Tidbits on July 17, 2010
Bob Jensen

I took this photograph behind my desk window on a summer morning in July
The tops of the highest mountains are obscured in the morning haze
The red blossoms are wild roses

 


A wild rose by any other name

Among all the photographs I've taken in these mountains, I think this is my favorite
The bumble bee looks and sounds fearsome --- but it's one of the gentlest creatures on earth
I find comfort and nature's harmony when it buzzes around me while I tend my flowers


Now days are slow and easy, the summer
Sighs into fall: a
purring bumble-bee
Can leave the flower, softened to a blur,
To soak in the noon sun, and fly carefree;
The night can breathe with pleasure as once more
We weave our visions into poetry
And seek to bring our thoughts under a rule,
Who are the mindful servants of the soul.

John Keats --- http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/robert-frosts-the-pasture/

This is a wishing well in the grove that separates our main yard from our wild flower field
I'm still waiting for most of my wishes to come true, but I've been blessed with many that did come true

And this is our wild flower field with the barn roof in the background

 

Here's the back of our cottage on a cloudy day

I used this studio as an office for the first couple of years
But after Erika's health worsened, I moved my office into house
My books and other junk are still in the studio

This is my wonderful, wonderful Polka Weigela bush
That bloomed all of June and will bloom once again in August

This is a butterfly was alive on our driveway but seemed unable to fly
It disappeared a few minutes later either on its own or in the mouth of a bird
I like to think it just regained the strength to fly once more amongst our many blossoms

A view of Mt. Lafayette from our south garden early in the spring before I planted the alysum

In front of our cottage are two large French lilac bushes that are more aromatic than any bushes I know
The sweet aroma fills the inside of our cottage

There are also two smaller French lilac bushes by our rock garden

I think this is an early-blooming hydrangea bush along the border of the rear of our land abutting the golf course
Please correct me if I incorrectly identified this as a hydrangea bush
Suzanne Williams Rautiola's expert gardener (also her husband) suspects its a deciduous azalea
And I suspect he's much more expert than me

This is one of the old tractors belonging to the golf course
I think it's fully depreciated but keeps on running like the Energizer Bunny

And this is one of the big blossoms on our clematis vine in the south garden

Ed Scribner's Photo of Elk in Estes Park, Colorado

David Fordham's Pictures o f Hummingbirds
http://cob.jmu.edu/fordham/hummers/

Pictures forwarded by Auntie Bev, Paula, Debbie and Others

How Twins are Made

Erika says its time to clean around my computer work station
Before it looks like this

But I've already planned my final resting place

 

If this does not bring tears to your eyes, nothing will bring tears to your eyes
Soldiers Surprising Their Loved Ones --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=hkGzqpGx1KU

Video:  The One Flaw in Women --- http://www.theoneflawinwomen.com/

Appalachian Mountain Club website
Mountain Watch --- http://www.outdoors.org/conservation/mountainwatch/index.cfm

Long Trail Photographs (the Green Mountains of Vermont) http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?title=Long Trail Photographs 
Oldest Long Distance Hiking Trail in the United States

Pick A Trail (hiking, travel, recreation, geography) ---  http://www.pickatrail.com  

Remember Captain Kirk ordering the crew of the USS Enterprise to put up the shields. Here is the latest real-life illustration of shields for armored vehicles in battle ---
Video Trophy - Active defence developed in Israel --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jzAupr044

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Pamela Murphy, widow of WWII hero and actor, Audie Murphy, died peacefully at her home on April 8, 2010. She was the widow of the most decorated WWII hero and actor, Audie Murphy, and established her own distinctive 35 year career working as a patient liaison at the Sepulveda Veterans Administration hospital, treatingevery veteran who visited the facility as if they were a VIP.

Any soldier or Marine who came into the hospital got the same special treatment from her. She would walk the hallways with her clipboard in hand making sure her boys got to see the specialist they needed.

If they didn't, watch out. Her boys weren't Medal of Honor recipients or movie stars like Audie, but that didn't matter to Pam. They had served their country. That was good enough for her. She never called a veteran by his first name. It was always "Mister." Respect came with the job. "Nobody could cut through VA red tape faster than Mrs. Murphy," said veteran Stephen Sherman, speaking for thousands of veterans she befriended over the years. "Many times I watched her march a veteran who had been waiting more than an hour right into the doctor's office. She was even reprimanded a few times, but it didn't matter to Mrs. Murphy. "Only her boys mattered. She was our angel."

Audie Murphy died broke in a plane crash in 1971, squandering millions of dollars on gambling, bad investments, and yes, other women. "Even with the adultery and desertion at the end, he always remained my hero," Pam told me.

She went from a comfortable ranch-style home in Van Nuys where she raised two sons to a small apartment - taking a clerk's job at the nearby VA to support herself and start paying off her faded movie star husband's debts. At first, no one knew who she was. Soon, though, word spread through the VA that the nice woman with the clipboard was Audie Murphy's widow. It was like saying General Patton had just walked in the front door. Men with tears in their eyes walked up to her and gave her a hug.

"Thank you," they said, over and over.

The first couple of years, I think the hugs were more for Audie's memory as a war hero. The last 30 years, they were for Pam.

One year I asked her to be the focus of a Veteran's Day column for all the work she had done. Pam just shook her head no.

"Honor them, not me," she said, pointing to a group of veterans down the hallway. "They're the ones who deserve it."

The vets disagreed. Mrs. Murphy deserved the accolades, they said. Incredibly, in 2002, Pam's job was going to be eliminated in budget cuts. She was considered "excess staff." "I don't think helping cut down on veterans' complaints and showing them the respect they deserve, should be considered excess staff," she told me. Neither did the veterans. They went ballistic, holding a rally for her outside the VA gates. Pretty soon, word came down from the top of the VA. Pam Murphy was no longer considered "excess staff."

She remained working full time at the VA until 2007 when she was 87.

"The last time she was here was a couple of years ago for the conference we had for homeless veterans," said Becky James, coordinator of the VA's Veterans History Project. Pam wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help some more of her boys. Pam Murphy was 90 when she died last week. What a lady.

Dennis McCarthy, Los Angeles Times on April 15, 2010

Audie Murphy --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy

 

Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on July 17, 2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations071710.htm         

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

 

Tidbits on July 17, 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

Facts Clock --- 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

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




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

If this does not bring tears to your eyes, nothing will bring tears to your eyes
Soldiers Surprising Their Loved Ones ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=hkGzqpGx1KU

Video:  The One Flaw in Women --- http://www.theoneflawinwomen.com/

Consumer Report Safety Video on Accelerator-Locked Car ---
http://video.consumerreports.org/services/player/bcpid1886192484?bctid=48234862001

Entire Harvard University Course on Justice (will not play in iPads)
Justice with Michael Sandel [Flash Player]  --- http://www.justiceharvard.org/

Amazing Hummingbirds (from PBS) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=hjnc1kHMDDo&feature=player_embedded

European Southern Observatory --- http://www.eso.org/public/
Thousands of photographs and videos of landscapes in 14 member countries around the world

A Place of Our Own --- http://aplaceofourown.org/index.php
An extension of a PBS show on many ways to improve life, especially in caring for children

Eulugy for a Camtasia game programmer
http://www.youtube.com/user/MaudDib01#p/p/C9B9986FD612FBF7/3/R5Pldwh3R2I
Thanks for the heads up Richard Campbel
l

Ten Best Hotels in America --- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/09/top-10-best-hotels-in-ame_n_641323.html
But not the ten best buys in America

European Southern Observatory --- http://www.eso.org/public/
Thousands of photographs and videos of landscapes in 14 member countries around the world

June 9, 2010 message from Dan Gheorghe Somnea [dan_somnea@yahoo.com]  (in Romania)

Thanks for the Tidbits on July 8th. Dear emeritus professor Robert (Bob), I wish your wife "prosit". I admire Miss Erika's effort, especially. Your atraction to immortalize on photos daily events like: your wife's activity, beautiful roses is providential.

Unfortunately, the Northern part of Romania is flooded (see videos):

http://article.wn.com/view/2010/06/30/Floods_kill_24_Romania_to_seek_emergency_EU_aid/ 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/video/fatal-flooding-in-romania/article1624081/?view=picks 

http://interceder.net/i/SUceava 

Sincerely,
Dan

 

Remember Captain Kirk ordering the crew of the USS Enterprise to put up the shields. Here is the latest real-life illustration of shields for armored vehicles in battle ---
Video Trophy - Active defence developed in Israel --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jzAupr044


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

Oldies from the 1950s and 1960s --- http://www.barb-coolwaters.com/

Sound of Music - Central Station in Antwerp --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k&feature=related

Thomas Hampson's Hand-Picked Mahler --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128338586

Psychological Slow Burn: 'Pelléas and Mélisande' (Introduction to the Opera) --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128391584

Mondays with Merce (dance) --- http://www.merce.org/studio/mondays-with-merce.php 

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

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

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

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


Photographs and Art

"The Mark of a Masterpiece:  The man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art," by David Grann, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/12/100712fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/12/100712fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all#ixzz0tVD75TMV

Abacus: The Art of Calculating with Beads --- http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/index.html

From the Library of Congress (Bob Hope)
Hope for America: Performers, Politics and Pop Culture --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/hopeforamerica/Pages/default.aspx 

The High Art of Photographic Advertising: The 1934 National Alliance of Art and Industry Exhibition http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/naai/

The United States Lighthouse Society --- http://www.uslhs.org/index.php 

Charlie Parker (films in history) --- http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/

Appalachian Mountain Club website
Mountain Watch --- http://www.outdoors.org/conservation/mountainwatch/index.cfm

Long Trail Photographs (the Green Mountains of Vermont) http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?title=Long%20Trail%20Photographs 
Oldest Long Distance Hiking Trail in the United States

Pick A Trail (hiking, travel, recreation, geography) ---  http://www.pickatrail.com  

Tara Donovan: Untitled --- http://www.imamuseum.org/art/exhibitions/tara-donovan

Bibliography of the History of Art --- http://library.getty.edu:7101/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First

The Accidental Art of Microfluidic Devices --- http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25720/?nlid=3223

Ron DiCianni: Painting the Resurrection --- http://www.cbn.com/media/player/index.aspx?s=/vod/MW131v2_WS

The Argus --- http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_iwu_argus.php?CISOROOT=/iwu_argus
The archives of Illinois Wesleyan University's newspaper

University of Washington Student Newspapers Archive --- http://content.lib.washington.edu/dailyweb/index.html

LaVie: The Penn State Life (Yearbook History Going Back to 1890) --- http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/lavie/  

Clara Barton National Historic Site (nursing) --- http://www.nps.gov/features/clba/feat0001/flash.html

H. Ambrose Kiehl Photograph Collection --- http://content.lib.washington.edu/kiehlweb/index.html
Over a century ago in Fort. Lawton, Washington

Craft Revival --- http://www.craftrevival.org/Index.htm

Weaving Art Museum and Research Institute --- http://www.weavingartmuseum.org/main.html

PingMag (arts and crafts from Japan) ---  http://www.pingmag.jp/

Arts & Crafts Movement: 1880-1920 in Europe and America ---
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=exhibit;id=7015

The Internet Craftsmanship Museum --- http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com/

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

Bibliography of the History of Art --- http://library.getty.edu:7101/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First

Craft Revival --- http://www.craftrevival.org/Index.htm

PingMag (arts and crafts from Japan) ---  http://www.pingmag.jp/

Arts & Crafts Movement: 1880-1920 in Europe and America ---
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=exhibit;id=7015

From the Library of Congress (Bob Hope)
Hope for America: Performers, Politics and Pop Culture --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/hopeforamerica/Pages/default.aspx 

Charlie Parker (films in history) --- http://tsutpen.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




Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on July 17, 2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations071710.htm 

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




809 Area Code Scam --- http://www.snopes.com/fraud/telephone/809.asp

"Internet Crime: Vuvuzela Meets Viagra:  E-mail spammers latch onto football's World Cup as the latest online hook for marketing come-ons. When will Web users learn?: by Matt Robinson, Business Week, July 2, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2010/tc2010072_326186.htm?link_position=link6


From the AICPA
Overview of Certified in Financial Forensics (CFF) Credential --- Click Here
http://www.aicpa.org/InterestAreas/ForensicAndValuation/Membership/Pages/Overview Certified in Financial Forensics Credential.aspx 


Pew News Current Events Test (I missed two) --- http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/quiz/index.php


Cleveland may be losing Lebron James, but at least the accounting faculty at Case Western are doing their best to offset the loss
A Good Year for Case Western's Accounting Faculty --- http://weatherhead.case.edu/

Promotions

 

Lee Blazey to Associate Professor

Karen Braun to Associate Professor

Julia Grant to Full Professor

 

Awards

 

Dr. Timothy Fogarty, 2010 Issues Best Paper Award, Issues in Accounting Education, for "Blessed Are the Gatekeepers: A Longitudinal Study of the Editorial Boards of The Accounting Review" coauthored by Chih-Hsien (Debra) Liao (PhD, Case Western Reserve University).

 

Dr. Gary Previts, 2010 Outstanding Educator Award, from the American Accounting Association.

 

Jensen Comment
I'm pleased with Case because it made a faculty home for one of my excellent former accounting students at Trinity University ---
http://weatherhead.case.edu/research/faculty/profile.cfm?idDM=372750
Yi-Jing Wu was a concert pianist until we convinced her the future might be brighter with an accounting PhD
She carried her tireless music work ethic into accounting


How Little Academic Achievers are Made
Who needs stark regression discontinuity to establish something that any competent, responsible parent can tell you over a cup of Starbucks? If you're trying to raise a well-educated, well-rounded child, you need to limit — not increase — the time he spends on a home computer. Of course, now that there's scientific research to prove the point, will educators and government bureaucrats take notice?

Marybeth Hicks, "Common Sense in Education Strikes Again," Townhall, July 14, 2010 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/MarybethHicks/2010/07/14/common_sense_in_education_strikes_again

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm


"Frontiers of Collaboration: The Evolution of Social Networking," Knowledge@Wharton, July 7, 2010 ---  
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2536              

Social networking tools such as Twitter and the emerging Google Wave web application are taking individuals and organizations to the frontiers of real-time communication and collaboration. The technology has the potential to make it easier to discover and share information, interact with others, and decide what to buy or do. But the key word is "potential": Social networking's evolution is still in its early stages. What makes the current crop of services more promising than those that came before? What are the obstacles to further progress?

