just to display the many versions of blades for older versions of Gillette razors?

Do you grumble these days if your "old" camera (like mine) stores pictures on miniature CDs that increasingly are not carried by retail stores because the newer technology calls for miniature DVD disks?

I can sympathize with the DVD replacements since DVD disks really do have value added in terms of storage space. But is the latest and greatest Gillette razor blade really noticeably better than the last three generations of Gillette blades?

And is Gillette simply "creatively destroying" your old and perfectly good razor by creatively destroying it by making it harder and harder to find blades to fit it?

And is Gillette creatively making new-style blades force you to buy replacement blades more often?

So what does Gillette have in store for us? Since 1971 it has been blades, blades, and more blades. They started with two and now have five. P&G was wise enough to realize that a razor that needs to be held with two hands was not functional so they've stopped at five blades (at least for now). Instead, Gillette has created a new grip, along with five highly lubricated, laser-thin blades. Is this innovation? And was the race to increase the number of blades — which borders on a level of comedy typically reserved for The Onion — innovative? The answer to both questions is yes. Innovation is a forward-moving process, creating slow and steady progress. But innovation is different than creative destruction, which is evolutionary and often revolutionary. If P&G really wants to propel Gillette, they need creative destruction. So what should Gillette do (or better yet, what should one of their more nimble competitors do)? Go back to a single blade.
Jeff Stibel, "Gillette, Razor Blades, and Creative Destruction," Harvard Business Review Blog, February 18, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/02/gillette_razor_blades_and_crea.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Gillette is perhaps one of the most innovative companies in the world, constantly reinventing its own model, often upending past products in favor of the new in a fit of what most people call creative destruction. And no surprise, Gillette is at it again, with the first new shaver developed since Procter & Gamble bought them in 2005.

A lot has been written about creative destruction (including by yours truly) but very few people actually understand it. Most people think that it is a process where innovative new products cripple lumbering dinosaurs. But the irony of creative destruction is that it is often the less innovative, more mundane changes that are the most disruptive. Clayton Christensen wrote about this in The Innovator's Dilemma where he says, "occasionally disruptive technologies emerge — innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near term.....generally disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features....they are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently, more convenient to use."

This is equally, if not more true in nature: Evolution is a process of creative destruction, wherein things evolve over time; not for better or worse in the long run, but for short term survival. Sometimes this leads to long term survival (cockroaches); sometimes it leads to demise (dinosaurs). Any study of evolution will show how nature can overshoot itself — witness the lumbering dinosaurs, so heavily plated with armor, versus the weaker but soon dominant mammals. What better metaphor for a big company than a beast that can't see around its own girth to the upstarts, nibbling away at the grass below. This is the big idea behind creative destruction — that the march of "progress" is not a smooth upward curve.

So what does Gillette have in store for us? Since 1971 it has been blades, blades, and more blades. They started with two and now have five. P&G was wise enough to realize that a razor that needs to be held with two hands was not functional so they've stopped at five blades (at least for now). Instead, Gillette has created a new grip, along with five highly lubricated, laser-thin blades.

Is this innovation? And was the race to increase the number of blades — which borders on a level of comedy typically reserved for The Onioninnovative? The answer to both questions is yes. Innovation is a forward-moving process, creating slow and steady progress.

But innovation is different than creative destruction, which is evolutionary and often revolutionary. If P&G really wants to propel Gillette, they need creative destruction. So what should Gillette do (or better yet, what should one of their more nimble competitors do)? Go back to a single blade.

A single blade product is at the essence of creative destruction: In Christensen's words, it is: "cheaper, simpler, smaller, and...more convenient to use." Dress it up anyway you please; call it a revolutionary, hand-forged, titanium alloy precision blade. The point is that a single-blade product is now incredibly disruptive.

Unfortunately, history has shown that lumbering dinosaurs such as Gillette rarely pursue this strategy because they aim to innovate instead of creatively destruct — because they think linearly. Stew Taub, of Gillette's parent company P&G, said, "Shaving is a very complicated and precise operation." (No wonder the cavemen were so hairy!) It is only natural to complicate the product with that line of thinking. But someone will evolve the razor back to a single blade, and I suspect that the savvy marketers at P&G just might have it in them to break the mold.


Jeffrey M. Stibel is an entrepreneur, a brain scientist, and the author of Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet.

 

Jensen Comment
“Creative destruction” creates interesting financial and managerial accounting problems?

To what extent does Gillette have a “liability” to keep providing replacements for those “obsolete” razors that may be last year’s models and ten other older models that customers are still happily using in their bathrooms? What is Gillette’s strategy for making it increasingly frustrating for customers to find replacement blades for older models?


