Tidbits on July 29, 2010
Bob Jensen
Tidbits will be suspended for a few weeks
while we attend the American Accounting Association
Meetings at the San Francisco Hilton and drive to visit our two sons and eight
grandchildren
in Yuba City (north of Sacramento)
Life is tough, but somebody has to stimulate the California economy
Meanwhile back in our front lawn the
wonderful view is like this before the foliage sets in
The pointed mountain is
Mt. Garfield
The white scar left of center is where the highway emerges from
Franconia
Notch
A Zoomed View
Our slate, alysum-lined walkway in the back
The slate walkway in front
The "studio" that I used to use as my office
A big woodchuck comes and goes from under that vine
In this flower bed I first put in new soil
and then sprayed it with what
the Roundup bottle said was "weed killer for flower
gardens"
The weed poison soon killed my marigolds, snap dragons, and alysum in the bed
All that survived were my larger impatience seedlings
Most new seedlings will not survive this Roundup weed poison
This is
the bed just after I planted the seedlings (before they died)
As I said, only the impatience survived
along with the long-established roses and clematis vine
But the surviving impatience (for-sun variety) really are spectacular
I was sorting through some old pictures
Here we are at a St. Patrick's Day Party about 15 years ago in San Antonio
And here's Erika holding grandbaby Jonathon
in Wisconsin
Jonathon is now a teenager
Here are some pictures sent to me by others
(Auntie Bev, Paula, etc.)
Short Video That's Very Sweet
"Anything Is Possible When You're in the Library," Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 15, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Anything-Is-Possible-When/25584/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
On Wednesday night
we posted
a video of the Old Spice Guy
plugging libraries. Today one of our interns sent us this brilliant Old
Spice parody filmed at Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library.
More like this. Please.
Jensen Comment
More information is available along with the video at the BYU site ---
http://universe.byu.edu/node/9676
How Scholars Search the Web ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on July 29,
2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations072910.htm
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Tidbits on July 29, 2010
Bob Jensen
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
CPA
Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Cool Search Engines That Are Not
Google ---
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
World Clock and World Facts ---
http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf
U.S. Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to an
opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com]
Free online 800 telephone numbers ---
http://www.tollfree.att.net/tf.html
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or
parens
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Daily News Sites for Accountancy, Tax, Fraud, IFRS, XBRL, Accounting
History, and More ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Cool Search Engines That Are Not
Google ---
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Education Technology Search ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Distance Education Search ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Microsoft's Bing ---
http://www.bing.com/
Computational Search With Wolfram Alpha ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Search for Listservs, Blogs, and Social Networks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Bob Jensen's essay on the financial crisis bailout's aftermath and an alphabet soup of
appendices can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
149 Interesting People to Follow on Twitter (but I don't have time to follow
them) ---
http://ow.ly/1sj5q
-
- I see from my house by the side of the road
- By the side of the highway of life,
- The men who press with the ardor of hope,
- The men who are faint with the strife,
- But I turn not away from their smiles and tears,
- Both parts of an infinite plan-
- Let me live in a house by the side of the road
- And be a friend to man.
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbitsdirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New
Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long
and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was
generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My
wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm
Bob Jensen's blogs and various threads on many topics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
(Also scroll down to the table at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ )
Global Incident Map ---
http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
If you want to help our badly injured troops, please check out
Valour-IT: Voice-Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops ---
http://www.valour-it.blogspot.com/
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
- With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting
Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
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
Seafood Safety (80% of U.S. seafood is imported) ---
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/835.html
Video: Steve Wynn Takes On Washington ---
http://www.infowars.com/steve-wynn-takes-on-washington/
Japanese Surrender Video ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vcnH_kF1zXc&feature=player_embedded
Dashboard: Indianapolis Museum of Art [Flash Player]
http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/
Link TV (global television links) ---
http://www.linktv.org/
Wöhr Multiparker 730 ---
http://www.woehr.de/en/projekte/budapest_m730/index.htm
Government Accountability Office (GAO) Podcast [iTunes]
http://www.gao.gov/podcast/watchdog.xml
The Sad State of Government Accounting and
Accountability ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Video of DPS Trooper Shot by Illegal Aliens ---
http://blutube.policeone.com/media/4115-Dashcam-footage-of-officer-being-shot/
Short Video That's Very Sweet
"Anything Is Possible When You're in the Library," Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 15, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Anything-Is-Possible-When/25584/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
On Wednesday night
we posted
a video of the Old Spice Guy
plugging libraries. Today one of our interns sent us this brilliant Old
Spice parody filmed at Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library.