An expert panel debated these questions at the annual Supernova technology strategy conference, produced in partnership with Wharton and held last winter in San Francisco. The 2010 Supernova forum will be held this month in Philadelphia.

The panel at the San Francisco event was chaired by David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Appearing on the panel were: Anna-Christina Douglas, product marketing manager at Google; Laura Fitton, principal of Pistachio Consulting and co-author of Twitter for Dummies; Paul Lippe, founder and CEO of Legal OnRamp; Jason Shellen, founder and CEO of Thing Labs, and Deborah Schultz, a partner with the Altimeter Group. In addition, Google engineers were in the room demonstrating Google Wave by allowing the audience to post to the social networking service during the session; their comments appeared in real time on projection screens near the panelists.

Weinberger began the session by asking panelists what made the introduction of social networking tools different from previous technological endeavors to improve communication and collaboration. One significant issue discussed was how social networking compared with knowledge management (KM). KM systems first appeared on the scene about 20 years ago and once represented the frontier, embodying companies' most innovative ideas for integrating internal access to disparate information in order to improve communication, collaboration and business processes.

KM systems were implemented through technologies such as web portals, e-mail networks, content management systems and business intelligence infrastructure. Web portals, which were probably the most successful type of KM system, allow users to access a range of information -- including reports, diagrams, catalogs and maintenance records -- through one interface, rather than many. The portals also include external information supplied by business partners, government agencies and news sources. The technology automatically pulls information from the sources on demand so that users do not have to search for it manually.

Organizations employ KM systems to increase the value of their "intellectual capital." However, the technology that supports KM systems has traditionally been difficult to develop and deploy. And the systems have not been universally successful at fostering real time collaboration between employees.

According to Shellen -- who was part of the development teams for Google's blogging program and Reader aggregator service -- before social networking tools enabled quick and casual communication, many bloggers in corporate organizations had "some KM tool where you captured the knowledge in the tool's silo and assigned all sorts of tags, folders and so on to it. You would then pass the blog to your manager for him or her to [learn from] what you were writing." Shellen now heads Thing Labs, a San Francisco-based company that builds web-based software for sharing content. Social networking is easing some of the frustration users in many organizations have encountered with traditional KM systems. Through use of Twitter and other tools, more of the intellectual capital that KM systems once guarded is flowing freely, in real time, inside and outside organizations. If an employee needs to find expertise or share information, he or she doesn't have to work within the rigid confines of a KM system, or even the confines of his or her organization. Instead, the employee can use social media to collaborate with others and to find answers more quickly and put relevant advice into practice.

While there are virtues to being able to communicate faster and more easily with social networking tools, panelists agreed that many organizations are struggling to adjust to the spontaneity and loss of control over information that comes with these tools. Concerned that organizations will eventually clamp down, Weinberger asked, "Will all the fun be stripped out of it? Will people become afraid to Tweet about things that are not strictly business-related?" Fitton, whose consulting firm focuses on helping companies to use micro-blogging in a business environment, suggested that companies may find the "messy and random serendipity" of Twitter and other social networks to be more efficient than lumbering KM systems and processes. "It brings an infusion of humanity to business," she noted, who adding that, in her experiences at Pistachio Consulting, she has observed social networking having an impact on organizations by leveling management hierarchies, accelerating team-building across geographical locations, and improving mentoring. She stated that, in some cases, research to find human expertise that used to take many hours can happen much faster when queries are "flung out into the commons" to catch the attention of people who can provide answers more quickly.

Breadth vs. Depth

One of the advantages social networking tools have over KM systems, experts say, is that they simplify the process of obtaining information that would be useful to a business or employee. Tools such as Twitter provide a sort of "KM in the cloud," allowing users to collaborate with each other and send messages to locate expertise without a company having to build and maintain a complex and expensive system to provide these capabilities internally. Social networking tools provide access to a broad population and employ simple, standardized, techniques to link users to information. But while social networking offers "an enormous amount of horizontal power," Lippe said, "most of the hard collaboration problems are [solved] in vertical domains." His firm, Legal OnRamp, is a collaboration platform for lawyers that allows information to be collected and shared virtually. Membership is by invitation only.

Lippe noted that, in the legal field, "there's already a structure of knowledge, and most knowledge repositories and structures of the collaborative web have existed for multiple generations. So, the question is, how do you tap into them?" One core structure is attorney-client privilege, which Lippe said "has long preceded the information confidentiality and security regime that we all have now. It creates the structure of what you can and cannot share." In the legal universe, he added, the messy serendipity of "horizontal" social networking cannot solve the hardest problems. "Lawyers have some questions they will answer for free, and others that they will figure out a way to get paid to answer."

But the legal field's communication sensitivities are "a very specific case," Shellen pointed out. He noted that companies have built private social networks that feature protected blogs and search engines, and that these tools have proven effective in achieving new forms of collaboration while keeping information secure. Organizations are now incorporating use of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social media into their daily routines, although they are in need of systems that can integrate and update the information being posted across all of the platforms. Shellen's Thing Labs produces a reader called "Brizzly" that can be used to provide that service.

Lippe agreed that, despite the concerns he noted, large legal firms have an opportunity to use social networking to reestablish an intimacy with clients that they may have lost as the businesses grew larger and adjusted to structural changes in the industry. Lippe wrote recently on his Legal OnRamp blog that social networking tools can be used to save attorneys from "e-mail and attachment overload" and to "share existing knowledge or collaborate on new work [including] high volume work like commercial contracts and high complexity work like major case litigation."

Office culture plays a significant role in what platform is used to share information, according to Schultz, a partner with the San Mateo, Calif.-based Altimeter Group, a technology strategy consulting firm. She noted that media companies, for example, may be a better fit for the horizontal nature of social networking. Schultz has been active in social media and networking for many years and has advised organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies, including Citibank and Procter & Gamble. At P&G, she built the P&G Social Media Lab, a program that enables the company to study the new dynamics of customer relationships in the age of social networking, and to use social media to break the mold of standard marketing measures and approaches that were geared toward older types of media. By encouraging brand managers to pay close attention to what customers were saying on community sites and other social networking places, Schultz said the Lab has helped P&G redefine how it engages, communicates with and uses marketing to influence consumers. "I see the tools making the roles we have more porous," she stated. "As the consumer-driven nature of social networking moves into organizations, the collaboration potential of their use becomes more interesting."

The use of tools like Twitter and Google Wave "definitely make a cultural statement," said Douglas. The Google product marketing manager described how Google Wave has the capabilities for real-time, rolling conversation and collaboration among users that can include messages, links and attachments. Douglas noted that each conversation or "wave" can be modified with different editing and replying privileges so that enterprises can "exercise controls for how people want to lock down content." The Google engineers demonstrated the application on the big screen behind the panelists; they showed how users can comment with links embedded in their messages and also load attachments.

Google Wave could be used effectively for private communication inside the firewall, as well as for working with a diverse community outside an organization, panelists said. Previous KM systems did not easily integrate communication with content management, making it difficult to use existing tools to access and manage information during real time conversations. Google Wave and other social networking tools offer the potential of a much tighter integration between communication and content, meaning conversations can include richer information sharing and easier references to content available across the organization.

To Shellen, the most interesting aspect to how social networking and collaboration tools are used is users' ability to join ongoing conversations. He said his firm is currently building a "data set on top of that engagement, where we ask people to explain trending topics on Twitter." The combination of immediate updates plus access to more in-depth information can enhance knowledge. "Tools like Twitter make me much smarter about you," Schultz noted. "And the 'you' could be an entity or an individual." She said that with the right kind of filtering, people can collaborate and make more effective use of the information available on social networks. "Companies can collaborate in real time with customers on products and even pricing."

But does the 140-character limit for posts to Twitter enable engagement, or is it "a sign of triviality?" asked Weinberger. "Constraints breed invention," replied Shellen. Douglas added that communities using Twitter, Google Wave and other tools are creating their own etiquette. Panelists agreed that both the creation of etiquette for particular conversations and the sheer ability to engage in several discussions at once would be difficult using blogs and older forms of web content sharing programs.

An Open and Vibrant World

Weinberger asked the panelists whether progress toward the real-time collaboration frontier is being driven by new technology or human needs. Speaking to the human needs, Fitton observed that social networking tools such as Twitter "help us overcome human isolation in a way that is not brand new but is happening on a different scale." She said that the collaboration possible on the site is a question of "not just; 'What are you doing?' but, 'What do we have in common?'" Fulfilling that need is what fascinates her about the phenomenon. Shellen added: "There's accountability behind it; we now have modes of identity tied to short bursts of communication that are very much 'you.'"

Schultz suggested that businesses could have achieved some of the same communications with earlier technology, "but not in real time, and not with the ability to participate using a device [such as a smartphone] we can take along with us in our pocket." The ubiquity of smartphones and Internet access is changing the opportunities available to people. "Interactivity used to be about clicking on a website, but it turns out that was pretty passive," she said. "We are now living up to what we said could be done." That includes the potential for much richer customer communication that can offer links and embedded content as part of real-time conversations. "Active" dialogue between consumers and companies using social media, she added, break through the limits of traditional marketing, which relies on one-way communication and canned messaging.

To Douglas, what's important is that the technology is allowing communication, collaboration and content sharing to become one and the same. "These tools bring human delight by breaking down barriers." Lippe cautioned that the notion of someone Tweeting to get an answer in a legal setting is "fairly mind-boggling." However, he agreed with the panelists that, even in the most vertically oriented industries, "the incredibly open and vibrant world represented by the social networking community" will be a catalyst for dynamic changes in the years to come.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on social networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm


"How The SEC Is Violating My Wife’s First Amendment Rights," by Brad Feld, MIT's Technology Review, July 11, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=358&bpid=25461&nlid=3235


Technology for Personal Finance
"Goalkeeping Gets Easier in the Finances Arena New Mint.com Feature Offers User-Friendly Options That Help Savers Set Up Budget Objectives and Stick to Them," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704911704575326914251218780.html

When most people hear the word "budget," they groan about all the numbers and spreadsheets involved in setting financial goals. Instead they procrastinate and continue spending without any specific savings goals. Case in point: I recently postponed a meeting with my financial planner because I didn't have the energy after a long business trip to work through my finances.

Now Mint.com, a website that already offers user-friendly options for studying how one's money is spent, has introduced an easy way to set budget objectives, link them to accounts and learn specific steps on how to reach those goals. The goals can even be personalized with digital photos, like an image of the car you're saving up to buy. And this service, which launched Tuesday, doesn't cost a cent.

I've been testing Intuit Inc.'s free, updated Mint.com service, specifically focusing on its new Mint Goals feature. The idea of adding goals that tie into real accounts has been a long time coming for the finance-management website. Mint previously offered a Planning section on its site, but it required too much manual input, including setting up personal budget categories, and guesswork about how much one should spend.

The Goals feature uses pop-up windows where users can quickly input data, like annual salary, to get estimates on how much they can afford to spend on things like a vacation, as well as how much they need to save for that vacation. Monthly savings estimates can be set to aggressive savings plans or conservative ones with just a mouse click.

Finances in One Place
Mint.com has been around for almost three years and is already used by millions of people. Its proprietary algorithms encrypt data so people will feel confident enough to input their usernames and passwords for their online financial accounts, allowing them to see all of their financial activity in one place. These accounts include those tied to credit cards, banks, retirement savings and others. Mint is known for displaying colorful visuals like pie charts and graphs, so it's easy for people to see where they're spending their money or how it's being invested.

Mint Goals is a new tab on the Mint.com site, and clicking on it directs users to a group of eight popular goals and one that can be customized (more will be added over time). The preset list includes goals to get out of debt, buy a home, buy a car, save for college, take a trip or save for retirement. A digital checklist in each goal called "Next Steps" gives people serious, doable tasks to complete, so they can actually make progress toward a goal in ways other than just putting money aside. This instant gratification saved me from doing a lot of calculating.

The Best Account
When you set up a goal for the first time, Mint suggests what type of account would work best for saving toward it. Examples include a 529 savings plan for people who are saving to put their kids through college or a Roth IRA for retirement savings. Mint will also tell you the provider with the best interest rate.

Unlike some other websites that encourage saving, like SmartyPig.com, Mint isn't a bank, so you'll have to leave the Mint site to create accounts and manage money transfers rather than starting them right on the site. Aaron Patzer, the company's founder and CEO, expects the site will enable setting up savings accounts and money transfers by the end of this year.

Each goal includes the overall amount of money intended to be saved, today's balance, planned and projected dates for reaching the goal and how much has been saved this month (like $200 of $750). I liked looking at Mint's colorful thermometers, which quickly showed me how I was progressing in a particular goal.

For example, the Buy a Home goal checklist includes steps like finding a Realtor, getting homeowner's insurance and getting prequalified for a loan. A panel beside each of these items also offers an educational explanation of what these steps really mean. Many explanations include links to a blog called MintLife, where blog posts from Mint employees and some freelancers offer deep explanations about financial questions.

Ads With Context
The Goals feature comes with contextual ads, which help it remain free. One checklist item suggests opening a high-yield savings account and also offers links to the Discover and American Express websites, which offer the accounts. If you've started a Mint Goal to save for a trip to Iceland, travel insurance is suggested, along with Web links to sites that sell trip insurance.

While these links might allow people to get started right away on a particular task, they also beg the question of whether these are the best options for users—or just the biggest advertisers on Mint. Mr. Patzer explained that companies for these ads are chosen according to what's best for the user and are selected from a list of savings options ranked by the site's editors.

Goals can be linked to several of your accounts on Mint so they're updated with real-time data. A long-term retirement goal can link to a 401(k), brokerage account and retirement account. If the stock market takes a dive and money is lost in an account, that loss is automatically reflected in the overall goal's balance. If you tie a savings account to a goal to save for a house, every dollar added to that account (on the bank's end) is automatically reflected in the goal.

Mint already gave people a visually engaging way to know more about what their money is doing, but Mint Goals give people a real reason to come back to the site more often.

Mint.com home page --- http://www.mint.com/

Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers


Joe Hoyle Challenging Students
"The Nonaggression Pact in Reverse," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Financial Accounting Blog, June 20, 2010 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2010/06/nonaggression-pact-in-reverse.html


You may want to liven up your accounting, math or history courses by illustrating the art and science of the Abacus Calculator

Abacus: The Art of Calculating with Beads --- http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/index.html

Contents

Introduction

Construction  ·  Basics  ·  Java Applet  ·  Technique  ·  The Abacus Today


History

Timeline  ·  Salamis Tablet  ·  Counting Board  ·  Roman Hand Abacus  ·  Suan Pan  ·  Soroban  ·  Schoty  ·  Nepohualtzitzin  ·  Khipu  ·  Lee Abacus
 

Interactive Abacus Tutor

Sarat Chandran and David A. Bagley's incredible Java abacus with a built-in tutor for counting, addition and subtraction.

