Tidbits on May 10, 2010
Bob Jensen

We were invited to the Town and Country for dinner on May 8
Fearing moose on the road at night, we spent the night as well
One of the T&C buildings (two floors) is longer than a football field
Town & Country Motor Inn, Shellbourne NH 03581
Because of the lousy weather I did not get pictures this time of the famous Shellbourne Birches
Next time we pass through on our way to Bangor we will stop for pictures of these wonderful birch trees

It's been snowing on and off again (but only flurries as of yet)
Sadly (for flowers) we've had frigid gale force winds with the temperature below freezing.
Sunrise over the Twin Mountains (photograph taken from my desk at home)

The circle near Franconia Notch below was somehow caused by my camera

The tiny red dots are reflectors on the side of my driveway

Sunrise in our living room

A Fuzzy Picture of Erika's Dining Table

 

Meanwhile, Paula sent pictures of the 2010 springtime in Texas


You can see Paula and more of her wildflower pictures at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/tidbits042910.htm

Paul, Auntie Bev, and others sent the pictures below

Yosemite Dining Table

This is a submitted slogan 65 years ago
That Carnation could not print in more modest times

 

Blind and Crippled at Birth (what determination can do for winners) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=9xwCG0Ey2Mg
This is a must see!

Slide Show to Make You Smile --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/PhotosToMakeYouSmile.pps 

Slide Show from the 1950s and 1960 --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Photos1950-1960.pps

Slide Show of Historic Photographs --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/HistoricPhotographis.pps

Stamps for Shelter Animals --- http://www.stampstotherescue.com/

 

Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on May 10, 2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations051010.htm         

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

 

 

Tidbits on May 10, 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/.


Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   


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

Bob Jensen's Home Page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines

World Clock and World Facts --- http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

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

Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to an opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
 Free Online Telephone Directory --- http://snipurl.com/411directory       [www_public-records-now_com] 
 Free online 800 telephone numbers --- http://www.tollfree.att.net/tf.html
 Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or parens

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

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
Bob Jensen's search helpers --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Education Technology Search --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Distance Education Search --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Search for Listservs, Blogs, and Social Networks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

Bob Jensen's essay on the financial crisis bailout's aftermath and an alphabet soup of appendices can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

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

149 Interesting People to Follow on Twitter (but I don't have time to follow them) ---
http://ow.ly/1sj5q
 
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

 




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

Ted Video Humor:  Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TEDTalks), by Sebastian Wernicke. TED, April 2010 ---
http://www.ted.com/talks/lies_damned_lies_and_statistics_about_tedtalks.html

Cognitive Bias Video Song --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RsbmjNLQkc&feature=player_embedded
Link forwarded from Simoleon Sense

Video:  Visualizing Desire (Brian Knutson, Stanford University) [implications for financial decisions] ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUK8D-kX0fE
Link forwarded from Simoleon Sense

Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library --- http://hidvl.nyu.edu/

Preventing Genocide [Flash Player] http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/

NOVA: scienceNOW [Flash Player] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/

Science Videos --- http://www.scivee.tv/

Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture [Flash Player] http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/leonardo/

Video:  Oil Absorbing Polymer --- Click Here
Thank you Richard Newmark for the heads up.


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

Bryn Terfel: The 'Bad Boy' Of Opera --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126245009

The 5 Browns: Blending Pop And Classical --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126193811

Ennio Marchetto is a world renowned comedian who has created his own theatrical language mixing mime, dance, music and quick change costumes made out of card-board and paper --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAFI1i5FIBc
Thanks to Gene and Joan for this link.

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

What happened to the naked and burned little girl in this famous Viet Nam War photograph? ---
http://ace.mu.nu/

"The Pageant of America" Photograph Archive (over 7,000 photographs) ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=culture&col_id=187

Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library --- http://hidvl.nyu.edu/

Sea & Ships: Explore online --- http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/sea-and-ships/

Hampton Roads Naval Museum --- http://www.hrnm.navy.mil/

Nashville Flood Pictures --- http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/A5RLfk/www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1987034,00.html/r:t

Sources on US Naval History http://www.history.navy.mil/sources/index.htm 

Naval History http://www.naval-history.net/

From Warrior to Saint: The Journey of David Pendleton Oakerhater (Cheyenne Warrior, Native American) ---
http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Oakerhater/

Tipatshimuna-Innu stories from the land (Canada, video) --- http://www.tipatshimuna.ca/ 

Edward J. McCauley Photographs (North Carolina) --- http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mccauley/ 

Eve Drewelowe Digital Collection (Iowa) --- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/drewelowe/

North Carolina Museum of Art: Far From Home --- http://ncartmuseum.org/exhibitions/farfromhome/main.shtml

Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design --- http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1384_leonardo/

Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture [Flash Player] http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/leonardo/

Leonardo da Vinci's Geometric Sketches http://mathdl.maa.org/convergence/1/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=1717 

Universal Leonardo --- http://www.universalleonardo.org/

Preservation Directory --- http://www.preservationdirectory.com/HistoricalPreservation/Home.aspx

Suspect Found Neck-Deep In Port-A-Potty (with a photo) --- http://www.komonews.com/news/92553919.html

Empire State Building Photo Set 1 --- http://www.freefoto.com/browse/1210-07-0?ffid=1210-07-0
Empire State Building Photo Set 2 --- http://www.fotosearch.com/photos-images/empire-state-building.html
Empire State Building Photo Set 3 --- http://andrewprokos.com/photos/new-york/landmarks/empire-state-building/

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

Find Book --- http://www.ufindbook.com/tags/Electronic Literature-1.html

The eBook Directory --- http://www.ebookdirectory.com/search/Literature/

Spark  Notes Study Guides --- http://www.sparknotes.com/

Free Literature About Islam --- http://islam.about.com/od/basicbeliefs/a/freelit.htm

Free English Literature on the Internet --- http://www.anglik.net/literatureonline.htm

Self Made Scholar --- http://selfmadescholar.com/b/2009/04/14/where-to-find-free-literature-and-literature-summaries/

Literature Quizzes --- http://www.actionquiz.com/quiz.php?trivia=literature

"Master of Revels Neil Simon’s comic empire," by John Lahr, The New Yorker, May 3, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/03/100503crat_atlarge_lahr

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 May 10, 2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations051010.htm         

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




"Female Students in Maine Rally for Topless Rights," Inside Higher Ed, May 3, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/03/qt#226440

Female students at the University of Maine at Farmington marched topless Friday to draw attention to their legal right in the state to appear that way and to try to adjust public attitudes so that doing so would not offend people, The Bangor Daily News reported. Judging from the reaction, they have a ways to go. Some critics are calling on university officials to better educate students about why women shouldn't appear topless. One local critic carried a blanket along the march route, trying to block views of the female students' breasts.

Jensen Comment
If the female students win this fight, it raises the question about dress codes for online video conferencing and Webcams on campus. However, I can't see the women winning on this one, and with all the creeps with cameras running about these days there's a huge question about safety. It also raises questions about debit and credit crib notes in examinations.


Humor about understanding research literature --- http://maaw.info/ArticleSummaries/ArtSumIngram87.htm
Thank you Rob Ingram and James Martin


"The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education," by Seth Godin, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 3, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Coming-Meltdown-in-Higher/65398/

For 400 years, higher education in the United States has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amounts of time and money and prestige in the college world have been climbing.

I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it.

Most undergraduate college and university programs are organized to give an average education to average students.

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which college it is? While there are outliers (like St. John's College, in Maryland, Deep Springs College, and Full Sail University), most colleges aren't really outliers. They are mass marketers.

Stop for a second and consider the impact of that choice. By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their missions.

This works great in an industrial economy where we can't churn out standardized students fast enough, and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college graduate dwarfs the cost. But ...

College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, millions of people are in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won't get fooled again.

This leads to a crop of potential college students who can (and will) no longer just blindly go to the "best" school they get into.

The definition of "best" is under siege.

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high-school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one-page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I've ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: So colleges can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in U.S. News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?

The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

College wasn't originally designed to be merely a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that's what it has become. The data I'm seeing show that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn't translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job, or more happiness than does a degree from a cheaper institution.

Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-return policies on institutions and rewarded colleges that churn out young wannabe professors instead of creating experiences that turn out leaders and problem solvers.

Just as we're watching the disintegration of old-school marketers with mass-market products, I think we're about to see significant cracks in old-school colleges with mass-market degrees.

Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things that students take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people. The question I'd ask: Is the money that mass-marketing colleges spend on marketing themselves and making themselves bigger well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high? Does NYU have to get so much bigger? Why?

The solutions are obvious. There are tons of ways to get a cheap liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter, and teaches you to make a difference (see DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, by Anya Kamenetz). Most of these ways, though, aren't heavily marketed, nor do they involve going to a tradition-steeped 200-year-old institution with a wrestling team. Things like gap years, research internships, and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new.

The only people who haven't gotten the memo are anxious helicopter parents, mass-marketing colleges, and traditional employers. And all three are waking up and facing new circumstances.

Seth Godin is the author of 12 books, including Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, published this year by Portfolio. He is founder and CEO of Squidoo.com, a publishing platform that allows users to generate Web pages on any subject of their choosing. This article is reprinted from his blog.

Bob Jensen's threads on our compassless colleges ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz

Bob Jensen's threads on the universal disgrace of grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation


Adobe's Creative Suite 5 Ships (with educational discounts) --- http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/04/30/creative-suite-5-ships.aspx


Innovation in Website Design
"Bucknell U. Wins Webby Award for Virtual Tour," by Andrea Fuller, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Bucknell-U-Wins-Webby-Award/23740/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

What do Roger Ebert and Jim Carrey have in common with Bucknell University? They all just won Webby Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, picked from over 10,000 entries.

Bucknell won in the category of best school or university Web site. The academy specifically praised Bucknell's virtual tour. Visitors to the site can click buttons to complete sentences that describe their interests and characteristics. The site then shows visitors a campus map, with arrows pointing to programs and areas at the university in which those interests might be developed. Visitors can then read related blurbs about Bucknell and click on mutimedia describing the Bucknell experience.

Bob Jensen's updates on education technology --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


Questions
Has the art and science of reading faces ever been part of an auditing curriculum?
Have there been any accountics studies of Ekman's theories as applied to auditing behavioral experiments?
(I can imagine that some accounting doctoral students have not experimented along these lines?)