More like this. Please.
Jensen Comment
More information is available along with the video at the BYU site ---
http://universe.byu.edu/node/9676
How Scholars Search the Web ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Video: Kensuke Ota on Piano ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cscl9p6Q8Ig
Thank you Dena for this heads up on his performance in San Antonio
Cleveland Orchestra Performs Wagner ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128513819
John McCormack: The Charming Irish Tenor ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128538000
Betrayal In Brooklyn: 'A View From The Bridge'
(hear the introduction to this opera) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128515491
Gospel Music History Archive: Center for Religion
& Civic Culture ---
http://crcc.usc.edu/initiatives/gmha/
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
Video Tribute to the Paper Art of Allen and Patty
Eckman ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tck5Hh38cxk
The Bridges Organization (mathematics and art)
---
http://bridgesmathart.org/
"Southwest of Kunming in Yunnan ---
Click Here
Also see
http://saigonocean.com/trangAlbertDong/Info/InfoSceneFarmYN.htm
Thank you Bob Overn for the heads up.
Dashboard: Indianapolis Museum of Art [Flash
Player]
http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/
The Batik Guild (art on cloth) ---
http://www.batikguild.org.uk
Picasso: Peace and Freedom ---
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/Picasso/roomintro.shtm
Minerva: The International Review of Ancient Art
& Archaeology ---
http://minervamagazine.com/
The Encyclopedia Arctica ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/ocn238796413/index.html
Leon Helguera Collection of Colombiana ---
http://helguera.library.vanderbilt.edu/
The
Walkable and Livable Communities Institute, Inc. ---
http://www.walklive.org/
Blogger notices BP had Photoshopped picture ---
http://www.lostremote.com/2010/07/20/blogger-notices-bp-had-photoshopped-picture/
University of California Digital Map Collection
---
http://library.berkeley.edu/EART/browse.html
The Global Art Initiative ---
http://globalartinitiative.org
Art Through Time: A Global View ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series211.html
Images from the History of Medicine ---
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/ihm/
From the Scout Report on July 23, 2010
Preserved cadaver exhibits banned in Seattle Seattle
council bans exhibits like 'Bodies'
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2012391385_bodies19m.html
Exhibition or freak show? 'Bodies?The Exhibition' cashes
in our own curiosity
http://www.seattlepi.com/visualart/286689_bodies28.html
Anatomy of a controversy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/19/AR2005081902055.html
Missouri congressman concerned about origin of bodies at
exhibit currently in Cleveland
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/07/lawmaker_concerned_about_origi.html
20/20: Inside the Bodies Exhibit
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4300207
Photographic History of Human Dissection
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/29/dissection
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
Internet Public Library (from the University of Michigan) --- http://www.ipl.org/
20,000 electronic texts, and an annotated guide to web sites
Ipl2: Literary Criticism ---
http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/guide.html
The Robert Louis Stevenson Website ---
http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
---
Click Here
Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 1894) ---
Click Here
The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894) ---
Click Here
Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
Underwoods by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
The Silverado Squatters
by Robert Louis Stevenson ---
Click Here
Travels With A Donkey In The Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894) ---
Click Here
Essays Of Travel by Robert Louis
Stevenson ---
Click Here
Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
Records of a Family of
Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
Edinburgh Picturesque
Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
The Plays of William
Ernest Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894) ---
Click Here
New Poems - Robert Louis Stevenson (1850- 1894)
---
http://www.logosfreebooks.org/pls/wordtc/new_wordtheque.w6_start.doc?code=17742&lang=EN
From
NPR
Revisiting Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' at 50 (with audio) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5419033
In The South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
Across the Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
New Poems by Robert
Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) ---
Click Here
The Encyclopedia Arctica ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/ocn238796413/index.html
Southern Spaces Journal ---
http://www.southernspaces.org/
Vermont vs. New Hampshire ---
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1992/2/1992_2_47.shtml
Thank you Richard Sansing for the heads up.