Calculations
Addition  ·  Subtraction  ·  Multiplication & Division  ·  Square Roots  ·  Cube Roots

The Lee Abacus

The manual for the Lee Abacus, c. 1958 is available as Text  ·  Images
 

The Abacus as Art

Michael Mode builds exotic abaci as art objects.
 

Abacus: Mystery of the Bead

Abacus Techniques by Totton Heffelfinger & Gary Flom.

Articles, Excerpts and Analysis

The Abacus vs.The Electric Calculator

In 1946, a contest held in Tokyo, pitted an abacus against an electric calculator; the abacus won, of course.
 

Feynman vs. The Abacus

Richard Feynman battles against the abacus; the result is not surprising (if you know Feynman).
 

Comparing the Chinese and the Mesoamerican Abacus

An analysis contributed by David B. Kelley.
 

The Roman Hand-Abacus

An analysis contributed by Steve Stephenson.
 

The Incan Khipu

String, and Knot, Theory of Inca Writing by John Noble Wilford.
Talking Knots of the Incas by Viviano and Davide Domenici.
 

Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge

An article about the dangers of forgetting knowledge learned from the past, by Eugene Linden.

All Things Abacus

Additional Abacus Resources

Purchase  or build an abacus  ·  An abacus for your Palm  ·  Books about the abacus  ·  Java applet source code  ·  The Mesoamerican abacus
 

Resources For Teachers

The abacus in the classroom  ·  Abacus lesson plan  ·  Math and science resources for teachers
 

Photos

High-resolution photos of my abacus collection.

Bob Jensen's threads on early accounting history are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory

 


"First Reactions to Blackboard Buying Wimba and Elluminate," by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, July 8, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning

Here I'm going on "Gut Feelings" and my "Blink" - an approach I wouldn't necessarily recommend.

I'd definitely read Ray Henderson's blog post about the acquisition - and the letter to clients is also worth your time.

I'm sure my reactions contain thoughts that will piss off everyone …. just remember that I may be wrong.

Gut Reactions:

--This is Very Smart for Blackboard: The future of the LMS involves knitting together various functions. Synchronous meetings, presence awareness, and voice-authoring/collaboration are all essential pieces of the online/hybrid learning experience. The danger for Blackboard is that their core product becomes essentially middleware - performing commodity functions such as enrollment management, gradebook, etc. etc. Tying the higher value-add services directly into the Blackboard product (as will happen over time) makes it more difficult to replace Blackboard with another LMS.

--Elluminate Needs Development: I have utilized Elluminate for Webinars, and I have to say that I find the platform lacking as compared to Adobe Connect Pro. Others will disagree - but whatever your synchronous collaboration tool preference I think you will agree that all the platforms need significant investment. I wonder how much better Elluminate will be than Adobe Connect Pro, particularly when the Adobe product is integrated with Blackboard using the building block. Even though I've never been wild about Elluminate, I think that the tool offers a quantum leap of functionality over the atrocious native Blackboard synchronous tools - and if Blackboard is smart they will quickly fold this Elluminate into their core offering.

--Wimba Voice/Chat Features Are Great: I've never quite understood why it was necessary to buy key voice and chat (presence awareness) tools on top of the LMS - but I think Wimba has been fulfilling an important need. If I were Blackboard I'd also integrate the Wimba features into the core - and make the money with services, integration, etc. etc.

--Bad News for Non-Blackboard Wimba and Elluminate Clients: I can't see how I'd be happy with this news if I'm running Moodle and Wimba or Elluminate. Ray is someone I trust - so his assurances that investments will be made to support and grow the products for non-Blackboard clients do carry a great deal of weight. Still … if I were a Moodle person I'd be reviewing my options about now.

--If You Are Worried About Lock-In, You Should Be: And you should be worried about lock-in, as it will be even more difficult to leave Blackboard once the core tool is also providing synchronous meetings and rich collaboration / student authoring functions. Many campuses will like the pre-baked integration and robust features that the eventual fully integrated products will deliver. Others will (wisely) decide to piece together open-source and consumer tools, leaving themselves with agility and flexibility.

--Kaltura or ShareStream or Ensemble Are Next: The big piece that is missing from Blackboard now is a way to do curricular media management. The Kaltura and ShareStream already offer robust Blackboard integration - wouldn't it make more sense from Blackboard's perspective if they could offer a full vertical solution - one sales cycle, one support model, one source for integration and localization?

--Good News for Blackboard Campuses (I Think): Overall, my gut tells me that this is good news for Blackboard campuses - as synchronous learning and collaboration will improve (I think) with both integration and focused resources. Getting rid of the need to have separate sales teams and back-offices, and combining developer resources, will mean more dollars and time can be spent on improving functionality. I'm also worried about lock-in, but perhaps more excited about the robust and seamless experience.

I'd also say this is good news for our industry. If I were working at Blackboard this is exactly the deal that I would have tried to arrange. This deal puts Blackboard in a very strong position in terms of their long-term relevance in higher ed, and I think addresses much of the risk that open/community source alternatives like Moodle were beginning to pose. I also believe that within 3 years time Blackboard will be acquired by Microsoft or Oracle or maybe even Google - as the education market will only grow. This acquisition will be seen as a smart move along the road to that destination.

June 8, 2010 reply from Peters, James M [jpeters@NMHU.EDU]

Well, I come from a much different experience. I have taught with Elluminte for three years now and have been quite satisfied with the technology. We also have used Blackboard for the same period and I consider it a major disaster and I would love to drive a stake through it heart, if it has one. So, let's see how badly Blackboard can screw up Elluminate.

For example, currently, Blackboard is the only LMS that we have researched that still uses Java. This has caused a nightmare for our faculty and students because Blackboard never works with the latest Java implementations. So many faculty and students have automatic updates set up and if they do, Blackboard stops working as soon as they update their Java. One of our faculty accidently hit the Java update icon one day before class and it took our tech people 30 minutes to get him back up and running.

I do use the Elluminate link in Blackboard, but it takes a five-page handout that involves things like clearing cookies and other things in your browers as well and tinkering with security settings in your browser to work. This is a mess because we have students scattered all over Northern New Mexico that do not have the experience to start resetting their browser security settings.

Finally, in New Mexico, our implementation of Blackboard has been highly unreliable and is down nearly every week. For example, Blackboard is currently doing an "upgrade" to try to make their platform more reliable. They estimated a day downtime. They have been down for three days, have lost three weeks of data in the process, and still can't get our classes to list right. All while we are trying to teach summer classes.

From my experience, Blackboard is a disaster and needs to die. I have had very few problems with Elluminate, but I my teaching approach is pretty simple and I don't use many of the features. However, if Blackboard gets a hold of it, I am sure they will mess it up.

I need to retire fast. We already have lost one accounting faculty member who tossed in the towel over Blackboard and quite teaching. The rest of our Business Faculty would love to corner a Blackboard representative and give them an earfull. In fact, I had a Blackboard VP in my office a couple of months ago (I actually am known by name at their headquarters), along with another accounting faculty member. I commented that if I stuck my head out my door and shouted that there was a Blackboard representative present, I could not guarantee that she would make it out of the building alive. Our experience with Blackboard has been horrible with massive downtime and lost class time. Some students have left because of it and most think we are a joke as a University because of it.

Sorry to rant, but this scares the hell out of me. I do agree it is a smart move for Blackboard. They are using their size and market power to drive everyone else out of the market so they can continue to turn out and sell inferior software. The Microsoft of learning platforms.

Jim Peters

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

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


Mike Milken once predicted that for-profit universities would "eat the lunch" of not-for-profit universities.
Hold the phone!

Are For-Profit University Equity Share Prices Headed for the Skids?
"For-Profit Colleges, Under Fire From Regulators, Face a New Foe: Short-Sellers," by Paul Fain, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Short-Sellers-Are-New-Foe-of/66289/

Wall Street has made a bundle on the rapid growth of for-profit higher education. But some sophisticated money managers are now betting against those companies in the stock market, and the influence of big money and related questionable behavior is clouding a debate about the industry on Capitol Hill.

Last week, ProPublica reported that an unnamed investment company paid a researcher to draft a letter to the Department of Education about for-profit recruiters targeting potential students at homeless shelters. The researcher, who solicited signatures from officials at 20 homeless shelters, some of whom had no direct knowledge of for-profit recruiting, later admitted she was working for a short-seller who has a stake in a drop in value of the for-profits' stocks.

The whole for-profit-college sector earned $26-billion in revenue last year, and the industry's earnings have made it a darling of Wall Street. Investors pay rapt attention to news reports and rumors about for-profit companies, which are facing possible new federal regulations. And ironically, investor money—the free market that helped fuel the sector's emergence—is also the motivator behind some of its loudest critics.

In addition to the investment company behind the homeless-recruiting letter, two other prominent short-sellers have actively lobbied the federal government to crack down on for-profit colleges. The money managers are relatively new players in the high-stakes policy debate. And the Career College Association says short-sellers have engaged in a systematic campaign to discredit its industry.

For-profit colleges have their own vested interest in the fight over regulations and have gone on a recent spending frenzy on lawyers and lobbyists. With so much money tainting the continuing debate, several college-finance experts say lawmakers should not rely on facts and figures about for-profits that come from short-sellers or the industry itself.

Mark Kantrowitz, who runs Finaid, a Web site that provides student financial-aid information, said policy decisions should be based on information from the Government Accountability Office or another unbiased source. "What you need are facts that are raw, not slanted," he says.

Battleground Stocks Steven Eisman, a hedge fund manager, made a splash with his testimony at a high-profile hearing in the U.S. Senate last month on for-profits. Mr. Eisman had famously bet against the housing market, and at the hearing he compared the growth and practices of career colleges to those of the subprime mortgage industry.

The share prices of major for-profit companies took a hit after Mr. Eisman's June 24 testimony, as they did after a similar speech he gave at an investors' conference in May. Shares of ITT Educational Services, for example, fell 4.5 percent after the hearing, and Apollo Inc., which owns the University of Phoenix, dropped 3.7 percent.

Those were hardly isolated events. Hedge funds have driven much of the volatility in for-profits stocks, with many dumping their holdings or selling short in recent months. And Trace A. Urdan, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group, said Wall Street firms use "leaks and access" in Washington to angle for their interests. Employees of investment companies have been regular fixtures on the Hill in recent weeks.

"This feels like some weird distillation of insider trading," said Mr. Urdan, whose group helps education companies raise capital, and who advises investors on buying and selling education stocks.

Mr. Eisman's testimony was controversial even before he sat in front of the microphone. But scrutiny of his role has increased in the wake of the ProPublica report. In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Eisman said he had no involvement with the researcher who created the homeless-recruiting letter. "That was not me," he said.

During the hearing, Mr. Eisman acknowledged that he had a financial stake in the industry's fortunes.

"I have been completely transparent about how I short those stocks," he said Tuesday. "I wasn't trying to manipulate anybody."

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, brought Mr. Eisman to the Hill. A senior Republican aide called that invitation "an appalling lack of judgment." And while the aide said senators on both sides of the aisle were concerned about how for-profits operate, Mr. Eisman "wasn't there as a dispassionate truth-teller, he was there to make a quick buck."

An aide in Senator Harkin's office defended the invitation, saying that Mr. Eisman's testimony advanced the public's interest. The aide also said that Mr. Eisman is a "well-respected analyst with a track record for making unpopular, but correct, observations about American industries."

The senator continues to cite Mr. Eisman's arguments. In an op-ed published in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times, Senator Harkin quotes the hedge-fund manager and uses his widely cited claim that students enrolled in for-profit colleges could default on as much as $275-billion in federal loans over the next decade.

The Profit Motive There is a surreal quality to for-profits criticizing the financial motivations of short-sellers; the quest for profits is a defining characteristic of the for-profit industry.

The difference between short-sellers and legitimate critics of the practices of some for-profit colleges, said Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, is that for the money managers, "it's in their best interest to distort and mislead."

Mr. Miller. who wrote a 13-page rebuttal to Mr. Eisman's testimony, said facts often do not back the claims of Mr. Eisman and other short-sellers, like Manuel P. Asensio, who, through the Alliance for Economic Stability, a nonprofit advocacy group he manages, has called for stronger regulations of for-profit colleges.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges and universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


"Teaching vs. Research," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,  July 13, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/13/grad

It’s common for many at research universities to say that just because they value scholarly production doesn’t mean they don’t care about teaching. But a new study of political science departments at doctoral institutions -- published in the journal PS -- suggests that there may be a tradeoff.

The study examined 122 departments at universities that grant doctorates in political science to see which institutions offer a course for doctoral students on how to become good teachers. It turns out that only a minority of departments (41) do so -- even though the American Political Science Association and others have urged graduate programs to recognize that the odds favor their students finding jobs at institutions that place at least as much value on teaching as on research. Of the 41 programs with courses, 28 are required and the rest are optional.

The analysis then tried to determine which programs were most likely to offer these courses. The size of the department and the size of the universities -- both of which could be thought to measure the resources available for courses -- were found not to be factors.

But there was an inverse relationship between research productivity in departments and the odds of offering such a course. The relationship, while significant, had notable exceptions in the survey among public but not among private institutions. Some of the public institutions with strong research records -- such as Ohio State University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison -- do have such courses. But as a general rule, highly ranked private university departments do not.

Over all, public institutions were seven times more likely than private institutions to offer such courses, the study found, citing as a possible explanation “the public service component of state institutions or the fact that public institutions are consistently faced with state-mandated programs to enhance teaching generally.”

The study notes that there are innovations that go beyond just having a single course on teaching techniques. For example, Baylor University, in its relatively young doctoral program in political science, has placed an emphasis on the idea that it is training future college teachers with a “teaching apprentice” program. In this program, grad students are assigned to work with senior professors teaching an undergraduate course -- not by becoming teaching assistants, but by analyzing the course. The grad students prepare an annotated syllabus -- different from the syllabus used -- to explore various teaching issues.

During the fourth year of the program, the grad students are “instructors of record” for a course, but then in their fifth year they shift to a focus on finishing dissertations. The study suggests that this approach provides in-depth exposure to teaching issues.