February 17, 2010 message from Glen Gray

Robots will replace all workers in 25 years

Cisco Systems futurist Dave Evans says the future of computing includes robots replacing all workers in 25 years. Evans also predicts that in five years people will create the equivalent of 92 million Libraries of Congress worth of data per year and that artificial brain implants will be available in 20 years. His predictions are based on several assumptions, including the pace of change seen over the last 30 years. "Because of the law of large numbers, things are accelerating at an exponential rate," Evans says. He expects the world's data will increase six times in each of the next two years, and that by 2029 it will cost $100 for 11 petabytes of storage. By 2013, wireless network traffic will reach 400 petabytes per month, compared to 9 petabytes per month today. Around 2021, says Evans, a breakthrough in quantum computing will making "mind-blowingly fast" computers that can perform instantaneous language translation, more accurate face recognition, and networks that can transmit unlimited amounts of data.

More at
http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/robots-will-replace-all-workers-in-25-years-futurist/139969 

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 18, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

 Don’t fret! The M6 generation will find other things to do --- like increasing the social and entertainment part of their days to 18 hours and 38 minutes. And they will pack in a whopping 42 hours and 48 minutes into every 24-hour day. How is this possible? Read below. 

Evolution will eventually wither our appendages, and we will indeed be eggs packed in cartons. Each egg will be wirelessly fed by virtual travel, virtual knowledge, virtual sex, and real electronic triggers that flood our brains with all that delightful serotonin. There will be no more politics, no more wars., no more disease, and no more crime. The machines will give us delightful lives ad infinitum. This isn’t my glimpse of heaven, but heaven may well be nothing more than the state of an egg-shaped, serotonin brain. All the eggs will be the same color and cultural differences will be nonexistent.

Steve Hornik’s great grandchildren will usher in the delightful version of 20th Life in 10-D ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife

Bob Jensen

"Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds," Kaiser Family Foundation, January 2010 ---
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf

A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation about young people's media use. It includes data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009), and is among the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information about media use among American youth.

The men at Cisco have already designed the mother robots:

And these mothers have solutions for eggs trying to squawk.


"Book Examines How Organizations and Communities Can Create Change," Stanford Graduate School of Business, Spring 2010 ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm1002/feature-heathbook.html?cmpid=knowledgebase&edition=10-february

Humans possess two minds — an “analytical brain” that plans for the future and an “emotional brain” that falls in love with routines and familiarity. The dichotomy helps explain why change is so hard, says a Stanford professor in a new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

“We’re all schizophrenic about change. Part of us wants to lose a few more pounds, part of us wants an Oreo,” said Chip Heath, the Thrive Foundation for Youth Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One side … may want a change to happen intellectually. But another part of us may be comfortable with the status quo and worried about whether we have what it takes to change.”

Heath wrote Switch with his brother, Dan Heath, a senior fellow at the Social Enterprise Center at Duke University. In Switch, they examine how organizations and communities can create change. Chip Heath recently previewed the book at a Stanford conference on nonprofit management, where he gave nonprofit leaders suggestions for creating change in their organizations during tough economic times.

He frequently invoked the image of an elephant and a rider to illustrate why change is so challenging. The human rider, representing the rational side of our brains, appears to be in charge of the elephant, representing the emotional side of our brains. “But, note, if there’s ever a disagreement about direction, the rider won’t win the battle. The elephant has a six-ton advantage,” said Heath.

Jensen Comment
Perhaps when all is said and done with IFRS in the U.S., there will be books examining how accountants and financial reporting stakeholders can create change in standards and auditing and education.
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#MethodsForSetting


"How to Teach with Tech Tools," by Tanya Roscoria, Converge Magazine, February 9, 2010 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/edtech/82633067.html

In Western Civilization class at The John Carroll School, freshmen grab plastic chairs from a stack against the wall, gather around the room in different areas and jump online with their tablet PCs.

Using a class hashtag, they respond to questions that teacher Shelly Blake-Plock posts on Twitter. He projects their discussions on the classroom wall so that everyone can easily track what's going on.

Then, instead of pulling out textbooks to study ancient Rome, the students check out primary sources online such as BBC's interactive history section or the Metropolitan Museum of Art timelines that integrate text and artwork. As jazz music plays in the background, they pull up a document and use Diigo to annotate the text as well as share annotations.

They'll keep scouring the web for sites on ancient Rome and share the links they find on Twitter, then pick the best ones to post on their class wiki. Afterward, students look for correlations between the history they're studying and current events that media sources post on Twitter.

At the end of the 45-minute class, Blake-Plock throws out another question on Twitter that the students use as a guide to write a post on their personal blogs that night. The next day, they read and comment on their classmates' blogs and start the process all over again.

These students are learning through technology and directing their own learning in the process. Here's how educators around the country are empowering their students to do the same.