Eastern Washington University Digital Collections ---
http://econtent.library.ewu.edu/
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 29,
2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations072910.htm
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"Stanford's 'Three Books' program turns to ethics," by Cynthia Haven,
Stanford News, July 6, 2010 ---
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/july/three-books-program-070610.html
Authors Tracy Kidder, Anne Fadiman and Joyce Carol
Oates take an uncomfortable look at the world of privilege – and the windows
we have on the rest of the world.
In the face of powerful lobbyists in publishing and other media, I never,
never thought this "fair use" would happen with the dreaded DMCA.
"New DVD Copyright Exemption for Educational Purposes," Inside
Higher Ed, July 27, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/27/qt#233421
The U.S. Copyright Office on Monday promulgated a
number of
new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, including one allowing university staffers and students to hack DVD
content and display it for educational purposes. If a university or student
lawfully obtains copy of a DVD, the agency says, they can bypass the
encryption so long as "circumvention is accomplished solely in order to
accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new
works for... Educational uses by college and university professors and by
college and university film and media studies students." The exemption
applies when professors or students want to use excerpts of the hacked DVD
in documentary films or "non-commercial videos." Tracy Mitrano, director of
I.T. policy at Cornell University and a technology law blogger for Inside
Higher Ed, called the decision "very big news," and "good news," for
higher education, noting that advocates in academe have been
lobbying for an expansion of fair use exemptions for
some time. One campus that might take heart is the University of California
at Los Angeles, which an educational media group
threatened to sue last spring for copying and
streaming DVD content on course websites. The university had
refused to stop the practice, and a UCLA spokesman
said the group, the Association for Information and Media Equipment, has not
followed through. He said UCLA is reviewing the new rules.
Read more about it at
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Information-on-the-New-DMCA/25795/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on the dreaded DMCA ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
"Is New York a Nice Place to Grow Old?" The New
York Times, July 22, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/opinion/l23elderly.html?_r=1&hpw
Jensen Comment
It amazes me how such an editorial can be written without a single comment on
high New York income taxes, estate taxes, and weather. These are the main
reasons for the mass exodus of senior citizens to Florida. Those three factors
are mainly what makes New York not such a nice place to grow old in spite of
some of the tremendous advantages in living near NYC or in beautiful upstate New
York.
I suspect that reductions of income taxes for senior
citizen retirees would go much further to retain older residents than putting
ramps on every street corner in the State of New York.
July 23, 2010 reply from Elliot Kamlet
[ekamlet@STNY.RR.COM]
As an aging New Yorker, I would point out 1) New
York does not tax the portion of Social Security taxed on the federal tax
return 2) New York does not tax any federal or state pension. 3) New York
exempts the first $20,000 of any retirement plan payments for everyone over
59 ˝. 4) Yes there are estate taxes.
The weather is the weather – an acquired taste.
And finally, we have got to have the worst state
legislature that has ever existed. As a result, real estate taxes are
oppressive. (The state keeps sending spending down to the local level and
localities raise taxes primarily from real estate tax.)
On second thought, I guess this is nothing new. In
the musical 1776, the representative from New York is asked why he
constantly abstains in all votes. He explains that he has never received
specific guidance from his legislature. When asked why not, he says:
“Have you ever been present at a meeting of the New
York legislature? They speak very fast and very loud and nobody pays any
attention to anybody else, with the result that nothing ever gets done.”
Our fiscal year began April 1. We still do not have
a budget in place.
Elliot Kamlet Binghamton University
July 23, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Thanks for the information Elliot,
I assume that the NY $20,000 retirement income exemption does not apply
to investment income other than retirement income and that capital gains get
no special relief for older retirees. For New Yorkers who can afford to move
to Florida the full investment income tax may be a turnoff for NY retirees,
along with the NY estate tax and very higher property taxes (relative to
Florida).
Another consideration is that Florida renews drivers licenses for people
over 100 years of age who are blind, deaf, or senile or all the above.