The paper on these issues was written by a professor (John Ishiyama) and two doctoral students (Tom Miles and Christine Balarezo) at the University of North Texas.

Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of accounting doctoral programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

 

Form Jensen's Archives

Question
What research methodology flaws are shared by studies in political science and accounting science?

"Methodological Confusion:  How indictments of The Israel Lobby (by John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, ISBN-13: 9780374177720) expose political science's flaws" by Daniel W. Drezner, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, February 22, 2008, Page B5 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i24/24b00501.htm 

Does the public understand how political science works? Or are political scientists the ones who need re-educating? Those questions have been running through my mind in light of the drubbing that John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt received in the American news media for their 2007 book,  The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Pick your periodical — The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, National Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World — and you'll find a reviewer trashing the book.

From a political-science perspective, what's interesting about those reviews is that they are largely grounded in methodological critiques — which rarely break into the public sphere. What's disturbing is that the methodologies used in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy are hardly unique to Mearsheimer and Walt. Are the indictments of their book overblown, or do they expose the methodological flaws of the discipline in general?

The most persistent public criticism of Mearsheimer and Walt has been their failure to empirically buttress their argument with interviews. Writing in the Times Book Review, Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, criticized their "writing on this sensitive topic without doing extensive interviews with the lobbyists and the lobbied." David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, recently seconded that notion: "If you try to write about politics without interviewing policy makers, you'll wind up spewing all sorts of nonsense."

That kind of critique has a long pedigree. For decades public officials and commentators have decried the failure of social scientists to engage more deeply with the objects of their studies. Secretary of State Dean Acheson once objected to being treated as a "dependent variable." The New Republic ran a cover story in 1999 with the subhead, "When Did Political Science Forget About Politics?"

To the general reader, such critiques must sound damning. International-relations scholars know full well, however, that innumerable peer-reviewed articles and university-press books utilize the same kind of empirical sources that appear in The Israel Lobby. Most case studies in international relations rely on news-conference transcripts, official documents, newspaper reportage, think-tank analyses, other scholarly works, etc. It is not that political scientists never interview policy makers — they do (and Mearsheimer and Walt aver that they have as well). However, with a few splendid exceptions, interviews are not the bread and butter of most international-relations scholarship. (This kind of fieldwork is much more common in comparative politics.)

Indeed, the claim that political scientists can't write about policy without talking to policy makers borders on the absurd. The first rule about policy makers is that they always have agendas — even in interviews with social scientists. That does not mean that those with power lie. It does mean that they may not be completely candid in outlining motives and constraints. One would expect that to be particularly true about such "a sensitive topic."

Further, most empirical work in political science is concerned with actions, not words. How much aid has the United States disbursed to Israel? How did members of Congress vote on the issue? Without talking to members of Congress, thousands of Congressional scholars study how the legislative branch acts, by analyzing verifiable actions or words — votes, speeches, committee hearings, and testimony. Statistical approaches allow political scientists to test hypotheses through regression analysis. By Brooks's criteria, any political analysis of, say, 19th-century policy decisions would be pointless, since all the relevant players are dead.

Other methodological critiques are more difficult to dismiss. Walter Russell Mead's dissection of The Israel Lobby in Foreign Affairs does not pull any punches. Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that Mearsheimer and Walt "claim the clarity and authority of rigorous logic, but their methods are loose and rhetorical. This singularly unhappy marriage — between the pretensions of serious political analysis and the standards of the casual op-ed — both undercuts the case they wish to make and gives much of the book a disagreeably disingenuous tone."

Mead enumerates several methodological sins, in particular the imprecise manner in which the "Israel Lobby" is defined in the book. For their part, the book's authors acknowledge that the term is "somewhat misleading," conceding that "the boundaries of the Israel Lobby cannot be identified precisely." It is certainly true that many of the central concepts in international-relations theory — like "power" or "regime" — have disputed definitions. But most political scientists deal with nebulous concepts by explicitly offering their own definition to guide their research. Even if others disagree, at least the definition is transparent. In The Israel Lobby, however, Mearsheimer and Walt essentially rely on a Potter Stewart definition of the lobby: They know it when they see it. That makes it exceedingly difficult for other political scientists to test or falsify their hypotheses.

Many of the reviews of the book highlight two flaws that, disturbingly, are more pervasive in academic political science. The first is the failure to compare the case in question to other cases. For example, Mearsheimer and Walt go to great lengths to outline the "extraordinary material aid and diplomatic support" the United States provides to Israel. What they do not do, however, is systematically compare Israel to similarly situated countries to determine if the U.S.-Israeli relationship really is unique. An alternative, strategic explanation would posit that Israel falls into a small set of countries: longstanding allies bordering one or multiple enduring rivals. The category of states that meet that criteria throughout the time period analyzed by Mearsheimer and Walt is relatively small: Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey. Compared to that smaller set of countries, the U.S. relationship with Israel does not look anomalous. The United States has demonstrated a willingness to expend blood, treasure, or diplomatic capital to ensure the security of all of those countries — despite the wide variance in the strength of each's "lobby."

Continued in article

Daniel W. Drezner is an associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Jensen Comment
When I read the above review entitled "Metholological Confusion" I kept thinking of the thousands of empirical and analytical studies by accounting faculty and students that have similar methodology confusions. How many mathematical/empirical database studies relating accounting events (e.g., a new standard) with capital market behavior also conduct formal interviews with investors, analysts, fund managers, etc. Do analytical researchers conduct formal interviews with real-world decision makers before building their mathematical models? The majority of behavioral accounting studies conducted by professors use students as surrogates for real-world decision makers. This methodology is notoriously flawed and could be helped if the researchers had also interviewed real-world players.

And Drezner overlooked another common flaw shared by both political science and accountics research. If the findings are as important as claimed by authors, why aren't other researchers frantically trying to replicate the results? The lack of replication in accounting science (accountics research) is scandalous --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Replication
Formal and well-crafted interviews with important players (investors, standard setters, CEOs, etc.) constitute possible ways of replicating empirical and analytical findings.

The closest things we have to in-depth contact with real world players in accounting research is research conducted by the standard setters themselves such as the FASB, the IASB, the GASB, etc. Sometimes these are interviews, although more often then not they are comment letters. But accountics researchers wave off such research as anecdotal and seldom even quote the public archives of such interviews and comments. Surveys are frequently published but these tend to be relegated to less prestigious academic research journals and practitioner journals.

Most importantly of all in accountics is that the leading accounting research journals for tenure, promotion, and performance evaluation in academe are devoted to accountics paper. Normative methods, case studies, and interviews are rarely used in studies published in such journals. The following is a quotation from “An Analysis of the Evolution of Research Contributions by The Accounting Review (TAR): 1926-2005,” by Jean L. Heck and Robert E. Jensen, Accounting Historians Journal, Volume 34, No. 2, December 2007, Page 121.

Leading accounting professors lamented TAR’s preference for rigor over relevancy [Zeff, 1978; Lee, 1997; and Williams, 1985 and 2003]. Sundem [1987] provides revealing information about the changed perceptions of authors, almost entirely from academe, who submitted manuscripts for review between June 1982 and May 1986. Among the 1,148 submissions, only 39 used archival (history) methods; 34 of those submissions were rejected. Another 34 submissions used survey methods; 33 of those were rejected. And 100 submissions used traditional normative (deductive) methods with 85 of those being rejected. Except for a small set of 28 manuscripts classified as using “other” methods (mainly descriptive empirical according to Sundem), the remaining larger subset of submitted manuscripts used methods that Sundem [1987, p. 199] classified these as follows:

292          General Empirical

172          Behavioral

135          Analytical modeling

119          Capital Market

  97          Economic modeling

  40          Statistical modeling

  29          Simulation

 

It is clear that by 1982, accounting researchers realized that having mathematical or statistical analysis in TAR submissions made accountics virtually a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for acceptance for publication. It became increasingly difficult for a single editor to have expertise in all of the above methods. In the late 1960s, editorial decisions on publication shifted from the TAR editor alone to the TAR editor in conjunction with specialized referees and eventually associate editors [Flesher, 1991, p. 167]. Fleming et al. [2000, p. 45] wrote the following:

The big change was in research methods. Modeling and empirical methods became prominent during 1966-1985, with analytical modeling and general empirical methods leading the way. Although used to a surprising extent, deductive-type methods declined in popularity, especially in the second half of the 1966-1985 period.
 

I think the emphasis highlighted in red above demonstrates that "Methodological Confusion" reigns supreme in accounting science as well as political science.

February 22, 2008 reply from James M. Peters [jpeters@NMHU.EDU]

A couple of years ago, P. Kothari, one of the Editors of JAE and a full professor at MIT, visited the U. of Maryland to present a paper. In my private discussion with him, I asked him to identify what he considered to the settled findings associated with the last 30 years of capital markets research in accounting. I pointed out that somewhere over half of all accounting research since Ball and Brown fit into this category and I was curious as to what the effort had added to Ball and Brown. That is, what conclusions have been drawn that could be considered settled ground so that researchers could move on to other topics. His response, and I quote, was "I understand your point, Jim." He could not identify one issue that researchers had been able to "put to bed" after all that effort.

Jim Peters
New Mexico Highlands University

February 22, 2008 reply from J. S. Gangolly [gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]

Jim,

P. Kothari's response is to be expected. I have had similar responses from at least two ex-editors of TAR; how appropriate a TLA! But who wants to bell the cats (or call off the naked emperors' bluff)? Accounting academia knows which side of the bread is buttered.

That you needed to flaunt Kothari's resume to legitimise his vacuous response shows the pathetic state of accounting academia.

If accounting academia is not to be reduced to the laughing stock of accounting practice, we better start listening to the problems that practice faces. How else can we understand what we profess to "research"? We accounting academics have been circling our wagons too long as a ploy to keep our wages arbitrarily high.

In as much as we are a profession, any academic on such a committee reduces the whole exercise to a farce.

Jagdish

September 8, 2009 reply from Amy Dunbar [Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]

Bob Jensen wrote:
The troubles with multiple regression and discriminant analysis models are those nagging assumptions of linearity, predictor variable independence, homoscedasticity, and independence of error terms. If we move up to non-linear models, the assumption of robustness is a giant leap in faith. And superimposed on all of this is the assumption of stationarity needed to have any confidence in extrapolations from past experience.

In the end, if gaming is allowed in the future as it has been allowed by bankers and their auditors for decades, putting accountics into the standards is not the answer.

Sophisticated accountics is just perfume sprayed on the manure pile.

Amy Dunbar comment/questions: Oh my, what a metaphor. ;-)

I continue to struggle with the dismissal of econometric analysis (accountics?) as an approach to address accounting issues. Many disciplines use econometric analysis in research, despite the limitations you point out. What research methods do you think are appropriate for studying accounting issues? In my opinion, research requires a disciplined approach that can be replicated, which you argue is crucial. Can one replicate research using the research methods that you favor? Or perhaps I am misunderstanding your points.

For example, consider the FIN 48 tax disclosures. My coauthors and I have collected data from the tax footnotes of300 companies to determine how firms are handling the FIN 48 21d requirement of forecasting the expected tax reserve change over the next 12 months. We want to know how accurate forecasts are and if the forecast errors result because of the inherent difficulty of providing the forecast or if firms do not want to disclose because they do not want to provide a roadmap for taxing authorities. We use econometric methods to test our hypotheses. How would you address this issue? By the way, the Illinois tax conference in October has a panel session on FIN 48 disclosures, including the forecast requirement, which suggests others are grappling with the informativeness of these disclosures.

I ordered the book that Paul Williams suggested: The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences. I hope I will have a better understanding of your position after I read it.

Amy Dunbar
UConn

September 8, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Amy,

If you really want to understand the problem you’re apparently wanting to study, read about how Warren Buffett changed the whole outlook of a great econometrics/mathematics researcher (Janet Tavkoli). I’ve mentioned this fantastic book before --- Dear Mr. Buffett. What opened her eyes is how Warren Buffet built his vast, vast fortune exploiting the errors of the sophisticated mathematical model builders when valuing derivatives (especially options) where he became the writer of enormous option contracts (hundreds of millions of dollars per contract). Warren Buffet dared to go where mathematical models could not or would not venture when the real world became too complicated to model. Warren reads financial statements better than most anybody else in the world and has a fantastic ability to retain and process what he’s studied. It’s impossible to model his mind.

I finally grasped what Warren was saying. Warren has such a wide body of knowledge that he does not need to rely on “systems.” . . . Warren’s vast knowledge of corporations and their finances helps him identify derivatives opportunities, too. He only participates in derivatives markets when Wall Street gets it wrong and prices derivatives (with mathematical models) incorrectly. Warren tells everyone that he only does certain derivatives transactions when they are mispriced.

Wall Street derivatives traders construct trading models with no clear idea of what they are doing. I know investment bank modelers with advanced math and science degrees who have never read the financial statements of the corporate credits they model. This is true of some credit derivatives traders, too.
Janet Tavakoli, Dear Mr. Buffett, Page 19

The part of my message that you quoted was in the context of a bad debt estimation message. I don’t think multivariate models in general work well in the context of bad debt estimation because of the restrictive assumptions of the models (except in some industries where bad debt losses are dominated by one or two really good predictor variables). There is an exception in the case of the Altman, Beaver, and Ohlson bankruptcy prediction models, but predicting bankruptcy is in a different ball park than predicting defaults among 10 million rather small accounts receivable.

As to multivariate models as applied in TAR, JAR, and JAE I’ve no objection since the 1970s after referees became much better at challenging model assumptions (in the 1960s refereeing of econometrics models in accounting literature was often a joke).
"FANTASYLAND ACCOUNTING RESEARCH: Let's Make Pretend..." by Robert E. Jensen, The Accounting Review, Vol. 54, January 1979, 189-196.

The problem, as I see it, is that there’s nothing wrong with our econometrics tool bag when applied to problems where the tools fit the problem. The econometrics models (except for nonlinear models) are relatively robust in most papers that do get published these days.

An Example of Challenges of Multivariate Model Assumptions

"Is accruals quality a priced risk factor?" by John E. Corea, Wayne R. Guaya, and Rodrigo Verdib, Journal of Accounting and Economics ,Volume 46, Issue 1, September 2008, Pages 2-22



Abstract
 In a recent and influential empirical paper, Francis, LaFond, Olsson, and Schipper (FLOS) [2005. The market pricing of accruals quality. Journal of Accounting and Economics 39, 295–327] conclude that accruals quality (AQ) is a priced risk factor. We explain that FLOS’ regressions examining a contemporaneous relation between excess returns and factor returns do not test the hypothesis that AQ is a priced risk factor. We conduct appropriate asset-pricing tests for determining whether a potential risk factor explains expected returns, and find no evidence that AQ is a priced risk factor.