Paul Ekman video on how to read faces and detect lying --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA8nYZg4VnI
This video runs for nearly one hour

Paul Ekman --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman

Ekman's work on facial expressions had its starting point in the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins.[Ekman showed that contrary to the belief of some anthropologists including Margaret Mead, facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but universal across human cultures and thus biological in origin. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Findings on contempt are less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.]

In a research project along with Dr. Maureen O'Sullivan, called the Wizards Project (previously named the Diogenes Project), Ekman reported on facial "microexpressions" which could be used to assist in lie detection. After testing a total of 15,000 [EDIT: This value conflicts with the 20,000 figure given in the article on Microexpressions] people from all walks of life, he found only 50 people that had the ability to spot deception without any formal training. These naturals are also known as "Truth Wizards", or wizards of deception detection from demeanor.

He developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to taxonomize every conceivable human facial expression. Ekman conducted and published research on a wide variety of topics in the general area of non-verbal behavior. His work on lying, for example, was not limited to the face, but also to observation of the rest of the body.

In his profession he also uses verbal signs of lying. When interviewed about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he mentioned that he could detect that former President Bill Clinton was lying because he used distancing language.

Ekman has contributed much to the study of social aspects of lying, why we lie, and why we are often unconcerned with detecting lies. He is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. His contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships. Ekman is also working with Computer Vision researcher Dimitris Metaxas on designing a visual lie-detector.

From Simoleon Sense on May 5, 2010 --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/

Research Papers Worth Reading On Deceit, Body Language, Influence etc.. (with links to pdfs)
 

Sixteen Enjoyable Emotions.(2003) Emotion Researcher, 18, 6-7. by Ekman, P

“Become Versed in Reading Faces”. Entrepreneur, 26 March 2009. Ekman, P. (2009)
Intoduction: Expression Of Emotion - In RJ Davidson, KR Scherer, & H.H. Goldsmith (Eds.) Handbook of Afective Sciences. Pp. 411-414.Keltner, D. & Ekman, P (2003)

Facial Expression Of Emotion. – In M.Lewis and J Haviland-Jones (eds) Handbook of emotions, 2nd edition. Pp. 236-249. New York: Guilford Publications, Inc. Keltner, D. & Ekman, P. (2000)

Emotional And Conversational Nonverbal Signals. – In L.Messing & R. Campbell (eds.) Gesture, Speech and Sign. Pp. 45-55. London: Oxford University Press.

A Few Can Catch A Liar. - Psychological Science, 10, 263-266. Ekman, P., O’Sullivan, M., Frank, M. (1999)
Deception, Lying And Demeanor.- In States of Mind: American and Post-Soviet Perspectives on Contemporary Issues in Psychology . D.F. Halpern and A.E.Voiskounsky (Eds.) Pp. 93-105. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lying And Deception. – In N.L. Stein, P.A. Ornstein, B. Tversky & C. Brainerd (Eds.) Memory for everyday and emotional events. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 333-347.

Lies That Fail.- In M. Lewis & C. Saarni (Eds.) Lying and deception in everyday life. Pp. 184-200. New York: Guilford Press.

Who Can Catch A Liar. -American Psychologist, 1991, 46, 913-120.
Hazards In Detecting Deceit. In D. Raskin, (Ed.) Psychological Methods for Investigation and Evidence. New York: Springer. 1989. (pp 297-332)

Self-Deception And Detection Of Misinformation. In J.S. Lockhard & D. L. Paulhus (Eds.) Self-Deception: An Adaptive Mechanism?. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988. Pp. 229- 257.

Smiles When Lying. – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1988, 54, 414-420.
Felt- False- And Miserable Smiles.Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V.

Mistakes When Deceiving. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1981, 364, 269-278.

Nonverbal Leakage And Clues To Deception Psychiatry, 1969, 32, 88-105.

"You Can't Hide Your Lying Brain (or Can You?), by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/You-Cant-Hide-Your-Lying/23780/

Earlier this week Wired reported that a Brooklyn lawyer wanted to use fMRI brain scans to prove that his client was telling the truth. The case itself is an average employer-employee dispute, but using brains scans to tell whether someone is lying—which a few, small studies have suggested might be useful—would set a precedent for neuroscience in the courtroom. Plus, I'm pretty sure they did something like this on Star Trek once.

But why go to all the trouble of scanning someone's brain when you can just count how many times the person blinks? A study published this month in Psychology, Crime & Law found that when people were lying they blinked significantly less than when they were telling the truth. The authors suggest that lying requires more thinking and that this increased cognitive load could account for the reduction in blinking.

For the study, 13 participants "stole" an exam paper while 13 others did not. All 26 were questioned and the ones who had committed the mock theft blinked less when questioned about it than when questioned about other, unrelated issues. The innocent 13 didn't blink any more or less. Incidentally, the blinking was measured by electrodes, not observation.

But the authors aren't arguing that the blink method should be used in the courtroom. In fact, they think it might not work. Because the stakes in the study were low--no one was going to get into any trouble--it's unclear whether the results would translate to, say, a murder investigation. Maybe you blink less when being questioned about a murder even if you're innocent, just because you would naturally be nervous. Or maybe you're guilty but your contacts are bothering you. Who knows?

By the way, the lawyer's request to introduce the brain scanning evidence in court was rejected, but lawyers in another case plan to give it a shot later this month.

(The abstract of the study, conducted by Sharon Leal and Aldert Vrij, can be found here. The company that administers the lie-detection brain scans is called Cephos and their confident slogan is "The Science Behind the Truth.")

"The New Face of Emoticons:  Warping photos could help text-based communications become more expressive," by Duncan Graham-Rowe,  MIT's Technology Review, March 27, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18438/

Computer scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a way to make e-mails, instant messaging, and texts just a bit more personalized. Their software will allow people to use images of their own faces instead of the more traditional emoticons to communicate their mood. By automatically warping their facial features, people can use a photo to depict any one of a range of different animated emotional expressions, such as happy, sad, angry, or surprised.

All that is needed is a single photo of the person, preferably with a neutral expression, says Xin Li, who developed the system, called Face Alive Icons. "The user can upload the image from their camera phone," he says. Then, by keying in familiar text symbols, such as ":)" for a smile, the user automatically contorts the face to reflect his or her desired expression.

"Already, people use avatars on message boards and in other settings," says Sheryl Brahnam, an assistant professor of computer information systems at MissouriStateUniversity, in Springfield. In many respects, she says, this system bridges the gap between emoticons and avatars.

This is not the first time that someone has tried to use photos in this way, says Li, who now works for Google in New York City. "But the traditional approach is to just send the image itself," he says. "The problem is, the size will be too big, particularly for low-bandwidth applications like PDAs and cell phones." Other approaches involve having to capture a different photo of the person for each unique emoticon, which only further increases the demand for bandwidth.

Li's solution is not to send the picture each time it is used, but to store a profile of the face on the recipient device. This profile consists of a decomposition of the original photo. Every time the user sends an emoticon, the face is reassembled on the recipient's device in such a way as to show the appropriate expression.

To make this possible, Li first created generic computational models for each type of expression. Working with Shi-Kuo Chang, a professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh, and Chieh-Chih Chang, at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, in Taiwan, Li created the models using a learning program to analyze the expressions in a database of facial expressions and extract features unique to each expression. Each of the resulting models acts like a set of instructions telling the program how to warp, or animate, a neutral face into each particular expression.

Once the photo has been captured, the user has to click on key areas to help the program identify key features of the face. The program can then decompose the image into sets of features that change and those that will remain unaffected by the warping process.

Finally, these "pieces" make up a profile that, although it has to be sent to each of a user's contacts, must only be sent once. This approach means that an unlimited number of expressions can be added to the system without increasing the file size or requiring any additional pictures to be taken.

Li says that preliminary evaluations carried out on eight subjects viewing hundreds of faces showed that the warped expressions are easily identifiable. The results of the evaluations are published in the current edition of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing.

Continued in article

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


US News Rankings of Universities and Colleges --- http://www.usnews.com/rankings

Best Business Schools According to Business Week Magazine ---http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/08_47/B4109best_business_schools.htm
This includes a history link on the rankings over the years.

Bob Jensen's threads on Ranking Controversies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings


From the CEO Who Wants to Be a Monopolist King of the World
"Steve Jobs Unleashes Harsh Criticism of Flash," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, April 29, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/25119/?nlid=2943&a=f

Apple CEO Steve Jobs lambasted Adobe's Flash platform today in a statement published on Apple's website. Flash is a near-ubiquitous desktop browser plug-in commonly used to power video, animation, and other interactive features on websites. Though Adobe wants to extend the Flash platform to mobile devices, it's hit a roadblock in Apple's refusal to support Flash on its popular iPhone and iPad. Adobe has also found itself in conflict with boosters of new Web standards, who believe Flash could be replaced by new specifications such as HTML 5.
 

Jobs outlined the reasons that Apple does not plan to support Flash on its devices, including concerns about its security and reliability and its effect on battery life. He also noted that current Flash sites aren't designed to be navigated by devices that use touch interfaces. Since they would need to be rewritten anyway, Jobs suggested, they could be rewritten so they don't use Flash.
 

Perhaps his strongest words are directed at Adobe's control over the Flash platform. "Apple has many proprietary products too," Jobs acknowledged, but followed up by stating in no uncertain terms that he wants a direct relationship with developers of applications for Apple's devices.
 

Jobs wrote:

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor's platforms.

Jobs denied that Apple's motivation to shut out Flash was a desire to protect its App store, but that's hard to buy when he attacks cross-platform development so harshly. I appreciate that Apple wants developers to build beautiful applications that are specifically molded to Apple's devices, but I'm also someone who uses multiple devices created by multiple manufacturers. I like applications that work on all of them, but I have a lot of sympathy for the time, money, and effort it takes developers to maintain support for the ever-increasing number of devices out there.
 

Cross-platform development has got to have a place, unless I'm expected to stick with devices created by one manufacturer. Ideally, the Web browser would be the ultimate cross-platform device, but so far, reality has been otherwise.
 

