Tidbits on June 10, 2010
Bob Jensen
Amidst frost warnings for the early mornings
this week, we are in the midst of
another June Lupine Festival in Sugar Hill.
The history of our cottage is rather
interesting. It was the structure called the Pavilion
when it was a golf clubhouse and later on Brayton Cottage on the grounds of a
huge resort. In 1973, all the structures in the resort were demolished except
for three summer homes on the golf course and a small power house. The power
house is now our barn, and one of the summer homes that was saved was originally
named Brayton Cottage. George Foss purchased the land and Brayton Cottage. He
poured a fine basement where the hotel's dining room once stood atop a hill.
Brayton Cottage was then moved over this basement. The views are spectacular.
The front side overlooks the Kinsman Range (about 10 miles away), the Twin Range
(about 20 miles away), and the Presidential Range (about 30 miles away) of the
White Mountains of New Hampshire. The backside overlooks the Green Mountains of
Vermont. On a clear night we're supposedly able to look down on the lights of 27
villages, although I've never spotted all of those villages. Pictures of the
history of our cottage are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080824.htm
The Pavilion in 1910 on
its original golf course location
This Field is in Front of Our
Cottage in June During Sugar Hill's Lupine Festival
|
For a description of our new location,
go to
http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0027pL
There is a fantastic spot in northern New
Hampshire for wildflowers with mountains on the horizon (though not
usually covered in snow at that time of the year). Go to Sugar Hill, NH
in mid-June for the lupine festival. From about June 10th to 17th there
are fields of lupines that bloom beneath the White Mountains. In Sugar
Hill on Sunset Road there is a 12 acre field completely filled lupines
that has Cannon Mountain and Mt. Washington in the background. These
lupines come in shades of blue, purple, white and pink. The attached
image was taken at sunrise in the lupine field on Sunset Road in Sugar
Hill. The back roads around Sugar Hill contain a number of spots where
there are large concentrations of lupines, some strategically located
near red barns and white churches. This spot is not only great for grand
landscape shots, but is also macro photography heaven, the dew drops and
little insects on the lupines also make great subjects. But be careful,
one morning at sunrise I was intently photgraphing the sunrise and moved
towards a tree to include it in my shot. I startled a mother moose and
calf who I did not realize were on the other side of the tree and they
ran right in front of me. Of course having a 17-35mm lens on my camera
with an ND grad and polarizing filter made it a little tough to get a
good shot of the moose.
About 5 miles away is Franconia Notch state
park where there are lots of nice waterfall opportunities, my favorites
include The Basin, the Falling Waters Trail (Stair Falls and Cloudland
Falls are both wonderful)and the Flume.
This area in early to mid-June can't be beat.
To do grand landscape photography in New England requires a little more
work than in the national parks out west, but Sugar Hill is one of the
better locations in New England for the kind of photography you are
interested in.
--
Ed McGuirk , April 06, 2002; 06:15 A.M. Eastern
Erika wanted to kill me three years ago when
I spent almost $1,000 seeding wild flowers in our south field
Now we can enjoy them for the rest of our lives
Different varieties appear all summer long
These are the June lupines (mixed with white daisies and yellow buttercups)
On Sunday while I was pruning our wild roses
out front, a man introduced himself
and asked permission to photograph our wild roses and other
wild flowers
He's a retired school teacher named Wes Lavin from Ashland, NH
He carries a huge camera on a tripod and does professional-quality photography
Here's his picture of one of our wild roses in bloom on Sunday, June 6, 2010
Here are two other pictures Wes took on
Sunday
Wes Lavin sent me some of his other pictures
that I will share in future editions of Tidbits
Here's a link to one of his 2006 pictures that landed on the cover of a
commercial newsletter
New Hampshire Electric Co-Op Newsletter on July 2006 ---
http://www.nhec.com/filerepository/july2006newsletter.pdf
Here are some pictures sent to me by others
My friend Professor Ed Scribner at New Mexico State University sent me this
picture
Las Cruces area (in the “suburb” of La Mesilla or “Old Mesilla”)
Many taxpayers in the U.S.must earn over
$52,000 to owe any Federal income tax
Ten Highest and Ten Lowest States in Terms
of Taxpayer Liability
A Lot of Taxpayers in the South Pay Zero Taxes (Non-Payers) Due to
Credits, Deductions, and Poverty
Source: Scott A. Hodge, Tax Foundation, May 24, 2010 ---
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/26336.html
According to the latest IRS figures for 2008, a record 52 million filers—36
percent of the 143 million who filed a
tax return—had no tax liability because their credits and deductions reduced
their liability to zero.
Indeed, tax credits such as the child tax credit and earned income tax credit
have become so generous
that a family of four earning up to about $52,000 can expect to have their
income tax liability erased entirely.
New Hampshire Electric Co-Op Art Gallery ---
http://www.cafepress.com/nhec_art/
A True Duck Story from San Antonio ---
http://www.veggieboards.com/boards/showthread.php?100060-A-True-Duck-Story-From-San-Antonio
Horse and Mule Power ---
http://www.slideshare.net/Nubiagroup/horse-and-mulepower-by-gboisjo
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on June 10,
2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations061010.htm
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Tidbits on June 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
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
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
- With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting
Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
- With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting
Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
Gaming for Tenure as an Accounting Professor
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)
"So you want to get a Ph.D.?" by David Wood, BYU ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=So_you_want_to_get_a_Ph.D.%3F
Do You Want to Teach? ---
http://financialexecutives.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-you-want-to-teach.html
Jensen Comment
Here are some added positives and negatives to consider, especially if you are
currently a practicing accountant considering becoming a professor.
Accountancy Doctoral Program Information from Jim Hasselback ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html
Why must all accounting doctoral programs be social science
(particularly econometrics) "accountics" doctoral programs?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
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
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
"The
Accounting Doctoral Shortage: Time for a New Model,"
by Neal Mero, Jan R. Williams and George W. Krull, Jr. .
Issues in Accounting Education 24 (4)
http://aaapubs.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=IAEXXX000024000004000427000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes&ref=no
ABSTRACT:
The crisis in supply versus demand for doctorally qualified faculty members in
accounting is well documented (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of
Business [AACSB] 2003a, 2003b; Plumlee et al. 2005; Leslie 2008). Little
progress has been made in addressing this serious challenge facing the
accounting academic community and the accounting profession. Faculty time,
institutional incentives, the doctoral model itself, and research diversity are
noted as major challenges to making progress on this issue. The authors propose
six recommendations, including a new, extramurally funded research program aimed
at supporting doctoral students that functions similar to research programs
supported by such organizations as the National Science Foundation and other
science-based funding sources. The goal is to create capacity, improve
structures for doctoral programs, and provide incentives to enhance doctoral
enrollments. This should lead to an increased supply of graduates while also
enhancing and supporting broad-based research outcomes across the accounting
landscape, including auditing and tax. ©2009 American Accounting Association
Bob
Jensen's threads on accountancy doctoral programs are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
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
"Video: Deaf Graduates Tackle Move to Hearing World,"
By Ashley Marchand, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 25, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Video-Deaf-Graduates-Tackle/65668/
Technology Aids for the Handicapped and Learning Challenged ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
Mind Lab [Flash Player on Unconscious Brain Functions] ---
http://jvsc.jst.go.jp/find/mindlab/english/index.html
Robie House Interior Restoration Project [Flash Player, Frank
Lloyd Wright, Hyde Park]
http://www.gowright.org/robie/
From NPR
Tell Me More (leadership and politics) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=46
ASIMO [Flash Player of robot built by Honda]
http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/
The Future of NSF On Its 60th Anniversary ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf_future
UCLA Preserved Silent Animation [Flash Player]
http://animation.library.ucla.edu/
The Silent Picture Era ---
http://www.silentera.com/index.html
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Archive ---
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
Horse and Mule Power ---
http://www.slideshare.net/Nubiagroup/horse-and-mulepower-by-gboisjo
Moving Images Pinewood Dialogues (for students of film) ---
http://www.movingimage.us/pinewood/
Video: The Greek Economic Crisis
Explained ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-greek-crisis-explained/
Video Lunch with a Laureate: Famous Financial Researcher Robert Merton ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/lunch-with-a-laureate-famous-financial-researcher-robert-merton/
Phil McKinney: Hacking the Future (Fora TV) ---
http://fora.tv/2010/05/22/Phil_McKinney_Hacking_the_Future
Manitobia: Life and Times [Flash Player, Canada] ---
http://manitobia.ca/
Five Year Old Golfer (Kyle Lograsso) ---
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/1197420?fr=yvmtf
A Tiger Woods Swing (As a toddler Kyle watched golfers on television)
Also learn about his eye tumor resulted in the loss of his left eye
Watch this video to the end for his amazing comeback in golf at Age 4
The Heart of a Teacher ---
http://www.heartofateachermovie.com/if
Wear Your Seatbelt Advertisement in the U.K. ---
http://embracethis.co.uk/
Ray Stevens - Illegal Immigrants
Assistance Program ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgOHOHKBEqE
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Here's to the Heroes: A Military Tribute
(Australia's Ten Tenors Video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL-0mdEg0U4&feature=related
The popular recording when you graduated from high school (enter
the date) ---
http://oldfortyfives.com/TakeMeBackToTheFifties.htm
TV Theme Song Quiz ---
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/webspecials07/interactives/tv-themes-quiz/
This Day in Music ---
http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/
First Listen: Eric Whitacre, 'Choral Music' ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127376914
Boston Symphony Orchestra ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15937109
All Classical WGBH ---
http://www.wgbh.org/listen/index.cfm
Forwarded by Romania by Dan Gheorghe Somnea
[dan_somnea@yahoo.com]
Dear Professor Bob
Please listen to :
Schrammel und Walzter
Musik (Vienna's specific musical backgrounds)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2QM-tAYzJs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-o9i_VeVfs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPf_fPtb3Yg&feature=related
=======
Bayern München - Tor-Hymne 08/09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtaHswIXz3U&feature=related
Bayerische Stubenmusik
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZLwIT9Aj0o&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pcWENACX5w&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9bONDihaDA&feature=related
=======
American's are yodeling ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDDEk2AMJAI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9oxbyLlAYI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIY9fpkA7ow&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whIj6mrUGzQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8e8k53YJL0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPaoJv-NrEU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtOWHoCD7C8&feature=related
and ... Tirol's singers
are yodeling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c_JPjNW6Qg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGHsXWPHZV0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWuC_7LPilw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3eI7FrPUHY
Sincerely,
Dan Gheorghe
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
Tate Learning: i-Map (art appreciation for the blind) ---
http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/
New Hampshire Electric Co-Op Art Gallery ---
http://www.cafepress.com/nhec_art/
Robie House Interior Restoration Project [Flash Player,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Hyde Park]
http://www.gowright.org/robie/
National American History: Museum Stories of Freedom and Justice [iTunes]
http://americanhistory.si.edu/freedomandjustice/
A Biography of America ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series123.html
Animal Science Image Gallery ---
http://anscigallery.nal.usda.gov/
Horse and Mule Power ---
http://www.slideshare.net/Nubiagroup/horse-and-mulepower-by-gboisjo
"The Pageant of America" Photograph Archive (over 7,000 photographs) ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=culture&col_id=187
Digital Image Collections: Indiana Historical Society ---
http://www.indianahistory.org/our-collections/digital-image-collections
The Cultural Landscape of the UW-Madison Campus
---
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UW/subcollections/UWCulturalLandAbout.html
The Robert Venn Carr Jr. Collection, Museum of
Art at the University of Maine ---
http://www.library.umaine.edu/Carr/default.asp
Windows on Maine [Quick Time, Windows Media] ---
http://windowsonmaine.library.umaine.edu/
Manitobia: Life and Times [Flash Player, Canada]
--- http://manitobia.ca/
The Virtual Museum of Canada ---
http://www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/index-eng.jsp
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum ---
http://baseballhall.org/
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
A Biography of America ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series123.html
South Carolina Digital Library ---
http://www.scmemory.org
"The Evolution of Computer Science," MIT's Technology
Review, June 3, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25276/?nlid=3070
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 March 3,
2010
To Accompany the March 3, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations030310.htm
"College Groups Share Health Care Worries With White House," Inside
Higher Ed, June 3, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/03/qt#229052
Supporters of
student health insurance plans who saw provisions of the Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act threatening the plans were
reassured Wednesday in a meeting with President Obama’s chief health care
deputy. Representatives of the American College Health Association, the
National Association of College and University Business Officers, College
and University Professional Association for Human Resources and the six
presidential higher education associations met Wednesday with Nancy-Ann
DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, to share their
concerns. They worry that student plans -- currently defined as "limited
duration," a category that exempts the plans from being part of the
individual market -- would under the new law become too expensive for
colleges and universities to offer.
One person in the room for the meeting, Steven
Bloom, assistant director of government and public affairs at the American
Council on Education, said that DeParle assured the group that the absence
of language making clear that the plans could continue to operate just as
they do today was "not intentional." The Obama administration has emphasized
that "if you like the insurance you have, you get to keep it," Bloom said,
"and they view student insurance as part of that.... It's just fallen
through the cracks."
College health advocates
first met with Congressional aides last fall to
discuss this same concern, but language supporting student health insurance
plans never made it into the final bill. Now that the bill has been passed
and legislation is all but frozen on Capitol Hill, Bloom and his peers
expect that a fix will come through regulations
Bob Jensen's threads on healthcare in the U.S. are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
The future of publishing :
18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom
are blood relatives.
Average annual earnings: $1.75
Garrison Keillor, Time Magazine, June 7, 2010. Page 23.
Question
Is this analogous to television show recorders that eliminate commercials?
Viewers all like to see those commercials removed. But advertising revenue
sustains the producers of those television shows and the networks that
distribute those shows.
If our television sets could strip away commercials and speed up programming
between segments of shows we just might not have any worthwhile shows to watch
that are broadcast "free" to us.
Keep in mind that advertising is what pays for our
popular Web sites like Google, Bing, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
Of course Bob Jensen's blockbuster Website has no advertising.
"Will Apple's Latest Browser Hurt Publishers (of Web sites)? Removing ads
from Web pages may be an attempt to push content creators toward the iPad and
iPhone." by Stephen Cass, MIT's Technology Review, June 9, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/25309/?nlid=3094
The latest version of Apple's Web browser, Safari
5, sports a feature called "Reader" that concatenates the multi-page
articles seen on most news sites (including Technology Review's) into a
single scrollable window. According to Apple, the stripped down format
"removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles."
It, of course, also removes advertising revenues
from the people who created those articles. Ad blocking software is nothing
new; personally I've appreciated the option to block pop-ups that are
incorporated into most modern browsers. What is new is that Apple doesn't
give the user the option to not block ads in Reader. This option wouldn't be
technically difficult to add in comparison to the work Apple has already
done on developing Reader: most websites already provide links to stripped
down versions of their articles, under a "printer-friendly" link, which
contain one or two static ads that could be integrated into the Reader
presentation of a story without being disruptive.
Why would a reader want an ad-enabled version?
Well, for the same reason I don't install any of the freely available ad
blockers; I'm happy to support sites that I think strike a reasonable
balance between advertising and content. Having to, say, watch a few
30-second commercial breaks in exchange for free video-on-demand from Hulu
seems a fair deal. Similarly, seeing a few display ads scattered around a
news article also seems like a fair exchange for original reporting and
writing. But Apple's Reader doesn't give users the flexibility to make that
choice; if they want Reader's functionality, they have to accept its
philosophy, which is firmly oriented towards what's best for Apple, not
users.
Some have interpreted Apple's ad-less Reader as a
blow for the little guy. But I don't think Apple really cares about sparing
surfers from advertising; it seems more likely the Reader is designed to
push publishers towards delivering their products via custom apps on the
iPad and iPhone, where ads can't be blocked. And if, as Apple hopes,
publishers serve ads using Apple's own iAd platform, the company will
happily take its 40 percent right off the top.
I can only imagine how loudly Apple would complain
if news websites retaliated against Reader by blocking Safari outright, and
heaven knows no-one wants a return to the days when many sites came with a
notice stating "Warning: Your browser is not supported!" if you dared to
visit them with anything other than the one or two browsers that had been
officially blessed. Instead, I hope a balance between Apple and content
providers can be struck, perhaps as simply as by adding a "Display
printer-friendly ads" checkbox in Safari's preferences.
Here's an interesting comment that follows the article:
When the Reader creates the concatenated article
view, it performs all page- and ad-views that would be involved in reading
the article page-by-page. So from the publisher's perspective, ad revenue
should not be affected by it. However, if enough people start using it (is
there any way for a publisher/advertiser to know this?), advertisers would
presumably be less likely to buy ads since they'll never be seen by the
user, which could set up an interesting problem.
That aside, I think it'd be a ballsy
and perhaps welcome move for some big publishers to block Safari over this.
Google Blasts Apple on Ad Rules," by Jessica E. Vascellaro, The
Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704575304575296702116945806.html#mod=todays_us_marketplace
Google Inc. blasted Apple Inc. for imposing new
rules on developers that could bar Google and other rivals from selling ads
inside iPhone and iPad applications, the latest sign of growing tensions
between the two Silicon Valley powerhouses.
The flap underscores the rising stakes associated
with selling ads on cellphones, a small but fast-growing market that
prompted Google to outbid Apple to buy AdMob Inc., which places ads on
mobile devices.
Apple on Monday amended the rules governing the
development of apps that work with a new operating system for its iPhone and
iPad devices. The language now prohibits developers from sharing usage data
from iPhone apps with some ad companies, preventing those companies from
targeting ads and making it harder for them to compete with Apple's own ad
network, iAd, which is set to launch July 1.
Omar Hamoui, AdMob's founder and now a Google vice
president, said in a blog post Wednesday the new rules "if enforced as
written, would prohibit app developers from using AdMob and Google's
advertising solutions on the iPhone." He added Apple's new rules "hurt both
large and small developers by severely limiting their choice of how best to
make money."
Apple didn't respond to requests for comment.
The rules don't affect conventional advertising
sold through a Web browser on Apple devices. But Apple's rules, which were
first announced in April, initially were interpreted to bar anyone except
Apple from selling ads inside iPhone apps.