It’s a bit of a bummer that New Hampshire has no income tax, including
retirement income tax, but NH does tax interest revenue and cash dividends
(with a measly $5,000 exemption), including muni-bond interest exempted on
Federal tax returns. Fortunately, NH does not tax capital gains or
retirement income and has no sales tax (except in restaurants and hotels).
But New Hampshire retirees over 80 years of age face a fearsome road test
required for drivers license renewal. And NH must be ranked 50th among the
50 states in terms of public transportation.
Also NH sort of locks in homeowners with a really, really fearsome real
estate transfer tax (as I recall it’s 10% of gross price). There’s no sales
tax for buying and selling vehicles, but that sales tax on real estate
transfers is monumental (and traditionally shared equally by the buyer and
the seller). This is something NH real estate agents don’t even whisper
until a real estate deal is for sure about to go down.
Bob Jensen
Vermont vs. New Hampshire ---
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1992/2/1992_2_47.shtml
Thank you Richard Sansing for the heads up.
Jim Martin developed a slide show to show what can be found
at his fantastic MAAW site for accounting educators and researchers as well as
users in other areas of business. Jim is a dogged archivist of historical
accounting literature and is one of the most open sharing accounting professors
in the world ---
http://maaw.blogspot.com/
"Law
School Tenure in Danger?" by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, July 26, 2010
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/26/law
Jensen Comment
What makes me think that LAW professor experts on litigation will be the last to
lose tenure?
Bob Jensen's threads on tenure (word search "tenure") ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Basically, I’m not interested in doing
research and I never have been
David Blackwell
I love his follow-up explanation
David Blackwell (the first African American to obtain tenure at UC Berkeley
and the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences)
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blackwell
Some of us were weaned on the Rao–Blackwell Theorem extensions of the Central
Limit (Mean Squared Error) Theorem ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rao%E2%80%93Blackwell_theorem
"David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91," by William
Grimes, The New York Times, July 16, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/education/17blackwell.html?_r=1&hpw
David Blackwell, a statistician and mathematician
who wrote groundbreaking papers on probability and game theory and was the
first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, died
July 8 in Berkeley, Calif. He was 91.
The death was confirmed by his son Hugo.
Mr. Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker with a
fourth-grade education, taught for nearly 35 years at the University of
California, Berkeley, where he became the first black tenured professor.
He made his mark as a free-ranging problem solver
in numerous subdisciplines. His fascination with game theory, for example,
prompted him to investigate the mathematics of bluffing and to develop a
theory on the optimal moment for an advancing duelist to open fire.
“He went from one area to another, and he’d write a
fundamental paper in each,” Thomas Ferguson, an emeritus professor of
statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Berkeley
Web site. “He would come into a field that had been well studied and find
something really new that was remarkable. That was his forte.”
David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919,
in Centralia, Ill. Early on, he showed a talent for mathematics, but he
entered the University of Illinois with the modest ambition of becoming an
elementary school teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in
1938 and, adjusting his sights, went on to earn a master’s degree in 1939
and a doctorate in 1941, when he was only 22.
After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship,
established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars,
he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but left after a
year when, because of his race, he was not issued the customary invitation
to become an honorary faculty member. At Berkeley, where the statistician
Jerzy Neyman wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial
objections also blocked his appointment.
Instead, Mr. Blackwell sent out applications to 104
black colleges on the assumption that no other schools would hire him. After
working for a year at the Office of Price Administration, he taught briefly
at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and Clark College in Atlanta
before joining the mathematics department at Howard University in Washington
in 1944.
While at Howard, he attended a lecture by Meyer A.
Girshick at the local chapter of the American Statistical Association. He
became intensely interested in statistics and developed a lifelong
friendship with Girshick, with whom he wrote “Theory of Games and
Statistical Decisions” (1954).
As a consultant to the RAND Corporation from 1948
to 1950, he applied game theory to military situations. It was there that he
turned his attention to what might be called the duelist’s dilemma, a
problem with application to the battlefield, where the question of when to
open fire looms large.
His “Basic Statistics” (1969) was one of the first
textbooks on Bayesian statistics, which assess the uncertainty of future
outcomes by incorporating new evidence as it arises, rather than relying on
historical data. He also wrote numerous papers on multistage
decision-making.