Focus on education At Charlotte Country Day School in North Carolina, Technology Integration Specialist Tim Moxley works with teachers to incorporate smartboards, document cameras and netbook computers into their lessons. To successfully blend tech tools into their instruction, teachers need to have a combination of technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK), which is a model that Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler of Michigan State University researched.

Educators took on the job of providing a quality education, and a piece of that quality education is teaching kids how to use and become comfortable with tech tools.

"When you work in education, the end goal is what’s best for the student," Moxley said. "If using a piece of technology is gonna improve the student outcome in some way, then it’s worth it.”

Students are turned on 24 hours a day, whether they're surfing the web, watching TV or playing the Nintendo Wii, said Technology Integration Specialist Susan Jenkins, and they need to be engaged in order to learn. Engaging students often means using technology to teach, if it can help meet a learning goal.

“We don’t want to put it out there just because it’s a cool thing to have," said Jenkins, who works in Bullitt County Public Schools in Shepherdsville, Ky. " We want a purpose for it.”

Learn about the tools Jenkins helps teachers find that purpose by providing in-service training once a month as well as meeting with them on an appointment basis. While she does show them how new tools work, she also gives them ideas about how they can use them to help students learn.

“As we’re training them to use the tool, we try to train them with the integration side mixed in," Jenkins said.

In addition to learning from other people in their school district, teachers can learn from people they're connected to on Twitter, said Kyle Pace, an instructional/consumer technology specialist with Lee's Summit School District in Missouri. He finds plenty of resources from educators, particularly those who use the hashtag edchat, and shares them with co-workers and teachers in his area.

“If you start to think, ‘Well, I’ve seen all there is to see with this kind of tool,’ something new comes out or the next day you learn about something new,” Pace said. “We’re fortunate in our district that instructional technology is a huge focus, and I think it just has to remain a huge professional development focus at the district and at the building level.”

Back in North Carolina, some teachers tell Moxley that they are computer-illiterate and are horrible with technology. He reminds them that they wouldn't accept that response from a child who tells them he isn't good at math, so he won't accept that as a response for them. When he puts it in those terms, they are more receptive to learning about new tools.

He sits in on grade-level planning meetings, and based on what he hears, he looks for resources that might work with the lessons that teachers have coming up.

“I try to deemphasize the technology itself and just try to get them to see it as a tool that hopefully will enhance the lesson in some way,” Moxley said.

Mix tech into lessons When language arts teacher Heather Mason plans a lesson, she starts by figuring out what she wants her students to learn in her class at Jefferson Middle School in Merritt Island, Fla. Then she thinks about what tools could help accomplish her goal.

And as she wrote on her blog, the technology doesn't have to be new to work. She uses tools such as Post-it notes, highlighters and personal whiteboards to engage her students.

Pencils are also effective tools, and they're the focus of John Spencer's blog Adventures in Pencil Integration. Set in 1897, the blog posts tell the story of a fictional character named Tom Johnson, whose small school district starts paper and pencil integration initiatives to prepare students for the 20th century.

Through satire, he paints a picture of the hype and the paranoia that comes with new technology. Back in his classroom at Raúl Castro Middle School in Phoenix, he teaches his students to identify with both extremes.

“I want them to be both absolute critics of technology and also people who absolutely embrace it," Spencer said. "And I know that’s a really idealistic kind of view to have, but I want them to be both.”

He helps them become both by starting conversations in his multimedia authoring/publishing class that force students to think critically about what they're doing and why they're doing it.

Continued in article

"Teaching Toolbox: 57 Ways to Upgrade Education," by Tanya Roscorla, Converge Magazine, January 4, 2010 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/edtech/The-2009-Edublog-Awards.html?elq=4768d02be55741bb9e3e0bc860e41996

Bob Jensen's threads on tools and tricks of the trade are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


"Youth Teach Financial Literacy at Microsoft in NYC," by Octaviar Latty, The Huffington Post, February 12, 2010 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-mack/youth-teach-financial-lit_b_462265.html

On February 12, high school students in the tri-state area were afforded an opportunity to experience an enriching workshop at Microsoft in New York City. Aside from learning their usual curriculum, students as young as eleven years of age, attended a series of seminars focusing on personal growth and career development.

This event was designed to help students formulate and perfect a 3-minute presentation commonly known as an "elevated pitch." Throughout the morning, towards the mid-afternoon, the students would have acquired the basic skill set necessary to compact a brief and marketable speech to any audience. With an incentive of two X Box game systems, students took out their pens and notepads and tediously focused on the speakers' words and advice.

At the start of the event, CNN Commentator and Community Activist, Ryan Mack, introduced the young crowd to several financial empowerment principles as well as functional information about maintaining credits scores and budgeting. All About Business, a versatile group of college students, founded by Mack, also accompanied him in speaking to the students.