Apple amended the rules Monday to allow some ad
companies to compete with iAd, as long as those competitors aren't owned by
or affiliated with a company that makes or distributes mobile devices or
mobile operating software.
In addition to Google, that category could include
Microsoft Corp., which makes its own mobile operating system, and phone
makers like Nokia Corp.
A Microsoft executive said the company was
investigating the change. A Nokia spokeswoman declined comment.
Google, which spent $750 million on AdMob and has
developed the Android operating system used by iPhone rivals, was quick to
criticize the provisions, with Mr. Hamoui posting his remarks on AdMob's
corporate blog. The Mountain View, Calif., company recently closed its
acquisition of AdMob, after an intense review of the deal by the Federal
Trade Commission that took Apple's moves into mobile advertising into
account.
Three months after Google announced the deal in
November to buy AdMob, Apple agreed to buy AdMob rival Quattro Wireless.
Apple's emergence as an AdMob rival heavily influenced the FTC's decision
not to block the deal, people familiar with the matter said.
In clearing Google's purchase of AdMob, the FTC
said it would continue to closely monitor the mobile-advertising
marketplace.
AdMob places ads in Android phones, BlackBerrys and
other devices, but Apple, which has sold more than 50 million iPhones, has
said iAd will deliver ads only on Apple devices. Revenue in the U.S. from
ads sold on cellphones is expected to reach $593 million in 2010, according
to eMarketer, a research firm.
It isn't clear what recourse Google has if it can't
convince Apple to change the new rules, though complaining to the government
is an option.
Before Apple's most recent amendment, the
Department of Justice and the FTC were moving to examine whether Apple's
business practices are anticompetitive, although it is unclear whether
either agency has begun a preliminary investigation.
A Google spokesman declined comment about whether
the company has discussed the matter with government officials. A spokesman
for the FTC declined comment; a Justice Department spokeswoman couldn't be
reached.
Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm
Gaming for Tenure as an
Accounting Professor
If you don't have time to read
anything else in this long message, please skim down to Table 1 published in the
May 2010 edition of Issues in Accounting Education. Also skim down to
Linda Kidwell's reply near the bottom of the message.
Tenure is relatively difficult
to achieve in the Academy's accounting discipline in a publish or perish
context. Major reasons are as follows:
- A-Level academic
accounting research journals have miniscule acceptance rates (not unique to
accounting) coupled with two or more year time lags between submission and
acceptance (that is less common in other disciplines and does vary somewhat
randomly with journal referees in given accounting journals). Getting a
paper accepted for publication in less than two years is somewhat of a risky
random process if you're on a tight time track for tenure. See Linda
Kidwell's reply at the bottom of this message.
- Virtually all
A-level accounting research journals are "accountics" journals that require
advanced levels of mathematics and statistics for acceptance. This creates
problems for many non-tenured accounting professors who are required to
teach professional accounting courses (that are more like law courses with
tens of thousands of arcane rules and standards needed to be covered for
passage of the difficult CPA Examination) but publish research that is
tantamount to analytical mathematics, econometrics, or psychometrics.
Accounting history research, case studies, and non-accountics applied
research are virtually barred from A-level academic accounting research
journals. Publication in professional journals just does not count much
toward tenure and performance evaluation in accountancy academe.
- Most tenured
accounting faculty got their tenure before accountics was required for
A-Level research journals or before colleges required publication in A-Level
journals. As a result non-tenured accounting faculty today find it very
difficult to find senior research mentors who are both active in accountics
research and willing to take non-tenured faculty under their wings on
campus. This makes accountancy much different than science where it is much
more common for new faculty to find senior research mentors in the labs.
- Research grant
opportunities for academic accountants from external sources are almost
nonexistent. Whereas scientists are evaluated by the number and size of
their research grants, accounting researchers are only judged on their
journal publication hits. This places more time pressure on non-tenured
faculty and discourages undertaking longer projects that scientists can
undertake if they get sufficient funding.
As a result non-tenured
accounting faculty are learning how to "game for tenure." There is also a
strategy for tenured faculty in some discipline other than accounting to
"bridge" to higher paying accounting faculty positions. New PhD graduates in
accounting are among the highest paid faculty in a university and often receive
more compensation and fringes that are higher than tenured faculty. The reason
is that there is an enormous shortage of PhD accounting graduates in North
America. The ere are only slightly over 100 accounting PhD new graduates a year
to meet demand in the thousands (demand keeps increasing because more and more
students are choosing to major in accounting at the undergraduate level). The
major A-Level research universities are now paying over $200,000 per year in
salary, guaranteed summer research stipends, and research expense stipends for
travel and other related research expenses.
Reasons for the extreme
shortage of new accounting PhD graduates are given at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
So here are some ways
non-tenured accounting professors are gaming for tenure.
- Probably the
most common way to game the system is co-authoring for purposes of
overcoming the A-Level journal publication acceptance delays. Three
researchers who are each in charge one submission can thus become a part of
three submissions in parallel streams. It is also a bit like when a group of
people pool lottery tickets and share winnings. The odds of getting a hit in
an A-Level journal increase with pooled submissions. There are of course
many other more legitimate reasons for co-authorship, but gaming for tenure
by this questionable ploy is increasing popular but difficult to prove. In
academic accounting research co-authoring itself has risen from less than
10% in the 1950s to over 90% in recent years.
- Rather than
submit a really good single research paper, one way to game the system is to
split the paper into multiple and overlapping parts for no reason other than
to increase the odds of a hit (in one of several journals) and to possibly
increase the hit counts (if more than one crumble is accepted).
- Another way to
game the tenure and performance evaluation systems is to undertake only
short-term research projects. Undertaking a long-term research project in
accounting academia is deadly.
- Because demand
for accounting PhD graduates greatly exceeds supply, graduates from
top-ranked doctoral programs negotiate very well indeed for purposes of
doing research and publishing in A-Level accounting research journals. Some
graduates negotiate to only have to teach one course a semester or even one
course a year. They sometimes only teach a doctoral seminar that lines up
more closely with their own research and avoids being burdened with
professional accounting courses like intermediate or advanced accounting or
tax accounting. They negotiate for a guaranteed summer research salary for
five or more years and additional research expense stipends ranging from
$10,000 to $30,000 per year. Those new graduates that did not negotiate well
and have to teach nine credits of professional-level accounting courses are,
thereby, at a huge competitive disadvantage when seeking tenure. You can
game the system by negotiating well as a new accounting professor.
Negotiating to teach only one doctoral seminar per year greatly reduces the
risk of getting hammered by student evaluations from intermediate or
advanced or tax professional-level accounting courses.
- PhD programs in
accountancy typically take five or six years beyond a masters degree. Many
other doctoral degrees can be earned in three to four years. Another way to
game the system is to really plan ahead before entering a doctoral program.
A CPA who knows and can teach accounting might earn a PhD in Education and
eventually become tenured in the School of Education. That tenured professor
can then enroll in the AACSB's "Bridge Program" that takes about one year
part-time. Successful completion of the Bridge Program then allows this
tenured professor to perhaps double or triple his/her salary as a
newly-minted tenured accounting professor. Maintaining tenure is not
assured if the newly-minted bridge professor changes universities, but a
given university most likely allows this person to keep his/her tenure
status within the university. And the university's School of Accounting is
so desperate for bridged accountants that the bridged accounting professor
will be welcomed with open arms and a high salary.
You can read more about the AACSB Bridge Program at
http://www.aacsb.edu/bridge/default.asp
The Bridge Program applies to accounting, finance, management, marketing,
and other areas of business.
- Tenured
professors who know very little about accounting and taxation are really not
able to teach professional accounting at the undergraduate or masters level.
However, since accounting doctoral programs teach almost no accounting, it
might be possible for particular types of tenured professors to enter the
AACSB Bridge Program in order to teach in "accounting" doctoral programs.
The typical professor who makes this bridge must be a mathematician or a
social scientist with high levels of knowledge of research and statistics.
The A-Level accounting research journals are, however, becoming more
demanding about making their publications more relevant to accountancy. But
in this regard, an "accounting" researcher who knows no accounting might
team very successfully with professors and students who know accounting very
well but lack some mathematics and statistics skills. The fact of the matter
is that we do have some professors of "accounting" teaching doctoral
students where the students are accountants and their major research
professor knows very little accounting.
You also should not judge all your accountics friends the same way you judge
yourself in terms of knowledge of accountancy. After he gave his speech
asserting that accounting research professors should take a greater interest in
accounting, Accounting Hall of Famer Dennis Beresford submitted his speech for
publication to Accounting Horizons. Referee A flatly rejected the Denny's
submission for the following reasons:
The paper provides
specific recommendations for things that accounting academics should be doing to
make the accounting profession better. However (unless the author believes that
academics' time is a free good) this would presumably take academics' time away
from what they are currently doing. While following the author's advice might
make the accounting profession better, what is being made worse? In other words,
suppose I stop reading current academic research and start reading news about
current developments in accounting standards. Who is made better off and who is
made worse off by this reallocation of my time? Presumably my students are
marginally better off, because I can tell them some new stuff in class about
current accounting standards, and this might possibly have some limited benefit
on their careers. But haven't I made my colleagues in my department worse off if
they depend on me for research advice, and haven't I made my university worse
off if its academic reputation suffers because I'm no longer considered a
leading scholar? Why does making the accounting profession better take
precedence over everything else an academic does with their time?
Referee A's rejection letter, Accounting Horizons, 2005
What riled me the most was the
arrogance of Referee A. I read into it that, whereas mathematicians and
econometricians are true "scholars," other accounting professors are little
better than teachers of bookkeeping and fairy tales. This is the same arrogant
attitude held by previous investment bankers trying to take advantage of Warren
Buffet as their counterparties in derivatives or other financial transactions.
The AACSB is also dealing
with the shortage of accounting doctoral students in other ways. The AACSB
loosened accreditation requirements for accounting faculty. It now has two major
categories for faculty qualifications called Academically Qualified (AQ) versus
Professionally Qualified (PQ) ---
http://www.aacsb.edu/accreditation/papers/AQ-PQCriteriaPaperFinal%20Draft09%20_2.pdf
The problem is that PQ faculty
not having doctoral degrees may be fully accepted for AACSB accreditation
but they are not fully qualified by their universities for the granting of
tenure. Universities in recent years find ways to circumvent AAUP restrictions
on how long non-tenured faculty may work full time for universities, but the
fact of the matter is that long-term non-tenured faculty are second class
citizens in the Academy.
*****************
I recently sent out the
message below to international accountancy professors on the AECM listserv.
Requiring four
"A-Level" accountics journal publications for tenure puts a small college well
ahead of the leading research universities, virtually none of whom require
four such hits at the A-Level (see Table 1 below).
Accountics is the
mathematical science of values.
Charles Sprague [1887] as quoted by McMillan [1998, p. 1]
You can read about how "accountics" was dormant between 1887 and 1958. A perfect
storm revived accountics to where it quickly came to dominate the leading
academic accounting research journals, doctoral programs, and publication
requirements for promotion, performance evaluation, and tenure after 1958 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
(Accounting
Historians Journal)
Question that I posed on the AECM Listserv of
international accounting educators and researchers:
Do you really, really want to become a non-tenured accounting professor?
Others on the AECM might be interested in your
answers to the two questions stated below.
But if you prefer, please send your answers to
me privately. I will respect the confidential nature of your reply unless you
give me permission to share the name of your college or university in terms of
these tenure criteria for accounting programs ---
rjensen@trinity.edu
A College President Changes the Tenure Rules
of the Road
Tenure Decisions: Does your college have a minimum quota for publication in the
Top Ten Academic research journals?
There are various published rankings of academic
accounting research journals, most of which are "accountics" journals that
require accepted articles to be rooted in mathematics and statistics. Some
rankings and references to rankings are provided at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#JournalRankings
David Wood and his BYU colleagues also rank
accounting research programs based upon publication records of those programs in
leading accounting research journals ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1337755
This study makes novel contributions to ranking accounting research programs
constructed from publication counts in top journals ("AOS, Auditing, BRIA, CAR,
JAE, JAR, JATA, JIS, JMAR, RAST, and TAR").
Other research publications in such journals as the
Accounting Historians Journal,
case research journals,
Critical Perspectives in Accounting,
Journal of Accountancy,
Management Accounting,
Issues in Accounting Education, are excluded in the BYU study and
hence did not impact of the BYU rankings of top accounting research programs in
the academy.
A College President Changes the Tenure Rules
of the Road
In the above context I received the following (slightly edited) disturbing
message from a good friend at a college that has a very small accounting
education program (less than 25 masters program graduates in accounting
annually). The college is not in the Top 50 business schools as ranked by US
News or Business Week or the WSJ. Nor does the program have a
doctoral program and is not even mentioned as having a an accounting research
program ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1337755
The message reads as follows (slightly edited):
Bob,
Our College's President just contacted our
non-tenured accounting faculty. He gave them a short list of “Accountics”
journals that they have to publish in order to get tenure. The list
consists of the usual (A-Level) suspects – JAR, TAR, JAE, AOS, JATA, CAR,
Auditing – A Journal of Practice and Theory, and a handful more. He
categorically told them that they need to have at least 4 articles in those
journals to be successful in getting tenure.
Just thought you should know!
I hope you and Erika are doing well. I always
look forward to you Tidbits and photos that accompany them. Of course, I
also follow you on the AECM listserve.
Best Regards
XXXXX
Jensen Comment
I would not classify AOS as an accountics journal, although its future is
a bit uncertain following the recent death of its founder and long-time editor
Anthony Hopwood. I would classify it more as a societal/philosophical journal
for accountancy research as very broadly defined. However, the other "usual
suspects" are A"A-Level" accountics journals that virtually require
sophisticated mathematics and statistics applications in accounting research for
publication acceptance. On average these journals reject 80%-90% of the
submissions.
Be that as it may, a follow up conversation with
Professor XXXXX reveals that this "four top accountics journal requirement" is
an abrupt change in tenure criteria at the college in question. Publication has
been required up to now, but there was no minimum number like four and
publications that counted could all be in journals like accounting history
journals, case research journals, applied research journals like Management
Accounting/Journal of Accountancy, and education research journals like
Issues in Accounting Education.
Requiring four "A-Level" accountics journal publications for tenure puts
a small college well ahead of the leading research universities, virtually none
of whom require four such hits at the A-Level (see Table 1 below).
Question 1
I'm interested in first of all finding out if your college has a minimum number,
for tenure, of "accounting research" publications even though it might not
require that these be the "Top 10" accountics research journals plus AOS?
It seems to be that a fixed minimum number is
absurd. It encourages an accounting researcher to split a really good research
paper artificially into parts for no purpose other than to increase the
publication count. It also discourages major research studies in favor of
quickies. It also seems to me that even the "Top 10" accounting research
universities would be better served with quality rather than quantity research
work. For example, suppose Eric Lie was a non-tenured research professor at the
University of Iowa. Eric wrote an award-winning research paper published in
Management Science (2005) that resulted in the 2007 American Accounting
Association Contribution to the Accounting Literature Award. It also landed him
among the 100 Most Influential People of the World Award by Time Magazine.
It would seem that this one research paper on options backdating is far more
significant than any four accountics research papers published in the same year
(2005). I doubt that any other accounting, finance, or business administration
professor in history has received this award from Time Magazine.
The policy also ignores how non-tenured faculty
can game the system by finding 12 or more co-authors who separately take charge
of one of the 12 studies. Then if four of the 12 studies make it into "Top 10"
accountics research journals, all 12 partners have better chances of obtaining
tenure in their respective universities. This is gaming the system if the
purpose of the partnering is only to increase the chances of getting at least
four of the "co-authored" papers into top accountics journals. This has been
popular among co-workers pooling lottery tickets, but it has dubious ethics for
research publication.
It would be funny if one of the 12 "co-authors"
was a family Chihuahua, Labrador or Golden Retriever.
Question 2
I am interested secondly in finding out if your college allows, for tenure, an
unspecified number of "accounting research" publications other than the "Top
10" accountics research journal publications plus AOS? Or could a non-tenured
accounting professor get tenure with only a "significant number" of research
publications in such journals as the
Accounting Historians Journal,
case research journals,
Critical Perspectives in Accounting,
Journal of Accountancy,
Management Accounting,
Issues in Accounting Education, etc.?
Others on the AECM might be interested in your
answers to the above two questions.
But if you prefer, please send your answers to
me privately. I will respect the confidential nature of your reply unless you
give me permission to share the name of your college or university in terms of
these tenure criteria for accounting programs ---
rjensen@trinity.edu
Thanks in advance
PS
In general I oppose using the AECM for formal survey studies, because this type
of thing can get out of hand. However, this is a highly informal inquiry that
should be of interest to virtually all subscribers to the AECM. I encourage
subscribers to reply directly to the AECM.
June 2, 2010 reply from James R.
Martin/University of South Florida
[jmartin@MAAW.INFO]
Bob, For another paper with lots of advice for Ph.D.
students and new faculty see Beyer, B., D. Herrmann, G. K. Meek and E. T. Rapley.
2010. What it means to be an accounting professor: A concise career guide for
doctoral students in accounting. Issues In Accounting Education (May): 227-244.
Jensen Comment
Here are some key quotations from the article"What It Means to be an Accounting Professor:: A Concise Career Guide for
Doctoral Students in Accounting," by Brooke Beyer, Don Herrmann, Gary K.
Meek, and Eric T. Rapley, Issues in Accounting Education, May 2010 ---
http://aaapubs.aip.org/getpdf/servlet/GetPDFServlet?filetype=pdf&id=IAEXXX000025000002000227000001&idtype=cvips&prog=normal
ABSTRACT:
The purpose of this paper is to provide a concise career guide for current
and potential doctoral students in accounting and, in the process, help them
gain a greater awareness of what it means to be an accounting professor. The
guide can also be used by accounting faculty in doctoral programs as a
starting point in mentoring their doctoral students. We begin with
foundational guidance to help doctoral students better understand the “big
picture” surrounding the academic accounting environment. We then provide
specific research guidance and publishing guidance to help improve the
probability of publication success. Actions are suggested that doctoral
students and new faculty can take to help jump-start their academic careers.