HTML 5 may be part of the answer, but I doubt it will be all of the answer. Developers want to take advantage of the special features that are being added to mobile devices, such as location services, and they want to do that on multiple devices. It's not clear to me that a standard can keep up with the pace of innovation on devices.
 

Whatever Flash's problems, I've respected Adobe for trying to manage the confusing changes taking place across the board--for example, by recently making it possible for its developers to manage multiple social network plug-ins through a single Flash interface.
 

Fragmentation just seems to be the rule--we're even seeing it these days in the variety of Android devices running different versions of that operating systems with different capabilities. I don't think the solution for it can be for every developer to handcraft every application for every device.

Jensen Comment
Steve Job's quest to be monopoly king got him into trouble before when Apple Corporation when the Mac operating system was hands down the best operating system in the world. His dysfunctional insistence that he alone control both Mac systems hardware manufacture and software applications enabled Microsoft's inferior Windows operating system to capture over 90% of the market share and very nearly drove Apple Corporation into the ground.

I guess that Steve Job's has not learned. The business world does not really like monopolists who are themselves creative but in reality want to stifle the creativity of millions of other developers in the world. It must've really irked Steve Jobs to finally have to open the door for Microsoft Office applications on a Mac. But if he had not done so, the Mac would've not regained any respectability in market share.

Someday he may have to also stop taking such monopolist control over applications development of his excellent and creative mobile devices. I predict that he will eventually surrender to Flash like he surrendered to Excel and some other Microsoft Office applications. Denying his faithful followers access to Flash is denying them a huge part of the archived multimedia world.

At the present Steve Jobs is yelling and screaming his protest against Adobe to the same level as he mistakenly took his protest against Microsoft into open media warfare. In reality he's not just taking on just Adobe nor did he just take on Microsoft. He keeps trying to stifle the creativity of the world by controlling the applications development of virtually all computers and networking. And now compare the enormous number of great computing and networking Windows and Linux applications of the world that will not run on any Apple product.

Jobs likes to brag that Mac products are more secure than Apple products. I think they're more secure mostly because their slim market share just does not attract the bad guys nearly like the Windows honey pot attracts hackers from all over the world. And when the hackers do bust into the Mac system, Apple Corporation developed a reputation of being slow to fix the problem. That's probably because the hackers are not paying Jobs 30%.


Letter From Frustrated Authors, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=60573.0
This heads up was sent to me by Ed Scribner at New Mexico State

Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:

Enclosed is our latest version of Ms. #1996-02-22-RRRRR, that is the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the g-d-running head! Hopefully, we have suffered enough now to satisfy even you and the bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your anonymous reviewers are less interested in the details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they were not reviewing manuscripts they would probably be out mugging little old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them, the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers’ comments we could not do anything about. For example, if (as C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has been improved and benefited. Plus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by five pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions 13–28 by reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before sending your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish–American war from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of the relevant literature, a subsection entitled “Review of Irrelevant Literature” that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions from other reviewers.

We hope you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process, and to express our appreciation for your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to this journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally submitted it, but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We could not – or would not – have done it without your input.

-- R.L. Glass
Computing Trends,
1416 Sare Road Bloomington, IN 47401 USA

E-mail address: rglass@acm.org

 

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm


On May 4, 2010, PBS Frontline broadcast an hour-long video called College Inc. --- a sobering analysis of for-profit onsite and online colleges and universities.
For a time you can watch the video free online --- Click Here
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

Even in lean times, the $400 billion business of higher education is booming. Nowhere is this more true than in one of the fastest-growing -- and most controversial -- sectors of the industry: for-profit colleges and universities that cater to non-traditional students, often confer degrees over the Internet, and, along the way, successfully capture billions of federal financial aid dollars.

In College, Inc., correspondent Martin Smith investigates the promise and explosive growth of the for-profit higher education industry. Through interviews with school executives, government officials, admissions counselors, former students and industry observers, this film explores the tension between the industry --which says it's helping an underserved student population obtain a quality education and marketable job skills -- and critics who charge the for-profits with churning out worthless degrees that leave students with a mountain of debt.

At the center of it all stands a vulnerable population of potential students, often working adults eager for a university degree to move up the career ladder. FRONTLINE talks to a former staffer at a California-based for-profit university who says she was under pressure to sign up growing numbers of new students. "I didn't realize just how many students we were expected to recruit," says the former enrollment counselor. "They used to tell us, you know, 'Dig deep. Get to their pain. Get to what's bothering them. So, that way, you can convince them that a college degree is going to solve all their problems.'"

Graduates of another for-profit school -- a college nursing program in California -- tell FRONTLINE that they received their diplomas without ever setting foot in a hospital. Graduates at other for-profit schools report being unable to find a job, or make their student loan payments, because their degree was perceived to be of little worth by prospective employers. One woman who enrolled in a for-profit doctorate program in Dallas later learned that the school never acquired the proper accreditation she would need to get the job she trained for. She is now sinking in over $200,000 in student debt.

The biggest player in the for-profit sector is the University of Phoenix -- now the largest college in the US with total enrollment approaching half a million students. Its revenues of almost $4 billion last year, up 25 percent from 2008, have made it a darling of Wall Street. Former top executive of the University of Phoenix Mark DeFusco told FRONTLINE how the company's business-approach to higher education has paid off: "If you think about any business in America, what business would give up two months of business -- just essentially close down?" he asks. "[At the University of Phoenix], people go to school all year round. We start classes every five weeks. We built campuses by a freeway because we figured that's where the people were."

"The education system that was created hundreds of years ago needs to change," says Michael Clifford, a major education entrepreneur who speaks with FRONTLINE. Clifford, a former musician who never attended college, purchases struggling traditional colleges and turns them into for-profit companies. "The big opportunity," he says, "is the inefficiencies of some of the state systems, and the ability to transform schools and academic programs to better meet the needs of the people that need jobs."

"From a business perspective, it's a great story," says Jeffrey Silber, a senior analyst at BMO Capital Markets, the investment banking arm of the Bank of Montreal. "You're serving a market that's been traditionally underserved. ... And it's a very profitable business -- it generates a lot of free cash flow."

And the cash cow of the for-profit education industry is the federal government. Though they enroll 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit schools receive almost a quarter of federal financial aid. But Department of Education figures for 2009 show that 44 percent of the students who defaulted within three years of graduation were from for-profit schools, leading to serious questions about one of the key pillars of the profit degree college movement: that their degrees help students boost their earning power. This is a subject of increasing concern to the Obama administration, which, last month, remade the federal student loan program, and is now proposing changes that may make it harder for the for-profit colleges to qualify.

"One of the ideas the Department of Education has put out there is that in order for a college to be eligible to receive money from student loans, it actually has to show that the education it's providing has enough value in the job market so that students can pay their loans back," says Kevin Carey of the Washington think tank Education Sector. "Now, the for-profit colleges, I think this makes them very nervous," Carey says. "They're worried because they know that many of their members are charging a lot of money; that many of their members have students who are defaulting en masse after they graduate. They're afraid that this rule will cut them out of the program. But in many ways, that's the point."

FRONTLINE also finds that the regulators that oversee university accreditation are looking closer at the for-profits and, in some cases, threatening to withdraw the required accreditation that keeps them eligible for federal student loans. "We've elevated the scrutiny tremendously," says Dr. Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits many post-secondary institutions. "It is really inappropriate for accreditation to be purchased the way a taxi license can be purchased. ...When we see any problematic institution being acquired and being changed we put it on a short leash."

Also note the comments that follow the above text.

But first I highly recommend that you watch the video at --- Click Here
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=toparea&utm_source=toparea

May 5, 2010 reply from Paul Bjorklund [paulbjorklund@AOL.COM]

Interesting program. I saw the first half of it and was not surprised by anything, other than the volume of students. For example, enrollment at Univ of Phx is 500,000. Compare that to Arizona State's four campuses with maybe 60,000 to 70,000. The huge computer rooms dedicated to online learning were fascinating too. We've come a long way from the Oxford don sitting in his wood paneled office, quoting Aristotle, and dispensing wisdom to students one at a time. The evolution: From the pursuit of truth to technical training to cash on the barrelhead. One question about the traditional university though -- When they eliminate the cash flow from big time football, will they then be able to criticize the dash for cash by the educational entrepreneurs?

Paul Bjorklund, CPA
Bjorklund Consulting, Ltd.
Flagstaff, Arizona


Capella University is one of the better for-profit online universities in the world. ---
http://www.capella.edu/

A Bridge Too Far
I discovered that Capella University is now offering an online Accounting PhD Program
--- 
http://www.capella.edu/schools_programs/business_technology/phd/accounting.aspx

Although I have been recommending that accountancy doctoral programs break out of the accountics mold, I don't think that the Capella's curriculum meets my expectation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

I really worry that students who hear about the dire shortage of new PhD graduates needed for North American colleges and universities will spend a lot of money earning an accounting PhD from Capella and then belatedly discover that Capella's PhD is just not fully accepted in the academy's tenure-track job market. Unless a tenure track applicant has exceptional credentials other than Capella's accounting PhD degree, I don't think that applicant will even get a foot inside the academy's doors. I'm not being snobby here! I just think that that, on paper, the Capella Accounting PhD Program is comparable to other doctoral programs in accountancy in North America.

On paper the curriculum is quite different from virtually all other North American accountancy doctoral programs that typically require much heavier prerequisites in accounting and have much more research foundation building curricula. For example, compare the Capella curriculum with that of the Fisher School of Accountancy at the University of Florida ---
http://warrington.ufl.edu/fsoa/programs/phd/
Or pick any other doctoral program listed in by Jim Hasselback ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html
Jim does not yet list Capella University, and maybe that's a good thing!

One thing that is quite confusing to me are the required courses in Capella's Accounting PhD Program. It seems to me that most of Capella's required doctoral program courses are really equivalents of undergraduate business and MBA courses (other than the dissertation credit courses). Most accountancy doctoral programs have required seminars and other courses that are beyond Capella's doctoral courses. Most also have more prerequisite accounting courses that are outside the doctoral-level curricula.

Capella's Accounting PhD program just does not require enough accounting. Virtually all other accounting programs require more accounting that students must have before matriculating into the doctoral program or take in addition to the doctoral-level courses. Capella apparently will admit accounting doctoral program students having little or nothing beyond two principles of accounting courses (I assume students cannot take the intermediate accounting course without having had basic accounting). If these students only take the accounting courses listed for Capella's doctoral program, they fall way short of having enough accounting in my judgment.