“He had this great talent for making things appear
simple,” Peter Bickel, a statistics professor at Berkeley, told the
university’s Web site. “He liked elegance and simplicity. That is the
ultimate best thing in mathematics, if you have an insight that something
seemingly complicated is really simple, but simple after the fact.”
Mr. Blackwell was hired by Berkeley in 1954 and
became a full professor in the statistics department when it split off from
the mathematics department in 1955. He was chairman of the department from
1957 to 1961 and assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science from
1964 to 1968. He retired in 1988.
In 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of
Sciences.
In addition to his son Hugo, of Berkeley, he is
survived by three of his eight children, Ann Blackwell and Vera Gleason,
both of Oakland, and Sarah Hunt Dahlquist of Houston; a sister, Elizabeth
Cowan of Clayton, N.C.; and 14 grandchildren.
Mr. Blackwell described himself as a “dilettante”
in a 1983 interview for “Mathematical People,” a collection of profiles and
interviews. “Basically, I’m not interested
in doing research and I never have been,” he said.
“I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And
often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no
one else has done it.”
July 18, 2010 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
[gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]
Bob,
The news
made me cry. I am a grand student of David Blackwell three times over, and
he has beena hero of mine most of my adult life.
His
contributions to mathematics and statistics were legendary. When I was an
undergraduate, I knew of him only through Rao-Blackwell theorem and
his work with Girshik on games.
When I
started doing my PhD, my third doctoral course, on Dynamic Programming, was
based almost entirely on a few of his seminal papers in the area, taught by
one of his students (the prerequisites for the course were doctoral seminars
in Real Analysis and in Measures & Integrals). Probably the most difficult
course I have ever taken.
Blackwell
was a child prodigy. As a black man growing up in Illinois, he got his PhD
(under JL Doob) in Mathematics at the ripe old age of 22 in 1941. He taught
at a small school in Louisiana and then at Clark Atlanta University before
moving to Berkeley via Howard. (Clark Atlanta was home to my other hero, A.T.
Bharucha-Reid, a brilliant African-American mathematician who refused to
finish his dissertation at Chicago).
One of my
professors in India, a student of Blackwell, was telling me of his shock at
seeing him for the first time in Berkeley (back in the late fifties) and
finding that Blackwell was really black; the received wisdom those days was
that to have the stature that he had in the academia you had to be white.
His
obituary at Berkeley: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2010/07/15_blackwell.shtml
Ar
African-American mathematicians page: http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/PEEPS/blackwell_david.html
His
biography at St, Andrews U: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Blackwell.html
At
Amstat: http://www.amstat.org/about/statisticiansinhistory/index.cfm?fuseaction=biosinfo&BioID=20
At
mathematical
geneology: http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=4209
Jagdish
Jagdish Gangolly
(gangolly@albany.edu)
Department of Informatics
College of Computing & Information
State University of New York at Albany
7A, Harriman Campus Road, Suite 220
Albany, NY 12206
Phone: (518) 956-8251, Fax: (518) 956-8247
July 18, 2010 reply from Mister,William
[William.Mister@business.colostate.edu]
Bob, I took David Blackwell’s course on Bayesian
Statistics at Berkeley. As I recall, he only taught at 8 in the morning,
but, the classroom was always full. During the term I was taking his course
he was elected Faculty Lecturer at Berkeley (quite an honor). He took off
one week to prepare for the lecture he would have to deliver. Professor
Neyman substituted and lectured on the philosophical differences between
Bayesian and Classical Statistics. A classroom already packed now became
crammed. One of my unforgettable experiences in academia. He was a great and
kind man.
William(Bill) G. Mister
william.mister@colostate.edu
Collaboration ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Collaboration
Social Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
Google Wave ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
Rick Telberg pointed me to this excellent
slide show by Tom Hood (Maryland Association of CPAs and a close friend of Barry
Rice)
CPAs and the
Social Media (75 slides) ---
http://www.slideshare.net/thoodcpa/social-media-strategy-quickstart-for-cpas
Early on Tom picked up on social networking as an important tool in a CPA firm's
tool bag.