We finish with guidance regarding some important acronyms of special
interest to doctoral students in accounting.
TABLE 1
Teaching and Research Expectations
of Faculty
Adopted from
Butler and Crack (2005)
Butler, A. W., and T. F. Crack. 2005. The
academic job market in finance: A rookie’s guide.
Financial Decisions
17
2:
1–17.
RESEARCH GUIDANCE
Research is the currency of academics. It is research,
not teaching, that drives the rewards for faculty at most universities
Hermanson 2008. This is the case not only for universities with doctoral
accounting programs, but also for many universities focusing solely on
undergraduate or master’s degrees in accounting. Hermanson
2008
provides
several reasons why this is the case including the scarcity of research
talent in comparison to teaching and that research is peer reviewed,
providing a better measure of quality. Regardless of the reasons,
doctoral students need to be aware of the importance of research and
place special emphasis in this area throughout their careers. In the
following section, we provide a summary of research advice commonly
provided to doctoral students through the mentoring process.
. . .
GMAT
GMAT scores are likely the single most important
admission criteria used by doctoral programs in selecting doctoral
candidates for admission. While selection committees carefully consider
other evidence including the applicant’s statement, work experience,
schools where the undergraduate and master’s degrees were received,
grade point average, and reference letters, the GMAT score provides a
consistent benchmark that many programs use as a starting point in their
decision process. Over half of the U.S. doctoral programs in accounting
have a stated minimum GMAT score of 650 or more. A score in the range of
700 or more (top 10 percent) is desirable to receive strong
consideration at many programs. The average GMAT score of the ADS
Scholars selected to begin their doctoral program in 2009 was 718 and
all of the candidates selected had a minimum GMAT score of 650.
Furthermore, some programs require a minimum quantitative score of 45 or
more (top 25 percent). Without strong quantitative skills, students can
struggle in graduate-level statistics and econometrics courses. While
the GMAT score is an important minimum benchmark in making initial
admissions decisions, it is less important as an indicator of overall
student success in a doctoral program. Doctoral program directors can
provide numerous examples of students with very high GMAT scores who
failed to complete the program. Likewise, some students with average
GMAT scores have gone on to be highly successful accounting researchers.
Similar to SAT/ACT scores for admission to college, the GMAT score is
important for admission into a doctoral accounting program, but becomes
progressively less important over one’s academic
career.
Jensen Comment
There are various published rankings of academic
accounting research journals, most of which are "accountics" journals that
require accepted articles to be rooted in mathematics and statistics. Some
rankings and references to rankings are provided at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#JournalRankings
David Wood and his BYU colleagues also rank
accounting research programs based upon publication records of those programs in
leading accounting research journals ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1337755
This study makes novel contributions to ranking accounting research programs
constructed from publication counts in top journals ("AOS, Auditing, BRIA, CAR,
JAE, JAR, JATA, JIS, JMAR, RAST, and TAR").
Other research publications in such journals as the
Accounting Historians Journal,
case research journals,
Critical Perspectives in Accounting,
Journal of
Accountancy,
Management
Accounting,
Issues in
Accounting Education, are excluded in the BYU study and hence did not
impact of the BYU rankings of top accounting research programs in the academy.
Opposition to Validity Questioning of Accountics Research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of accountancy doctoral programs in
North America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
June 2, 2010 reply from Linda A Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
Back to your original questions, Bob, our
department has no set minimum number of hits in particular journals, but
rather a system of weighting journals. For example, the top tier journals
(the usual suspects) are worth more than sectional and other high quality
journals, which in turn are worth more than other journals and
presentations. The list and weightings were developed in a collaborative
process using various sources for rankings as well as our department mission
as guides. To be eligible for tenure, a candidate must have accrued a
certain number of points, so higher quality requires less quantity, though
we have to remind untenured faculty that hanging all their hopes on top tier
articles that may take 2 years to get accepted, if at all, is not likely to
do it alone if they have no lower tier articles to fill out their vitae.
They also can't earn it on low-quality alone: there must be at least some
high quality content. It's an imperfect system, but I think it strikes a
good balance between quality and quantity, doesn't set unrealistic
expectations, and allows those who don't do accountics research ample
opportunity for their work to be respected. Finally, it also helps at the
college T&P level, where we are the only non-doctoral department, and other
departments need some help seeing the role of practitioner articles in an
accounting vita.
"Burning Out, and Fading Away," by Jack Stripling, Inside Higher Ed,
June 10, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/10/aaup
College faculty aren’t any more burned out than the
rest of the U.S. workforce on average, but the struggles of the untenured on
the tenure track are the most pronounced, according to a survey presented at
an American Association of University Professors conference here Wednesday.
In an analysis of professional burnout among
professors, a Texas Woman’s University Ph.D. candidate found tenure track
professors had more significant symptoms of workplace frustration than their
tenured and non-tenure track faculty counterparts.
Janie Crosmer, who conducted the survey of more
than 400 full-time faculty across the U.S. in December 2008, said she was
unsurprised that the high stresses of pursuing academe’s most coveted status
led to burnout. As she discussed those stresses during a presentation
Wednesday, audience members nodded in agreement, and one faculty member
among them described the pursuit of tenure as “a living hell.”
Crosmer, who completed her doctorate and now works
as a strategic account executive at OptumHealth, relied upon an often-used
measure of burnout levels in her study. Developed by
Christina
Maslach, a professor of psychology at the
University of California at Berkeley, the Maslach Burnout Inventory
Educators Survey assesses three aspects of burnout on a multi-point scale.
The categories include:
• Emotional Exhaustion: Feelings of being
emotionally overextended or just worn out with work. (Average Scores:
14-23).
• Depersonalization: An unfeeling and impersonal
response toward recipients of one’s service, care, treatment or instruction.
(Average Scores 3-8).
• Personal Accomplishment : Feelings of competence
and successful achievement in one’s work. (Average Scores 36-42).
While professors across the tenure spectrum scored
within the average range of “emotional exhaustion,” tenure track faculty had
the highest score at 22.3, edging toward the “high degree of burnout”
designation. In contrast, those not on the tenure track had the lowest
scores at 16.4, and tenured faculty were in the middle at 20.9.
Surveyed faculty also fell within the scale's
average range of burnout when assessed for “depersonalization,” a category
marked by heightened cynicism and a tendency to abandon tasks. Notably,
however, tenure track faculty had the most heightened levels of
depersonalization as well, coming in on the high end of the scale's overall
average at 6.8. As with the "emotional exhaustion" category, non-tenure
track faculty scored the lowest -- 5.2 -- and tenured professors were in the
middle at 6.6.
As for the “personal accomplishment” category,
Crosmer’s survey found no statistically significant difference between
faculty across the tenure spectrum. Her survey did find, however, that older
faculty had the highest personal accomplishment scores, suggesting
professors become more satisfied with their achievements as they age.
Those surveyed cited a variety of factors they saw
as contributing to burnout. Many mentioned budget cuts and a lack of support
from administrators, for instance. They also had choice words for students,
whom one typical respondent described as “entitled and lazy.”
“They speak to their instructors in ways that
previous generations of learners would never dare,” one professor wrote.
While the 411 respondents made for a significant
and geographically diverse sample, Crosmer concedes the as-yet-unpublished
study relies upon self-reporting and doesn’t represent the full tapestry of
higher education. About 65 percent of those surveyed were males, and 90
percent were white. Respondents were 49 percent tenured, 25 percent
non-tenured and 24 percent tenure track. They also tended to be at doctoral
universities – 42 percent – and mostly worked in the health sciences – 27
percent.
To pull together her sample, Crosmer used listservs
and blogs, finding that respondents often passed the survey along to
colleagues.
Women surveyed tended to score higher on the
emotional exhaustion scale. While both genders scored within the average
range, women averaged 20.9 on the scale, compared with men at 18.5. Anything
above 24 on the scale would represent a "high" degree of burnout, but both
genders surveyed fell within the average.
Crosmer said she was struck by the candor and, at
times, negativity manifested in faculty comments. Professors complained
about massive red tape, inflexible mandates for holding office hours, low
morale, health concerns and insufficient travel funds. And while Crosmer
would still like to land a faculty position in the future, she was
disheartened by what she heard.
“By reading that, you were [thinking] do I really
want to teach ever? Some of the comments were, oh my goodness.”
As with just about any industry, professors also
said they felt they should earn more money. One respondent opined, “We are
the most highly educated people in the country and among the worst paid.”
Accounting Program Rankings in Academe
The top ranked accounting programs do not set a
four-hit minimum number of A-Level publications for tenure. In fact the rankings
below indicate that some things are more important to program quality,
especially in the eyes of firms that hire graduates, than research and
publication records of the faculty.
What I found interesting is how different these rankings
are from the A-Level journal hit accounting program rankings at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1337755
"While the World Implodes, Let’s Bicker About
Accounting Program Rankings," by Caleb Newquist, Going Concern, May
6, 2010 ---
http://goingconcern.com/2010/05/while-the-world-implodes-lets-bicker-about-accounting-program-rankings/
Despite
your 401k taking a
deuce and the entire continent of Europe about to
sink into the Atlantic, the Bloomberg Businessweek
Business School undergraduate speciality rankings
are out and the
accounting rankings are, shall we say,
interesting. Maybe no one is that worried about it but if sports play any
part in your like/dislike of a particular school, then there should be a few
words:
1 University of Notre Dame (Mendoza)
2 Brigham Young University (Marriott)
3 Emory University (Goizueta)
4 University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
5 Wake Forest University
6 Lehigh University
7 Boston College (Carroll)
8 University of California – Berkeley (Haas)
9 University of San Diego
10 Southern Methodist University (Cox)
11 Babson College
12 University of Washington (Foster)
13 University of Richmond (Robins)
14 Villanova University
15 Case Western Reserve University (Weatherhead)
16 University of Texas – Austin (McCombs)
17 University of Virginia (McIntire)
18 Cornell University
19 College of William & Mary (Mason)
20 New York University (Stern)
21 University of Southern California (Marshall)
22 Tulane University (Freeman)
23 Fordham University
24 Georgia Institute of Technology
25 Loyola University – Chicago
26 University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign
27 Ohio University
27 University of Denver (Daniels)
29 University of Texas – Dallas
30 University of South Carolina (Moore)
31 University of Connecticut
32 Boston University
33 Santa Clara University
34 University of Maryland (Smith)
35 Indiana University (Kelley)
36 Syracuse University (Whitman)
37 Washington University – St. Louis (Olin)
38 Binghamton University
39 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
40 Texas Christian University (Neeley)
41 University of Miami
42 University of Missouri – Columbia (Trulaske)
43 University of Michigan (Ross)
44 North Carolina State University
45 University of Wisconsin – Madison
46 Texas A&M University (Mays)
47 The College of New Jersey
48 University of Minnesota (Carlson)
49 Miami University (Farmer)
50 University of Georgia (Terry)
51 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
52 University of Delaware (Lerner)
53 Ohio Northern University (Dicke)
54 Seattle University (Albers)
55 Northern Illinois University
56 Michigan State University (Broad)
57 Georgetown University (McDonough)
58 California Polytechnic State University (Orfalea)
59 Loyola College in Maryland (Sellinger)
60 University at Buffalo
61 Bentley University
62 DePaul University
63 University of Iowa (Tippie)
64 Drexel University (LeBow)
65 Northeastern University
66 Marquette University
67 St. Joseph’s University (Haub)
68 University of Pittsburgh
69 University of Utah (Eccles)
70 University of Oregon (Lundquist)
71 Seton Hall University (Stillman)
72 Bowling Green State University
73 Kansas State University
74 Colorado State University
75 Louisiana State University (Ourso)
76 Baylor University (Hankamer)
77 University of Oklahoma (Price)
78 University of Colorado – Boulder (Leeds)
79 University of Massachusetts – Amherst (Isenberg)
80 James Madison University
81 George Washington University
82 University of Tennessee – Chattanooga
83 University of Houston (Bauer)
84 Xavier University (Williams)
85 Florida State University
86 John Carroll University (Boler)
87 University of Hawaii (Shidler)
88 Arizona State University (Carey)
89 Florida International University
90 University of Louisville
91 Bryant University
92 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Lally)
93 Purdue University (Krannert)
94 Illinois State University
95 University of Arizona (Eller)
96 Texas Tech University (Rawls)
97 Hofstra University (Zarb)
98 Ohio State University (Fisher)
99 Clemson University
100 University of Florida (Warrington)
101 University of Akron
102 University of Arkansas – Fayetteville (Walton)
103 Butler University
104 University of Nebraska – Lincoln
105 University of Illinois – Chicago
106 University of Central Florida
107 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University (Pamplin)
108 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)
109 Temple University (Fox)
110 Pennsylvania State University (Smeal)
111 Clarkson University
Jensen Comment
Although virtually all of the above universities have AACSB-accredited business
programs, many do not have the specialty AACSB-accredited accounting programs
---
https://www.aacsb.net/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=AACSB&WebKey=4BA8CA9A-7CE1-4E7A-9863-2F3D02F27D23
I've always had doubts whether AACSB accounting program accreditation benefits
exceed the costs.
What I found interesting is how different these rankings are from the A-Level
journal hit accounting program rankings at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1337755
"'U.S. News' May Shift Rankings Methodology," Inside Higher Ed,
June 7, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/07/qt#229379
U.S. News & World Report is considering several
changes in the methodology for its college rankings. Robert Morse, who
directs the rankings, discussed the possible changes and invited comment on
them
a blog post. . He said that the magazine may
combine a ranking by high school counselors with the peer ranking currently
done by college presidents -- one of the most controversial parts of the
rankings. He also wrote that the magazine may add yield -- the percentage of
accepted applicants who enroll -- to its formula, and may give more weight
to "predicted graduation rate," which gives credit to colleges that exceed
their expected rates.
Jensen Comment
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies
are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Tips about teaching, technology, and productivity
"You Can't Be Trusted If You're Trusted with Too Much," by Jason B. Jones,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/You-Cant-Be-Trusted-If-Youre/24463/
The title of this post emerged at home a couple of
weeks ago: the
seven-year-old [YouTube] barked it at his mother
as she tried to juggle, simultaneously, helping him with a convoluted
craft/project and improving a policy that had been held up by the senate. He
complained that she was taking too long answering an e-mail; she responded
that he should trust that she was coming back; and he flipped the script:
"Mom, you can't be trusted if you're trusted with too much."
There's a tricky moment in any career: When you're
starting out, you want to be appreciated for your abilities, and are often
frustrated that you're not being asked to do certain things that you think
are within your skill set. Over time, you start to earn more respect from
your colleagues, and are given more responsibilities . . . until there comes
a time when you wake up in a panic every day about what you need to
accomplish vs. what can plausibly be done in the time that you have. (As my
wife said to my mother a few weeks ago: "I think there was a moment, back
when he was 4, when we got a little overconfident about what we could
plausibly do.")
I'm the last person in the world to dispense advice
about this--I have a shameful list of "stuff I should've finished more
quickly"--but I will risk three observations:
- An e-mail that says, "hey--I haven't forgotten
about X. Here's where things stand, and here's what I'm waiting on. Is
that ok?" is useful, especially for service/shared governance tasks.
Keeps people in the loop. (Obviously, you wouldn't want to overdo this,
either.)
- George wrote two posts about using your
calendar to stay on top of things: "Have
a life, with help from your calendar"
and
"Hit your deadlines, with help from your calendar".
Although they're pitched to the start of the year, the summer is an
excellent time to make sure your calendar accurately reflects the actual
commitments you've made.
- Donald E. Hall's
The Academic Self: An Owner's Manual
has a wealth of practical advice about how to translate academic
commitments--teaching, research, and service--into step-by-step projects
that can be captured on a calendar.
Nobody likes to say "no," especially to genuinely
cool things. But it's generally better to say no in advance, rather than to
say no by defaulting on things you care about.
How do you make decisions about choosing
projects?
"Lessons for New Professors," by Elizabeth Parfitt, Inside Higher
Ed, May 28, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/05/28/parfitt
Bob Jensen's Somewhat Dated Advice for New Faculty ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
Higher Education Controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Are the Canadian critics being too kind and gentle on themselves?
"Have Canadian Law Schools Become 'Psychotic Kindergartens'?" Inside
Higher Ed, June 7, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/07/qt#229422
Canadian bloggers have been buzzing in the last
week about a harsh critique of the country's law schools, which are compared
to "psychotic kindergartens" in a journal article published by Robert
Martin, a retired law professor at the University of Western Ontario. The
article was published last year in the journal Interchange, but has
only recently been the topic of debate. The article portrays law schools as
politically correct and focused on obscure issues. Martin closes his piece
by suggesting that Canada's law schools all be shut down and turned over to
the homeless as a place to live -- thus in Martin's view solving multiple
social problems at the same time. The article is available only to
subscribers of the journal, and while its focus is law schools, it isn't
much more kind to the rest of the country's universities. "Each fall, a
horde of illiterate, ignorant cretins enters Canada's universities. A few
years later, they all move on, just as illiterate, just as ignorant and
rather more cretinous, but now armed with bits of paper, which most of them
are probably not able to read, called degrees," he writes. The Canadian
legal blog
SLAW features a defense of legal education in the
country and criticism of Martin's views.
Questions
What is driving tuition increases in law schools?
Are these same cost drivers impacting on some business schools and accountancy
programs for the same reasons?
Why are minority enrollments increasing with the exception of African American
law students?
Jensen Comment
Before reading the argument below, it should be noted that court decisions have
been adverse to affirmative action admissions and financial aid, most notably
the famous case that shook the foundations of the University of Michigan ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicStandards
"Law-School Cost Is Pushed Up by Quest for Prestige, Not Accreditation,
GAO Survey Finds," by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education,
October 26, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Competition-Not/48940/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Critics have
sometimes blamed the accreditation standards of the American Bar Association
for driving up the cost of law school and making it more difficult for
students of color to be admitted to those programs.