We need to see the above disputes become the rule rather than the exception!
Francis, LaFond, Olsson, and Schipper vigorously disagree with criticisms of their work such that there are some interesting disputes that on occasion arise in accountics research. For the most part, however, published papers like this are rarely replicated such that errors and frauds go unchallenged in most of the thousands of accountics papers that have been published in the past four decades --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Replication

The Corea, Guaya, and Verdib replication is a very, very, very rare exception. I only wish there were more such disputes over underlying modeling assumptions --- they should be extended to data quality as well.

Now let me ask about your FIN 48 tax disclosure study. Was there any independent replication to verify that you did not make any significant data collection or modeling analysis errors (you would be the last person in the world that I would suspect of research fraud)? Do we accept your harvest as totally edible without a single taste test by independent replicators?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Replication

The Bigger Problems

Accountics models seldom focus on the big problems of the profession, because the econometrics and mathematical analysis tools just are not suited to our systemic accountancy problems (such as the vegetable nutrition problem) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews

The editorial problem in TAR, JAR, and JAE is that they commenced in the 1980s to ignore problems that could not be attacked with accountics mathematics and statistical tool bags. This leaves out most problems faced in the accounting profession since practitioners and standard setters seldom (almost never) have copies of TAR, JAR, JAE, and even AH on the table when they are dealing with client issues or standards issues. AH evolved from its original charge to where articles in AH versus TAR are virtually interchangeable. I repeat from a message yesterday:

Not everything that can be counted, counts. And not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein

For a long time, elite accounting researchers could find no “empirical evidence” of widespread earnings management. All they had to do was look up from the computers where their heads were buried.
Bob Jensen --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm

“Research should be problem driven rather than methodologically driven," said Lisa Garcia Bedolla, a member of the task force who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.
Scott Jascik --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/04/polisci  

"I understand your point, Jim." He could not identify one issue that (accountics) researchers had been able to "put to bed" after all that effort.
P. Kothari, one of the Editors of JAE and a full professor at MIT, as quoted by Jim Peters below.

Do we forecast? You bet. Do we have confidence in our forecasts? Never! Confidence about a non-linear chaotic system can only come in degrees, and even those degrees of confidence are guesses. Not all hope is lost. There are times when it seems our ability to predict is better than others. Thus we need to take advantage of it if we see it. Trading ranges, pivot points, support and resistance, and the like can help, and do help the trader.
Michael Covel, Trading Black Swans, September 2009 --- http://www.michaelcovel.com/pdfs/swan.pdf

The following is an excerpt from my accounting theory threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
The rise of accountics is summarized at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm 

Most importantly of all in accountics is that the leading accounting research journals for tenure, promotion, and performance evaluation in academe are devoted to accountics paper. Normative methods, case studies, and interviews are rarely used in studies published in such journals. The following is a quotation from “An Analysis of the Evolution of Research Contributions by The Accounting Review (TAR): 1926-2005,” by Jean L. Heck and Robert E. Jensen, Accounting Historians Journal, Volume 34, No. 2, December 2007, Page 121.

Leading accounting professors lamented TAR’s preference for rigor over relevancy [Zeff, 1978; Lee, 1997; and Williams, 1985 and 2003]. Sundem [1987] provides revealing information about the changed perceptions of authors, almost entirely from academe, who submitted manuscripts for review between June 1982 and May 1986. Among the 1,148 submissions, only 39 used archival (history) methods; 34 of those submissions were rejected. Another 34 submissions used survey methods; 33 of those were rejected. And 100 submissions used traditional normative (deductive) methods with 85 of those being rejected. Except for a small set of 28 manuscripts classified as using “other” methods (mainly descriptive empirical according to Sundem), the remaining larger subset of submitted manuscripts used methods that Sundem [1987, p. 199] classified these as follows:

292          General Empirical

172          Behavioral

135          Analytical modeling

119          Capital Market

  97          Economic modeling

  40          Statistical modeling

  29          Simulation

 

It is clear that by 1982, accounting researchers realized that having mathematical or statistical analysis in TAR submissions made accountics virtually a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for acceptance for publication. It became increasingly difficult for a single editor to have expertise in all of the above methods. In the late 1960s, editorial decisions on publication shifted from the TAR editor alone to the TAR editor in conjunction with specialized referees and eventually associate editors [Flesher, 1991, p. 167]. Fleming et al. [2000, p. 45] wrote the following:

The big change was in research methods. Modeling and empirical methods became prominent during 1966-1985, with analytical modeling and general empirical methods leading the way. Although used to a surprising extent, deductive-type methods declined in popularity, especially in the second half of the 1966-1985 period.
 

I think the emphasis highlighted in red above demonstrates that "Methodological Confusion" reigns supreme in accounting science as well as political science.

February 22, 2008 reply from James M. Peters [jpeters@NMHU.EDU]

A couple of years ago, P. Kothari, one of the Editors of JAE and a full professor at MIT, visited the U. of Maryland to present a paper. In my private discussion with him, I asked him to identify what he considered to the settled findings associated with the last 30 years of capital markets research in accounting. I pointed out that somewhere over half of all accounting research since Ball and Brown fit into this category and I was curious as to what the effort had added to Ball and Brown. That is, what conclusions have been drawn that could be considered settled ground so that researchers could move on to other topics. His response, and I quote, was "I understand your point, Jim." He could not identify one issue that researchers had been able to "put to bed" after all that effort.

Jim Peters
New Mexico Highlands University

 

February 22, 2008 reply from J. S. Gangolly [gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]

Jim,

P. Kothari's response is to be expected. I have had similar responses from at least two ex-editors of TAR; how appropriate a TLA! But who wants to bell the cats (or call off the naked emperors' bluff)? Accounting academia knows which side of the bread is buttered.

That you needed to flaunt Kothari's resume to legitimise his vacuous response shows the pathetic state of accounting academia.

If accounting academia is not to be reduced to the laughing stock of accounting practice, we better start listening to the problems that practice faces. How else can we understand what we profess to "research"? We accounting academics have been circling our wagons too long as a ploy to keep our wages arbitrarily high.

In as much as we are a profession, any academic on such a committee reduces the whole exercise to a farce.

Jagdish

September 10, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi again Amy,

Accountics is the mathematical science of values.
Charles Sprague [1887] as quoted by McMillan [1998, p. 1][NH1] 
 

The history of the accountics takeover of leading academic accounting research journals around the world as well as the takeover of accountancy doctoral programs in the U.S. and other nations can be found at  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm  

The more I read in the book Dear Mr. Buffet by Janet Tavakoli, the more I see a parallel between investment bankers and accountics researchers.

After almost 20 years working for Wall Street firms in New York and London, I made my living running a Chicago-based consulting business. My clients consider my expertise in product they consume. I had written books on credit derivatives and complex structured finance products, and financial institutions, hedge funds, and sophisticated investors came to identify and solve potential problems.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 5)
Jensen Comment
Before she wrote Dear Mr. Buffett, her technical book on Structural Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations (Wiley) sat on my desk for constant reference. Janet also runs her own highly successful hedge fund. She won't disclose how big it is, but certain clues make me think it is over $100 million with very wealthy clients. Her professional life changed when she commenced to correspond with what was the richest man in the world in 2008  (before he gave much of his wealth to the Gates Charitable Foundation). He's also one of the nicest and most transparent and most humble men in the world.
Warren Buffett --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

Warren Buffett disproved the theory of efficient markets that states that prices reflect all known information. His shareholder letters, readily available (free) through Berkshire Hathaway's Web site, told investors everything they needed to know about mortgage loan fraud, mospriced credit derivatives, and overpriced securitizations, yet this information hid in plain "site."
Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 7)
Jensen Comment
Berkshire Hathaway --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway
Jensen Comment
This of course does not mean that on occasion Warren is not fallible. Sometimes he does not heed his own advice, and rare occasions he loses billions. But a billion or two to Warren Buffett is pocket change.

I finally grasped what Warren was saying. Warren has such a wide body of knowledge that he does not need to rely on “systems.” . . . Warren’s vast knowledge of corporations and their finances helps him identify derivatives opportunities, too. He only participates in derivatives markets when Wall Street gets it wrong and prices derivatives (with mathematical models) incorrectly. Warren tells everyone that he only does certain derivatives transactions when they are mispriced.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 19)

Why investment bankers are like many accoutics professors
Wall Street derivatives traders construct trading models with no clear idea of what they are doing. I know investment bank modelers
with advanced math and science degrees who have never read the financial statements of the corporate credits they model. This is true of some credit derivatives traders, too.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 19)
Jensen Comment
Especially note the above quotation when I refer to Reviewer A below.

Warren is aided by the fact that most investment banks use sophisticated Monte Carlo models that misprice the transactions. Some of the models rely on (credit) rating agency inputs, and the rating agencies do a poor job of rating junk debt.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 21)

Investment banks could put on the same trades if they did fundamental analysis of the underlying companies, but they are too busy playing with correlation models.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 24)

Warren has another advantage:  Wall Street underestimates him. I mentioned that Warren Buffett and I have similar views on credit derivatives . . . My former colleague, a Wall Street structured products "correlation" trader, wrinkled his nose and sniffed:  "That old guy? He hates derivatives."
Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 24)

Warren Buffett writes billions of dollars worth of put options
When Warren sells a put buyer the right to make him pay a specific price agreed today for the stock index (no matter what the value 20 years from now), Warren receives a premium. Berkshire Hathaway gets to invest that money for 20 years. Warren thinks the buyer, the investment bank, is paying him too much . . . Furthermore, Berkshire Hataway invests the premiums that will in all likelihood cover anything he might need to pay out anything at all, since the stock index is likely to be higher than today's value.
Janet Tavokoli, Dear Mr. Buffett (Wiley, 2009, Page 24)

 

My Four Telltale Quotations about accoutics professors
Although there are no longer any investment banks in the United States since early 2009, how were investment bankers much like accountics researchers? There is of course very little similarity now since investment bankers are standing in unemployment lines and investment banks are out of business --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#InvestmentBanking

Accountics professors are still happily in business dancing behind tenure walls and biased journal editors who still cannot see beyond accountics research methodology.

I provide three quotations below that, I think, pretty well tell the story of why many, certainly not all, accountics professors are pretty much like investment bankers that were superior at mathematics and model building and lousy at accounting and finance fundamentals. You, Amy, will probably recall each of these quotations although they may not have sunk in like they should've sunk in.

Quotation 1
Denny Beresford gave a 2005 luncheon speech at the annual meetings of the American Accounting Association. Having been both a former executive partner with E&Y and, for ten years, Chairman of the FASB before becoming an accounting professor at the University of Georgia, Denny has lived all sides of accounting --- practice, standard setting, and academe. In his speech Denny very politely suggested that accountics professors should take and interest in and learn a bit more about, gasp, accounting.

After he gave his speech, Denny 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.

Investment bankers and many accountics professors put on superior airs because of their backgrounds in mathematics and science. To hell with knowledge of fundamentals in accounting and finance apart from mathematical models. To hell with reading and analyzing financial statements in great depth. Accountics scholars, at least some of them who referee many submissions to journals, don't waste their time on such mundane things.


Quotation 2

My second quotation laments that accounting education programs now often have to pay the highest starting salaries for some graduates of accounting doctoral programs who know very little accounting. Before she moved to Wyoming, Linda Kidwell wrote a revealing message to the AECM listserv.

I cannot find the exact quotation in my archives, but some years ago Linda Kidwell complained that her university had recently hired a newly-minted graduate from an accounting doctoral program who did not know any accounting. When assigned to teach accounting courses, this new "accounting" professor was a disaster since she knew nothing about the subjects she was assigned to teach.

Quotation 3
In the year following his assignment as President of the American Accounting Association Joel Demski asserted that research focused on the accounting profession will become a "vocational virus" leading us away from the joys of mathematics and the social sciences and the pureness of the scientific academy:

Statistically there are a few youngsters who came to academia for the joy of learning, who are yet relatively untainted by the vocational virus. I urge you to nurture your taste for learning, to follow your joy. That is the path of scholarship, and it is the only one with any possibility of turning us back toward the academy.
Joel Demski, "Is Accounting an Academic Discipline? American Accounting Association Plenary Session" August 9, 2006 --- http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/demski/Is_Accounting_an_Academic_Discipline.pdf

Accounting professors are no longer "leading scholars" if they succumb to a vocational virus and focus on accounting rather than mathematics, econometrics, and/or psychometrics --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR.htm

Quotation 4
One of the very leading accountics professors is employed by the graduate school at Northwestern University. Ron Dye's academic background is in mathematics rather than accounting, and he's written some of the most esoteric accountics research papers ever published in leading accounting research journals.

Richard Sansing  from Dartmouth, on the AECM, occasionally stresses the importance of a background in mathematics for students seeking fame and fortune as accounting professors. Although I agree with Richard because of the dominance of accountics in the accounting academy over the past four decades, I don't think Richard anticipated the response he got from Ron Dye when he (Richard Sansing) asked Ron Dye to comment about accountics research and about the possible desirability of getting a doctorate in mathematics, econometrics, psychometrics, statistics, etc. before becoming an accounting assistant professor.

About the question: by and large, I think it is a mistake for someone interested in pursuing an academic career in accounting not to get a phd in accounting. If you look at the "success" stories, there aren't many: most of the people who make a post-phd transition fail. I think that happens for a couple reasons.

1. I think some of the people that transfer late do it for the money, and aren't really all that interested in accounting. While the $ are nice, it is impossible to think about $ when you are trying to come up with an idea, and anyway, you're unlikely to come up with an idea unless you're really interested in the subject.

2. I think, almost independent of the field, unless you get involved in the field at an early age, for some reason it becomes very hard to develop good intuition for the area - which is a second reason good problems are often not generated by "crossovers."

The bigger thing - not related to the question you raise - but maybe you could add to the discussion is that there are, as far as I can tell, not a lot of new ideas being put forth by anyone in accounting nowadays (with the possible exception of John Dickhaut's neuro stuff). In most fields, the youngsters are supposed to come up with the new problems, techniques, etc., but I see a lot more mimicry than innovation among newly minted phds now.