I would also like to know more about the credentials of the faculty teaching the doctoral program courses and supervising the dissertation research. Are they themselves PhD accountants with respectable track records in accounting research and publication?

Although I respect Capella University a great deal as a leading distance education pioneer, it would seem to me that the Capella Accounting PhD Program is a bridge too far.

I would like to hear from insiders who know a great deal about this program.

Capella has some doctoral programs that purportedly are successful, particularly this in the School of Education. At this point, however, I think the Capella PhD Program in Accounting may give Cappella a bad name in the academy.

I'm all in favor of distance education if it is as rigorous or more rigorous than its onsite competition. I think Capella has some undergraduate, masters, and maybe a few doctoral programs meeting this standard. But I'm very dubious about the admission standards, curriculum, and faculty credentials of the Capella University Accounting PhD Program. I would certainly like to learn more about this program.

Other Capella University Doctoral Programs --- http://www.capella.edu/schools_programs/degrees/phd.aspx

I still stand by my long-standing claim that there are no respectable online doctoral programs in accountancy even though there are some highly respected masters of accounting and masters of taxation online programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Added Jensen Comment
Another questionable feature of the Capella Accounting PhD Program is that the program now charges $4,485 per quarter on a plan that involves taking 12 credits per quarter for 120 credits for students having no transfer credits. This means that the program is intended to be completed in 10 quarters of part-time study  --- http://www.capella.edu/schools_programs/business_technology/phd/accounting.aspx
It takes even less time for students transferring in up to 48 credits allowed.
It also takes even less time for students carrying a full-time load of 16 credits per quarter at Capella.

A student transferring in the maximum of 48 credits can complete the doctorate in 1.5 years in theory, although Capella might not allow the dissertation credits to be earned simultaneously with other courses.

Taking the recommended 48 quarter credits per year, Capella Accounting PhD Program students can expect to graduate in 2.5 years or less depending upon transfer credits.

Traditional onsite accounting doctoral programs now take four or five years of full time study on campus irrespective of transfer credits. Hasselback reports that in reality "it often takes five or six years" --- "
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/FAQs.pdf

It hardly seems comparable for a Capella doctoral graduate to complete the PhD in 2.5 years part-time compared with onsite full time accounting doctoral students needing 4-6 years on campus. Either all the other accounting doctoral programs take too much time or Capella is offering a cheap shot accounting doctorate. I think both claims are supportable. But the point is that Capella's accounting doctorate is in no way comparable with other accounting doctoral programs in terms of study time.

Added Jensen Comment
One of the most time consuming aspects of a traditional onsite accounting doctoral program in North America, apart from earning course credits, is the need to study for a sequence of comprehensive examinations plus, in most instances, an oral examination. Capella frees up all this time by not having any comprehensive examinations or oral examinations. Bummer!

May 3, 2010 reply from Kate Mooney  [kkmooney@STCLOUDSTATE.EDU]

My concern with part-time/online PhD programs is the lack of academic behavior modeling. Without actually observing academics at work, how does the prospect figure out what they do? Most universities don’t really spell out the details of success. Without at least some time spent in-in residence watching the faculty in action, it is difficult to imagine ALL the pieces required for tenure.

Kate Mooney, PhD, CPA
Chairperson and Professor, Department of Accounting G. R. Herberger College of Business 367A St. Cloud State University St. Cloud MN 56301 USA 320.308.4987

kkmooney@stcloudstate.edu 
http://web.stcloudstate.edu/kkmooney/ 

May 3, 2010 reply from Barbara Scofield [barbarawscofield@GMAIL.COM]

Nova Southeastern has long had a nontraditional PhD program in business, but it now has a 4-course "specialization" in accounting in that program. My university has had several applicants with doctoral degrees "in accounting" from Nova Southeastern. What is the general evaluation of these degrees? Students also seem to complete these degrees very rapidly.

Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA
Chair of Graduate Business Studies Professor of Accounting
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin 4901 E. University Dr. Odessa, TX 79762
432-552-2183 (Office) 817-988-5998 (Cell)

BarbaraWScofield@gmail.com

May 3, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

HI Barbara,

Reputable doctoral programs are all money losers, which it is what makes it almost impossible, in my judgment, to attain highly respectable doctoral program in for-profit universities. Are there any respected accountancy doctoral programs in North America that do not rely upon undergraduate and masters program cash cows? To attain respect, a doctoral program has to provide access to a really costly library, expensive electronic databases, research support, and the highest paid faculty in the discipline who refuse to supervise more than a small handful of doctoral students. There’s no “volume” efficiency in a quality-program PhD CPV model.

Why would for-profit universities try to build new and reputable doctoral programs that probably will always be cash flow disasters? The answer is that they probably won’t become reputable among the competing doctoral programs in the academy. Rather they are more apt to develop cheap-shot doctoral programs with lower admission standards, inadequate assistantships and fellowships, poor libraries and electronic databases, no really challenging comprehensive examinations that students sweat blood over trying to pass, and hire unknown research faculty in the program. There is a need for distance education doctoral programs, but these should be developed by highly reputable universities that have the cash cows to develop creative, albeit cash losing, programs.

What’s the incentive for Capella University to lose an enormous amount of cash on a quality accounting doctoral program that knocks the socks off those of us in the accounting academy? There would be an incentive if governments or customers would pick up the tab. For example, a startup masters CASB program for chartered accountants developed a high quality distance education model in Western Canada, but chartered accountancy firms themselves picked up much of the tab either directly or indirectly. If CASB also started up a doctoral program, who would pick up the tab?

In my original message about Capella I mentioned that the Education Doctoral Program at Capella might be an exception. One reason is that education doctoral programs in even our top universities do not have the same respect as other doctoral programs to a point that the Carnegie Foundation is heavily funding studies and experiments to change both the PhD and EED programs in colleges of education:

All is Not Well in Programs for Doctoral Students in Departments/Colleges of Education
The education doctorate, attempting to serve dual purposes—to prepare researchers and to prepare practitioners—is not serving either purpose well. To address what they have termed this "crippling" problem, Carnegie and the Council of Academic Deans in Research Education Institutions (CADREI) have launched the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), a three-year effort to reclaim the education doctorate and to transform it into the degree of choice for the next generation of school and college leaders. The project is coordinated by David Imig, professor of practice at the University of Maryland. "Today, the Ed.D. is perceived as 'Ph.D.-lite,'" said Carnegie President Lee S. Shulman. "More important than the public relations problem, however, is the real risk that schools of education are becoming impotent in carrying out their primary missions to prepare leading practitioners as well as leading scholars."
"Institutions Enlisted to Reclaim Education Doctorate," The Carnegie Foundation for Advancement in Teaching --- http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/news/sub.asp?key=51&subkey=2266

 Capella might do better focusing on doctoral programs for graduates headed into practice instead of the academy. I think this is why Capella’s doctoral program in education has a much better chance of success than in something like accounting or business in general where there is little incentive to get a doctorate outside of wanting a ticket to pass through the gates of our snooty academy.  The Capella Accounting PhD Program just is not going to cut it any better than Nova’s PhD program fails to provide keys to the kingdom.

I haven’t followed Nova recently Barbara, but Trinity University had a staff (not faculty) applicant who earned a Nova doctorate. This applicant was actually quite capable, but he was looked down upon by faculty and staff for putting a Nova PhD degree on his resume. That particular degree seems to have a negative stigma. The humor going around afterwards was that he might’ve been hired if he’d kept his PhD a secret. I think Nova makes a serious effort to have respected faculty teach classes and supervise dissertations. But it’s not really the same to rely on moonlighting faculty as opposed to resident faculty.

And there are so many factors going into educating a doctoral student and so many important learning interactions with other doctoral students and multiple faculty, such as those involved in creating and grading comprehensive examinations, that I really think that the researcher/teacher doctoral degree is a special kind of degree that benefits more from serendipity in residence than other types of degrees. Kate Mooney hinted at this in her reply. But I think it goes much further than that. Zane is correct about the importance of assisting other researchers face-to-face on campus. These researchers become mentors and role models --- usually positive but negative role models also serve a purpose.

How many of you benefitted from lifelong relationships and learning with your classmates onsite in a doctoral program? I would think virtually all of you had face-to-face experiences over several years of residency that are very hard to duplicate in distance education in spite of the intense communications that are now possible online. For example, one of the benefits of residency is to encounter bad role models whether or not you actually took classes from a bad teacher.

Another important factor in non-traditional programs is the quality of the applicants that are turned away. Perceptions of doctoral programs are often judged in the same manner as perceptions of research journals.

Capella would much more respected accounting doctoral program if it announced that applicants with less than 700 GMAT scores need not apply. But it must also be willing to lose a lot of money on the few that are admitted. Instead, Capella developed a cheap shot curriculum where applicants with no transfer credits can get a PhD in accounting in 2.5 years --- absurd by present standards of the accounting academy.

The worst thing that could happen for the accounting academy and Capella graduates would be for Capella to start cranking out more accounting graduates each year than any other accounting doctoral program in the Hasselback Directory --- http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html

This would give a black eye to virtually all of the other degree programs in Capella University. Capella will then look more like a sausage factory than a university.

To earn greater respect, non-traditional doctoral program should have really tough admission standards, a really tough curriculum, and take as long or longer to meet all academic standards for completing a degree. Most importantly the program should employ faculty known by their track records for tough standards. Better yet the doctoral faculty should be so widely respected that the faculty themselves attract high-quality applicants. The academy is a snobby place, and starting out with a new program it’s important to recognize this from the start.

Snobby faculty set the faculty hiring standards as well as the graduation standards. This is not as bad as it seems in this era of disgraceful grade inflation.

The most sought after accounting PhD graduates will graduate from doctoral programs losing the most money per graduate.

Bob Jensen

May 4, 2010 reply from J. S. Gangolly [gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]

Bob,

Back around 1978 when I was starting my accounting career at Kansas, there was this myth that doctoral programs, as they then existed, are  a resource drain. I was on the doctoral committee, and the chair of the committee (a well-known Management Science faculty member) asked me, as a freshly minted  accounting PhD, to get an accounting of the net costs of the doctoral program. After impting the costs, we were shocked to learn that the program was actually subsidising the rest of the school.  The army of doctoral students manned most first courses under the very able mentorship of very outstanding senior faculty, and the marginal costs of PhD courses was non-existent since most courses were shared with MS students.