But a report
released on Monday by the Government Accountability Office says that most
law schools surveyed instead blamed competition for better rankings and a
more hands-on approach to educating students for the increased price of a
law degree. In addition, the federal watchdog agency reported that, over
all, minorities are making up a larger share of law-school enrollments than
in the past, although the percentage of African-American students in those
programs is shrinking. The GAO attributed that decrease to lower
undergraduate grade-point averages and scores on law-school admissions
tests.
Law-school
accreditation is technically voluntary but practically important: 19 states
now require candidates to have a degree from an institution approved by the
bar association to be eligible to take the bar examination. And a degree
from an ABA-accredited institution makes a student eligible to take the bar
exam in any state.
The costs of
getting a law degree, however, have increased at a faster rate than the
costs of comparable professional programs, says the report, "Higher
Education: Issues Related to Law School Cost and Access." In-state tuition
and fees at public law schools averaged $14,461 in the 2007-8 academic year,
7.2 percent higher than the cost 12 years earlier. In comparison, the cost
of a medical degree from a public institution increased 5.3 percent over the
same period, to $22,048 annually.
Law-school costs
for nonresidents and at private institutions also increased at a slower rate
over that period, but now total about twice as much or more in dollars
compared with residents' costs at public institutions.
The reasons for the
fast-rising costs are that law schools are providing courses and
student-support programs that require more staff and faculty, the federal
survey found. In addition, law schools spent more on faculty salaries and
library resources, among other things, to boost their standing in the U.S.
News & World Report annual rankings, law-school officials told the GAO.
Those findings
stand in contrast to some criticisms that the accreditation standards for
faculty and facilities are a major factor in the cost of law schools.
"Officials from more than half of the ABA-accredited schools we spoke with
stated they would meet or exceed some ABA accreditation standards even if
they were not required," the report says.
Law-school
officials also cited recent declines in state appropriations as a reason for
rising tuition, federal researchers reported.
Accreditation
standards also were not widely blamed for the declining share of
African-American law students, most of those surveyed said. Between the
1994-95 and 2006-7 academic years, the percentage of black students has
shrunk from 7.5 percent of law school students to 6.5 percent, even as the
number of blacks earning bachelor's degrees has grown by two percentage
points.
"Most law-school
officials, students, and minority-student-group representatives we
interviewed focused on issues such as differences in LSAT scores, academic
preparation, and professional contacts, rather than accreditation standards,
to explain minority access issues," the report says.
But the report also
noted that some officials blamed not only accreditation, but also rankings
by U.S. News & World Report for lower or static enrollment rates of
minorities: "Schools are reluctant to admit applicants with lower LSAT
scores because the median LSAT score is a key factor in the U.S. News &
World Report rankings."
The study was a
requirement of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, passed in 2008, and was
meant to compare the costs and level of minority enrollment at law schools
to similar professional-degree programs, including medical, dental, and
veterinary colleges. Federal researchers surveyed officials at 22
institutions, including three that are not accredited by the ABA, and
students in two law programs, one of which did not have the ABA's stamp of
approval.
Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AccreditationIssues
"Universities are offering doctorates but few jobs," by Alana Semuels,
Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2010 ---
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-phd-blues-20100604,0,6349908.story
Thanks to Glen Gray for this heads up.
As they walk in hooded robes to the strains of
"Pomp and Circumstance," many students getting their doctorates this spring
dream of heading to another university to begin their careers as
tenure-track professors.
But when Elena Stover finished her doctorate in
September, she headed to the poker tables. Frustrated with the limited
opportunities and grueling lifestyle of academia, Stover, 29, decided to
eschew a career in cognitive neuroscience for one playing online poker. She
got the idea from a UCLA career counselor, who was trying to help her find
employment.
"The job market is abysmal, especially within the
academic system," said Stover, who spent six years getting her doctorate at
UCLA.
It has never been easy to find a tenure-track
teaching job. But this year, dwindling endowments and shrinking state
budgets — especially in California — have made that goal more elusive than
ever. Now, many graduates with doctoral degrees are finding themselves
looking for jobs outside universities — jobs they probably could have gotten
without five to six years of intense schooling and tens of thousands of
dollars of education debt.
"That's one of the weird things — after all this
training, you should really have these career options, but in reality, it's
really scarce," said Stover, who moved to Oakland, got a poker coach and
says she's making enough to pay the bills.
Budget cuts are plaguing California's once-admired
higher education system. The California State University system lost 10% of
its teaching force over the last year, which is the equivalent of 1,230
full-time posts. The University of California's share of state general fund
revenue of $2.6 billion in the 2009-10 fiscal year was 20% less than it was
two years earlier.
Many universities are cutting costs by reducing
full-time staff and hiring adjunct or part-time professors. The number of
full-time faculty members at universities was around 51% in 2007, down from
78% in 1970, said Jack Schuster, a senior research fellow at Claremont
Graduate University. That leaves many doctoral degree candidates stuck with
adjunct work, which can pay as little as $2,000 a semester.
Graduates with humanities doctorates are particular
vulnerable to the downturn in university hiring. In 2008, 86% of humanities
doctoral recipients ended up in academia, whereas only 15% of engineering
doctoral recipients did.
The number of jobs listed in the Modern Language
Assn.'s Job Information List, a clearinghouse for English and foreign
literature doctoral students, is down more than 40% over two years, the
steepest decline since the association began keeping count.
But doctoral recipients in all disciplines are
having a tough time landing teaching gigs, said William Pannapacker, a
columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education and an associate professor
of English at Hope College in Michigan. For example, university job openings
requiring a math doctorate declined 40% in the 2009-10 academic year from
the year before, according to the American Mathematical Society.
At the same time, schools keep producing doctoral
recipients. The number of doctorates awarded by U.S. colleges and
universities reached an all-time high in 2008 at 48,802, nearly double the
number awarded in 1970.
People holding doctoral degrees do, on average,
make more money than workers with less education. The 2009 median weekly
earnings for someone with a doctorate was $1,532, 50% higher than the median
weekly earnings for someone with a bachelor's degree, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Continued in article
Still a shortage of PhDs in accounting
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
"What the new iPhone probably won't include (but should)," Babbage
Blog (from The Economist Magazine), June 6, 2010 ---
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage?fsrc=nlw|pub|03_30_2010|publishers_newsletter
"The Evolution of Computer Science," MIT's Technology Review, June 3,
2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25276/?nlid=3070
Bing for the
Iphone and Ipad
From:
AECM, Accounting Education using Computers and Multimedia [mailto:AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Richard Campbell
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 5:39 PM
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
Subject: Bing for the Iphone and Ipad
AECMers:
Microsoft really got it right on this free app.
It uses the geolocation capability of the Iphone and Ipad to provide great
assistance.
Type in "Chinese restaurant" and it will find the nearest to your present
location, and provide
a route to that destination, and the phone number to call for reservations.
The app is graphically superior to google, and the ads are less intrusive
than google's.
Richard
Richard J. Campbell
mailto:campbell@rio.edu
Jensen Comment
Read more of the
rave reviews at
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bing/id345323231?mt=8
Only a small percentage of college students are "very interested" in buying
and iPad and the competition will soon heat up
"Minor Bumps for iPad," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, April
23, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/23/ipad
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic book readers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/eBooks.htm
Of course the iPad is more than an electronic book reader, although this is one
of its major features.
"Blackboard's 'Next Generation' Software Gets Mixed Reviews," by
Sophia Li, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Blackboards-Next-Generation/24539/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on Blackboard ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Blackboard.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the history of course management systems ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
"The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains," by Nicholas Carr, Wired
Magazine, June 2010 ---
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1
During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of
psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web
surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair
of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his
subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance
imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a
handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional
benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new
car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by
increases in blood flow.
The two groups showed marked differences. Brain
activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the
newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with
problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal
blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no
significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups.
The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of
experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.
The most remarkable result of the experiment
emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the
novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet.
The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically;
it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet
and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He
later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same
results.
When first publicized, the findings were greeted
with cheers. By keeping lots of brain cells buzzing, Google seemed to be
making people smarter. But as Small was careful to point out, more brain
activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was
how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways.
“The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we
live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly
altering our brains.”
What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That
question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the
years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the
news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists,
neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go
online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and
distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants
us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into
shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.
Back in the 1980s, when schools began investing
heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent
advantages of digital documents over paper ones. Many educators were
convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on monitors would
be a boon to learning. Hypertext would strengthen critical thinking, the
argument went, by enabling students to switch easily between different
viewpoints. Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages,
readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections between diverse
works. The hyperlink would be a technology of liberation.
By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was
turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different
picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents,
it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks,
deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are
extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration,
such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended
just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included
hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment
revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”
Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext
ubiquitous and presumably less startling and unfamiliar, the cognitive
problems remain. Research continues to show that people who read linear text
comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text
peppered with links. In a 2001 study, two scholars in Canada asked 70 people
to read “The Demon Lover,” a short story by Elizabeth Bowen. One group read
it in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read a passage and click the
word next to move ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to
click on highlighted words in the text to move ahead. It took the hypertext
readers longer to read the document, and they were seven times more likely
to say they found it confusing. Another researcher, Erping Zhu, had people
read a passage of digital prose but varied the number of links appearing in
it. She then gave the readers a multiple-choice quiz and had them write a
summary of what they had read. She found that comprehension declined as the
number of links increased—whether or not people clicked on them. After all,
whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to
click, which is itself distracting.
Continued in article (including hot links not provided above)
Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Kids to Today Are Not Necessarily Lazy; Their Brains May Be Different
Video: A Vision of Students Today ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
Brain Alterations Possibly Caused by the World Wide Web ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#BrainAlteration
"The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains," by
Nicholas Carr, Wired Magazine, June 2010 ---
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1
Meanwhile, from an
infinity of online sources, heads are being filled with data, information, and
images, from all manner of sources — responsible, sensible, loony, exploitative,
and malevolent. Fencing off children from much of this stuff has become a major
parental concern, as well as a hopeless task, given children’s zest for the
forbidden and preternatural facility at the keyboard.
Dan Greenberg,
"We've Got a Monster on the Loose: It's Called the Internet," Chronicle of
Higher Education, February 27, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=247
June 6, 2010 message from Richard Newmark
[richard.newmark@PHDUH.COM]
I think this little anecdote
highlights massive differences between kids today and kids a generation or
two or three ago.
My son, Quinn, is 11. He has been
doing video editing for two or three years. We started with Windows Movie
Maker and I did much of the work. As time went on, he started doing more of
the work himself. I always tried to let him make the creative decisions.
Then, last summer, I purchased a MacBook Pro and Final Cut Studio for him so
he could use what he learned at a week-long digital video editing camp. Now
he is quite competent with the basic tool-set of Final Cut. You can see some
of his work at
http://www.youtube.com/phduh.
Well, after his project, a video
of Mile High Mayhem three-day rocket launch that we attended
http://www.youtube.com/phduh#p/a/u/0/Utptvf8hrBo , I
floated the idea about him doing video-editing for other people and making
money doing it. He is really excited about the idea. We talked about setting
up a Youtube channel as an advertisement, using PayPal to collect money,
using Skype to video conference with customers, and ftp sites like
sendspace.com to deliver the final product.
For me, this exercise highlights
how different the world is now as compared to when we were kids. It also
illustrates that today’s kids are not lazy; they just have a totally
different mindset than we do. Maybe it helps that his dad is a former CPA
and an AIS professor and that both of his parents make sure that we nurture
his creativity.
Rick
----------------------------------------
Richard Newmark
Professor, School of Accounting and Computer Information Systems
Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business
2004 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality
Award Winner
University of Northern Colorado
Campus Box 128, Kepner Hall 2090G
Greeley, CO 80639
(970) 405-5576 mobile/home
(801) 858-9335 personal fax
http://PhDuh.com/unc
Bob Jensen's Threads on the Dark Side of Education Technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things this site provides acceptance rate percentages
I'm dubious about the data validity
"Lessons for New Professors," by Elizabeth Parfitt, Inside Higher
Ed, May 28, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/05/28/parfitt
Bob Jensen's Somewhat Dated Advice for New Faculty ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
Higher Education Controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Keeping Fraud in the Cross Hairs." by Joseph T. Wells (Interviewed) ,
Journal of Accountancy, June 2010 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2010/Jun/20102852.htm
ID Theft Protection (including some ID Theft Horror Stories) ---
http://www.criminal-justice-careers.com/crime/id-theft.html
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ThingsToKnow
Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Won't Pledge to "Do No Evil"
"MBA Oath Loses Traction at Yale," Business Week, May 26, 2010
---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2010/05/mba_oath_loses_traction_at_yale.html
It looks like the MBA Oath, a controversial attempt
to give the business world its own version of the Hippocratic Oath, may be
suffering its first major defeat. The Community Blog at the
Yale School of Management (Yale
Full-Time MBA Profile) is
reporting
that an SOM Town Hall meeting ended without an
endorsement of the oath. According to the post, “We didn’t reach a
consensus, so we won’t join, nor formally oppose the Business Oath. Future
classes may decide to take a stance, but for now, the conversation has
begun, and individuals can sign or not sign as they see fit.” Bottom line:
an oath that has been enthusiastically embraced by virtually every top
b-school is getting a noncommittal shrug from Yale.
Don't Get Gored
"For Richer or Poorer: Financial Planning for Newlyweds," Smartpros,
May 27, 2010 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x69612.xml
"FDIC Offers Money-Saving Tips in the New World of Credit Cards,"
Smartpros, May 27, 2010 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x69598.xml
Bob Jensen's helpers for personal financial planning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
"High-Profile Trader's Harsh Critique of For-Profit Colleges,"
Inside Higher Ed, May 27, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/27/qt#228602
Steven Eisman, the Wall Street trader who was
mythologized in Michael Lewis's
The Big Short as that rare person who saw the
subprime mortgage crisis coming and made a killing as a result, thinks he
has seen the next big explosive and exploitative financial industry --
for-profit higher education -- and he's making sure as many people as
possible know it. In
a speech Wednesday at the Ira Sohn Investment
Research Conference, an
exclusive
gathering at which financial analysts who rarely
share their insights publicly are encouraged to dish their "best investment
ideas," Eisman started off with a broadside against Wall Street's college
companies.
"Until recently, I thought that there would never
again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially
destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry," said
Eisman, of FrontPoint Financial Services Fund. "I was wrong. The For-Profit
Education Industry has proven equal to the task." Eisman's speech lays out
his analysis of the sector's enormous profitability and its questionable
quality, then argues that the colleges' business model is about to be
radically transformed by the Obama administration's plan to hold the
institutions accountable for the student-debt-to-income ratio of their
graduates. "Under gainful employment, most of the companies still have high
operating margins relative to other industries," Eisman said. "They are just
less profitable and significantly overvalued. Downside risk could be as high
as 50 percent. And let me add that I hope that gainful employment is just
the beginning. Hopefully, the DOE will be looking into ways of improving
accreditation and of ways to tighten rules on defaults." Stocks of the
companies appeared to fall briefly in the last hour of trading Wednesday,
after
news of Eisman's speech
made the rounds.
"Subprime goes to college: The new mortgage crisis — how students at
for-profit universities could default on $275 billion in taxpayer-backed student
loans," by Steven Eusnan, The New York Post, June 6, 2010 ---
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/subprime_goes_to_college_FeiheNJfGYtoSwmtl5etJP
Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an
opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive
and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong.
The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.
The for-profit industry has grown at an extreme and unusual rate,
driven by easy access to government sponsored debt in the form of
Title IV student loans, where the credit is guaranteed by the
government. Thus, the government, the students and the taxpayer bear
all the risk, and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards.
This is similar to the subprime mortgage sector in that the subprime
originators bore far less risk than the investors in their mortgage
paper.
Read more:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/subprime_goes_to_college_FeiheNJfGYtoSwmtl5etJP#ixzz0q6iq9jsm
Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an
opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive
and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong.
The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.
The for-profit industry has grown at an extreme and unusual rate,
driven by easy access to government sponsored debt in the form of
Title IV student loans, where the credit is guaranteed by the
government. Thus, the government, the students and the taxpayer bear
all the risk, and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards.
This is similar to the subprime mortgage sector in that the subprime
originators bore far less risk than the investors in their mortgage
paper.
Read more:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/subprime_goes_to_college_FeiheNJfGYtoSwmtl5etJP#ixzz0q6iq9jsm
Until recently, I thought that there would
never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially
destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was
wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.
The for-profit industry has grown at an
extreme and unusual rate, driven by easy access to government sponsored debt
in the form of Title IV student loans, where the credit is guaranteed by the
government. Thus, the government, the students and the taxpayer bear all the
risk, and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards. This is similar to
the subprime mortgage sector in that the subprime originators bore far less
risk than the investors in their mortgage paper.
A student prepares for an online quiz at home
for the Universtity of Phoenix. In the past 10 years, the for-profit
education industry has grown 5-10 times the historical rate of traditional
post secondary education. As of 2009, the industry had almost 10% of
enrolled students but claimed nearly 25% of the $89 billion of federal Title
IV student loans and grant disbursements. At the current pace of growth,
for-profit schools will draw 40% of all Title IV aid in 10 years.
How has this been allowed to happen?
The simple answer is that they’ve hired every
lobbyist in Washington, DC. There has been a revolving door between the
people who work for this industry and the halls of government. One example
is Sally Stroup. In 2001-2002, she was the head lobbyist for the Apollo
Group — the company behind the University of Phoenix and the largest
for-profit educator. But from 2002-2006 she became assistant secretary of
post-secondary education for the Department of Education under President
Bush. In other words, she was directly in charge of regulating the industry
she had previously lobbied for.
From 1987 through 2000, the amount of total
Title IV dollars received by students of for-profit schools fluctuated
between $2 billion and $4 billion per annum. But when the Bush
administration took over, the DOE gutted many of the rules that governed the
conduct of this industry. Once the floodgates were opened, the industry
embarked on 10 years of unrestricted massive growth. Federal dollars flowing
to the industry exploded to over $21 billion, a 450% increase.
At many major-for profit institutions, federal
Title IV loan and grant dollars now comprise close to 90% of total revenues.