Anyway, for what it's worth....
Ron Dye, Northwestern University

I think Ron Dye is being extremely blunt and extremely honest. What really strikes me is that four decades of accountics research as pretty much evolved into sterile research where "not a lot of new ideas are being put forth" by accountics professors.

What the big problem is with accountics research is that it is too restrictive as to what problems are taken on by accountics researchers, what papers are written for submission to the leading academic accounting research journals, and the high level of mathematics required for admission/progression in an accountancy doctoral program.

What a boring time it is in accountics research where virtually nothing comes out that is deemed worth replicating and verifying.

Accountics researchers, however, should thank the heavens that they did not become, like those "correlation investment bankers,"  counterparties in derivatives with Warren Buffet. It's far better to be among the highest paid professors in a university while dancing behind the protective walls of tenure.

I will probably send out a lot more tidbits from my hero Janet Tavaloli (she became more of a hero after she delved into the mind of Warren Buffett).

Bob Jensen

September 10, 2009 reply from Patricia Walters [patricia@DISCLOSUREANALYTICS.COM]

Having been very busy at my "day job" the last few days, I've missed much of this thread, but I'd like to comment on something Ron Dye said in the excerpt below about "new ideas." I apologize if my thoughts are not fully developed, so I'll label them observations or questions.

How many new PhDs actually have any experience in accounting or of thinking about accounting issues outside of their undergraduate degree program?

Although I'm generally on the side of the non-accountics folks in the debate about relevant research, I also believe it's difficult for someone to come up with new and interesting questions about which to do even accountics research if that person hasn't spent time thinking about the issues of financial reporting (or management decisions-making, etc).

I don't see the problem raised by Ron as one related to the methodology used for the research. Rather my observation is a lack of experience about the issues that cause us to want/need some research in the first place.

Thoughts?

Pat

September 10, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Pat,

Gary Sundem, while editor of TAR and while AAA President, made a major point of saying that the accounting profession should not look to empirical research for "new theories."

The following is a quote from the 1993 President’s Message of Gary Sundem, President’s Message. Accounting Education News 21 (3). 3.
 

Although empirical scientific method has made many positive contributions to accounting research, it is not the method that is likely to generate new theories, though it will be useful in testing them. For example, Einstein’s theories were not developed empirically, but they relied on understanding the empirical evidence and they were tested empirically. Both the development and testing of theories should be recognized as acceptable accounting research.

If we ever had an accounting Einstein in the past four decades, that accounting Einstein probably could’ve never published in TAR, JAR, JAE, CAR, or even AH (in later years). Hence, we do not look to these “leading” research journals of the accounting academy for the development of new theories that perhaps cannot be immediately tested.

When I was Program Director for an AAA annual meeting in NYC, I arranged for Joel Demski to be on a plenary session (actually a debate with Bob Kaplan). Among other things I asked Joel to identify at least one seminal and creative idea from the academy of accountics researchers that impacted on the practitioner world. In his speech, Joel suggested Dollar-Value Lifo. Later I inspired accounting historian Dale Flesher investigate the origins of Dollar-Value Lifo.

 

-----Original Message----- 
From: Dale Flesher University of Mississippi [mailto:actonya@HOTMAIL.COM]  
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 1:35 PM 
To: AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU 
Subject: Re: The Only Invention of Academic Accountants

Contrary to a recent statement in this forum, Dollar-Value Lifo (DVL) was not developed by a professor. The father of DVL was Herbert T. McAnly, who retired in 1964 as a partner at Ernst & Ernst after 44 years with the firm. Throughout his career, McAnly was known as "Mr. LIFO."

Although he did not develop LIFO, which had been around for decades in the form of the base-stock method, he did develop DVL after the Internal Revenue began accepting LIFO from all types of companies. The Treasury would probably never have agreed to allow all companies to use LIFO (in 1939) had they been able to prognosticate McAnly's idea. He first described the concept in an address delivered at the Accounting Clinic and the Central States Accounting Conference in Chicago in May 1941. His concept was finally accepted by the IRS following the Hutzler Brothers Co. case in 1947 (8 TC 14 (1947)). He later worked with the Treasury Department trying to get more practical regulations relating to LIFO.

Dale L. Flesher 
Professor of Accountancy University of Mississippi

I repeat a few quotations below:

For a long time, elite accounting researchers could find no “empirical evidence” of widespread earnings management. All they had to do was look up from the computers where their heads were buried.
Bob Jensen --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm

 If we ever had an accounting Einstein in the past four decades, that accounting Einstein probably could’ve never published in TAR, JAR, JAE, CAR, or even AH (in later years). Hence, we do not look to these “leading” research journals of the accounting academy for the development of new theories that perhaps cannot be immediately tested.
Bob Jensen

“Research should be problem driven rather than methodologically driven," said Lisa Garcia Bedolla, a member of the task force who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.
Scott Jascik --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/04/polisci  

 

"I understand your point, Jim." He could not identify one issue that (accountics) researchers had been able to "put to bed" after all that effort.
P. Kothari, one of the Editors of JAE and a full professor at MIT, as quoted by Jim Peters in an AECM message.

 Bob Jensen

 

September 9, 2009 reply from Paul Williams [Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]

Amy,
Why don't you ask the protagonists what they are doing and why? Anthropolotgists and sociologists do it all the time. At the AAA meeting in NYC I used an analogy that Sylvia Earle provided at an Emerging Issues Forum here at NC State a number of years ago. She is an oceanographer who holds all the records for time and depth spent under water by a woman. She described her discipline before and after the invention of SCUBA and other forms (bathosphere) of deep diving technology. Before the ability to immerse in the ocean environment she likened her research to being in a balloon over NYC throwing a basket through the clouds and dragging it along the streets.

From the bits and pieces (much of which was simply the detritus of life in the city) you had to infer what life was actually like in a place you couldn't see. What underwater breathing technology did for her field was absolutely revolutionary because, as she said, you could actually be in the life of the sea. Obviously what we thought was the case from the bits of stuff retrieved turned out to be woefully inadequate for developing a rich understanding of oceanic life.

Accountics research is still little more than throwing a basket over the side. It is observing at a distance the detritus (bits of accounting data that float to the surface in the form of public archives) and inferring what must be happening. This is further limited by the invariable assumption that whatever is happening must be economic! Little wonder we have made so little progress.

Ackerloff and Shiller (Animal Spirits) provide an interesting, two dimensional matrix for understanding human behavior (they are still economists, but at least Shiller's wife is a social psychologist who has had a very positive influence on his thinking): One dimension is Motives -- economic and non-economic (people are likely more non-economic than economic) and Responses -- rational and irrational. Of the four boxes, accountics research has confined itself to just one: motives must be economic and responses must be rational. Seventy five percent of the terrain of human social behavior is completely ignored.

Added to Bob's shortcomings to accountics research I would add one more. Sue Ravenscroft and I have a working paper trying to sort out the inadequacies of "decsion usefulness" as both a policy criterion and a research objective. One problem with accounting research is that the accountics approach privileges exclusively algorithmic knowledge -- behavior that can be modeled (so Wayne Gretzky's famous observation, "I skate to where the puck is going to be" is beyond understanding). Much of this research utilizes accounting data as a principal source of measurement. The problem is that though accountants produce numbers, they don't produce Quantities, which is essential for performing mathematical operations.

Brian West discusses this extensively in his Notable Contribution Award winner Professionalism and Accounting Rules. To perform even the simplest arithmetic operation of addition the numbers you add must represent quantities of a like type. I can add a coffee cup to a Volkswagon and claim I have two, but two of what?

Accounting numbers are what Gillies describes as operational numbers, i.e., numbers obtained by performing operations, analogous to grading an exam. As West points out financial statements today consist of numbers developed by performing operations that require cost, unamortized cost, lower-of-cost or market (with floor and ceiling rules), exit market values, present values, and, now, "fair" value. When you add all of these up what do you have? Good question. You have a number, but you most certainly do not have a quantity. So when an accountics researcher develops a 20 variable regression model where the dependent variable and at least half of the independent variables are the operational numbers produced by accountants (numbers, not quantities), what could the results possibly MEAN.

 It is a false precision of the most egregious kind (GIGO?). In your study you will use operational numbers and assert this is what my measures mean, but you have no way of knowing if this describes the actual context in which the decisions were actually made (you are looking at the stuff from the basket). What it means to you isn't necessarily what it meant to the actual people who made these decisions.

My issue with so much accountics research is that it means what the researcher chooses to have it mean; the researcher assigns the meaning, but to understand what is going on with human beings it is important to know what their behavior means to them.

And in accountics research this remains a mystery. A couple of other books (once you finish Shapiro"s) are by Bent Flyvbjerg: Rationality and Power and Making Social Science Matter. In the latter he discusses the work of Dreyfus and Dreyfus on what they call "a-rational" behavior (what Gretzsky is doing when he skates to where the puck is going to be). See also Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious..

September 9, 2009 reply from Jagdish Gangolly [gangolly@GMAIL.COM]

Amy,

Statistical methods are not inherently faulty. But they can be, and far too frequently are, misused. So, to turn your metaphor on its head, much accountics econometrics work is more like spraying manure in a perfumed room, or more like a skunk spraying in a perfumed room.

 Statistical methods are used for classifying, associating, predicting, inferring (causally as well as associatively), organising, and learning. It is important to always keep in mind in which context you are using statistics. 

 1.
In the accountics stuff I am familiar with, determining association is the avowed objective, but the language subtly takes a predictive turn in discussions. The reason usually is the positivist dogma having to do with absence of causation in a naive positivist's lexicon.

 I have been stunned by well known accounticians professing that we do not study causes because there are no statistical methods for causal inference. And to the last person, these folks have not heard of modern statistical tools for the study of causation in statistics.

Ignorance is bliss in this wonderland. Social scientists, however, have used them for a long time. Theological commitments are dangerous for ANY "science".

2.
Classification is the first step in learning. It is only VERY recently that accounting folks have started talking about the use of classification by use of clustering, support vector machines, neural nets, etc., but most of these discussions take place in non-mainstream contexts.

 3.
Many of the techniques in 2 are nowadays considered part of the field of machine learning, a hybrid between statistics and computing. I am sure one of these days, when they have become stale elsewhere,They’ll be used in accounting. Mainstream accountics academics are far too conservative to accept any statistical method unless they have been certified stale.

4.
Often, in conversations, accountics folks revert to counterfactual statements.That is natural in the sciences. Underlying such statements are usually causal inferences. It is in this context that I had made observation 1 above. Building a better mousetrap is a legitimate objective   of sciences, and therefore predictive models are essential component of any science. Accountics' theological commitment to positivist dogma makes them schizophrenic in that they cannot admit causality without jeopardising their philosophical suppositions and yet cannot ignore it if they are to maintain their credibility as scientists.

 As to some work in these areas of statistics, any list I prepare would include the following books.

1.
Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research (Analytical Methods for Social Research) by Stephen L. Morgan and Christopher Winship 

 

2.
Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference by Judea Pearl

3.
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics) by Christopher M. Bishop

4.

The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition (Springer Series in Statistics) by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman

I think 3 is available online for free, but it is dense reading. 1 is outstanding.

2 is a classic, and 4 is, to an extent, based on the work of Vapnik.  

Jagdish

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

The rise of accountics is summarized at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm 


As David Bartholomae observes, “We make a huge mistake if we don’t try to articulate more publicly what it is we value in intellectual work. We do this routinely for our students — so it should not be difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and legislators.” If we do not try to find that public language but argue instead that we are not accountable to those parents and legislators, we will only confirm what our cynical detractors say about us, that our real aim is to keep the secrets of our intellectual club to ourselves. By asking us to spell out those secrets and measuring our success in opening them to all, outcomes assessment helps make democratic education a reality.
Gerald Graff, "Assessment Changes Everything," Inside Higher Ed, February 21, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/21/graff
Gerald Graff is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and president of the Modern Language Association. This essay is adapted from a paper he delivered in December at the MLA annual meeting, a version of which appears on the MLA’s Web site and is reproduced here with the association’s permission. Among Graff’s books are Professing Literature, Beyond the Culture Wars and Clueless in Academe: How School Obscures the Life of the Mind.

The consensus report, which was approved by the group’s international board of directors, asserts that it is vital when accrediting institutions to assess the “impact” of faculty members’ research on actual practices in the business world.

"Measuring ‘Impact’ of B-School Research," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed, February 21, 2008 ---  http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/22/impact

 


"Journal Review Process Increasingly Includes Check for Plagiarism," by Sophia Li, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Journal-Review-Process/25420/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
Thank you David Albrecht for the heads up.

A growing number of journal publishers are checking papers for possible plagiarism as part of their review process.

That's according to the makers of CrossCheck, a service that checks articles submitted to scholarly journals against already-published work for possible plagiarism. Over 80 publishing companies have adopted CrossCheck since its debut in June 2008, Nature News reported, and the service's increasing use has sniffed out high rates of plagiarism in the submissions to some journals.

The anti-plagiarism service uses software from iParadigms, the California-based company behind Turnitin, which checks student papers for plagiarized work. CrossCheck compares submitted materials with the full text of the 25.5 million articles in its database, a collection of articles pooled by the publishers that subscribe to the service.

The service, which has been adopted by publishers including Nature Publishing and Sage, has turned up plenty of copycat work, including articles that would have been published otherwise. Taylor & Francis, a publishing company based in the United Kingdom, found that 23 percent of submissions to one of its journals were rejected because they contained plagiarism, Nature News reported. (The journals that were selected to test CrossCheck had seen incidents of plagiarism in the past.)

After using CrossCheck on submissions, one journal from Mary Ann Liebert, a publisher based in New Rochelle, N.Y., rejected about 7 percent of articles that had been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, said Adam Etkin, assistant vice president and the director of online and Internet services for the publishing company. On the other hand, some of the publisher's other journals, out of the dozen or so that have begun using CrossCheck, have not uncovered any incidents of plagiarism.

After CrossCheck has detected passages that are identical or similar to work that has already been published, journal editors must decide what to do next.

This depends on the incident's severity and intent, Mr. Etkin said. CrossCheck sometimes flags passages as plagiarized when they have been improperly cited, and, in some instances, there are few ways to describe methods or materials differently. Editors at his company's journals sometimes contact authors to ask them to revise their work or correct their citations.

The consequences are much more severe when plagiarists are caught: Authors have been banned from Mary Ann Liebert's journals after they were caught plagiarizing—in one instance, for three years. In some cases, the violations have been reported to the author’s institution.