Even considering the assistantships that paid the students barely subsistence wages, with even more meagre faculty salaries those days (assistant professors started at $19,500 those days), the subsidy was not trivial.

Imagine what the situation today would be, with the astronomical faculty salaries in accounting. And these astronomical salaries are not of AAU's making. They are our equivalent of "Mark to Market".

It is true that as an AAU school, KU had to support a large library, a large computing center, and so on, but those costs were a given, unless KU wanted to drop out of AAU. I am sure the administrators would have rather dropped dead than dropped out of AAU.

I think teaching by the doctoral students, especially under faculty tutelage, is a valuable apprenticeship experience that perhaps many schools with accountics lack.

The way most accounting courses are taught, as I have seen at many schools, I am not sure if it matters that the PhDs are from within or without accounticitis indoctrination. I would rather have a CPA with sound business knowledge teach my kids than a PhD in numerical regression who has never seen the real world books of accounts. It is time we stopped pretending that accounting is rocket science. That the academic accounting emperors wear no clothes is perhaps a surprise to only a very few who wear the crowns.

Jagdish S. Gangolly,
Associate Professor
(j.gangolly@albany.edu)
Director, PhD Program in Information Science, Department of Informatics,
College of Computing & Information 7A Harriman Campus Road, Suite 220
State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12206.
Phone: (518) 956-8251, Fax: (518) 956-8247

URL: http://www.albany.edu/acc/gangolly

 May 4, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

Amen to that Jagdish, especially the part about rather having experienced specialists teach courses than people who bought a fast-track, cheap-shot sausage link.

The really sad part about Capella’s Accounting PhD Program is that Capella just went a bridge too far when it created an accounting doctoral program that can be completed part-time in 2.5 years without much in the way of accounting courses and research skills courses. I also cannot respect a doctoral program that has no serious comprehensive examination hurdles even if the oral examination is waived.

By going this "bridge too far," Capella defeats the fine reputation that it established to date in most of its other online degree programs. Before it went a bridge too far, Capella was really one of my bright stars in the distance education galaxy --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

In 2008 the largest accountancy doctoral program in North America was the University of Texas at Austin. UT pours millions of dollars of resources into a doctoral program that raised its output of accounting graduates to seven in 2008 according to
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf

University of Texas
PhD Graduates in Accounting
2003 = 1
2004 = 4
2005 = 3
2006 = 2
2007 = 3
2008 = 7

Another large accounting doctoral program at the University of Washington graduated seven in 2007, but before and since it only graduated one or two year. Penn State similarly had an exceptional year in 2006 by graduating six, but the numbers are much smaller in other recent years. A historically large accounting doctoral program at Illinois is down to graduating one or two a year.

If Capella should try to make a profit on its new accounting doctoral program by cranking out more than one or two a year, it really will begin to look like a sausage factory.

The most an accounting PhD graduate will have invested in tuition at Capella over 120 required quarter credits is $44,850 = ($4,485)(10 part-time quarters). Without more data for a CPV analysis I can only guess that (even without an investment in an expensive research library, without investing in expensive electronic research databases, and without paying enormous fees to noted academic researchers in the accounting academy) Capella cannot possibly break even by graduating only one or two accounting doctoral students per year. The numbers of graduates will have to reach some sausage-cranking level of perhaps 20 or more a year.

Welcome to North America’s largest accounting doctoral program!

In my judgment the curriculum of this program is not at all comparable to any other accounting doctoral program in North America. It’s somewhat comparable to a few two-year, full-time MBA programs. And by going full time (16 credits per quarter) a student having only a bachelor’s degree can get an accounting PhD from Capella in less than two years. Bummer!

Is this the best way to solve our accounting PhD shortage problem in North America?
I'm with you Jagdish. I would rather have CPAs and other technical specialists teaching our courses than cheap-shot, fast-track sausage links.

Bob Jensen


"Methodology Change for Ph.D. Rankings," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, May 10, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/10/nrc

The National Research Council -- responding to criticism it received in the internal peer review of its forthcoming doctoral program rankings -- is changing the methodology in a few key places for the long-awaited project.

The changes -- which are not yet final -- are likely to divide the main ranking of each program into two separate rankings -- one based on explicit faculty determinations of which criteria matter in given disciplines, and one based on implicit criteria. Further, the council is likely to release ranges of ratings for a 90 percent "confidence level," not the confidence level target of 50 percent that was in the methodology released last year.

The use of confidence levels means that instead of saying that a given program is the second or eighth or 20th best, the council will instead say that a given program is in a certain range. By raising the confidence level to 90 percent, instead of saying that there is a 50 percent chance that a program is between 20th and 26th, the council will say (to use that hypothetical) that there is a 90 percent chance that a program is between the 15th and 35th best in the nation -- resulting in much broader ranges for the rankings.

The additional changes in methodology -- which was theoretically released in final form in July -- suggest that further delays are likely for the rankings. NRC officials have for about a year now stopped answering questions about the timing of the release, although the ratings are still expected in 2010.

Many graduate program directors and deans are increasingly frustrated by the timing of the project. Data collection for the project (whatever methodology changes are used) started in 2006, with an original schedule for releasing the rankings in 2007. Many programs note that the departure or arrival of a few faculty members who are skilled at landing grants means that some programs may have changed significantly in the years that passed. Further, with many universities looking at trimming graduate programs, some of those who run stellar but threatened programs have been hoping that the NRC rankings would bolster their defenses.

The NRC has not formally announced that it is changing the methodology. But Jeremiah P. Ostriker, chair of the committee overseeing the project and a professor of astronomy at Princeton University, described for Inside Higher Ed the changes that he said are "likely" but not yet certain.

On the question of the ranges to be reported, Ostriker said that the committee has long wanted to avoid the "spurious precision problem" of previous rankings in implying certainty that a given program is a precise number in relation to all others. Given the way programs change constantly, imperfections in information and averages, and a range of other factors, Ostriker said the rankings will be "more accurate" for being presented as a range, and not as a single figure. He noted that "commercial" ranking efforts tend to give a single number, "but that's no excuse for us making the error."

While the idea of giving ranges was part of the methodology released last year, he said that the peer review comments for the rankings (and outside comments) have led him and other committee members to question the idea of giving a range that provides only a 50 percent confidence level, meaning there is also a 50 percent chance that the program is somewhere outside of that range. Peer reviewers found it "confusing" to offer that low a confidence level, so the idea is to increase it to 90 percent, which will have the effect of expanding the range of possibilities.

Ostriker acknowledged that this change will make it more difficult for people to pinpoint exactly where a program stands. But he said that's because it is impossible to do so in any accurate way. "We wanted more honesty and more data and we wanted to be honest about the true uncertainties in rankings," he said. "We hope it doesn't make people unhappy, but if that does make people unhappy, they will need to get used to it."

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

Bob Jensen's threads on vegetable ranking controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews


Department of Education Underlying Intent:  Allow More Transfer Credits from For-Profit Colleges and Universities
"Duncan Orders Study of Restrictive Transfer of Credit Rules," Inside Higher Ed, May 7, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/07/qt#226860

Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, has announced that he is ordering a study on "restrictive" policies on the transfer of academic credit from colleges to one another. In a letter to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, one of the groups that requested such a study, he said that the analysis should be completed within a year. With more students attending multiple institutions to earn a bachelor's degree, transfer rules have become increasingly controversial, with many community colleges charging that they are needlessly detailed and some for-profit institutions saying their students are discriminated against.

Jensen Comment
It is increasingly complicated to discriminate against distance education courses in traditional onsite colleges and universities since most of them no longer distinguish between whether credits were granted for their onsite or online courses that are considered by them to be equivalents. However, it is still rather easy to discriminate against transfer credits from colleges and universities that only offer courses online and/or transfer credits from for-profit colleges and universities.

 


"2009 Securities Litigation Study," by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), May 6, 2010 ---
http://snipurl.com/pwc050610

Summary:
The financial crisis continued to dominate the litigation landscape in 2009 - although to a lesser degree than in 2008, according to the annual PwC Securities Litigation Study. Governments worldwide remained focused on regulatory overhaul, stimulus plans and investigations into the "who, what, when, where, why, and how" of alleged wrongdoings related to the crisis.

This is an annual PwC study.

Bob Jensen's threads on securities frauds ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on auditing firm litigation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

 


Reporting on our foul-mouthed political leaders is wearing out my asterisk key.

"Barney Frank To Hank Paulson 'F**k You! F**K You!'," by Bruce McCarthy, Huffington Post, May 4, 2010 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/04/jonathan-alters-the-promi_n_563045.html 

The leaked portions of Newsweek scribe Jonathan Alter's "The Promise," which details President Obama's first year in office and is due out in May 18, continue to surface. And Alter's got more profanity-laced details of tense backroom meetings.

At the Washington Independent Aaron Weiner highlights another F-bomb festival, this time from a September 2008 meeting that included House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D - Mass.), Obama, John McCain, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and President Bush.

Frank was apparently incensed at Paulson's attempt to stop Democrats from criticizing the huge plan to bailout the financial sector -- in fact, it was Republicans who balked, Weiner observes. Here's Frank's blowup at Paulson:

Barney Frank muscled his way past Harry Reid and started yelling. "F-- you, Hank! F-- you! Blow up this deal? We didn't blow up this deal! Your guys blew up the deal! You better tell [GOP Rep. Spencer] Bacchus and the rest of them to get their sh*t together!"

Earlier leaks of the book have included some embarrassing portrayals of White House adviser Rahm Emanuel. New York magazine had some choice bits about Rahm's anger at Bo, the Obama's family dog ("I'm going to kill that f**king dog," and his yelling to a male staffer: "Take your f**king tampon out and tell me what you have to say."

Bob Jensen's threads on the Greatest Swindle in the History of the World are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008bailout.htm


Nobel Laureate Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner disagree over prospects of a VAT tax ---
Becker:  http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/04/should-the-us-introduce-a-value-added-tax-becker.html
Posner:  http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/04/should-the-united-states-institute-a-federal-valueadded-tax-posner.html
Jensen Comment
I'm will Posner on this!