Later on in the workshop, the association covered another segment that introduced the seven steps to financial freedom. All About Business Community Service Director, Kareem Hertzog said, "This was another great opportunity for us to spread financial literacy to the youth and as we continue to expand, we hope to captivate a global presence and really have an impact on people's lives."

Microsoft program coordinator, Gina Davis, mainly directed attention to the advantages of internet usage. Davis explained how the internet can be used as a marketing platform and urged the students to market themselves in positive ways. In an effort to teach youth how to stay mindful on social networking sites, Davis also highlighted cases that dealt with child pornography and child abduction.

Davis said, "I am very excited and encouraged by all the participation of the high schools that came out today and I hope they take something from this experience."

Author, scholar, and entrepreneur, Randall Pinkett illustrated the vital role and value of education by sharing his success story. His goal was to motivate the audience to be producers of technology opposed to consumers of technology.

"Necessity is the mother of invention," said Pinkett as he enlightened the students about their innate ability to see opportunities other people don't see.

After the speakers left words of encouragement among the students, they had a chance to work on their individual pitches within smaller groups to efficiently incorporate what they learned. As the students stood lined in the front of the convention room, their presentations where consecutively heard by Microsoft personnel and other guests of the event. Everyone had an opportunity to participate and share their accomplishments and goals for the future.

Student, Gabrielle Louis, asserts, "I never realized how useful technology was until today. Even if I don't go home with the X Box, I will still leave knowing how important I am to society and the potential I have to change the world."

Written By Octaviar Latty, Freshman at York College and Reporter for Ryan Mack's Youth Financial Literacy Group All About Business

 

Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers


"Microsoft to pull FaceBook, MySpace into Outlook," by Jessica Mintz, The Washington Post, February 17, 2010 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/17/AR2010021700016.html?wpisrc=nl_tech

Microsoft Corp. is taking another step toward turning Outlook, its desktop e-mail program, into a hub for information from popular social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace.

On Wednesday, Microsoft is releasing a "beta" test version of the Outlook Social Connector. The add-on software, which was first discussed last November, adds a new pane to the main e-mail reading screen on Outlook. When a user clicks to read an e-mail message, the new pane fills up with the sender's most recent social-networking activities. Those could include the addition of a professional contact on LinkedIn or a "what I'm doing now" status update from FaceBook.

Microsoft has a mixed record when it comes to Web trends. The company's free Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger programs are widely used, but its Windows Live blog/social network didn't pick up much steam in the face of competition from FaceBook. In this case, a small startup called Xobni has already built an Outlook add-on that combines inbox search with content from FaceBook, LinkedIn and others.

Microsoft's new software also treats Outlook itself as a social network. If the e-mail sender and recipient are jointly working on a document stored on a company's Sharepoint server, both will see updates if one logs on to make edits.

For now, the new software doesn't let people use Outlook to push information back up to LinkedIn, FaceBook or other sites.

People using Office 2003, 2007 and beta versions of Office 2010 can download the updated Outlook Social Connector beta Wednesday. LinkedIn, which is primarily used for business networking online, is the first company to make its add-in software available. It can be downloaded from LinkedIn.com.

Microsoft said the FaceBook and MySpace plug-ins will be ready for download by the time Office 2010 goes on sale in June.

Will Kennedy, a corporate vice president for the Office group, said some of Microsoft's business customers have expressed concern that employees will become less productive if they have all this extra information at their fingertips.

But Kennedy sees business-friendly uses for the Social Connector. He thinks it could speed up processes that require a string of people to sign off, because each person in that chain could see when it's time for him or her to weigh in.

"We don't want this to sort of be the next great time waster in the workplace," he said.

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


"Experts Say Schools Need to Screen for Cheating," by Shalia Dewan, The New York Times, February 12, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/education/13erase.html?hpw

This week, Georgia officials said they had found evidence that cheating might have occurred on standardized tests at one in five public elementary and middle schools around the state. What was extraordinary, however, was not so much the extent of the problem, but the decision of the state to screen for cheating at all.

Using a computer scanner, the state used a simple, quick analysis to flag classes where an unusually high number of wrong answers were erased and corrected. The testing company generated the data at no charge.

Yet even as test scores carry greater stakes for students, schools and districts, testing experts say most states fail to use even this most elementary means to monitor for cheating.

“No one is doing it, and when you ask people why they’re not doing it, they shrug their shoulders,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at New York University who studies school accountability.

Ms. Jennings suggested that the federal government should require states to check their test results. “It’s absolutely scandalous that we have no audit system in place to address any of this,” she said.