Bob Jensen's threads on Professors Who Plagiarize/Cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize


"iZepto: Timesheets Made Human," by Rick Lillie, Thinking Outside the Box Blog, July 5, 2010 ---
http://iaed.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/izepto-timesheets-made-human/

For anyone who spent time in public practice, the “timesheet” was both a good thing and a bad thing!  It helped you keep track of what you accomplished (and what you didn’t).  I have often wondered whether maintaining a timesheet would be a useful exercise for a faculty member.

A couple of years ago, I discovered a personal timesheet program called iZepto developed by Shine Technologies, an Australian company.  I started using iZepto to keep track of my time.  iZepto is particularly useful when preparing my annual faculty activitity report.

iZepto is a Web 2.0 hosted software service.  There is nothing to download except reports that you setup and print periodically.  It is easy to tailor to personal needs.  Classify your activities in ways that make sense to you.

iZepto is free for 1 to 3 users.  Great price!  For iPhone users, there is a free iPhone application that you can download from the iPhone App Store.  What could be more useful?

iZepto is a great personal productivity tool.  Take a look.  Give it a try.

Rick Lillie
(CalState, San Bernardino)

Bob Jensen's on Tricks and Tools of the Trade are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


"How Sharia-compliant is Islamic banking?:" by John Foster, BBC News, December 11, 2009 ---
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8401421.stm

The Islamic finance industry has often battled with the question: How Islamic is Islamic banking?

The question's pertinence was raised in March last year, when Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, of the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Finance Institutions (AAOIFI), a Bahrain-based regulatory institution that sets standards for the global industry, said that 85% of Sukuk, or Islamic bonds, were un-Islamic.

Usmani is the granddaddy of modern-day Islamic finance, so having him make this statement is synonymous with Adam Smith saying that free-markets are inefficient.

Because Sukuk underpin the modern-day Islamic financial system, one of its pre-eminent proponents arguing that the epicentre of the system was flawed sent shockwaves through the industry.

It also gave ammunition to the many critics who see Islamic finance as an industry more driven by cultural identity than practical problem solving: as a hodgepodge of incoherent, incomplete, impractical and irrelevant ideas.

Recognisable products

The products that modern-day Islamic bankers have created are very similar to conventional products.

This immediately creates a problem for Islamic banks, as conventional banks charge borrowers an interest rate through which they can reward their depositors and make some profit for being the broker.

With interest ruled out it is harder to make money.

The modern Islamic banker has found a way around this prohibition, however.

As in many Islamic products, the bank enters a partnership with its depositors and invests his money in a Sharia compliant business.

The profit from this investment is then shared between the depositor and the bank after a set time.

In many cases this "profit rate" is competitive with the conventional banking system's interest rate for savers.

Lease agreements

Alternatively, an Islamic banker might enter into a lease agreement for a car or a house with an individual.

The bank would buy a vehicle outright and then lease it back to the person who wanted it, over a time period that would ensure that the capital was repaid and the bank made a profit.

Alternatively the bank would enter into a partnership with a person wanting to buy a house. The bank would buy 70% of the house, the individual 30%.

The bank then rents its share of the house back to the individual until the house is fully paid for.

The bank makes a profit on the rent, which would be higher than equivalent rents in the area, but on an annualised percentage basis, would look very much like a conventional mortgage interest rate.

To the casual observer, a spade is a spade.

Whether the product is dressed up in Arabic terminology, such as Mudarabah, or Ijarah, if it looks and feels like a mortgage, it is a mortgage and to say anything else is semantics.

Sophisticated finance

The potential wealth locked up in oil-rich Gulf states encouraged the conventional banks to enter Islamic finance.

HSBC established the Amanah Islamic Finance brand in 1998 and Deutsche Bank, Citi, UBS and Barclays quickly joined the fray, all offering interest-free products for wealthy Arabs.

However, this new generation of Islamic bankers had cut their teeth in the City and Wall Street, and were used to creating sophisticated financial products.

They often bumped heads with the Sharia scholars who authorised their products as Sharia compliant.

However, these bankers had a way of dealing with this, as one investment banker based in Dubai, working for a major Western financial organisation explains:

"We create the same type of products that we do for the conventional markets. We then phone up a Sharia scholar for a Fatwa [seal of approval, confirming the product is Shari'ah compliant].

"If he doesn't give it to us, we phone up another scholar, offer him a sum of money for his services and ask him for a Fatwa. We do this until we get Sharia compliance. Then we are free to distribute the product as Islamic."

No consensus

This "Fatwa shopping", which was carried out by some institutions, brings us back to the Sharia scholars.

Even these scholars do not agree all the time, which means that in some cases a product is deemed Sharia compliant in one market and not in another.

This is especially the case with Malaysian products, which are often deemed not Sharia complaint in the more austere Gulf.

"Often no rulings exist for modern day problems, such as use of narcotics," Alamad explains.

"In Islam intoxication by wine is forbidden, but at the time of the Prophet Mohammed there was no crack cocaine."

Modern scholars had to interpret the rules on intoxication, and the consensus was that crack should also be forbidden to Muslims, as it is a dangerous intoxicant.

"This is how we make rulings, whether in finance or societal," Alamad says. "The consensus rules, which usually will become mandatory for all Muslims to follow, but there are some opinions and sometimes scholars are not in the consensus."

Banking is banking

This makes it more important to be in the consensus, and so getting a favourable ruling from a leading Sharia scholar is important for a product manager.

That is why the top scholars can earn so much money - often six-figure sums for each ruling.

The most creative scholars are the ones in the most demand, says Tarek El Diwany, analyst at London-based Islamic financial consultancy Zest Advisory.

"To date, most Islamic financiers have been looking at examples of financing in Islamic history and figuring out how to apply them to today's financial products."

Continued in article

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


Potentially a Great Case for Managerial Accounting CoursesL  How can Harry Potter movies be financial losers?
"'Hollywood Accounting' Losing In The Courts:  From the math-is-hard dept," TechDirt ---
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml

If you follow the entertainment business at all, you're probably well aware of "Hollywood accounting," whereby very, very, very few entertainment products are technically "profitable," even as they earn studios millions of dollars. A couple months ago, the Planet Money folks did a great episode explaining how this works in very simple terms. The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the "film corporation" a huge fee (which creates a large part of the "expense" that leads to the loss). The end result is that the studio still rakes in the cash, but for accounting purposes the film is a money "loser" -- which matters quite a bit for anyone who is supposed to get a cut of any profits.

For example, a bunch of you sent in the example of how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, under "Hollywood accounting," ended up with a $167 million "loss," despite taking in $938 million in revenue. This isn't new or surprising, but it's getting attention because the income statement for the movie was leaked online, showing just how Warner Bros. pulled off the accounting trick:

In that statement, you'll notice the "distribution fee" of $212 million dollars. That's basically Warner Bros. paying itself to make sure the movie "loses money." There are some other fun tidbits in there as well. The $130 million in "advertising and publicity"? Again, much of that is actually Warner Bros. paying itself (or paying its own "properties"). $57 million in "interest"? Also to itself for "financing" the film. Even if we assume that only half of the "advertising and publicity" money is Warner Bros. paying itself, we're still talking about $350 million that Warner Bros. shifts around, which get taken out of the "bottom line" in the movie accounting.

Now, that's all fascinating from a general business perspective, but now it appears that Hollywood Accounting is coming under attack in the courtroom... and losing. Not surprisingly, your average juror is having trouble coming to grips with the idea that a movie or television show can bring in hundreds of millions and still "lose" money. This week, the big case involved a TV show, rather than a movie, with the famed gameshow Who Wants To Be A Millionaire suddenly becoming "Who Wants To Hide Millions In Profits." A jury found the whole "Hollywood Accounting" discussion preposterous and awarded Celador $270 million in damages from Disney, after the jury believed that Disney used these kinds of tricks to cook the books and avoid having to pay Celador over the gameshow, as per their agreement.

On the same day, actor Don Johnson won a similar lawsuit in a battle over profits from the TV show Nash Bridges, and a jury awarded him $23 million from the show's producer. Once again, the jury was not at all impressed by Hollywood Accounting.

With these lawsuits exposing Hollywood's sneakier accounting tricks, and finding them not very convincing, a number of Hollywood studios may face a glut of upcoming lawsuits over similar deals on properties that "lost" money while making millions. It's why many of the studios are pretty worried about the rulings. Of course, these recent rulings will be appealed, and a jury ruling might not really mean much in the long run. Still, for now, it's a fun glimpse into yet another way that Hollywood lies with numbers to avoid paying people what they owe (while at the same sanctimoniously insisting in the press and to politicians that they're all about getting content creators paid what they're due).

Bob Jensen's threads on case learning are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Cases

Bob Jensen's threads on return on investment
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/roi.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on management accounting
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#ManagementAccounting

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


Ray Williams --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Williams_(basketball)
"Nobody wants you when you're down and out" --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsrA2fMn0sk&feature=fvst

A Sad, Sad Case That Might Be Used When Teaching Personal Finance:  Another Joe Lewis Example
"Desperate times:  Ex-Celtic Williams, once a top scorer, is now looking for an assist," by Bob Hohler, Boston Globe, July 2, 2010 ---
http://www.boston.com/sports/basketball/celtics/articles/2010/07/02/desperate_times/

Every night at bedtime, former Celtic Ray Williams locks the doors of his home: a broken-down 1992 Buick, rusting on a back street where he ran out of everything.

The 10-year NBA veteran formerly known as “Sugar Ray’’ leans back in the driver’s seat, drapes his legs over the center console, and rests his head on a pillow of tattered towels. He tunes his boom box to gospel music, closes his eyes, and wonders.

Williams, a generation removed from staying in first-class hotels with Larry Bird and Co. in their drive to the 1985 NBA Finals, mostly wonders how much more he can bear. He is not new to poverty, illness, homelessness. Or quiet desperation.

In recent weeks, he has lived on bread and water.

“They say God won’t give you more than you can handle,’’ Williams said in his roadside sedan. “But this is wearing me out.’’

A former top-10 NBA draft pick who once scored 52 points in a game, Williams is a face of big-time basketball’s underclass. As the NBA employs players whose average annual salaries top $5 million, Williams is among scores of retired players for whom the good life vanished not long after the final whistle.

Dozens of NBA retirees, including Williams and his brother, Gus, a two-time All-Star, have sought bankruptcy protection.

“Ray is like many players who invested so much of their lives in basketball,’’ said Mike Glenn, who played 10 years in the NBA, including three with Williams and the New York Knicks. “When the dividends stopped coming, the problems started escalating. It’s a cold reality.’’

Williams, 55 and diabetic, wants the titans of today’s NBA to help take care of him and other retirees who have plenty of time to watch games but no televisions to do so. He needs food, shelter, cash for car repairs, and a job, and he believes the multibillion-dollar league and its players should treat him as if he were a teammate in distress.

One thing Williams especially wants them to know: Unlike many troubled ex-players, he has never fallen prey to drugs, alcohol, or gambling.

“When I played the game, they always talked about loyalty to the team,’’ Williams said. “Well, where’s the loyalty and compassion for ex-players who are hurting? We opened the door for these guys whose salaries are through the roof.’’

Unfortunately for Williams, the NBA-related organizations best suited to help him have closed their checkbooks to him. The NBA Legends Foundation, which awarded him grants totaling more than $10,000 in 1996 and 2004, denied his recent request for help. So did the NBA Retired Players Association, which in the past year gave him two grants totaling $2,000.

Continued in article

July 8, 2010 reply from Dan Stone, Univ. of Kentucky [dstone@UKY.EDU]

Thanks Bob,

This sad case is consistent with the research showing that lottery winners get a big initial boost in happiness but return to a set-point of happiness over time. So that, in the long run, winning the lottery makes 0 difference in happiness. E.g., http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/invest/forbes/P95294.asp

The cultural myth is that large amounts of $ bring happiness -- which is true for the initial receipt of $.  But research suggests that big $$$ brings long-term happiness only if the $ comes with considerable wisdom regarding managing one's own desires, and, knowledge (personal or purchased) regarding how to preserve the $.

Hence, the simple standard utility function of $ = utility = happiness is a special case that only holds for the short-term. The equation for the long-term perhaps should be modified to be something like $ + knowledge + wisdom = long-term happiness. This would be consistent with George Kinder's model of money maturity:

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Stages-Money-Maturity-Understanding/dp/0440508339.

IMHO, I think Kinder's model is very useful and should be receiving more attention in research.

Dan Stone

Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers


Are you still teaching an obsolete Black-Scholes Model?

"Coarse Thinking, Implied Volatility, and the Price of Call and Put Options," by Hammad Siddiqi, SSRN, January 8, 2010 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1636247

Abstract:     
People think by analogies and comparisons. Such way of thinking, termed coarse thinking by Mullainathan et al [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] is intuitively very appealing. We derive a new option pricing formula based on the notion that the market consists of coarse thinkers as well as rational investors. The new formula, called the behavioral option pricing formula is a generalization of the Black-Scholes formula. The new formula not only provides explanations for the implied volatility skew and term structure puzzles in equity index options but is also consistent with the observed negative relationship between contemporaneous equity price shocks and implied volatility.

Jensen Comment
Since valuation of options is required under FAS 133 and FAS 123-R, I think many intermediate accounting instructors are still leaving their students with the impression that the Black-Scholes formula is the appropriate alternative for valuing options. It is a poor valuation model for FAS 133 and a really lousy valuation model for FAS 123-R where employees have great aversion to the possibility that their stock options will tank out of the money.

I've no thoughts yet on the appropriateness of the Siddiqi model proposed above, but for years when I was still teaching accounting theory I made my students learn the lattice model.

The problem in theory and practice is that the Black-Scholes model that is popular in financial markets for purchased options is not especially well suited for employee stock options where employees tend to have greater fears that option values will tank before expiration dates. It's a little like having to put your salary in suspension and then losing it before you get it back. As a result the lattice model described below may be more approprate.

 "How to “Excel” at Options Valuation," by Charles P. Baril, Luis Betancourt, and John W. Briggs, Journal of Accountancy, December 2005 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/dec2005/baril.htm
This is one of the best articles for accounting educators on issues of option valuation!