And this growth has resulted in spectacular profits and executive salaries.
For example, ITT Educational Services, or ESI, has a roughly 40% operating
margin vs. the 7%-12% margins of other companies that receive major
government contracts. ESI is more profitable on a margin basis than even
Apple.
This growth is purely a function of government
largesse, as Title IV has accounted for more than 100% of revenue growth.
Here is one of the more upsetting statistics.
In fiscal 2009, Apollo increased total revenues by $833 million. Of that
amount, $1.1 billion came from Title IV federally funded student loans and
grants. More than 100% of the revenue growth came from the federal
government. But of this incremental $1.1 billion in federal loan and grant
dollars, the company only spent an incremental $99 million on faculty
compensation and instructional costs — that’s 9 cents on every dollar
received from the government going toward actual education. The rest went to
marketing and paying executives.
Leaving politics aside for a moment, the other
major reason why the industry has taken an ever increasing share of
government dollars is that it has turned the typical education model on its
head. And here is where the subprime analogy becomes very clear.
There is a traditional relationship between
matching means and cost in education. Typically, families of lesser
financial means seek lower cost colleges in order to maximize the available
Title IV loans and grants — thereby getting the most out of every dollar and
minimizing debt burdens.
The for-profit model seeks to recruit those
with the greatest financial need and put them in high cost institutions.
This formula maximizes the amount of Title IV loans and grants that these
students receive.
With billboards lining the poorest
neighborhoods in America and recruiters trolling casinos and homeless
shelters (and I mean that literally), the for-profits have become
increasingly adept at pitching the dream of a better life and higher
earnings to the most vulnerable of society.
If the industry in fact educated its students
and got them good jobs that enabled them to receive higher incomes and to
pay off their student loans, everything I’ve just said would be irrelevant.
So the key question to ask is — what do these
students get for their education? In many cases, NOT much, not much at all.
At one Corinthian Colleges-owned Everest
College campus in California, students paid $16,000 for an eight-month
course in medical assisting. Upon nearing completion, the students learned
that not only would their credits not transfer to any community or four-year
college, but also that their degree is not recognized by the American
Association for Medical Assistants. Hospitals refuse to even interview
graduates.
And look at drop-out rates. Companies don’t
fully disclose graduation rates, but using both DOE data and
company-provided information, I calculate drop out rates of most schools are
50%-plus per year.
Default rates on student loans are already
starting to skyrocket. It’s just like subprime — which grew at any cost and
kept weakening its underwriting standards to grow.
The bottom line is that as long as the
government continues to flood the for-profit education industry with loan
dollars and the risk for these loans is borne solely by the students and the
government, then the industry has every incentive to grow at all costs,
compensate employees based on enrollment, influence key regulatory bodies
and manipulate reported statistics — all to maintain access to the
government’s money.
Read more:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/subprime_goes_to_college_FeiheNJfGYtoSwmtl5etJP#ixzz0q6hwLIst
June 6, 2010 reply from
dgsearfoss@comcast.net
Hi Bob,
Equally as bad, if not worse, are the companies
that provide on-line courses to the military. They price their tuition at
exactly the amount that will be covered by the military, set horribly low
levels of expectation as reflected by the “testing” and “grading”, and
virtually none of the “credits” are transferrable to an accredited higher
education institution.
It is a scandal that should be dealt with harshly
by Congress.
Jerry
"Higher education's bubble is about to
burst," by: University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds,
Washington Examiner, June 6, 2010 ---
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Higher-education_s-bubble-is-about-to-burst-95639354.html
It's a story of an industry that may sound
familiar.
The buyers think what they're buying will
appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more
and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset
by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.
Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds
of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides,
for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily.
What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it
doesn't.
Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm
afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education
bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher
education, I think it's better for us to face up to what's going on before
the bubble bursts messily.
College has gotten a lot more expensive. A recent
Money magazine report notes: "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount
families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982. ... Normal
supply and demand can't begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude."
Consumers would balk, except for two things.
First -- as with the housing bubble -- cheap and
readily available credit has let people borrow to finance education. They're
willing to do so because of (1) consumer ignorance, as students (and, often,
their parents) don't fully grasp just how harsh the impact of student loan
payments will be after graduation; and (2) a belief that, whatever the cost,
a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity.
Bubbles burst when there are no longer enough
excessively optimistic and ignorant folks to fuel them. And there are signs
that this is beginning to happen already.
A New York Times profile last week described
Courtney Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University with nearly
$100,000 in student loan debt -- debt that her degree in Religious and
Women's Studies did not equip her to repay. Payments on the debt are about
$700 per month, equivalent to a respectable house payment, and a major bite
on her monthly income of $2,300 as a photographer's assistant earning an
hourly wage.
And, unlike a bad mortgage on an underwater house,
Munna can't simply walk away from her student loans, which cannot be
expunged in a bankruptcy. She's stuck in a financial trap.
Some might say that she deserves it -- who borrows
$100,000 to finance a degree in women's and religious studies that won't
make you any money? She should have wised up, and others should learn from
her mistake, instead of learning too late, as she did: "I don't want to
spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for
four years and would happily give back."
But bubbles burst when people catch on, and there's
some evidence that people are beginning to catch on. Student loan demand,
according to a recent report in the Washington Post, is going soft, and
students are expressing a willingness to go to a cheaper school rather than
run up debt. Things haven't collapsed yet, but they're looking shakier --
kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.
So what happens if the bubble collapses? Will it be
a tragedy, with millions of Americans losing their path to higher-paying
jobs?
Maybe not. College is often described as a path to
prosperity, but is it? A college education can help people make more money
in three different ways.
First, it may actually make them more economically
productive by teaching them skills valued in the workplace: Computer
programming, nursing or engineering, say. (Religious and women's studies,
not so much.)
Second, it may provide a credential that employers
want, not because it represents actual skills, but because it's a weeding
tool that doesn't produce civil-rights suits as, say, IQ tests might. A
four-year college degree, even if its holder acquired no actual skills, at
least indicates some ability to show up on time and perform as instructed.
And, third, a college degree -- at least an elite
one -- may hook its holder up with a useful social network that can provide
jobs and opportunities in the future. (This is more true if it's a degree
from Yale than if it's one from Eastern Kentucky, but it's true everywhere
to some degree).
While an individual might rationally pursue all
three of these, only the first one -- actual added skills -- produces a net
benefit for society. The other two are just distributional -- about who gets
the goodies, not about making more of them.
Yet today's college education system seems to be in
the business of selling parts two and three to a much greater degree than
part one, along with selling the even-harder-to-quantify "college
experience," which as often as not boils down to four (or more) years of
partying.
Post-bubble, perhaps students -- and employers, not
to mention parents and lenders -- will focus instead on education that
fosters economic value. And that is likely to press colleges to focus more
on providing useful majors. (That doesn't necessarily rule out traditional
liberal-arts majors, so long as they are rigorous and require a real general
education, rather than trendy and easy subjects, but the key word here is
"rigorous.")
My question is whether traditional academic
institutions will be able to keep up with the times, or whether -- as Anya
Kamenetz suggests in her new book, "DIY U" -- the real pioneering will be in
online education and the work of "edupunks" who are more interested in
finding new ways of teaching and learning than in protecting existing
interests.
I'm betting on the latter. Industries seldom reform
themselves, and real competition usually comes from the outside. Keep your
eyes open -- and, if you're planning on applying to college, watch out for
those student loans.
Examiner contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds hosts "InstaVision" on
PJTV.com and blogs at Instapundit.com.
He is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee.
Bob Jensen's threads on how for-profit universities operate in the gray
zone of fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
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
Bob Jensen's threads on many of the for-profit universities are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Although there is a gray zone, for-profit colleges should not be confused
with diploma mills ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
"'College, Inc.'," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education,
May 10, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/College-Inc/23850/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
PBS broadcast a
documentary on for-profit higher education last
week, titled College, Inc. It begins with the slightly ridiculous
figure of
Michael Clifford, a former cocaine abuser turned
born-again Christian who never went to college, yet makes a living padding
around the lawn of his oceanside home wearing sandals and loose-fitting
print shirts, buying up distressed non-profit colleges and turning them into
for-profit money machines.
Improbably, Clifford emerges from the documentary
looking OK. When asked what he brings to the deals he brokers, he cites
nothing educational. Instead, it's the "Three M's: Money, Management, and
Marketing." And hey, there's nothing wrong with that. A college may have
deep traditions and dedicated faculty, but if it's bankrupt, anonymous, and
incompetently run, it won't do students much good. "Nonprofit" colleges that
pay their leaders executive salaries and run
multi-billion dollar sports franchises have long
since ceded the moral high ground when it comes to chasing the bottom line.
The problem with for-profit higher education, as
the documentary ably shows, is that people like Clifford are applying
private sector principles to an industry with a number of distinct
characteristics. Four stand out. First, it's heavily subsidized. Corporate
giants like the University of Phoenix are now pulling in hundreds of
millions of dollars per year from the taxpayers, through federal grants and
student loans. Second, it's awkwardly regulated. Regional accreditors may
protest that their imprimatur isn't like a taxicab medallion to be bought
and sold on the open market. But as the documentary makes clear, that's
precisely the way it works now. (Clifford puts the value at $10-million.)
Third, it's hard for consumers to know what they're
getting at the point of purchase. College is an experiential good;
reputations and brochures can only tell you so much. Fourth—and I don't
think this is given proper weight when people think about the dynamics of
the higher-education market—college is generally something you only buy a
couple of times, early in your adult life.
All of which creates the potential—arguably, the
inevitability—for sad situations like the three nursing students in the
documentary who were comprehensively ripped off by a for-profit school that
sent them to a daycare center for their "pediatric rotation" and left them
with no job prospects and tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The
government subsidies create huge incentives for for-profit colleges to
enroll anyone they can find. The awkward regulation offers little in the way
of effective oversight. The opaque nature of the higher-education experience
makes it hard for consumers to sniff out fraudsters up-front. And the fact
that people don't continually purchase higher education throughout their
lives limits the downside for bad actors. A restaurant or automobile
manufacturer that continually screws its customers will eventually go out of
business. For colleges, there's always another batch of high-school
graduates to enroll.
The Obama administration has made waves in recent
months by proposing to tackle some of these problems by implementing
"gainful
employment" rules that would essentially require
for-profits to show that students will be able to make enough money with
their degrees to pay back their loans. It's a good idea, but it also raises
an interesting question: Why apply this policy only to for-profits?
Corporate higher education may be the fastest growing segment of the market,
but it still educates a small minority of students and will for a long time
to come. There are plenty of traditional colleges out there that are mainly
in the business of preparing students for jobs, and that charge a lot of
money for degrees of questionable value. What would happen if the gainful
employment standard were applied to a mediocre private university that
happily allows undergraduates to take out six-figure loans in exchange for a
plain-vanilla business B.A.?
The gainful employment standard highlights some of
my biggest concerns about the Obama administration's approach to
higher-education policy. To its lasting credit, the administration has taken
on powerful moneyed interests and succeeded. Taking down the FFEL program
was a historic victory for low-income students and reining in the abuses of
for-profit higher education is a needed and important step.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The biggest question remains concerning the value of "education" at the micro
level (the student) and the macro level (society). It would seem that students
in training programs should have prospects of paying back the cost of the
training if "industry" is not willing to fully subsidize that particular type of
training.
Education is another question entirely, and we're still trying to resolve
issues of how education should be financed. I'm not in favor of "gainful
employment rules" for state universities, although I think such rules should be
imposed on for-profit colleges and universities.
What is currently happening is that training and education programs are in
most cases promising more than they can deliver in terms of gainful employment.
Naive students think a certificate or degree is "the" ticket to career success,
and many of them borrow tens of thousands of dollars to a point where they are
in debtor's prisons with their meager laboring wages garnished (take a debtor's
wages on legal orders) to pay for their business, science, and humanities
degrees that did not pay off in terms of career opportunities.
But that does not mean that their education did not pay off in terms of
life's fuller meaning. The question is who should pay for "life's fuller
meaning?" Among our 50 states, California had the best plan for universal
education. But fiscal mismanagement, especially very generous unfunded
state-worker unfunded pension plans, has now brought California to the brink of
bankruptcy. Increasing taxes in California is difficult because it already has
the highest state taxes in the nation.
Student borrowing to pay for pricey certificates and degrees is not a good
answer in my opinion, but if students borrow I think the best alternative is to
choose a lower-priced accredited state university. It will be a long, long time
before the United States will be able to fund "universal education" because of
existing unfunded entitlements for Social Security and other pension
obligations, Medicare, Medicaid, military retirements, etc.
I think it's time for our best state universities to reach out with more
distance education and training that prevent many of the rip-offs taking place
in the for-profit training and education sector. The training and education may
not be free, but state universities have the best chance of keeping costs down
and quality up.
"Wal-Mart Employees Get New College Program—Online," by Marc Parry,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Wal-Mart-Employees-Get-New/24504/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The American Public University System
has been described as a higher-education version
of Wal-Mart: a publicly traded corporation that mass-markets moderately
priced degrees in many fields.
Now it's more than an analogy. Under a deal
announced today, the for-profit online university
will offer Wal-Mart workers discounted tuition and credit for job
experience.
Such alliances are nothing new; see these materials
from
Strayer
and
Capella for other examples. But Wal-Mart is the
country's largest retailer. And the company is pledging to spend $50-million
over three years to help employees cover the cost of tuition and books
beyond the discounted rate, according to the
Associated Press.
"What's most significant about this is that, given
that APU is very small, this is a deal that has the potential to drive
enrollments that are above what investors are already expecting from them,"
Trace A. Urdan, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group, told Wired
Campus. "Which is why the stock is up."
Wal-Mart workers will be able to receive
credit—without having to pay for it—for job training in subjects like ethics
and retail inventory management, according to the AP.
Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million people in the U.S.
Roughly half of them have a high-school diploma but no college degree,
according to
The New York Times. A department-level
manager would end up paying about $7,900 for an associate degree, factoring
in the work credits and tuition discount, the newspaper reported.
“If 10 to 15 percent of employees take advantage of
this, that’s like graduating three Ohio State Universities,” Sara Martinez
Tucker, a former under secretary of education who is now on Wal-Mart’s
external advisory council, told the Times.
Jensen Comment
This Wal-Mart Fringe Benefit Should Be Carefully Investigated by Employees
It does not sit well with me!
- I certainly hope that the Wal-Mart contributions toward tuition can
be extended to state-supported colleges and universities having more
respected credits. For example, online degrees from the University of
Wisconsin or the University of Maryland are are likely much more
respected for job mobility and for acceptance into graduate schools.
- Giving credit for "job experience" is an absolute turn off for me.
Most adults have some form of "job experience." This is just not
equivalent to course credit experience in college where students face
examinations and academic projects. Weaker colleges generally use credit
for "job experience" ploy as a come on to attract applicants. But the
credits awarded for job experience are not likely to be transferrable to
traditional colleges and universities.
- The "discounted tuition" in this for-profit online program is likely
to be higher than the in-state tuition from state-supported colleges and
universities.
- I'm dubious about the standards for admission in for-profit colleges
as well as the rigor of the courses. Watch the Frontline video served up
by PBS.
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
- The American Public University System is accredited by the North
Central Association accrediting agency that is now under investigation
for weakened standards for college credits.
"Inspector General Keeps the Pressure on a Regional Accreditor," by Eric
Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 27, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Inspector-General-Keeps-the/65691/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The inspector general of the U.S. Department of
Education has reaffirmed a recommendation that the department should
consider sanctions for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central
Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's major regional
accrediting organizations. In a
report this week, the Office of Inspector General
issued its final recommendations stemming from a
2009 examination of the commission's standards for
measuring credit hours and program length, and affirmed its earlier critique
that the commission had been too lax in its standards for determining the
amount of credit a student receives for course work.
The Higher Learning Commission accredits more than
1,000 institutions in 19 states. The Office of Inspector General completed
similar reports for two other regional accreditors late last year but did
not suggest any sanctions for those organizations.
Possible sanctions against an accreditor include
limiting, suspending, or terminating its recognition by the secretary of
education as a reliable authority for determining the quality of education
at the institutions it accredits. Colleges need accreditation from a
federally recognized agency in order to be eligible to participate in the
federal student-aid programs.
In its examination of the Higher Learning
Commission, the office looked at the commission's reaccreditation of six
member institutions: Baker College, DePaul University, Kaplan University,
Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and the
University of Phoenix. The office chose those institutions—two public, two
private, and two proprietary institutions—as those that received the highest
amounts of federal funds under Title IV, the section of the Higher Education
Act that governs the federal student-aid programs.
It also reviewed the accreditation status of
American InterContinental University and the Art Institute of Colorado, two
institutions that had sought initial accreditation from the commission
during the period the office studied.
The review found that the Higher Learning
Commission "does not have an established definition of a credit hour or
minimum requirements for program length and the assignment of credit hours,"
the report says. "The lack of a credit-hour definition and minimum
requirements could result in inflated credit hours, the improper designation
of full-time student status, and the over-awarding of Title IV funds," the
office concluded in its letter to the commission's president, Sylvia
Manning.
More important, the office reported that the
commission had allowed American InterContinental University to become
accredited in 2009 despite having an "egregious" credit policy.
In a letter responding to the commission, Ms.
Manning wrote that the inspector general had ignored the limitations the
accreditor had placed on American InterContinental to ensure that the
institution improved its standards, an effort that had achieved the intended
results, she said. "These restrictions were intended to force change at the
institution and force it quickly."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The most successful for-profit universities advertise heavily about credibility
due to being "regionally accredited." In some cases this accreditation was
initially bought rather than achieved such as by buying up a small, albeit still
accredited, bankrupt not-for-profit private college that's washed up on the
beach. This begs the question about how some for-profit universities maintain
the spirit of accreditation acquired in this manner.
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Are You a Teacher or Are You a Mentor?" by Joe Hoyle, Teaching
Financial Accounting Blog, May 30, 2010 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2010/05/are-you-teacher-or-are-you-mentor.html
"How Do You Radically Improve Education?" by Joe Hoyle,
Teaching Financial Accounting Blog, May 30, 2010 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-do-you-radically-improve-education.html
Really about what's wrong with textbooks.