Cheating on tests used to be thought of as primarily the domain of students, but as standardized test results have taken on an increasing importance as a way to measure schools, the culprits have increasingly turned out to be educators, experts said.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are required to meet improvement goals or face penalties including, in the worst cases, the loss of jobs. Cities like New York and Houston have recently threatened the tenure of teachers whose students do not meet goals.

As the consequences have grown more serious, reports of cheating have exploded, said Robert Schaeffer, the president of FairTest, an organization that opposes the emphasis on standardized testing. “They’ve gone from a handful a year to a handful a month,” he said.

Because parents, students and administrators all like to see higher scores, said Gregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the University of North Carolina, “There’s really no incentive to vigorously pursue cheaters.”

He said some states did not ask their testing contractors to generate an erasure analysis, while others did receive them but did not use them.

One problem, experts said, was asking school systems to police themselves, which often requires the kind of independent oversight set up in Georgia. The state Department of Education is led by an elected superintendent, Kathy Cox, but the governor, Sonny Perdue, controls a separate Office of Student Achievement, which has auditing powers.

It was the Office of Student Achievement that conducted the erasure study, not the Education Department.

Even states that have weathered widespread cheating scandals do not necessarily follow up with regular statistical monitoring. In 2005, after an investigation by The Dallas Morning News pointed to extensive cheating in Texas, the state hired Caveon Test Security, a Utah company that improves testing procedures, to conduct what the company callsforensics analyses” of answer forms. But the company was not retained to do yearly monitoring, said John Fremer, Caveon’s president.

Caveon’s forensics analyses use several methods of detecting cheating, screening not only for erasures but improbable increases or decreases in scores, individual students whose performance swings widely from year to year, patterns where multiple students share the same wrong answers and other anomalies.

Erasures alone only indicate certain types of misconduct, as when answers are changed after a test. Other methods, Mr. Fremer said, flag other types of cheating, like filling in the remaining answers on an incomplete form.

States that are not checking answers with such forensic measures cannot use the excuse that they are new, said Walt Haney, a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy at Boston College. Using statistics to detect cheating on standardized tests dates back to the 1920s, and erasure analyses are practically as old as filling in bubbles on answer forms with a No. 2 pencil.

Of about 16 state public education clients of his company, Mr. Fremer said, fewer than 10 conduct such analysis regularly. A few other states use their own testing vendors, as Georgia did, to provide similar data. Mr. Fremer said he thought more states would move toward statistical analysis in order to maintain public confidence in test scores and school ratings.

“I don’t think they can avoid doing it,” he said. “There’s too much riding on the test results.”

Southern states, which have embraced the accountability movement in education, have also been quicker to adopt statistical methods to combat cheating.

South Carolina has been quietly using an erasure analysis since the 1980s, said Elizabeth Jones, the director of the state Education Department’s Office of Assessment. If a class is flagged for suspicious activity, the state sends testing monitors the following year, and sometimes educators are criminally prosecuted or lose their teaching certificates.

Principals and teachers are well aware that the state can detect erasures, and only a handful of classes are flagged each year, Ms. Jones said.

In Washington, the superintendent of education has recently conducted the first of what is to be an annual statistical analysis of test results. Twelve of about 230 schools were flagged and asked to conduct investigations, said Chad Colby, a spokesman for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. (The state superintendent oversees the District of Columbia Public Schools and the city’s charter schools.)

In Mississippi, Caveon does forensics analyses each time a test is administered, and the state withholds questionable scores until an investigation is completed.

“Initially, it was a new thing and folks were a little skeptical — could we really reach these kind of conclusions just by looking at the data?” said Kristopher Kaase, Mississippi’s deputy superintendent for instructional programs. But investigations bore out the statistical findings. “That’s made believers out of the school districts,” he said.

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm


From the Scout Report on February 12, 2010

Switch Off 3.2.0.450 --- http://www.airytec.com/ 

This helpful program lets users create a timer that will shut down, log off, or force their computer to hibernate at any given moment. The program can be operated in either the "countdown" mode, or just set up as an alarm clock of sorts. Also, users can set the program to operate daily, or just once. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer.


Evernote 3.5.1.1410 --- http://www.evernote.com/ 

Looking to remember an image you found? Or perhaps a helpful email link? Evernote makes this all possible, and it can be used with a range of mobile devices as well. The program works as a note-taking application as well, and everything a user does with the program is automatically synchronized to their Evernote account. Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images. This version of Evernote is compatible with computers running Windows XP and Vista or Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6.