"Senator Questions Another Break for Colleges: Tax-Exempt Bonds," by Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Senator-Questions-Another/65374/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en 

A U.S. senator with influence over federal tax policy may now be setting his sights on a longstanding cornerstone of colleges' financial practice: paying for new and renovated buildings by borrowing money with tax-exempt bonds.

The attention comes as a result of a just-released report from the Congressional Budget Office. The report, "Tax Arbitrage by Colleges and Universities," questions the merits of allowing nonprofit institutions to rely on taxpayer-subsidized debt while they also benefit from investing their assets to earn them more than what they pay out in interest on the debt.

The report says such a practice allows many universities to benefit from what it describes as "indirect tax arbitrage" because "holding those assets while borrowing on a tax-exempt basis is, in effect, equivalent to using tax-exempt proceeds to invest in those higher-yielding securities."

College advocates say the broad definition of tax arbitrage the report uses reflects an economic argument on the merits of tax-exempt financing but doesn't take into account the social good that colleges provide or the current financial pressures they face.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley, who requested the budget-office analysis in 2007 as part of a broad look at tax-exempt organizations, said in a statement on Friday that the report raises questions "for parents, students, and taxpayers about universities issuing bonds and going into debt when they have money in the bank."

The study estimates that allowing colleges and universities to borrow using tax-exempt debt will cost the federal government about $5.5-billion in forgone revenue in 2010.

In his statement, Senator Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, highlighted several concerns: "Issuing bonds costs money on interest and management fees. Does the expense of debt service take money away from student aid or academic service? Do bond issuances occur even as universities raise tuition and build investment assets?"

But it is unclear whether the senator, who is the senior minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, intends to propose any changes in law in response to the report. In the statement released on Friday evening, he says, "These are further questions to explore."

Charles A. Samuels, a lawyer for the National Association of Health and Educational Facilities Finance Authorities, a group of organizations that help private colleges issue bonds, said current law already restricts colleges and other organizations from directly profiting from their tax-exempt bond issues, or tax arbitrage. (To avoid tax arbitrage, a college that raises money from tax-exempt bonds can reinvest it only temporarily, and even then only in investments earning about the same as the cost of the debt.)

"Now would be a very bad time to make it more difficult for nonprofit organizations in this country to borrow money," Mr. Samuels said in an interview on Sunday.

He said the Congressional Budget Office report is "an 'academic' study in the worst sense of the word" and added that he hoped it would not result in some new limits on tax-exempt financing.

"It isn't going to really help the cost of higher education to restrict financing" that saves colleges money, he said.

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://chronicle.com/article/Senator-Questions-Another/65374/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en


Us Fearsome Old Male Professors (personally I suspect that we're less fearsome than a lot of older women professors)

 "There has actually been a decrease in uncivil behavior in that I grow older and more frightening."
"Chief Targets of Student Incivility Are Female and Young Professors," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 4, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Chief-Targets-of-Student/65396/

When it comes to being rude, disrespectful, or abusive to their professors, students appear most likely to take aim at women, the young, and the inexperienced, a new study has found.

The study, presented here on Sunday at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, involved an online survey of 339 faculty members, roughly evenly split by gender, at nine geographically dispersed colleges and universities of various institutional types. It was conducted by three researchers at the University of Redlands: Rodney K. Goodyear, a professor of education, and Pauline Reynolds and Janee Both Gragg, both assistant professors of education.

Most previous research on college professors' experiences with incivility has focused on their mistreatment at the hands of other members of the faculty. The Redlands researchers' study focused solely on faculty members' experiences with incivility at the hands of students, surveying college faculty members of various ranks, from part-time instructors on up.

The study looked beyond the classroom, asking faculty members about their experiences with student incivility in the course of any class-related activities. The types of student incivility it covered included passive behavior, such as sleeping or texting in class; more actively disruptive behavior, such as coming to class late or talking on cellphones in the classroom; and behaviors that appeared directed at the instructor, such as open expressions of anger, impatience, or derision.

Only about 16 percent of the faculty members surveyed reported not having experienced student incivility at all, but that aggregate figure masked a wide gulf between men and women in terms of the likelihood of their recalling such incidents. When the researchers broke their data down by gender, they found that 24 percent of men, and just 9 percent of women, could not recall incidents of uncivil student behavior, Women were also much more likely to report that the uncivil behavior they experienced was severe, or to say that they had been upset by it.

When the researchers broke down their data in other ways, they found that the oldest and the most experienced faculty members they surveyed were the least likely to report encounters with student incivility.

Given the universal nature of some of the student behaviors examined, such as dozing off in class, it may be fair to ask whether some faculty members were just more inclined than others to have let student incivility roll off of them and not recall it or see it as worth reporting.

Other possible explanations were offered by one survey subject who said students "seemed to smell the vulnerability of the professor seeking tenure," and another who said, "There has actually been a decrease in uncivil behavior in that I grow older and more frightening."

Jensen Comment
There are various possible biases in this study. If you consider professors who've been teaching more than 25 years, there are probably more males than females in most academic disciplines. And there's a bit of Darwinism here in that perhaps the most fit among those males have survived in the classroom for so many years. These veterans probably developed more effective ways of preventing student incivility. Having both seniority and tenure, many of them may be more willing to take hits on teaching evaluations from students who've been dressed down in or out of class. Perhaps they've just learned how to slip in the answer to a future quiz question when noticing a student doze off. More troublesome than sleeping students are probably the students who disrupt a class in progress by arriving late. The old guys might solve this problem by having short quizzes at the very start of class and/or by not allowing late arrivals into the classroom no matter what excuse a student might have for being late.

Then there's always the old trick of picking on uncivil students in some way such as by calling on them more for answers in class or by requiring them to sit in the front row.

 


Our Broken Corporate Governance Model
"Why Executive Pay is So High," by Neil Weinberg, Forbes, April 22, 2010 ---
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0510/outfront-pay-bosses-ceo-chairman-why-executives-pay-is-high.html?boxes=Homepagetoprated

How can investors reel in pay and get more out of corporate bosses? Here's one view: Kick the chief executive out of the boardroom.

When it comes to the way corporate boards oversee chief executives--or, all too often, fail to--few people have as many war stories to tell from as many vantage points as Gary Wilson. He was Walt Disney Co. ( DIS - news - people )'s chief financial officer and, as a director, the subject of scorn when its board was twice ranked the worst in the country. As a Yahoo ( YHOO - news - people ) director Wilson was targeted by investor Carl Icahn, who sought to oust the board during a 2008 failed shotgun marriage with Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ). As a private equity guy he led the 1989 Northwest Airlines ( NWA - news - people ) buyout along with Alfred Checchi.

So Wilson can say, with more than a little credibility, that the boards supposedly overseeing management are instead packed with lackeys with appalling frequency. It's a familiar complaint but one that he believes is responsible for out-of-control pay, the short-term greed that helped spawn the recent financial meltdown and a staggering waste of resources. Wilson's solution: Abolish the joint role of chief executive and chairman and install independent bosses to oversee boards.

"From what I've seen, managers are interested in what goes into their pockets and willing to use lots of leverage to add short-term profits, boost the stock price and sell their options," says Wilson, 70. "Long-term shareholders risk getting screwed."

The Alliance, Ohio native has joined up with Ira Millstein, a Wall Street attorney, and Harry Pearse, former General Motors general counsel and Marriott Corp. director, to push for independent chairmen. Their platform is the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance at Yale.

Does splitting the title benefit shareholders? Evidence is inconclusive, but here's an indicator suggesting they're on to something: 76% of the 25 bosses who rank lowest on our annual survey comparing compensation to shareholder return hold dual titles. Only 44% of the best 25 hold both titles. The dual players include Richard D. Fairbank of Capital One, Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum ( OXY - news - people ), David C. Novak of Yum Brands and Howard Solomon of Forest Labs. ( FRX - news - people ) Wilson and Pearse insist that they saw boards transformed overnight from supplicants to independents when the roles were separated at companies where they were directors.

Boards occasionally go through spasms of feistiness. In 1992 General Motors' board ousted Robert Stemple as chairman, which led to similar moves at American Express ( AXP - news - people ), Westinghouse and other companies. But today only 21% of boards are chaired by bona fide independents, says RiskMetrics Group, a New York financial advisory firm that owns ISS Proxy Advisory Services. In 43% of big companies the roles are ostensibly split, but the chairman, says RiskMetrics, is an ex-chief executive or otherwise defined as a company "insider."

In some cases nothing less than corporate survival is at stake, Wilson argues. He points to Lehman Brothers ( LEHMQ - news - people ), where Richard Fuld was chief executive and chairman for 15 years and where management took the sorts of big risks that ultimately sank the firm.

Wilson isn't against stock options but believes in tying them to long-term returns with strike prices that rise at the rate of inflation plus some risk premium, as he has done at some companies he has invested in. That way management isn't rewarded just for showing up.

Independent boards might also rein in pay. In Europe Wilson sat on KLM's advisory board and says it's no coincidence that (a) chief executives typically run a management board, which reports up to the separate advisory board, and (b) pay is well below U.S. levels. At many U.S. companies, he says, the combined boss often recruits board members and then "directors feel obligated to the CEO/chairman, make the friendliest member chairman of the compensation committee and then hire a friendly consultant to do an analysis that favors high management pay."

Continued in Article

Comment Letter from 80 Business and Law Professors Regarding Corporate Governance
I submitted to the SEC yesterday a comment letter on behalf of a bi-partisan group of eighty professors of law, business, economics, or finance in favor of facilitating shareholder director nominations. The submitting professors are affiliated with forty-seven universities around the United States, and they differ in their view on many corporate governance matters. However, they all support the SEC’s “proxy access” proposals to remove impediments to shareholders’ ability to nominate directors and to place proposals regarding nomination and election procedures on the corporate ballot. The submitting professors urge the SEC to adopt a final rule based on the SEC’s current proposals, and to do so without adopting modifications that could dilute the value of the rule to public investors.
Lucian Bebchuk, Harvard Law School, on Tuesday August 18, 2009 --- Click Here

Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous executive compensation (that even rewards executives for failure) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation

Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance


Complicated Derivatives Used in Tax Fraud:  This Case is Dragging on for Years
"Galleon Rajaratnam Sued KPMG In 2005, But Did KPMG Pay?" Big Four Blog, April 30, 2010 ---
http://www.bigfouralumni.blogspot.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on the saga that led to KPMG paying a $456 million fine are reported at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#KPMG


Great Nova Video: Can a market of irrational people be a "rational market?"
PBS Nova Videp:  "Mind Over Money," http://video.pbs.org/video/1479100777 

Jensen Question
This seems to beg the question of how accountants can contribute information to irrational people with an underlying goal of helping their markets themselves be more rational.