The above site provides a link to Joe's updated and free financial accounting
textbook.
Joe also makes his examinations free to educators.
"Why losers have delusions of grandeur: The less you know, the more
you think you do," by Daniel Simons and Chrostopher Chapris, The
Washington Post, May 23, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/why_losers_have_delusions_of_grandeur_kmSEG1YrE1Uhfh1fL4tdWP
Charles Darwin observed that “ignorance more
frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” That was certainly true
on the day in 1995 when a man named McArthur Wheeler boldly robbed two banks
in Pittsburgh without using a disguise. Security camera footage of him was
broadcast on the evening news the same day as the robberies, and he was
arrested an hour later. Mr. Wheeler was surprised when the police explained
how they had used the surveillance tapes to catch him. “But I wore the
juice,” he mumbled incredulously. He seemed to believe that rubbing his face
with lemon juice would blur his image and make him impossible to catch.
In movies, criminal masterminds often are geniuses,
James Bond villains in volcano lairs. But the stereotype doesn’t apply to
actual cons, at least not the ones who get caught.
Studies show those convicted of crimes are, on
average, less intelligent than non-criminals. And they can be spectacularly
foolish. One of us had a high school classmate who decided to vandalize the
school — by spray painting his own initials on the wall. A Briton named
Peter Addison went one step further and vandalized the side of a building by
writing “Peter Addison was here.” Sixty-six-year-old Samuel Porter tried to
pass a one-million-dollar bill at a supermarket in the United States and
became irate when the cashier wouldn’t make change for him. All of these
people seem to have been under what we call the “illusion of confidence,”
which is the persistent belief that we are more skilled than we really are —
in this case, that the criminals were so good they would not get caught.
The story of McArthur Wheeler was told by social
psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning in a brilliant paper entitled
“Unskilled and Unaware of It.” In a set of clever experiments, Kruger and
Dunning showed that people with the least skill are the most likely to
overestimate their abilities. For example, they measured people’s sense of
humor (psychologists have learned that almost anything can be measured) and
found that those who scored the lowest on their test still thought they had
a better-than-average sense of what is funny.
These findings help to explain why shows like
“American Idol” and “Last Comic Standing” attract so many aspiring
contestants who have no hope of qualifying, let alone winning. Many are just
seeking a few seconds of TV time and a shot at “Pants on the Ground” fame,
but some seem genuinely shocked when the judges reject them.
It turns out that the illusion of confidence can
survive even the measurement of skill.
Chess, for instance, has a mathematical rating
system that provides up-to-date, accurate and precise numerical information
about a player’s “strength” (chess jargon for ability) relative to other
players. Ratings are public knowledge and are printed next to each player’s
name on tournament scoreboards. Ratings are valued so highly that chess
players often remember their opponents better by their ratings than by their
names or faces. “I beat a 1600” or “I lost to a 2100” are not uncommon
things to hear in the hallway outside the playing room.
Armed with knowledge of their own ratings, players
ought to be exquisitely aware of how competent they are. But what do they
actually think about their own abilities? Some years ago, in a study we
conducted with our colleague Daniel Benjamin, we asked a group of chess
players at major tournaments two simple questions: “What is your most recent
official chess rating?” and “What do you think your rating should be to
reflect your true current strength?”
As expected, all of the players knew their actual
ratings. Yet 75% of them thought that their rating underestimated their true
playing ability. The magnitude of their overconfidence was stunning: On
average, these competitive chess players estimated that they would win a
match against another player with the exact same rating as their own by a
two-to-one margin — a crushing victory. Of course, the most likely outcome
of such a match would be a tie.
This tendency for the least skilled among us to
overestimate their abilities the most has more serious consequences than an
inflated sense of humor or chess ability. Everyone has encountered
obliviously incompetent managers who make life miserable for their
underlings because they suffer from the illusion of confidence. And as the
joke reminds us, the people who graduate last in their medical school class
are still doctors; what is less funny is that they probably believe they are
still the best ones.
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of “The
Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us” (Crown). Visit
their website at
theinvisiblegorilla.com.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"BP Misleads You With Charts," by Andrew Price, Good Blog, May
27, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://www.good.is/post/bp-misleads-you-with-charts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+good%2Flbvp+%28GOOD+Main+RSS+Feed%29
Kent Wells, BP's
Senior Vice President of Exploration and Production, has
a "technical briefing" video up. Its aim is to
give the public a little more detail about their efforts to stop the leak.
After explaining what all their different ships and robots are doing, he
gets into their containment efforts and talks about how they're collecting
oil directly from the leak with their "riser insertion tool." He uses this
chart (bigger version
here) to illustrate
the amount they've been collecting.
case you can't read
the chart, it has time on the x-axis and the volume of oil collected on the
y-axis. Wells explains (at around 4:10) that since they got the riser
insertion tool in there, they've been tweaking a few different variables to
maximize the amount of oil it collects and points to the chart, saying that
it illustrates how they've been "ramping up."
Here's the problem (first
caught by Rachel Maddow's blog): The volume of oil
represented by those green bars is cumulative. It's the running total amount
of oil the riser insertion tool has collected, not each day's individual
total. So of course it's increasing. It couldn't possibly decrease. In the
context of the video, however, you might well think that these ever-taller
green bars represent an ever-more effective oil collection thanks to the
parameter tweaking he's just been talking about.
And worse, if you look at the amounts of oil collected on each day, they
don't steadily increase. Here's a chart from Stephen Few:
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on data visualization are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm
Watch the Video: Tax Professor Amy Dunbar Loves Google Docs
May 31, 2010 message from Amy Dunbar
[Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
I just finished the first week of a 12-week MSA
online tax course at UConn. I put students in groups and I ask them to work
fairly lengthy quizzes (homework) independently, putting their answers in an
Excel spreadsheet, and then they meet in chats to discuss their differences.
When they can’t resolve a question, they invite me into chat. This week a
student introduced me to Google docs, and I was swept off my feet by the way
this tool could be used in my class. I love it! I created a video on the fly
on Thursday to illustrate how to create a spreadsheet and share it with
other group members. I may be the last to the party on this tool, but in
case some of you aren’t aware of it, I am posting the video.
http://users.business.uconn.edu/adunbar/videos/GoogleDocs/GoogleDocs.html
If anyone wants the “quiz” that the students
worked, send me an email (not AECM), and I will send you the file.
Amy
Amy Dunbar University of Connecticut School of
Business Department of Accounting 2100 Hillside Road Unit 1041 Storrs, CT
06269-1041
cell 860-208-2737
amy.dunbar@business.uconn.ed
Interactive (online or offline) Homework and Other Student-Friendly
Features of Google Apps
Google Docs has added an equation editor so students
can actually complete math problems within a document, allowing students to not
only write papers that include numbers and equations but also take notes from
quantitative classes using Google Docs. Google has also added the ability to
insert superscripts and subscripts, which can be useful for writing out chemical
compounds or algebraic expressions.
"Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly," by Lena Rao, TechCrunch.com via The
Washington Post, September 28, 2009 ---
Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/28/AR2009092802665.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Google has been aggressively marketing Google Apps
to schools, recently
launching a
centralized site designed to recruit universities and colleges. Now, Google
is
tweaking Google Docs, which is a part of Google
Apps' productivity suite, by adding a few student-friendly features.
Google Docs has added an equation editor so
students can actually complete math problems within a document, allowing
students to not only write papers that include numbers and equations but
also take notes from quantitative classes using Google Docs. Google has also
added the ability to insert superscripts and subscripts, which can be useful
for writing out chemical compounds or algebraic expressions.
Google is also trying to
make Docs appealing to those humanities majors out there by letting users to
select from various bulleting styles for creating outlines and giving
students ability to print footnotes as endnotes for term papers. And a few
weeks ago, Google
launched a translation feature in Google Docs.
As we've written in the
past, Google is wise to recruit educational institutions because that's
where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances
to productivity apps. Drawing from Apple's strategy, Google knows that brand
loyalty is definitely forged at these schools and is steadily developing its
products to become more appealing to students. Rival Microsoft is also
launching web-based versions of its Office
products aimed at the student audience. And startup
Zoho offers a free web-based productivity suite.
May 31, 2010 reply from Rick Lillie
[rlillie@CSUSB.EDU]
Hi Amy,
I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets with all of my courses. It's free,
includes most of the Microsoft Office features, and makes it easy for
students to collaborate on team projects. It also makes it easy to submit
the final document in various formats (e.g., .pdf format).
My students use two communication tools in conjunction with Google Docs and
Spreadsheets (i.e., TokBox and Skype). To use these tools, they need a
headset/microphone and webcam.
TokBox (http://www.tokbox.com)
is a free, hosted video messaging service. You can record up to a 10 minute
video clip that can be shared by URL link. TokBox also includes a video
chat feature that enables multiple people to video conference. This feature
works great with study teams.
Skype (http://www.skype.com)
includes chat, audio and video-conferencing. The chat feature works
probably better than what you have been using. With a headset/microphone,
you can have up to 10+ people in a audio conference call.
Video-conferencing is 1:1 and includes a great screen sharing feature.
You can really change the nature of team collaboration when you combine
Google Docs and Spreadsheets with TokBox and/or Skype. Following is an
example of how to do this.
EXAMPLE
Students use Google Docs to create a shared workspace for writing a paper.
One student sets up the workspace and invites team members into the space
through an email link. Each team member is given editor rights.
Using a headset/microphone and webcam, students use TokBox to host a group
video conference call. This enables students to brainstorm and get a
project running.
During the work process, each team member adds/changes the paper in the
common workspace in Google Docs.
When it is time to pull the paper together and do final editing, students
use the audio conference call feature to talk with each other. While all
are online in Skype, each team member logs into the Google Docs paper and
views it on his/her computer screen. One or more students act as the
editor. All see changes as they are made.
When editing is finished, one student exports the final assignment document
in .pdf format to his/her hard drive. The student then submits the document
for grading (e.g., student uploads the paper through the Digital Drop Box in
Blackboard).
OUTCOME
By combining the features of Google Docs and Spreadsheets with communication
tools like TokBox and Skype, students learn how to use technology to get
things done. Major companies pay a fortune to do what your students can do
for free. Purchasing a headset/microphone and webcam is relatively
inexpensive. The experience students get is priceless.
I use this approach and technology tools with face-2-face, blended, and
online classes. It works great. The approach changes the nature of how
students and instructor interact in the teaching-learning experience.
Rick Lillie, MAS,
Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Email:
rlillie@csusb.edu
Telephone: (909) 537-5726Skype (Username): ricklillie
On the last day of
class, I would love to hear my students say:
“I never thought I could work so hard. I never thought I could learn so
much. I never thought I could think so deeply. And, it was actually fun.”
(Joe Hoyle)
Also see
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Teaching-with-Google-Wave/24406/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
June 2, 2010 reply from Amy Dunbar
[Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
And I forgot to mention Doodle, which a student introduced me to:
Just thought
I'd share another electronic tool that I am using in Phillips' class. We
were having some trouble scheduling so I made a Doodle (not sure if you ever
seen one before so I thought I would share). It is a great scheduling tool
for groups that are just starting up. Here is the email I sent them...
"Hey y'all,
I created a Doodle so we can schedule our meetings for the rest of the
semester. It's is really simple to use.
1. Click the link
http://www.doodle.com/
(I deleted the rest of the link)
2. Type in your name in the bottom row
3. Fill in the check boxes for times you ARE available
This should
make scheduling go a lot smoother. (fingers crossed)”
My class is simply fabulous!
Amy
UConn
Bob Jensen's threads on Tricks and Tools of the Trade are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"A Place to See and Be Seen (and Learn a Little, Too): $109-million
renovation of Ohio State's library reinforces its role in connecting the campus,"
by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Do-Libraries-Still-Matter-/65708/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
The Shocking Future of Higher Education and Education Technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm
"Countrywide (now part of Bank of America) Pays $108 Million to Settle
Fees Complaint." by Edward Wyatt, The New York Times, June 7, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/business/08ftc.html?hp
The Federal Trade Commission announced Monday that
two Countrywide mortgage servicing companies had agreed to pay $108 million
to settle charges that they collected excessive fees from financially
troubled homeowners.
The $108 million payment is one of the largest
overall judgments in the commission’s history and resolves its largest
mortgage servicing case. The money will go to more than 200,000 homeowners
whose loans were serviced by Countrywide before July 2008, when it was
acquired by Bank of America.
Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the Federal Trade
Commission, said that Countrywide’s loan servicing operation charged
excessive fees to homeowners who were behind on their mortgage payments, in
some cases asserting that customers were in default when they were not.
The fees, which were billed as the cost of services
like property inspections and lawn mowing, were grossly inflated after
Countrywide created subsidiaries to hire vendors to supply the services,
increasing the cost several-fold in the process, the commission said.
In addition, the commission said that Countrywide
at times imposed a new round of fees on homeowners who had recently emerged
from bankruptcy protection, sometimes threatening the consumers with a new
foreclosure.
“Countrywide profited from making risky loans to
homeowners during the boom years, and then profited again when the loans
failed,” Mr. Leibowitz said.
The $108 million settlement represents the agency’s
estimate of consumer losses, but does not include a penalty, which the
commission is not allowed to impose.
Clifford J. White III, the director of the
executive office for the United States Trustees Program, which enforces
bankruptcy laws for the Department of Justice, said that the commission’s
settlement “will help prevent future harm to homeowners in dire financial
straits who legitimately seek bankruptcy protection.”
The settlement bars Countrywide from making false
representations about amounts owed by homeowners, from charging fees for
services that are not authorized by loan agreements, and from charging
unreasonable amounts for work.
In addition, the settlement requires Countrywide to
establish internal procedures and an independent third party to verify that
bills and claims filed in bankruptcy court are valid.
“Now more than ever, companies that service
consumers’ mortgages need to do so in an honest and fair way,” Mr. Leibowitz
said.
The F.T.C. has not yet established how much will be
paid to each consumer, in part, Mr. Leibowitz said, because Countrywide’s
record keeping was “abysmal.” About $35 million of the $108 million total
was charged to homeowners already in bankruptcy proceedings, with the
remainder charged to customers whom Countrywide said were in default on
their mortgages.
Jensen Comment
I think Countrywide got off too easy. The evil Countrywide brokered mortgages to
borrowers that had no hope of paying back the debt and then charged they
excessive fees when they got behind in their payments.
Bob Jensen's threads on the sleaze of Countrywide are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Booksellers Embrace Amazon," Jerry Trites' E-Business Blog,
May 26, 2010 ---
http://trites-e-business.blogspot.com/2010/05/booksellers-embrace-amazon-while.html
While independent booksellers have long feared
Amazon, they are now changing their view. Many of them are selling through
the Amazon website and some of them are having some real success. It's a
change that might have legs, and might point the way to a new business model
for the industry.
People who sell books over the Internet are finding that Affiliate marketing
seems to work the best. This method involves splitting the sales revenues
with an affiliate, but in exchange gaining access to a wider market. Often,
the split goes as high as 50%.
With Amazon, the split is normally 15%, which makes for a better deal. One
downside, however, is that Amazon is so big that individual sellers can get
lost in it. That means they still need to launch effective marketing
campaigns. Nevertheless, some independent booksellers and making a success
of it. Here's a Here's a
write-up on this approach.write-up
on this approach.
Key takeaways from Sornette's forecasting method which he calls the
Financial Bubble Experiment
- There are good reasons to think that stock markets
are fundamentally unpredictable. Many econophysicists believe for example,
that the data from these markets bear a startling resemblance to other data
from seemingly unconnected phenomena, such as the size of earthquakes,
forest fires and avalanches, which defy all efforts of prediction.
- Sornette says there are two parts to his
forecasting method. First, he says bubbles are markets experiencing
greater-then-exponential growth. That makes them straightforward to spot,
something that surprisingly hasn't been possible before.
Second, he says these bubble markets display the tell signs of the human
behaviour that drives them. In particular,
people tend to follow each other and this result in a kind of herding
behaviour that causes prices to fluctuate in a periodic fashion.
- That's when Sornette announced an brave way of
test his forecasting method which he calls the Financial Bubble Experiment.
His idea is to make a forecast but keep it secret. He posts it in encrypted
form to the arXiv which time stamps it and ensures that no changes can be
made.
Then, six months later, he reveals the forecast and analyses how successful
it has been. Today, we can finally see the analysis of his first set of
predictions made 6 months ago.
- It's tempting to imagine that this extra
information would have a calming effect on otherwise volatile markets. But
the real worry is that it could have exactly the opposite effect: that
predictions of the imminent collapse whether accurate or not would lead to
violent corrections. That will have big implications for econophysics and
those who practice it.
"Econophysicist Accurately Forecasts Gold Price Collapse: The first results
from the Financial Bubble Experiment will have huge implications for
econophysics," MIT's Technology Review, June 2, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25269/?nlid=3065
There are good reasons to think that stock markets
are fundamentally unpredictable. Many econophysicists believe for example,
that the data from these markets bear a startling resemblance to other data
from seemingly unconnected phenomena, such as the size of earthquakes,
forest fires and avalanches, which defy all efforts of prediction.
Some go as far as to say that these phenomena are governed by the same
fundamental laws so that if one is unpredictable, then they all are.
And yet financial markets may be different. Last year, this blog covered an
extraordinary forecasts made by Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich, who declared that the Shanghia Composite
Index was a bubble market and that it would collapse within a certain
specific period of time.
Much to this blog's surprise, his prediction turned out to be uncannily
correct.
Sornette says there are two parts to his forecasting method. First, he says
bubbles are markets experiencing greater-then-exponential growth. That makes
them straightforward to spot, something that surprisingly hasn't been
possible before.
Second, he says these bubble markets display the tell signs of the human
behaviour that drives them. In particular, people tend to follow each other
and this result in a kind of herding behaviour that causes prices to
fluctuate in a periodic fashion.
However, the frequency of these fluctuations increases rapidly as the bubble
comes closer to bursting. It's this signal that Sornette uses in predicting
a change from superexponential growth to some other regime (which may not
necessarily be a collapse).