 

 

 


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

Textbooks: Purchased Hardcopy vs. Downloadable eBook Purchases vs. Non-downloadable eBook Leases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooksDeal.htm

What's lacking in downloaded Kindle eBooks?
Would you believe the chapter exhibits?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooksDeal.htm


Education Tutorials

Carnegie Connections [what's happening in higher education] http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/carnegie-connections

FRONTLINE: Digital Nation --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

PBS creates a library of digital resources for free use in schools ---
http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/07/08/pbs-creates-library-of-digital-resources-targeted-to-classroom-use.aspx

The History Education Network [Canada] http://www.thenhier.ca/

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

How would you like to buy gasoline made from $30 domestic coal versus $75 imported oil?
Arlington scientists find way to make cheap gas from coal ---
http://www.wfaa.com/news/gasoline-84801677.html

AMSER Science Reader Monthly --- http://www.amser.org/srm

EPA: Science NoteBook [iTunes, pdf] --- http://www.epa.gov/epahome/sciencenb/action_teams/index.html

Environmental Protection Agency: Wetlands --- http://www.epa.gov/wetlands/

1000 Cities, 1000 Lives [health] --- http://1000cities.who.int/

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


Social Science and Economics Tutorials

The Census is Getting Personal ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsDhkPym01k

"Hugh Hendry' 'Nassim Taleb' Hendry Taleb inflation deflation hyperinflation euro USD dollar forex economy bubble" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ2otZqmNKE&feature=email

Entrepreneurship Corner [Stanford University audio] --- http://ecorner.stanford.edu/ 

The Secrets of Tomb10A: Egypt 2000 BC [Flash Player] --- http://www.mfa.org/tomb/

1000 Cities, 1000 Lives [health] --- http://1000cities.who.int/

Columbia Historical Corporate Reports Online Collection --- http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/business/CorpReports.html 

The Business and Economics Library at Columbia University has digitized 770 historic corporate annual reports from their very extensive print collection. The reports are from 36 companies, and they range in dates from the 1850s to the 1960s, and are mainly from "corporations that operated in and around New York City." Visitors can search for the reports through an "Alphabetical List" or "Subject List", or browse by clicking on "View the Full List (XLS)". The "Sample Images" that are featured in the lower right hand corner of the homepage are from "Edison Electric Illuminating" and "Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Company". Once visitors choose an image to view, they will be able to view all of the years' digitized reports for that corporation, by clicking on the "Table of Contents" dropdown box. Visitors shouldn't miss the greatly detailed illustration from 1911 of the "Hudson Terminal Buildings", which is one of the chosen "Sample Images".

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory

 

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

February 16, 2010 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@BONACKERS.COM]

Caveat Emptor, Law Students Seeking Outlines 

The title of this post isn’t designed to demonstrate any sort of proficiency in Latin but to alert law students to the dangers of relying on outlines received from other students. The risks posed by using passed-down outlines have been threatening law students for almost as long as there have been law schools, but digital technology coupled with the internet has multiplied the risk by orders of magnitude. Ten or fifteen years ago, students could get their hands on outlines for courses taught in the law school they were attending. In almost every instance the outline was from a previous semester offering of the course, taught by the same professor presently teaching the course.

Now, students at any law school can obtain outlines for just about any course taught at any law school. Recently, my attention was drawn to
Outline Depot, which claims to be “the most comprehensive source of law school outlines anywhere.” (emphasis in the original). Perhaps it is, and I’ve not researched that point. Students earn the right to download outlines by accumulating credits, which can be obtained by uploading outlines or by purchasing the credits.

The point to which students are desperate to get their hands on outlines is apparent from what one finds on the site. There are all sorts of red flags and warning bells.

http://mauledagain.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html#2661520804417965026

This is primarily about law schools, and is a blog by a tax law professor no less, but if there is one there surely is another. Outlines are useful, but in my case mainly when I make one from material I am reading.

Scott Bonacker CPA
Springfield, MO

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

 

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


Math Tutorials

AMSER Science Reader Monthly --- http://www.amser.org/srm

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


History Tutorials

Edward Weston Photographs (photography history) --- http://www.ir.uair.arizona.edu/ccp/item/234 

Reservation Life: Helga Teiwes Photography, Arizona State Museum --- 
http://www.statemuseum.arizona.edu/exhibits/helga/reservation_life.asp?ver= 

The History Education Network [Canada] http://www.thenhier.ca/

The Secrets of Tomb10A: Egypt 2000 BC [Flash Player] --- http://www.mfa.org/tomb/

Minnesota's Greatest Generation [Flash Player] -- http://www.mnhs.org/people/mngg/index.htm

National Naval Aviation Museum [Flash Player] --- http://www.navalaviationmuseum.org/

America by Air [multimedia airplane history] http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal102/americabyair/

IUPUI Image Collection of Indiana University --- http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/special/collections/uarchives/ua024

The Frick Collection: Multimedia [art history] --- http://www.frick.org/multimedia/

Maryland Map Collection ---  http://www.lib.umd.edu/sapps/mdmap/?pid=umd:57340

Columbia Historical Corporate Reports Online Collection --- http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/business/CorpReports.html 