Research shows that employees value options at a small fraction of their Black-Scholes value, because of the possibility that they will vest underwater. --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3014835

"Toting Up Stock Options," by Frederick Rose, Stanford Business, November 2004, pp. 21 --- http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0411/feature_stockoptions.shtml 

How to value stock options in divorce proceedings --- http://www.optionanimation.com/MarlowHowToValueStockOptionsInDivorce.htm

How the courts value stock options --- http://www.divorcesource.com/research/edj/employee/96oct109.shtml

Search for the term options at http://www.financeprofessor.com/summaries/shortsummaries/FinanceProfessor_Corporate_Summaries.html

"Guidance on fair value measurements under FAS 123(R)," IAS Plus, May 8, 2006 ---
http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm

Deloitte & Touche (USA) has updated its book of guidance on FASB Statement No. 123(R) Share-Based Payment: A Roadmap to Applying the Fair Value Guidance to Share-Based Payment Awards (PDF 2220k). This second edition reflects all authoritative guidance on FAS 123(R) issued as of 28 April 2006. It includes over 60 new questions and answers, particularly in the areas of earnings per share, income tax accounting, and liability classification. Our interpretations incorporate the views in SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin Topic 14 "Share-Based Payment" (SAB 107), as well as subsequent clarifications of EITF Topic No. D-98 "Classification and Measurement of Redeemable Securities" (dealing with mezzanine equity treatment). The publication contains other resource materials, including a GAAP accounting and disclosure checklist. Note that while FAS 123 is similar to IFRS 2 Share-based Payment, there are some measurement differences that are Described Here.

Bob Jensen's threads on employee stock options are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory/sfas123/jensen01.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on fair value accounting are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#FairValue

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


From the Scout Report on July 9, 2010

TeamViewer --- http://www.teamviewer.com

Trying to get a group of people together can be a challenge, even in our age of connectivity. It is nice to know that there's a program like TeamViewer which can be of great assistance. The application is designed to allow screen-sharing and file-transfers between business partners and others.

Visitors can share their access code with others to let them remotely access a computer or share screens. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and newer, Max OS X 10.4 and newer, and Linux.


AMG Anti-Virus Free Edition 9.0 --- http://www.avg.com/

 With this version of its popular product, AMG Anti-Virus is offering a few new notable highlights. For one, visitors can use the full-featured scheduling utility for automating tasks and checking for new definitions.

This version of Anti-Virus also includes new anti-phishing detection techniques and an up-to-date link scanner. Users running Windows 2000 and newer as well as Linux will be able to use this application.

From the Scout Report on June 25, 2010

Omeka 1.2.1 --- http://omeka.org/ 

So maybe you have a clutch of photos or documents that would like to transform into a digital collection? Omeka can help you out with that. This web-publishing platform allows users to set up an online exhibition quickly, and it is designed with non-IT specialists in mind. The program also has features and plugins that information science specialists will enjoy, including Dublin Core metadata standards and customizable item fields. This version requires a web server with a Linux operating system, Apache HTTP server, MySQL version 5.0 or greater, PHP version 5.2.4 or greater, and ImageMagick. If users are interested in installing Omeka in a VMWare virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux on Mac and Windows desktop platforms, instructions are also provided.


HardCopy Pro 3.2.2 --- http://www.desksoft.com/HardCopy.htm 

The HardCopy Pro program is a great way to capture screens of interest that might be of later use in a professional or recreational setting. Visitors can use the program to capture rectangular screen areas, and then manipulate the images via a cropping tool. Additionally, they can use the application to save the images in a variety of file formats. This version is free for 30 days, and it is compatible with computers running Windows XP and newer.


U.S. government announces new policy to address homelessness Integrating Services a Key to Homelessness Plan http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=10985475 

Shelter residents, operators react to U.S. Homeless plan
http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/x383282834/Shelter-residents-operators-react-to-U-S-homeless-pla 

Obama builds on Bush success to help the homeless
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/0622/Obama-builds-on-Bush-success-to-help-the-homeless  

A 1% fix for homelessness
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/home/49752645-73/percent-homeless-housing-homelessness.html.csp  

United States Interagency Council on Homelessness --- http://www.usich.gov/

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: Homelessness Resource Exchange ---
http://www.hudhre.info/index.cfm 


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

Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing Universities
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

In particular, note MIT's searchable lecture browser at
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm  

More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu
Many universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers over 500

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Architecture Week --- http://www.architectureweek.com/today.html

Appalachian Mountain Club website
Mountain Watch --- http://www.outdoors.org/conservation/mountainwatch/index.cfm

Food Research And Action Center --- http://www.frac.org/index.html

Soil Science Society of America [Real Player, pdf] https://www.soils.org/

Future Agricultures --- http://www.future-agricultures.org/

News on Nursing --- http://www.nursingadvocacy.org/news/news.html 

International Centre for Human Resources in Nursing --- http://www.ichrn.org/

Clara Barton National Historic Site (nursing) --- http://www.nps.gov/features/clba/feat0001/flash.html

MethResources (drug addiction) --- http://www.methresources.gov/Index.html

Sportscience --- http://www.sportsci.org/index.html

National Center for Home Food Preservation --- http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/

TeensHealth --- http://teenshealth.org/teen/

US Green Building Council: LEED --- http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CategoryID=19 

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

A Place of Our Own --- http://aplaceofourown.org/index.php
An extension of a PBS show on many ways to improve life, especially in caring for children

Migration Information Source (immigration) --- http://www.migrationinformation.org/?mpi

Seen and Heard: Reclaiming the Public Realm with Children and Young People ---
http://www.demos.co.uk/files/070928_DEMOS_S&H_Pamphlet.pdf

When They Were Young (Photography, History, Children, Cultures) --- http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/young/ 
(Some of the photographs are fantastic)

Unite for Children --- http://www.uniteforchildren.ca/

The UNESCO Courier --- http://www.unesco.org/courier

News on Nursing --- http://www.nursingadvocacy.org/news/news.html

International Centre for Human Resources in Nursing --- http://www.ichrn.org/

Clara Barton National Historic Site (nursing) --- http://www.nps.gov/features/clba/feat0001/flash.html

Smart Growth America (a coalition of local, state, and national organizations to rebuild America) --- http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org

Appalachian Mountain Club website
Mountain Watch --- http://www.outdoors.org/conservation/mountainwatch/index.cfm

From the Library of Congress (Bob Hope)
Hope for America: Performers, Politics and Pop Culture --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/hopeforamerica/Pages/default.aspx 

Charlie Parker (films in history) --- http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/

Food Research And Action Center --- http://www.frac.org/index.html

World Summit on Food Security --- http://www.fao.org/wsfs/world-summit/en/?no_cache=1

MethResources (drug addiction) --- http://www.methresources.gov/Index.html

 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

Entire Harvard University Course on Justice (will not play in iPads)
Justice with Michael Sandel [Flash Player]  --- http://www.justiceharvard.org/

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


Math Tutorials

Abacus: The Art of Calculating with Beads --- http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/index.html  

Mathematics Careers http://www.maa.org/careers/

"Beyond Bayes: causality vs correlation," by Steve Hsu Professor of physics at the University of Oregon, Information Processing, July 10, 2010 ---
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/07/beyond-bayes-causality-vs-correlation.html

A draft paper by Harvard graduate student James Lee (student of Steve Pinker; I'd love to post the paper here but don't know yet if that's OK) got me interested in the work of statistical learning pioneer Judea Pearl. I found the essay Bayesianism and Causality, or, why I am only a half-Bayesian (excerpted below) a concise, and provocative, introduction to his ideas.

Pearl is correct to say that humans think in terms of causal models, rather than in terms of correlation. Our brains favor simple, linear narratives. The effectiveness of physics is a consequence of the fact that descriptions of natural phenomena are compressible into simple causal models. (Or, perhaps it just looks that way to us ;-)
 

Judea Pearl: I turned Bayesian in 1971, as soon as I began reading Savage’s monograph The Foundations of Statistical Inference [Savage, 1962]. The arguments were unassailable: (i) It is plain silly to ignore what we know, (ii) It is natural and useful to cast what we know in the language of probabilities, and (iii) If our subjective probabilities are erroneous, their impact will get washed out in due time, as the number of observations increases.

Thirty years later, I am still a devout Bayesian in the sense of (i), but I now doubt the wisdom of (ii) and I know that, in general, (iii) is false. Like most Bayesians, I believe that the knowledge we carry in our skulls, be its origin experience, schooling or hearsay, is an invaluable resource in all human activity, and that combining this knowledge with empirical data is the key to scientific enquiry and intelligent behavior. Thus, in this broad sense, I am a still Bayesian. However, in order to be combined with data, our knowledge must first be cast in some formal language, and what I have come to realize in the past ten years is that the language of probability is not suitable for the task; the bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient for capturing those relationships. Specifically, the building blocks of our scientific and everyday knowledge are elementary facts such as “mud does not cause rain” and “symptoms do not cause disease” and those facts, strangely enough, cannot be expressed in the vocabulary of probability calculus. It is for this reason that I consider myself only a half-Bayesian. ...

"Why Bayesian Rationality Is Empty, Perfect Rationality Doesn’t Exist, Ecological Rationality Is Too Simple, and Critical Rationality Does the Job,"
Simoleon Sense, February 15, 2010 --- Click Here
http://www.simoleonsense.com/why-bayesian-rationality-is-empty-perfect-rationality-doesn%e2%80%99t-exist-ecological-rationality-is-too-simple-and-critical-rationality-does-the-job/

"An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes':  Theorem:  Bayes' Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction," by Eliezer S., Yudkowsky, August 2009 --- http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

 

Statistics Lesson:  Spanking is a cause of lower IQ?
U.S. children who were spanked had lower IQs four years later than those not spanked, researchers found. University of New Hampshire Professor Murray Straus, who is presenting the findings Friday at the 14th International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, in San Diego, called the study "groundbreaking." "The results of this research have major implications for the well being of children across the globe," Straus said in a statement. "It is time for psychologists to recognize the need to help parents end the use of corporal punishment and incorporate that objective into their teaching and clinical practice." "How often parents spanked made a difference. The more spanking the, the slower the development of the child's mental ability," Straus said. "But even small amounts of spanking made a difference."
"Study: Spanking linked to lower IQ," Breitbart, September 25, 2009 ---
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=upiUPI-20090925-121520-9596&show_article=1&catnum=0

Jensen Comment
I think Straus was frequently spanked as a child. Could it be that lower IQ students get more frustrated and are inclined toward greater degrees of misbehavior?

This is a little like the historic 0.63 correlation between stork nests and birth rates --- http://www.jstor.org/pss/2983064

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

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


History Tutorials

Entire Harvard University Course on Justice (will not play in iPads)
Justice with Michael Sandel [Flash Player]  --- http://www.justiceharvard.org/

"The Mark of a Masterpiece:  The man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art," by David Grann, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/12/100712fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

Abacus: The Art of Calculating with Beads --- http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/index.html

European Southern Observatory --- http://www.eso.org/public/
Thousands of photographs and videos of landscapes in 14 member countries around the world

The Argus --- http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_iwu_argus.php?CISOROOT=/iwu_argus
The archives of Illinois Wesleyan University's newspaper

University of Washington Student Newspapers Archive --- http://content.lib.washington.edu/dailyweb/index.html

LaVie: The Penn State Life (Yearbook History Going Back to 1890) --- http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/lavie/  

H. Ambrose Kiehl Photograph Collection --- http://content.lib.washington.edu/kiehlweb/index.html
Over a century ago in Fort. Lawton, Washington

Appalachian Mountain Club website
Mountain Watch --- http://www.outdoors.org/conservation/mountainwatch/index.cfm

Bibliography of the History of Art --- http://library.getty.edu:7101/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First

Long Trail Photographs (the Green Mountains of Vermont) http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?title=Long%20Trail%20Photographs 
Oldest Long Distance Hiking Trail in the United States

Pick A Trail (hiking, travel, recreation, geography) ---  http://www.pickatrail.com  

The Medieval Bestiary --- http://bestiary.ca/index.html

Clara Barton National Historic Site (nursing) --- http://www.nps.gov/features/clba/feat0001/flash.html

From the Library of Congress (Bob Hope)
Hope for America: Performers, Politics and Pop Culture --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/hopeforamerica/Pages/default.aspx

Charlie Parker (films in history) --- http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/  

The United States Lighthouse Society --- http://www.uslhs.org/index.php 

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  

Craft Revival --- http://www.craftrevival.org/Index.htm

Weaving Art Museum and Research Institute --- http://www.weavingartmuseum.org/main.html

PingMag (arts and crafts from Japan) ---  http://www.pingmag.jp/

Arts & Crafts Movement: 1880-1920 in Europe and America ---
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=exhibit;id=7015

The Internet Craftsmanship Museum --- http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com/

The High Art of Photographic Advertising: The 1934 National Alliance of Art and Industry Exhibition http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/naai/


Language Tutorials

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


Music Tutorials

Mondays with Merce (dance) --- http://www.merce.org/studio/mondays-with-merce.php

As the Old Sing, So the Young Twitter --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/astheoldsing/Pages/default.aspx

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/

July 8, 2010

July 10, 2010

July 12, 2010

July 13, 2010

July 14, 2010

July 15, 2010

July 16, 2010

 


From the Scout Report on July 9, 2010

Study indicates the potential benefits of additional sleep for teenagers Extra half-hour in bed 'helps children concentrate' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7872758/Extra-half-hour-in-bed-helps-children-concentrate.html  

Small delay in school start times=big benefits http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/05/small-delay-in-school-start-timesbig-benefits/  

At St. George's, more sleep equals better performance
http://www.projo.com/education/content/SCHOOL_START_TIME_SLEEP_07-06-10_BTJ3V3C_v18.1687c8e.html 

National Sleep Foundation http://www.sleepfoundation.org/ 

Sleep Disorders: Medline Plus http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/sleepdisorders.html


TeensHealth --- http://teenshealth.org/teen/


MethResources (drug addiction) --- http://www.methresources.gov/Index.html




Historic Political Humor --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/hopeforamerica/Pages/default.aspx


Two Letters Forwarded by Auntie Bev

  • Dear Dad
    Berlin is wonderful, people are nice and I really like it here, but Dad, I am a bit ashamed to arrive at my college with my pure-gold Ferrari 599 GTB when all my teachers and many fellow students travel by train.

  • My dear loving son
    Ten billion US Dollars have just been transferred to your account. Please stop embarrassing us. Go and get yourself a train too.
    Love, your Dad


     

    Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
    Herbert Hoover --- http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/herberthoo110353.html


    Historic Political Humor --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/hopeforamerica/Pages/default.aspx


    Video:  Accounting Done Easy (Ma and Pa Kettle) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6vS1edTsV8&feature=related


    Video:  The Italian Clock --- http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80461036/




    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

    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