While Sornette's success last year was remarkable it wasn't entirely
convincing as this blog pointed out at the time
"The problem with this kind of forecast is that it is difficult interpret
the results. Does it really back Sornette's hypothesis that crashes are
predictable? How do we know that he doesn't make these predictions on a
regular basis and only publicise the ones that come true? Or perhaps he
modifies them as the due date gets closer so that they always seem to be
right (as weather forecasters do). It's even possible that his predictions
influence the markets: perhaps they trigger crashes Sornette believes he can
spot."
That's when Sornette announced an brave way of test his forecasting method
which he calls the Financial Bubble Experiment. His idea is to make a
forecast but keep it secret. He posts it in encrypted form to the arXiv
which time stamps it and ensures that no changes can be made.
Then, six months later, he reveals the forecast and analyses how successful
it has been. Today, we can finally see the analysis of his first set of
predictions made 6 months ago.
Back then, Sornette and his team identified four markets that seemed to be
experiencing superexponential growth and the tell tale signs of an imminent
bubble burst.
These were:the IBOVESPA Index of 50 brazillian stocks, a Merrill Lynch
Corporate Bond Indexthe spot price of goldcotton futures
These predictions had mixed success. First let's look at the failures.
Sornette says that it now turns out that the Merill Lynch Index was in the
process of collapse when Sornette made the original prediction six months
ago. So that bubble burst long before Sornette said it would. And cotton
futures are still climbing in a bubble market that has yet to collapse. So
much for those forecasts.
However, Sornette and his team were spot on with their other predictions.
Both the IBOVESPA Index and the spot price of gold changed from
superexponential growth to some other kind of regime in the time frame that
Sornette predicted. That's an impressive result by anybody's standards.
And the team says it can do better. They point out that they learnt a
substantial amount during the first six months of the experiment. They have
used this experience to develop a tool called a "bubble index" which they
can use to determine the probability that a market that looks like a bubble
actually is one.
This should help to make future forecasts even more accurate. Had this tool
been available six months ago, for example, it would have clearly showed
that the Merrill Lynch index had already burst, they say. If Sornette
continues with this type of success it's likely that others will want to
copy his method. An interesting question is what will happen to the tell
tale herding behaviour once large numbers of analysts start looking for and
betting on it.
It's tempting to imagine that this extra information would have a calming
effect on otherwise volatile markets. But the real worry is that it could
have exactly the opposite effect: that predictions of the imminent collapse
whether accurate or not would lead to violent corrections. That will have
big implications for econophysics and those who practice it.
Either way, Sornette is continuing with the experiment. He has already
sealed his set of predictions for the next six months and will reveal them
on 1 November. We'll be watching.
Ref:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0911/0911.0454.pdf:
The Financial Bubble Experiment: Advanced Diagnostics and Forecasts of
Bubble Terminations Volume I
Jensen Comment
If there is anything at all to Sornette's forecasting theory, it most likely
cannot be extended to markets where insiders play a key role such as the price
bubble of a particular company's common shares. Insiders can, and often do,
manipulate markets. But in deep commodities markets such as the price of gold or
stock index prices, Sornette may have something that is rooted in his herding
behavior theory. The problem of course is in identifying false positives.
Oil and Water Must Read: Economists versus Criminologists
:"Why the ‘Experts’ Failed to See How Financial Fraud Collapsed the Economy,"
by "James K. Galbraith, Big Picture, June 2, 2010 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/06/james-k-galbraith-why-the-experts-failed-to-see-how-financial-fraud-collapsed-the-economy/
The following is the text of a James K. Galbraith’s written statement
to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee delivered this May. Original
PDF text is here.
Chairman Specter, Ranking Member Graham, Members of
the Subcommittee, as a former member of the congressional staff it is a
pleasure to submit this statement for your record.
I write to you from a disgraced profession.
Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to
understand the forces behind the financial crisis. Concepts including
“rational expectations,” “market discipline,” and the “efficient markets
hypothesis” led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices,
that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor
could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur. Not
all economists believed this – but most did.
Thus the study of financial fraud received little
attention. Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between
economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are
few specialists and very few students. Economists have soft- pedaled the
role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan
debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble.
They continue to do so now. At a conference sponsored by the Levy Economics
Institute in New York on April 17, the closest a former Under Secretary of
the Treasury, Peter Fisher, got to this question was to use the word
“naughtiness.” This was on the day that the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with
fraud.
There are exceptions. A famous 1993 article
entitled “Looting: Bankruptcy for Profit,” by George Akerlof and Paul Romer,
drew exceptionally on the experience of regulators who understood fraud. The
criminologist-economist William K. Black of the University of
Missouri-Kansas City is our leading systematic analyst of the relationship
between financial crime and financial crisis. Black points out that
accounting fraud is a sure thing when you can control the institution
engaging in it: “the best way to rob a bank is to own one.” The experience
of the Savings and Loan crisis was of businesses taken over for the explicit
purpose of stripping them, of bleeding them dry. This was established in
court: there were over one thousand felony convictions in the wake of that
debacle. Other useful chronicles of modern financial fraud include James
Stewart’s Den of Thieves on the Boesky-Milken era and Kurt Eichenwald’s
Conspiracy of Fools, on the Enron scandal. Yet a large gap between this
history and formal analysis remains.
Formal analysis tells us that control frauds follow
certain patterns. They grow rapidly, reporting high profitability, certified
by top accounting firms. They pay exceedingly well. At the same time, they
radically lower standards, building new businesses in markets previously
considered too risky for honest business. In the financial sector, this
takes the form of relaxed – no, gutted – underwriting, combined with the
capacity to pass the bad penny to the greater fool. In California in the
1980s, Charles Keating realized that an S&L charter was a “license to
steal.” In the 2000s, sub-prime mortgage origination was much the same
thing. Given a license to steal, thieves get busy. And because their
performance seems so good, they quickly come to dominate their markets; the
bad players driving out the good.
The complexity of the mortgage finance sector
before the crisis highlights another characteristic marker of fraud. In the
system that developed, the original mortgage documents lay buried – where
they remain – in the records of the loan originators, many of them since
defunct or taken over. Those records, if examined, would reveal the extent
of missing documentation, of abusive practices, and of fraud. So far, we
have only very limited evidence on this, notably a 2007 Fitch Ratings study
of a very small sample of highly-rated RMBS, which found “fraud, abuse or
missing documentation in virtually every file.” An efforts a year ago by
Representative Doggett to persuade Secretary Geithner to examine and report
thoroughly on the extent of fraud in the underlying mortgage records
received an epic run-around.
When sub-prime mortgages were bundled and
securitized, the ratings agencies failed to examine the underlying loan
quality. Instead they substituted statistical models, in order to generate
ratings that would make the resulting RMBS acceptable to investors. When one
assumes that prices will always rise, it follows that a loan secured by the
asset can always be refinanced; therefore the actual condition of the
borrower does not matter. That projection is, of course, only as good as the
underlying assumption, but in this perversely-designed marketplace those who
paid for ratings had no reason to care about the quality of assumptions.
Meanwhile, mortgage originators now had a formula for extending loans to the
worst borrowers they could find, secure that in this reverse Lake Wobegon no
child would be deemed below average even though they all were. Credit
quality collapsed because the system was designed for it to collapse.
A third element in the toxic brew was a simulacrum
of “insurance,” provided by the market in credit default swaps. These are
doomsday instruments in a precise sense: they generate cash-flow for the
issuer until the credit event occurs. If the event is large enough, the
issuer then fails, at which point the government faces blackmail: it must
either step in or the system will collapse. CDS spread the consequences of a
housing-price downturn through the entire financial sector, across the
globe. They also provided the means to short the market in residential
mortgage-backed securities, so that the largest players could turn tail and
bet against the instruments they had previously been selling, just before
the house of cards crashed.
Latter-day financial economics is blind to all of
this. It necessarily treats stocks, bonds, options, derivatives and so forth
as securities whose properties can be accepted largely at face value, and
quantified in terms of return and risk. That quantification permits the
calculation of price, using standard formulae. But everything in the
formulae depends on the instruments being as they are represented to be. For
if they are not, then what formula could possibly apply?
An older strand of institutional economics
understood that a security is a contract in law. It can only be as good as
the legal system that stands behind it. Some fraud is inevitable, but in a
functioning system it must be rare. It must be considered – and rightly – a
minor problem. If fraud – or even the perception of fraud – comes to
dominate the system, then there is no foundation for a market in the
securities. They become trash. And more deeply, so do the institutions
responsible for creating, rating and selling them. Including, so long as it
fails to respond with appropriate force, the legal system itself.
Control frauds always fail in the end. But the
failure of the firm does not mean the fraud fails: the perpetrators often
walk away rich. At some point, this requires subverting, suborning or
defeating the law. This is where crime and politics intersect. At its heart,
therefore, the financial crisis was a breakdown in the rule of law in
America.
Ask yourselves: is it possible for mortgage
originators, ratings agencies, underwriters, insurers and supervising
agencies NOT to have known that the system of housing finance had become
infested with fraud? Every statistical indicator of fraudulent practice –
growth and profitability – suggests otherwise. Every examination of the
record so far suggests otherwise. The very language in use: “liars’ loans,”
“ninja loans,” “neutron loans,” and “toxic waste,” tells you that people
knew. I have also heard the expression, “IBG,YBG;” the meaning of that bit
of code was: “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”
If doubt remains, investigation into the internal
communications of the firms and agencies in question can clear it up. Emails
are revealing. The government already possesses critical documentary trails
— those of AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Treasury Department and the
Federal Reserve. Those documents should be investigated, in full, by
competent authority and also released, as appropriate, to the public. For
instance, did AIG knowingly issue CDS against instruments that Goldman had
designed on behalf of Mr. John Paulson to fail? If so, why? Or again: Did
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac appreciate the poor quality of the RMBS they were
acquiring? Did they do so under pressure from Mr. Henry Paulson? If so, did
Secretary Paulson know? And if he did, why did he act as he did? In a recent
paper, Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson argue that the “Paulson Put” was
intended to delay an inevitable crisis past the election. Does the internal
record support this view?
Let us suppose that the investigation that you are
about to begin confirms the existence of pervasive fraud, involving millions
of mortgages, thousands of appraisers, underwriters, analysts, and the
executives of the companies in which they worked, as well as public
officials who assisted by turning a Nelson’s Eye. What is the appropriate
response?
Some appear to believe that “confidence in the
banks” can be rebuilt by a new round of good economic news, by rising stock
prices, by the reassurances of high officials – and by not looking too
closely at the underlying evidence of fraud, abuse, deception and deceit. As
you pursue your investigations, you will undermine, and I believe you may
destroy, that illusion.
But you have to act. The true alternative is a
failure extending over time from the economic to the political system. Just
as too few predicted the financial crisis, it may be that too few are today
speaking frankly about where a failure to deal with the aftermath may lead.
In this situation, let me suggest, the country
faces an existential threat. Either the legal system must do its work. Or
the market system cannot be restored. There must be a thorough, transparent,
effective, radical cleaning of the financial sector and also of those public
officials who failed the public trust. The financiers must be made to feel,
in their bones, the power of the law. And the public, which lives by the
law, must see very clearly and unambiguously that this is the case.
Thank you.
~~~
James K. Galbraith is the author of
The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why
Liberals Should Too, and of a new preface to The Great Crash, 1929, by
John Kenneth Galbraith. He teaches at The University of Texas at Austin
June 9, 2010 reply from Thompson, Shari
[shari.thompson@PVPL.COM]
Bob, that is an awesome article! I can only hope
that the system listens!
Bob Jensen's threads on the subprime sleaze is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
History of Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Cloud Computing ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
"How Cloud Computing Can Transform Business," by Bernard Golden,
Harvard Business Review Blog, June 4, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/06/business_agility_how_cloud_com.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
You're in a meeting. You and your team identify a
great new business opportunity. If you can launch in 60 days, a rich new
market segment will be open for your product or service. The action plan is
developed. Everything's a go.
And then you come down to earth. You need new
computer equipment, which takes weeks, or months, to install. You also need
new software, which adds more weeks or months. There's no way to meet the
timeframe required by the market opening. You are stymied by your
organization's lack of IT agility.
Or, you could have the experience
the New York Times had when it needed to convert
a large number of digital files to a format
suitable to serve up over the web. After the inevitable "it will take a lot
of time and money to do this project," one of their engineers went to the
Amazon Web Services cloud, created 20 compute instances (essentially,
virtual servers), uploaded the files, and converted them all over the course
of one weekend.
Total cost? $240.
This example provides a sense of why cloud computing is transforming the
face of IT, with the potential to deliver real business value. The rapid
availability of compute resources in a cloud computing environment enables
business agility — the dexterity for businesses to quickly respond to
changing business conditions with IT-enabled offerings.
Notwithstanding the fact that IT seems to always
have the latest, greatest thing on its mind, cloud computing has the entire
IT industry excited, with companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google
and others investing billions of dollars in this new form of computing. And
in terms of IT users,
Gartner recently named cloud computing as the
second most important technology focus area for 2010.
But what is cloud computing exactly? Why is it
different than what went before? And why should you care? While there are
many definitions of cloud computing, I look to the definition of cloud
computing from the National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST), part
of the US Department of Commerce. In its cloud computing definition,
NIST identifies five characteristics of cloud computing,
which include:
- on-demand self service, which allows business
units to get the computing resources they need without having to go
through IT for equipment .
- broad network access, which enables
applications to be built in ways that align with how businesses operate
today - mobile, multi-device, etc.
- resource pooling, which allows for pooling of
computing resources are to serve multiple consumers
- rapid elasticity, which allow for quick
scalability or downsizing of resources depending on demand
- and measured service, which means that
business units only pay for the compute resources they use. Translation:
IT costs match business success.
To offer a concrete example of how cloud computing
agility enables organizations to respond to business opportunity, let me
share the experience of one of our clients, the Silicon Valley Education
Foundation. Its Lessonopoly application allows 13,000 teachers throughout
Silicon Valley to collaborate on lesson plans. NBC approached SVEF just
before this year's Winter Olympics with science-focused lesson plans
centered around the science behind the experience of Olympic athletes (e.g.,
the loads placed on a skier's legs as she swerves around a slalom gate).
One concern SVEF had was whether or not Lessonopoly
could handle the likely application load increase. There were only a few
days before the start of the Olympics, which would initiate heavy use of
these lesson plans. The group had migrated the application to Amazon Web
Services a few months earlier, and they were able to quickly shut down the
small machine Lessonopoly was running on and bring it back up on a larger
instance with three times the computing capacity of the original.
It's a cliché to say that business is changing at
an ever-increasing pace, but one of the facts about clichés is they often
contain truth. The deliberate pace of traditional IT is just not suited for
today's hectic business environment. Cloud computing's agility is a much
better match for constantly mutating business conditions. To evaluate
whether your business opportunities could be well-served by leveraging the
agility of cloud computing, download the
HyperStratus Cloud Computing Agility Checklist, which
outlines ten conditions that indicate a business case for taking advantage
of the agility of cloud computing.
Bernard Golden is CEO of HyperStratus, a Silicon Valley-based cloud
computing consultancy that works with clients in the US and throughout the
world. Contact him at bernard.golden@hyperstratus.com
Winner: "Heads
in the Cloud" from Anseo.net
This post shows how one school uses cloud computing through Google Apps as a
communication tool for the staff and board of management.
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
UCLA Award Finalist: Congratulations to Francine McKenna ---
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x32584.xml
As reported by Going Concern, May 25, 2010
2010 Gerald Loeb Award Finalists Announced by UCLA Anderson
School of Management [UCLA]
Congratulations are due to our own
Francine McKenna (look for her column later today)
who was named as a finalist for a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished
Business and Financial Journalism in the “Online Commentary and Blogging
Category” for her work at
re:The Auditors.
Other nominees include Adrian Wooldridge, Steven N.
Kaplan, Nell Minow, Patrick Lane, Brad DeLong, Luigi Zingales, Saugato Datta,
Thomas Picketty and Chris Edwards for “Online Debates” for The Economist;
David Pogue for “Pogue’s Posts” for The New York Times; Jim Prevor
for “Business, Finances and Public Policy” for The Weekly Standard.
Jensen Comment
Francine puts in more investigative research into her blog and Twitter feeds
than most any blogger I can think of at the moment. In addition to investigating
the literature, she often goes directly to sources seeking interviews.
The competition for the Gerald Loeb Award is intense. Among the other
competitors is one of my favorites, David Pogue.
"Report Assails 'Liberal Political
Agenda' of Summer Reading Programs for Freshmen," by Kelly Truong,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Report-Assails-Liberal/65796/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Complaints of liberal bias often arise over a
college's choice of reading assignment over the summer for new freshmen.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and
Washington State University, for example, have
been the targets of such criticism in recent years.
Now a scholarly group says it has more than
anecdotal evidence that such a bias exists and is pervasive.
The National Association of Scholars says it looked
at common-reading selections for this summer at 290 colleges and
universities and found that 70 percent of the books "either explicitly
promote a liberal political agenda or advance a liberal interpretation of
events."
The association's report,
"What Do Colleges Want Students to Read Outside Class?,"
also faults the assignments as insufficiently
intellectually challenging.
The report includes a series of recommendations,
advising colleges to select classic works and avoid books that "cheerlead
for popular causes or reinforce a political sensibility."
Alix Schwartz, director of academic planning at the
University of California at Berkeley, defended the common-reading
assignments as a starting point from which students explore a variety of
views. The books are not chosen to indoctrinate students with a particular
viewpoint, but are intended as a means of providing students with a common
basis for dialogue, she said.
"It's a way of starting an intellectual
conversation," said Ms. Schwartz. "We certainly don't think the book is the
last word on any subject. It's the first word."
Berkeley's reading selection for the 2009-10
academic year, The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, was
identified in the report's
book list as
promoting environmentalism and animal rights. Ms. Schwartz said that the
university had engaged students about the book through faculty discussions,
freshman seminars, expert lectures, and panels.