The Business and Economics Library at Columbia University has digitized 770 historic corporate annual reports from their very extensive print collection. The reports are from 36 companies, and they range in dates from the 1850s to the 1960s, and are mainly from "corporations that operated in and around New York City." Visitors can search for the reports through an "Alphabetical List" or "Subject List", or browse by clicking on "View the Full List (XLS)". The "Sample Images" that are featured in the lower right hand corner of the homepage are from "Edison Electric Illuminating" and "Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Company". Once visitors choose an image to view, they will be able to view all of the years' digitized reports for that corporation, by clicking on the "Table of Contents" dropdown box. Visitors shouldn't miss the greatly detailed illustration from 1911 of the "Hudson Terminal Buildings", which is one of the chosen "Sample Images".

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  


Language Tutorials

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages


Music Tutorials

 

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


Writing Tutorials

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries


Updates from WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/

February 15, 2010

February 16, 2010

February 18, 2010

February 20, 2010

February 22, 2010


Question
Are cell phones a health risk?

"Not exactly a ringing endorsement," by John Donelly, MIT's Technology Review, February 16, 2010 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/12/AR2010021204438.html?wpisrc=nl_tech

Lisa Oakley knows that some studies on long-term use of cellphones suggest an increased correlation with cancerous tumors. And she knows of a couple of people who have had brain tumors, and wonders whether their cellphones had anything to do with it.

Still, the Chevy Chase, D.C., mother, didn't think long about health hazards when she bought a phone last year for her 12-year-old son, Will. For one thing, several other studies have shown no health risks at all. And for another, Will rarely holds the phone to his head. He holds it in his hands, sending text messages to friends.

"He never talks on it, and I think this is true with a lot of kids, they seem to just text," Oakley said. "It would be different if I did see my son talk on the phone all the time. But there are a lot of questions. Are some cellphones worse than others? . . . What about living near a cellphone tower? I would love it if there were definitive data out there."

A long-awaited study by the International Agency for Cancer Research -- an arm of the World Health Organization -- will attempt to give the world's billions of cellphone users a better informed perspective; the findings are now in the midst of peer review for publication. The so-called Interphone study looks at the results of published national studies in 13 countries (the list includes Canada, eight European nations, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Israel, but not the United States) to assess whether radio-frequency radiation exposure from cellphones is associated with cancer risk.

The international study, though, will hardly be the last word. Now in motion is a 10-year, $25 million research project by the U.S. government. It will soon beam 10 hours' worth of cellphone radio waves daily into specially designed stainless-steel containers housing rats and mice to test whether cellphones pose any health risk. Preliminary results are expected in two to three years.

The truth is that after nearly two decades of widespread cellphone use, "we don't know if cellphones pose a health risk," said Michael Wyde, a toxicologist at the National Toxicity Program in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and the project leader on the ongoing U.S. study. "Everyone has to make their own decision on whether to limit exposures or not."

But some things can be explained. One of them is how cellphones work.

When you turn on your phone, it searches for a signal from a base station. When you place a call, the phone converts voice into a digital signal -- an electronic code -- that is packaged and sent via base stations such as towers to another cellphone, where it is converted back to voice. This electronic transfer uses radio-frequency, which is a form of electromagnetic radiation.

Continued in article

Also see http://tinyurl.com/yzfmruk 
Thanks Neal





Forwarded by Auntie Bev

THE PERFECT SOLUTION...

Here's the perfect solution to all the controversy over full-body scanners in airports.

Have a booth that you will step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have ON you.

It would be a win-win for everyone, and there would be none of this left-wing, liberal bullcrap about racial profiling!!!


Forwarded by Auntie Bev

The Philosophy of Ambiguity

FOR THOSE WHO LOVE THE PHILOSOPHY OF AMBIGUITY, AS WELL AS THE  IDIOSYNCRASIES OF ENGLISH:

Please enjoy and understand the following

1.  DON'T SWEAT THE PETTY THINGS AND DON'T PET THE SWEATY THINGS.

2.  ONE TEQUILA, TWO TEQUILA, THREE TEQUILA, FLOOR.

3.  ATHEISM IS A NON-PROPHET ORGANIZATION.

4.  IF MAN EVOLVED FROM MONKEYS AND APES, WHY DO WE STILL HAVE MONKEYS AND APES?

5.  THE MAIN REASON THAT SANTA IS SO JOLLY IS BECAUSE HE KNOWS WHERE ALL THE BAD GIRLS LIVE.

6.  I WENT TO A BOOKSTORE AND ASKED THE SALESWOMAN, "WHERE'S THE SELF- HELP SECTION?" SHE SAID IF SHE TOLD ME, IT WOULD DEFEAT THE PURPOSE.