Of course many scholars argue that markets themselves are not " rational" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fox

Behavioral Economics --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics

Bounded Rationality --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

Bob Jensen's threads on the efficient market hypothesis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#EMH


Question
Can any of you identify the mystery "Fraud Girl" who will be writing a weekly (Sunday) column for Simoleon Sense?

Hint
She seems to have a Chicago connection and seems very well informed about the blog posts of Francine McKenna.
http://retheauditors.com/
But I really do know know who is the mystery "Fraud Girl."

"Guest Post: Fraud Girl Says, “Regulators, Ignore the Masses — It’s Your Responsibility!!”
(A New SimoleonSense Series on Fraud, Forensic Accounting, and Ethics)

Simoleon Sense, April 25, 2010 --- Click Here
http://www.simoleonsense.com/guest-post-fraud-girl-says-regulators-ignore-the-masses-it%e2%80%99s-your-responsibility-must-follow-series-on-fraud-forensic-accounting-and-ethics/
 

I’m exceptionally proud to introduce you to Fraud Girl, our new Sunday columnist. She will write about all things corp governance, fraud, accounting, and business ethics. To give you some background (and although I can not reveal her identity). Fraud girl recently visited me in Chicago for the Harry Markopolos presentation to the local CFA. We were incredibly lucky to meet with Mr. Markopolos  and enjoyed 3 hours of drinks and accounting talk. Needless to say Fraud Girl was leading the conversation and I was trying to keep up. After a brainstorm session I persuaded her to write for us and teach us about wall street screw-ups.

So watch out, shes smart, witty, and passionate about making the world a better place. I think Sundays just got a lot better…

Miguel Barbosa
Founder of SimoleonSense

P.S. For Questions or Comments:  Reach fraud girl at:    FraudGirl@simoleonsense.com 

Regulators, Ignore the Masses — It’s Your Responsibility

Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion, supported by the majesty of the government. In the actions of all men, and especially of princes who are not subject to a court of appeal, we must always look to the end. Let a prince, therefore, win victories and uphold his state; his methods will always be considered worthy, and everyone will praise them, because the masses are always impressed by the superficial appearance of things, and by the outcome of an enterprise. And the world consists of nothing but the masses; the few have no influence when the many feel secure.

-Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Why are Machiavelli’s words so astonishingly prophetic? How does a 500 year old quote explain contagion, bubbles, and Ponzi schemes? Do financial decision makers consciously overlook reality or do they merely postpone due diligence? That is the purpose of this series — to analyze financial fraud(s) and question business ethics.

Recent accounting scandals i.e. Worldcom, Enron, Madoff, reveal a variety of methods for boosting short term performance at the expense of long run shareholder value. WorldCom recorded bogus revenue, Enron boosted their operating income through improper classifications, and Madoff ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Sure these scandals were unethical, deceived the public, and made a ton of money. But what is the most striking similarity? Each of these companies was seen as the golden goose egg; an indestructible force that could never fail. Of course, the key word is “seen”, regulators, attorneys, financial analysts, and auditors failed to see reality. But why?

Fiduciaries are entrusted with protecting the public and shareholders from crooks like Skilling, Pavlo, and Schrushy. An average shareholder lacks the knowledge and expertise of a prominent regulator, right? Shareholders don’t perform the company’s annual audit, review all legal documentation, or communicate with top executives. No, shareholders base their decisions off information that is “accurate” and “meticulously examined”.

Unfortunately in each of these instances regulators failed to take a stand against consensus and became another ignorant face in the crowd. “Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion”. Who are the few that really know who these companies are? The answer should be evident. What isn’t clear is why these cowardly few are in charge of overseeing our financial markets.

When Auditors Look The Other Way

A week ago, I came across this article: Ernst & Young defends its Lehman work in letter to clients. I chuckled as I was reading it, remembering Roxie Hart from the play Chicago shouting the words “Not Guilty” to anyone who would listen. Like Roxie, the audit team pleaded that the media was inaccurate. In recording Lehman’s Repo 105 transactions, they claimed compliance with GAAP and believed the financial statements were ‘fairly represented’. But, fair reporting is more than complying with GAAP. Often auditors are “compliant” while cooking the books (a mystery that still eludes me). In this case, the auditors blatantly covered their eyes and closed their ears to what they must have known was deliberate misrepresentation of Lehman Brother’s financial statements.

We will explore the Lehman Brothers fiasco in next week’s post…but here’s the condensed version. Days prior to quarter end, Lehman Brothers used “Repo 105” transactions, which allowed them to lend assets to others in exchange for short-term cash. They borrowed around $50 Billion; none of which appeared on their balance sheet. Lehman instead reported the debt as sales. They used the borrowed cash to pay down other debt. This reduced both their total liabilities and total assets, thereby lowering their leverage ratio.

This was allegedly in compliance with SFAS 140, Accounting for Transfers and Servicing of Financial Assets and Extinguishments of Liabilities that allowed Lehman to move the $50 Billion of assets from its balance sheet. As long as they followed the rules, auditors could stamp [the] financial statements with a “Fairly Represented” approval and issue an unqualified opinion.

Clearly in this case complying was unethical and probably illegal. Howard Schilit, the author of Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports, once said, “You [the auditor] work for the investor, even though you are paid by someone else”. He insists that auditors should look beyond the checklists and guidelines and should instead question everything. Auditors are the first line of defense against fraud and the shareholders are dependent upon the quality of their services. So I ask again, with respect to Lehman Brothers, were the auditors working for the investors or where they in the pockets of senior management?

What can we do?

An admired value investor believes in a similar tactic for confirming the honesty of companies. It’s known as “killing the company”, where in his words, “we think of all the ways the company can die, whether it’s stupid management or overleveraged balance sheets. If we can’t figure out a way to kill the company, then you have the beginning of a good investment”. Auditors must think like this, they must kill the company, and question everything. If you can’t kill a company, then (and only then) are the financial statements truly a fair representation of the firms operations.

There was no “killing” going on when the lead auditing partner said that his team did not approve Lehman’s Accounting Policy regarding Repo 105s but was in some way comfortable enough with them to audit their financial statements. This engagement team failed in looking beyond SFAS 140 and should have realized what every law firm (aside from one firm in London) was stating; that the accounting methods Lehman Brothers used to record Repo 105s were a deliberate attempt to defraud the public.

So I repeat: Ignoring reality is not an option. Ignoring the crowd, however, is an obligation.

See you next week….

-Fraud Girl

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

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

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


From the Scout Report on April 30, 2010

CCleaner 2.31.1153 --- http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner 

If you are looking to clear away your web-browsing tracks, the CCleaner application is a good place to start. With its simple interface, the application works with a number of browsers (including Chrome and Opera) to remove traces of online activities, and it also contains a fully featured registry cleaner. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and newer.

Opera 10.52 --- http://www.opera.com/ 

Many people may know about the merits of the Opera browser, but this new release may offer long-time users and neophytes additional cause for pause. Beyond the usual features people have come to expect (i.e. tabbed browsing, mouse-over previews), Opera offers a new range of desktop widgets, file sharing utilities, and full-text searching from the address field. This version is compatible with computers running Mac OS X 10.3 and newer, Windows 2000 or newer, and Linux.


Ethical questions abound as scientists and others consider the effects of geoengineering projects Mother Earth has a fever http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/the-climate-report/archive/2010/04/mother-earth-has-a-fever/39320/ 

Building a better volcano http://www.grist.org/article/2010-04-22-building-a-better-volcano 

Engineering the Climate http://www.pri.org/science/environment/engineering-the-climate1954.html 

A Novel Geoengineering Idea: Increase the Ocean's Quotient of Whale Poop
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/04/23/a-novel-geoengineering-idea-increase-the-oceans-quotient-of-whale-poop/ 

Top 5 Geoengineering Schemes http://news.discovery.com/tech/geoengineering-schemes-top-5.html 

Pat Mooney on the Dangers of Geoengineering and Manipulating the Planet to Combat Climate Change http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/20/four

 

 

 


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


Education Tutorials

NOVA: scienceNOW [Flash Player] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/

Science Videos --- http://www.scivee.tv/

Accounting and Other Books for Sight Impaired "Readers"

"Archive Makes Over a Million Digital Books Available for Those Who Can't Use Print," by Mary Helen Miller, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Archive-Makes-Over-a-Million/23816/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

With a service it started Thursday, the Internet Archive has more than doubled the number of books available to blind people and others who cannot read print books. The nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, has made more than a million digital books available free in a format that can be downloaded to a device that reads them aloud.

The Internet Archive has been scanning books and making them available free online since 2005, and the books in the new format are part of the organization's collection of more than two million texts. To make a book accessible for those unable to read print volumes, the Internet Archive uses an automatic process to digitize it into a special format, Daisy.

The process does not work well for textbooks or other kinds of texts with complex formatting, said Brewster Kahle, the archive's founder and digital librarian. Other organizations, like Bookshare, make textbooks available for people who can't use print books, Mr. Kahle said.

He added that the Internet Archive's collection is useful for research. "You could find books that are now out of print that you wouldn't find in your library," he said.

Arielle Silverman, the president of the national association of blind students, said college students are often required to read popular books, which they might be able to get sooner through the new service.

"The situation right now is that for the majority of books, if we want to obtain them, we have to negotiate with the disabled-students office," said Ms. Silverman, who is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Ms. Silverman said that students sometimes have to wait months for the books they request to be provided in a digital format. Now many more books will be available instantly, she said. Ms. Silverman also said that the Daisy format is preferable to the traditional audio book because it lets the user skip around easily.