"It's not a monolithic thing, where everyone bows
down to Michael Pollan," she said.
Some colleges allow their incoming freshman to
choose from among more than one book. San Diego State University, for
example, sponsors both the Common Experience program, whose 2010 theme is
specifically centered on social justice, and the One Book, One San Diego
program, which engages the entire San Diego community and has no such theme.
In its study, however, the association included only the Common Experience
book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, by Ray Anderson.
The association's president, Peter Wood, said that
the study had considered all programs that were not for academic credit. "We
were looking for programs that were general to the public," he said.
"Preparing Undergraduates as Business Professionals," Harvard
Business Review, June 2, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/imagining-the-future-of-leadership/2010/06/preparing-undergraduates-as-bu.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
Editor's note: This post is part of a six-week blog series on
how leadership might look in the future. The conversations generated by
these posts will help shape the agenda of a symposium on the topic in June
2010, hosted by HBS's
Nitin Nohria,
Rakesh Khurana, and
Scott Snook. This week's focus: leadership development.)
"Institutional Research Roundup," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher
Ed, June 1, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/01/air
Institutional researchers
are higher education's version of a utility infielder. That doesn't mean
they lack expertise: They specialize in bringing data to bear on issues and
problems, and explaining and interpreting those data to campus constituents
who often come at the information from widely varying viewpoints. Their
versatility comes, though, in the wide range of subjects they touch and of
decisions over which they have some influence.
Given that eclectic role,
the annual forum of the Association for Institutional Research typically
covers a plethora of topics, and
this year's
meeting, the organization's 50th, is no exception.
But it is also true that examining the forum's agenda usually offers a sense
of which issues are keeping institutional leaders up at night, since those
are often the topics that presidents and provosts and other campus officials
have asked their data gurus to dive into.
Not surprisingly, given
the emphasis that policy makers are placing on college completion and the
fiscal realities that make every lost student a liability, retention and
student success were all over the AIR agenda. Roughly a third of the 375
sessions related to institutional efforts to measure or improve students’
academic progress in higher education.
In one such session, Roger
Mourad, director of institutional research at Michigan’s Washtenaw Community
College, compared the characteristics of students who transferred from his
institution and then graduated from a four-year college to those who
transferred and did not earn a bachelor’s degree.
The study would help to
shed light, Mourad said, on what he said remains a “very viable debate
nowadays”: “Whether community colleges are democratic institutions operating
as gateways to four-year institutions, or do they end up diverting students
away from four-year bachelor’s institutions?”
Mourad’s study, which
examined students who entered Washtenaw for the first time in 2000 and
followed for eight years those who transferred to a four-year institution,
found that about 44 percent of all transferring students graduated (with
significantly higher proportions of transfers graduating from the University
of Michigan than from Eastern Michigan University and other institutions).
Students were more likely
to complete their bachelor’s degrees if they earned more credits and had
higher grade point averages at the two-year college before transferring, as
one might expect, Mourad said. But every additional semester they spent at
Washtenaw actually reduced their odds of earning a bachelor’s degree, he
said. “Students who were more immersed academically at the community college
over a shorter period of time were better prepared to succeed at four-year
institutions,” he said.
Why might staying longer
at the community college actually reduce their likelihood of completion at
the four-year institution? Mourad and the audience offered several theories,
including that students “become too comfortable with the small class size,
the easier access to faculty members,” and other nurturing elements of the
two-year environment, or that they get used to the “less competitive”
environment (marked by “easier grading”) that they may find at two-year
institutions. “When they hit the four-year institutions, do they have
transfer shock?” he wondered.
Diane Dean, an assistant
professor of higher education policy at Illinois State University, came at
the question of bachelor’s degree completion from another angle.
Amid growing interest
among state policy makers in trying to limit fast-rising tuition rates, she
examined whether
state guaranteed tuition programs affected
retention and completion rates.
Looking at comparable
students and institutions in Illinois (which has a guaranteed tuition
program) and those in surrounding Great Lakes states, which do not, Dean
found that Illinois’s program had had insignificant effects on the success
of its students at public universities. That may be, she speculated, because
guaranteeing students a tuition rate may improve predictability of what
students pay, but it doesn’t, by itself, make college more affordable for
those students.
A Search for a Better
Way
Many if not most sessions
at the institutional researchers’ meeting involved campus IR officials
presenting the results of studies they’ve conducted, with the goal of
shedding light on local issues or problems.
One session Monday had a
very different purpose: providing a forum for a group of college officials
grappling with a common problem: the failure of the federal graduation rate
to capture what’s happening on campuses filled with adult students.
Chris Davis, vice provost
of institutional effectiveness at Chicago’s National-Louis University, said
that many campuses like his were trying to find their own alternatives to
the federal rate, which by focusing exclusively on full-time, first-time
students captures a tiny fraction of the students at many adult-serving
institutions. National-Louis has begun contemplating a series of indicators
to measure its own students' success, such as looking separately at the
graduation rates of students who transfer into the university with 15 or
more credits and those who enter the university with 45 or more credits.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
From the Scout Report on May 28, 2010
EasyBib ---
http://www.easybib.com/
If you have just finished a long paper on Madame Bovary, you may not
relish the thought of finishing all the citations necessary to complete a
finished work. With EasyBib, such matters become relatively painless. This
website helps visitors create bibliographies in a variety of different
citation styles, including MLA and APA. Visitors can just type in the item
they need to cite, and EasyBib will provide the correct citation for each
entry. Some services on the website are always free, but there is also a
premium service that visitors can pay for, if they so desire. [KMG]
ZoneAlarm Free Firewall 9.2 ---
http://www.zonealarm.com
This latest version of ZoneAlarm Free Firewall 9.2
will help keep users' computers free from phishing devices and other such
pesky intruders. The application takes about 5 minutes to setup, and it can
now also stop program spoofing, which is when a malicious program pretends
to be a good one. The program also has an extensive interactive help
feature, which can be useful for new users. This version is compatible with
computers running Windows XP, Vista, and 7.
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
"Video: Deaf Graduates Tackle Move to Hearing World," By Ashley
Marchand, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 25, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Video-Deaf-Graduates-Tackle/65668/
Technology Aids for the Handicapped and Learning Challenged ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
The Cultural Landscape of the UW-Madison Campus ---
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UW/subcollections/UWCulturalLandAbout.html
Tate Learning: i-Map (art appreciation for the blind) ---
http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
"The Evolution of Computer Science," MIT's Technology Review, June 3,
2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25276/?nlid=3070
History and Future of Course Authoring Technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
Personal Computer History
"Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer --- The PC's
back story involves a little-known Texas connection," by Lamont Wood,
Computer World, August 8, 2008 ---
Click Here
Functions Grapher ---
http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/3/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=404
Interactives: 3D Shapes ---
http://www.learner.org/interactives/geometry/index.
History of Media Technology ---
http://www.cedmagic.com/history/
Bob Jensen's threads on science and medicine tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Animal Science Image Gallery ---
http://anscigallery.nal.usda.gov/
Horse and Mule Power ---
http://www.slideshare.net/Nubiagroup/horse-and-mulepower-by-gboisjo
Mind Lab [Flash Player on Unconscious Brain Functions] ---
http://jvsc.jst.go.jp/find/mindlab/english/index.html
National Science Foundation: Classroom Resources ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/classroom/
Moon Zoo (crater counts) ---
http://www.moonzoo.org/
We Choose The Moon ---
http://wechoosethemoon.org/
The Future of NSF On Its 60th Anniversary [Flash Player]
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf_future
NSF and the Birth of the Internet (video) ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/
How Internet Stuff Works ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Web
Penn State Gerontology Center ---
http://gerontology.ssri.psu.edu/
What's in the Food You Eat ---
http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=17032
National Academy of Engineering: The Bridge ---
http://www.nae.edu/Publications/TheBridge.aspx
ASIMO [Flash Player of robot built by Honda]
http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/
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
From NPR
Tell Me More (leadership and politics) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=46
Truthdig (politics and news in depth) ---
http://www.truthdig.com/
The State of the News Media 2010 ---
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/
Video: The Greek Economic Crisis
Explained ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-greek-crisis-explained/
Video Lunch with a Laureate: Famous Financial Researcher Robert Merton ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/lunch-with-a-laureate-famous-financial-researcher-robert-merton/
Phil McKinney: Hacking the Future (Fora TV) ---
http://fora.tv/2010/05/22/Phil_McKinney_Hacking_the_Future
Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation ---
http://igcc.ucsd.edu/
North American Jewish Data Bank ---
http://www.jewishdatabank.org/default.asp
Parliament of South Africa ---
http://www.parliament.gov.za/live/
Institute for Democracy in South Africa ---
http://www.idasa.org.za/index.asp
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development:
Publications ---
http://www.huduser.org/portal/publications/pdrpubli.html
HUD User [Housing Data] ---
http://www.huduser.org/portal/index.html
Hardship and Hope: Stories of the economic crisis on
Tobacco Road [Flash Player]
http://www.carolinaphotojournalism.org/economy/
West Coast Poverty Center ---
http://depts.washington.edu/wcpc/
American RadioWorks: Early Lessons (African American
Education) ---
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/preschool/
A Biography of America ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series123.html
The Cultural Landscape of the UW-Madison Campus ---
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UW/subcollections/UWCulturalLandAbout.html
Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan ---
http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/framing/
Penn State Gerontology Center ---
http://gerontology.ssri.psu.edu/
Michigan
Department of Natural Resources and Environment [pdf]
http://www.michigan.gov/deq/
Ray Stevens - Illegal Immigrants Assistance Program ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgOHOHKBEqE
Tate Learning: i-Map (art appreciation for the blind)
---
http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Horse and Mule Power ---
http://www.slideshare.net/Nubiagroup/horse-and-mulepower-by-gboisjo
"The Evolution of Computer Science," MIT's Technology Review, June
3, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25276/?nlid=3070
History and Future of Course Authoring Technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
National American History: Museum Stories of Freedom and Justice [iTunes]
http://americanhistory.si.edu/freedomandjustice/
A Biography of America ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series123.html
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
http://baseballhall.org/
Video: The
Greek Economic Crisis Explained ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-greek-crisis-explained/
UCLA Preserved Silent Animation [Flash Player]
http://animation.library.ucla.edu/
The Silent Picture Era ---
http://www.silentera.com/index.html
Silent Movies
http://www.silent-movies.org/
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Archive ---
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
Moving Images Pinewood Dialogues (for students of film) ---
http://www.movingimage.us/pinewood/
"The Pageant of America" Photograph Archive (over 7,000 photographs) ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=culture&col_id=187
Robie House Interior Restoration Project [Flash Player, Frank Lloyd Wright,
Hyde Park]
http://www.gowright.org/robie/
North American Jewish Data Bank ---
http://www.jewishdatabank.org/default.asp
American RadioWorks: Early Lessons (African American Education) ---
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/preschool/
This Day in Music ---
http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/
The Association of Jewish Libraries ---
http://www.jewishlibraries.org/ajlweb/
Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation ---
http://igcc.ucsd.edu/
Hardship and Hope: Stories of the economic crisis on Tobacco Road [Flash
Player]
http://www.carolinaphotojournalism.org/economy/
Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan ---
http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/framing/
South Carolina Digital Library ---
http://www.scmemory.org
The Robert Venn Carr Jr. Collection, Museum of Art at the University of Maine
---
http://www.library.umaine.edu/Carr/default.asp
Digital Image Collections: Indiana Historical Society ---
http://www.indianahistory.org/our-collections/digital-image-collections
Manitobia: Life and Times [Flash Player, Canada] ---
http://manitobia.ca/
Manitobia: Life and Times [Flash Player, Canada] ---
http://manitobia.ca/
The Virtual Museum of Canada ---
http://www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/index-eng.jsp
The State of the News Media 2010 ---
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/
Truthdig (politics and news in depth) ---
http://www.truthdig.com/
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
This Day in Music ---
http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/
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 29, 2010
May 29, 2010
May 30, 2010
May 31, 2010
June 1, 2010
June 2, 2010
June 3, 2010
June 4, 2010
June 5, 2010
June 7, 2010
June 8, 2010
June 9, 2010
"Binge drinking and risky sex among college students," byJeffrey
DeSimone, Voxeu, May 30, 2010 ---
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5119
It is commonly acknowledged that heavy alcohol
consumers are more likely to be having sex. This column examines carefully
the causal link from drinking to sex on US college campuses. After
accounting for other potential co-determinants, the evidence suggests that
binge drinking is unlikely to be the trigger for sexual activity, but might
lead to more promiscuous sex than would otherwise take place, putting
students at risk of unsafe sex.
"Does good sex keep a marriage stable over the long term?"
StumbleUpon via Bakadesuyo, May 30, 2010 ---
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8aTIBo/www.bakadesuyo.com/does-good-sex-keep-a-marriage-stable-over-the
Sexual satisfaction, marital quality, and marital
instability have been studied over the life course of couples in many
previous studies, but less in relation to each other. On the basis of the
longitudinal data from 283 married couples, the authors used autoregressive
models in this study to examine the causal sequences among these 3
constructs for husbands and wives separately. Results of cross-lagged
models, for both husbands and wives, provided support for the causal
sequences that proceed from sexual satisfaction to marital quality, from
sexual satisfaction to marital instability, and from marital quality to
marital instability. Initially higher levels of sexual satisfaction resulted
in an increase in marital quality, which in turn led to a decrease in
marital instability over time. Effects of sexual satisfaction on marital
instability appear to have been mediated through marital quality.
From the Scout Report on June 4, 2010
New study on acupuncture contains promising findings Acupuncture may
trigger natural painkillers
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/639541.html
The Great Beyond: Acupuncture 'works in mice'
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/05/acupuncture_works_in_mice.html
Yankees starter A.J. Burnett credits acupuncture with helping him stay
healthy http://www.nj.com/yankees/index.ssf/2010/05/yankees_starter_aj_burnett_cre.html
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Acupuncture
http://nccam.nih.gov/health/acupuncture/
Acupuncture: MedlinePlus
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/acupuncture.html
American Academy of Medical Acupuncture [pdf]
http://www.medicalacupuncture.org/
Acupuncture has been practiced for thousands of
year, but some medical scholars and health care experts remain skeptical
of its benefits. Some have claimed that establishing a control group in
clinical trails to prove the treatment's efficacy is difficult, if not
impossible. This week, a team of researchers at the Center for
Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical
Center announced that the needle pricks involved in acupuncture might
help relieve pain by triggering a natural painkilling chemical. Medical
researcher and lead author Dr. Maiken Nedergaard and her colleagues
reported their findings in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The findings
were based on studies that administered half-hour acupuncture treatments
to a group of mice with paw discomfort. Dr. Nedergaard and her
colleagues found that adenosine (the natural painkiller in question)
levels in the affected areas near the needle insertion points were 24
times greater after treatment. This particular chemical is best known
for regulating sleep by inhibiting nerve signals and inflammation. While
these are certainly early days for this work, the initial results are
promising and it will be interesting to track follow-up studies.
The first link will take visitors to a piece
from this Monday's Bloomburg Businessweek which reports on this recent
study. The second link will take interested parties to an entry from the
Nature blog, "The Great Beyond". The entry talks a bit about the new
study and also has several additional links. The third link will lead
visitors to a recent article from the Newark Star- Ledger about New York
Yankee A.J. Burnett's use of acupuncture. Moving on the fourth link
leads to the acupuncture information page, provided by the National
Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The fifth link will
whisk users away to more information on acupuncture from MedlinePlus and
the National Institutes of Health. The last link leads to the homepage
of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, which has information on
their professional work and the world of acupuncture.
Ray Stevens - Illegal Immigrants Assistance Program ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgOHOHKBEqE
A Little Odd History
There is an old Hotel/Pub in Marble Arch, London which used to have gallows
adjacent. Prisoners were taken to the gallows (after a fair trial of course) to
be hung. The horse drawn dray, carting the prisoner was accompanied by an armed
guard, who would stop the dray outside the pub and ask the prisoner if he would
like ''ONE LAST DRINK''. If he said YES it was referred to as “ONE FOR THE
ROAD”. If he declined, that prisoner was “ON THE WAGON”
So there you go. More bleeding history.. They used to use urine to tan animal
skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken &
sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor". But
worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot
they "Didn’t have a pot to Piss in" & were the lowest of the low.
Jensen Comment
When I was invited to lecture at the University of Alaska, the Dean had a dinner
party in his house in the evening. He'd just returned from a hunting trip and
had the hides of two elk hung over a fence. He requested after dark that the
male guests urinate on the hides. The trick was to hit the top of the fence.
Forwarded from Romania by Dan Gheorghe Somnea
[dan_somnea@yahoo.com]
AMAZING
ANAGRAMS
Someone out there
Must be "deadly" at
Scrabble..
(Wait till you see the
last one)!
PRESBYTERIAN:
When you
rearrange the letters:
BEST IN
PRAYER
ASTRONOMER:
When you
rearrange the letters:
MOON STARER
DESPERATION:
When you
rearrange the letters:
A ROPE ENDS
IT
THE EYES:
When you
rearrange the letters:
THEY SEE
GEORGE
BUSH:
When you
rearrange the letters:
HE BUGS
GORE
THE MORSE
CODE:
When you
rearrange the letters:
HERE COME
DOTS
DORMITORY:
When you
rearrange the letters:
DIRTY ROOM
SLOT
MACHINES:
When you
rearrange the letters:
CASH LOST
IN ME
ANIMOSITY:
When you
rearrange the letters:
IS NO AMITY
ELECTION
RESULTS:
When you
rearrange the letters:
LIES -
LET'S RECOUNT
SNOOZE
ALARMS:
When you
rearrange the letters:
ALAS! NO
MORE Z 'S
A DECIMAL
POINT:
When you
rearrange the letters:
I'M A DOT
IN PLACE
THE
EARTHQUAKES:
When you
rearrange the letters:
THAT QUEER
SHAKE
ELEVEN PLUS
TWO:
When you
rearrange the letters:
TWELVE PLUS
ONE
AND FOR THE
GRAND FINALE:
MOTHER-IN-LAW:
When you
rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER
======
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/
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
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