7.  WHAT IF THERE WERE NO HYPOTHETICAL QUESTIONS?

8.  IF A DEAF CHILD SIGNS SWEAR WORDS, DOES HIS MOTHER WASH HIS HANDS WITH SOAP?

9. IF SOMEONE WITH MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES THREATENS TO KILL HIMSELF, IS IT CONSIDERED A HOSTAGE SITUATION?

10.  IS THERE ANOTHER WORD FOR SYNONYM?

11.  WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU SEE AN ENDANGERED ANIMAL EATING AN ENDANGERED PLANT?

12.  IF A PARSLEY FARMER IS SUED, CAN THEY GARNISH HIS WAGES?

13.  WOULD A FLY WITHOUT WINGS BE CALLED A WALK?

14.  WHY DO THEY LOCK PETROL STATION BATHROOMS? ARE THEY AFRAID SOMEONE WILL CLEAN THEM?

15.  IF A TURTLE DOESN'T HAVE A SHELL, IS HE HOMELESS OR NAKED?

16.  CAN VEGETARIANS EAT ANIMAL CRACKERS?

17.  IF THE POLICE ARREST A MIME, DO THEY TELL HIM HE HAS THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT?

18.  WHY DO THEY PUT BRAILLE ON THE DRIVE-THROUGH BANK MACHINES?

19.  HOW DO THEY GET DEER TO CROSS THE ROAD ONLY AT THOSE  YELLOW ROAD   SIGNS?

20.  WHAT WAS THE BEST THING BEFORE SLICED BREAD?

21. ONE NICE THING ABOUT EGOTISTS: THEY DON'T TALK ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE.

22.  DOES THE LITTLE MERMAID WEAR AN ALGEBRA?

23.  DO INFANTS ENJOY INFANCY AS MUCH AS ADULTS ENJOY ADULTERY?

24.  HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE A CIVIL WAR?

25.  IF ONE SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMER DROWNS, DO THE REST DROWN TOO?

26.  IF YOU ATE BOTH PASTA AND ANTIPASTO, WOULD YOU STILL BE HUNGRY?

27.  IF YOU TRY TO FAIL, AND SUCCEED, WHICH HAVE YOU DONE?

28.  WHOSE CRUEL IDEA WAS IT FOR THE WORD 'LISP' TO HAVE 'S' IN IT?

29.  WHY ARE HEMORRHOIDS CALLED "HEMORRHOIDS" INSTEAD OF "ASSTEROIDS"?

30.  WHY IS IT CALLED TOURIST SEASON IF WE CAN'T SHOOT AT THEM?

31.  WHY IS THERE AN EXPIRATION DATE ON SOUR CREAM? 

32.  IF YOU SPIN AN  ORIENTAL PERSON IN A CIRCLE   THREE TIMES, DO THEY BECOME DISORIENTED?

33.  CAN AN ATHEIST GET INSURANCE AGAINST ACTS OF GOD?

 


Forwarded by Auntie Bev

STORY OF A CHALLENGED SENIOR -  


  The last paragraph is priceless!

  At a certain age, everyone will understand this poor guy...

  I thought about the 30 year business I ran with 1800 employees, all without a Blackberry that played music, took videos, pictures and communicated with FaceBook and Twitter.

  I signed up under duress for Twitter and FaceBook, so my seven kids, their spouses, 13 grandkids and 2 great grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.

  That was before one of my grandkids hooked me up for Tweeter, Tweetree, Twhirl, Twitterfon, Tweetie and Twittererific Tweetdeck, Twitpix and something that sends every message to my cell phone and every other program within the texting world.

  My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation. I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag..

  The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue tooth [it's red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife as everyone in the nearest 50 yards  was glaring at me. Seems I have to take my hearing aid out to use it and I got a little loud.

  I mean the GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, "Re-calc-ul-ating" You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then when I would make a right turn instead, it was not good.

  When I get really lost now, I call my wife and tell her the name of the cross streets and while she is starting to develop the same tone as Gypsy, the GSP lady, at least she loves me.

  To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house. We have had them for 4 years, but I still haven't figured out how I can lose three phones all at once and have run around digging under chair cushions and checking bathrooms and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.  (sounds familiar, please let it keep ringing until I find it. . . don't laugh, I am serious)

  The world is just getting too complex for me. They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store. You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden "Paper or Plastic?" every time I check out just knocks me for a loop.

  I bought some of those cloth reusable bags to avoid looking confused but I never remember to take them in with me.

  Now I toss it back to them. When they ask me, "Paper or Plastic?" I just say, "Doesn't matter to me. I am bi-sacksual.." Then it's their turn to stare at me with a blank look.


 

 




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

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