The Internet Archive will make all new additions to its library available in Daisy if the text's format allows. It is seeking book donations, and it has promised to pay for digitization of the first 10,000 volumes it receives.

Internet Archive --- http://www.archive.org/

"Textbooks for the Disabled," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, August 28, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/28/access

The Association of American Publishers and the University of Georgia this week unveiled an electronic database aimed at making it easier for blind, dyslexic and otherwise impaired college students to get specialized textbooks in time for classes.

The database, called AccessText,, is designed to centralize the process by which electronic versions of textbooks are requested by colleges and supplied by publishers. Experts say it will allow disabled students to get their textbooks more efficiently, help colleges save money and avoid lawsuits, and protect publishers’ copyrights.

For students whose disabilities prevent them from using traditional texts, the normally straightforward task of acquiring books for their courses can be tedious and frustrating. Federal law requires that colleges and universities provide disabled students equal access to educational materials, but this is often easier said than done. College officials have to track down and contact the publisher of every textbook that each of its disabled students buys and request an electronic copy. If such a copy exists -- the likelihood shrinks the older the book and the smaller the publisher -- college officials still have to convert the file to a format that can be read by whatever reading aid the student uses. If not, the college has to wait, sometimes weeks, to obtain permission to scan the book and create its own electronic version.

Once a college has an electronic copy, converting to a readable format can be another complex process, says Sean Keegan, associate director of assistive technology at Stanford University. Math and science texts often arrive as scanned pages, and cannot always be easily read by the character-recognition software the university uses to turn them into standard electronic files, Keegan says. “That can take a longer amount of time to process that material internally and turn it around and give that to the student efficiently,” he says.

Meanwhile, delays in the process can make it impossible for disabled students to prepare for and participate in classes. “Students need to have a book in time so they can do the assigned reading and study for tests and papers,” says Gaeir Dietrich, interim director of high-tech training for the California Community Colleges system. “So if the book doesn’t come until the term has been in session for three or four weeks, that puts that student very far behind.” Some students have sued colleges over such delays, she says.

AccessText aims to mitigate these woes by streamlining the request and delivery process, says Ed McCoyd, executive director for accessibility affairs at AAP.

“There’s a lot of transactional friction taking place currently,” says McCoyd. “What AccessText is trying to do is take some of that out of the transaction by having parties agree to streamlined rules up front.”

Having colleges submit requests using the AccessText portal should eliminate the need for the publishers to require endless paperwork with each request to protect its copyrights, McCoyd says. Under the system, the copyright protection agreements can be handled once, during registration, and the requester’s bona fides can be verified by a log-in.

Currently, colleges that get tired of waiting for publishers to process the paperwork and procure an electronic copy of a text sometimes just scan a text themselves to try to satisfy the needs of disabled students in a timely fashion, says Dietrich.

AccessText is also set up to eliminate the need for different colleges to convert the same text to a readable format once it is acquired. Currently “numerous schools could be doing the exact same thing, converting the same text,” says Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the publishers' association. Under the new system, “if one school has already spent the time and the money to convert a file to a format, they could advise the AccessText network, which could then make the info available that it was still available in that format, and that school could share it with another school” -- thereby sparing those colleges the time and resources it would have used to convert the file themselves, he says.

Eight major publishing houses paid a total of just under $1 million to develop the AccessText network and maintain it through its beta phase, which will end next July. From then on, it will sustain itself by billing member colleges between $375 and $500 annually, depending on size.

Dietrich notes that community colleges might not benefit from the AccessText network as much as other institutions, since “we have a lot more vocational classes and basic-skills classes, and a lot of those books don’t come through those big publishers, they come through specialized publishers,” she says. “It doesn’t solve that part of the problem for us.”

The network includes 92 percent of all college textbook publishers and is recruiting even more, according to AAP officials.

Bob Jensen's threads on aids to handicapped learners ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Video:  Oil Absorbing Polymer --- Click Here
Thank you Richard Newmark for the heads up.

Beyond Stone & Bone --- http://archaeology.org/blog/

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

Preventing Genocide [Flash Player] http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/

Impacts of Resource Development on Native American Lands --- http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/nativelands/

International Indian Treaty Council --- http://www.treatycouncil.org/

University of Alaska Anchorage Institute of Social and Economic Research --- http://www.iser.uaa.alaska.edu/ 

EU Civilian Crisis Management: The Record So Far --- http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2010/RAND_MG945.pdf

Miami Metropolitan Archive --- http://miami.fiu.edu/index.htm

Free Literature About Islam --- http://islam.about.com/od/basicbeliefs/a/freelit.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social


Law and Legal Studies

Impacts of Resource Development on Native American Lands --- http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/nativelands/

International Indian Treaty Council --- http://www.treatycouncil.org/

Preventing Genocide [Flash Player] http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/

Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals: United Nations War Crimes Commission ---
 http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/law-reports-trials-war-criminals.html

Preservation Directory --- http://www.preservationdirectory.com/HistoricalPreservation/Home.aspx

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


Math Tutorials

Ted Video Humor:  Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TEDTalks), by Sebastian Wernicke. TED, April 2010 ---
http://www.ted.com/talks/lies_damned_lies_and_statistics_about_tedtalks.html

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


History Tutorials

Free Literature About Islam --- http://islam.about.com/od/basicbeliefs/a/freelit.htm

National American History: Museum Stories of Freedom and Justice [iTunes] http://americanhistory.si.edu/freedomandjustice/

Sea & Ships: Explore online --- http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/sea-and-ships/

Hampton Roads Naval Museum --- http://www.hrnm.navy.mil/

Sources on US Naval History http://www.history.navy.mil/sources/index.htm 

Naval History http://www.naval-history.net/

Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals: United Nations War Crimes Commission ---
 http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/law-reports-trials-war-criminals.html

"The Pageant of America" Photograph Archive (over 7,000 photographs) ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=culture&col_id=187

Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library --- http://hidvl.nyu.edu/

From Warrior to Saint: The Journey of David Pendleton Oakerhater (Cheyenne Warrior, Native American) ---
http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Oakerhater/

Tipatshimuna-Innu stories from the land (Canada, video) --- http://www.tipatshimuna.ca/ 

National (American) History Education Clearinghouse ---  http://teachinghistory.org/

"Master of Revels Neil Simon’s comic empire," by John Lahr, The New Yorker, May 3, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/03/100503crat_atlarge_lahr

Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design --- http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1384_leonardo/

Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture [Flash Player] http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/leonardo/

Leonardo da Vinci's Geometric Sketches http://mathdl.maa.org/convergence/1/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=1717 

Universal Leonardo --- http://www.universalleonardo.org/

Miami Metropolitan Archive --- http://miami.fiu.edu/index.htm

The Spanish Antiphoner [Flash Player, Music History] --- http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/spanishantiphoner/

Eve Drewelowe Digital Collection (Iowa) --- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/drewelowe/

Edward J. McCauley Photographs (North Carolina) --- http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mccauley/ 

North Carolina Museum of Art: Far From Home --- http://ncartmuseum.org/exhibitions/farfromhome/main.shtml

Preservation Directory --- http://www.preservationdirectory.com/HistoricalPreservation/Home.aspx

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

The Spanish Antiphoner [Flash Player, Music History] --- http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/spanishantiphoner/

Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library --- http://hidvl.nyu.edu/

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/

May 1, 2010

May 3, 2010

May 4, 2010

May 5, 2010

May 6, 2010

May 7, 2010

May 8, 2010

May 9, 2010

 




Forwarded by Paula

Proofreading is a Dying Art

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says  
      

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers 
 
Now that's taking things a bit far!  
-----------------------------------------------------------  

Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over 
 
       What a guy!
---------------------------------------------------------------  

Miners Refuse to Work after Death  

 No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's!  
------------------------------------------------------   

Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant   

See if that works any better than a fair trial!  
  ----------------------------------------------------------  

War Dims Hope for Peace 
 
 I can see where it might have that effect!  
 
 ----------------------------------------------------------------  

If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile 

Ya think?!  
----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
 
      Who would have thought!  
 ----------------------------------------------------------------

Enfield (London) Couple Slain; Police Suspect
Homicide

 
They may be on to something!  
------------------------------------------------------------------------  

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges   

You mean there's something stronger than duct tape?  
----------------------------------------------------------  

Man Struck By Lightning: Faces  Battery   Charge 
 
He probably IS the battery charge!  
----------------------------------------------   

New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group 

Weren't they fat enough?!
-----------------------------------------------    

Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft 

That's what he gets for eating those beans!
 ---------------- ---------------------------------   

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks 

Do they taste like chicken?
 
****************************************  

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half 

Chainsaw Massacre all over again!
  
 ***************************************************  

Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
 
       Boy, are they tall!  
*******************************************

And the winner is...
 

Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead

Did I read that right?  

 


Forwarded by Hossein Nouri.

Somali Pirates Say They Are Subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. Could Make Prosecution Difficult, Experts Say

Eleven indicted Somali pirates dropped a bombshell in a U.S. court today, revealing that their entire piracy operation is a subsidiary of banking giant Goldman Sachs.

There was an audible gasp in the courtroom when the leader of the pirates announced, “We are doing God’s work. We work for Lloyd Blankfein.” The pirate, who said he earned a bonus of $48 million in doubloons last year, elaborated on the nature of the Somali’s work for Goldman, explaining that the pirates forcibly attacked ships that Goldman had already shorted.

”We were functioning as investment bankers, only every day was casual Friday,” the pirate said.

The pirate acknowledged that they merged their operations with Goldman in late 2008 to take advantage of the more relaxed regulations governing bankers as opposed to pirates, “plus to get our share of the bailout money.”

In the aftermath of the shocking revelations, government prosecutors were scrambling to see if they still had a case against the Somali pirates, who would now be treated as bankers in the eyes of the law.

”There are lots of laws that could bring these guys down if they were, in fact, pirates,” one government source said. “But if they’re bankers, our hands are tied.”


 


John Cleese vs. the Volcano: (reminds me of the time I had to take a $200 ride from La Guardia to Yale)
And He Wins ($ort of) --- http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b176917_john_cleese_vs_volcano_wins_ort_of.html

Room With a View
Suspect Found Neck-Deep In Port-A-Potty (with a photo) --- http://www.komonews.com/news/92553919.html




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/

Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at http://iaed.wordpress.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