Twitter is still pretty much
small peanuts and Myspace is on the decline
Note the graphic ---
http://socialmediatoday.com/derekbaird/150111/infographic-rise-and-fall-social-networks
"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.'"
Continued in article
"What Belongs in a 21st-Century Classroom? Faculty and IT Staff Disagree,"
by Sophia Li, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 19, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/What-Belongs-in-a-21st-Century/25642/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Faculty members and information-technology staff
members alike say technology is useful for teaching and learning, but
professors take a narrower view of what technology belongs in today's
classroom, according to a report released on Monday by the technology
company CDW Government Inc.
Eighty-eight percent of the 303 faculty members
surveyed said technology was essential or useful for student learning, and
over 60 percent said they used electronic materials in their teaching,
according to the report.
The most popular tools cited by professors were
e-textbooks and online documents, with faculty members reporting far less
enthusiasm for other electronic tools. Under a quarter of faculty members
surveyed use wikis or blogs in their teaching, and only 31 percent of
professors surveyed considered online collaboration tools "essential" to
today's classroom, compared with 72 percent of over 300 IT employees
surveyed.
That suggests an interesting gap between technology
staff members and professors when it comes to how smart classrooms need to
be. How wired should teaching spaces be?
E-mail Print Comment (22) Share Share Delicious
Digg Facebook Linked In Mixx Reddit Twitter Yahoo Buzz Comments 1.
morningsider - July 19, 2010 at 05:47 pm
Perhaps IT employees already know how to use such
tools. I am self taught but have been evangelizing wikis to my faculty
colleagues. I have even voluntarily led a faculty workshop on wikis--just to
help my colleagues learn how to use them.
I think there are at least three problems that
might explain this "gap" between IT and faculty attitudes. First, for many
faculty there is a learning curve: on top of structuring course material,
they have to learn the vagaries of specific software or platforms. Second,
there are so many options for tech tools many faculty don't know which are
most appropriate for their teaching style. Who can guide them to the tools
most useful for their teaching? Third, many faculty, at least at my
institution, don't have enough technical support in the classroom. Let's say
an instructor has prepared a class period on collaborative work on a wiki:
the network goes down (too frequent an occurrence on our campus) or the data
projector malfunctions. S/he calls computer services for help--no one is
available to troubleshoot until it is too late.
The existence of technology tools is not enough.
Faculty need help, training, and technical support before such tools can be
used effectively.
2. arrive2__net - July 20, 2010 at 05:06 am
The information-technology staff members provide
support across all faculty members, so their answers probably would reflect
the perceived needs across all faculty. Faculty are likely answering just
for themselves. Faculty have to pay a lot of attention to what is going on
in their own field, they have to keep up-to-date with what often turns out
to be a moving target. For professors, learning, developing, and practicing
applications of new learning technologies is a whole other work effort that
goes on top of their existing full time job of being a teacher and a scholar
(and often a researcher). Another factor is that a professor can get burned
by investing a lot of time developing and learning tech applications if
then, he or she turns out not to be teaching that course next year or term,
or if changes in the text or field renders the tech application out-of-date.
For IT, on the other hand, the technology is their bread-and-butter, so
naturally ... (you'd better bet) it matters.
Bernard Schuster Arrive2.net
3. beveridge - July 20, 2010 at 07:09 am
At Queens College, where I teach, seven different
sign-ons are required for students to have full access to the various types
of computer systems they need: Account to Claim College System Account,
College System Account, E-mail Account, Blackboard Account, Cuny Portal
Account, MyQc Web Account, Portal Account for Library Access, Account for
Remote Access.
Any of these tools: wikis, e-portfolios, blogs, add
still another level of access issues and make teaching even more difficult
with extremely limited resources.
In a recent survey, we found tht about 15% of
students do not have adequate access to do their work in a Statistics class.
About half drop out, and the other half jump through significant hoops to
get them.
In the words of Van Holland (former UMICH Tech
Guru) "No more miracles please."
4. paievoli - July 20, 2010 at 07:20 am
You can easily fix the sign-on problem. Just use a
student portal that supplies all needs in one place. A very simple
aggregator of all contant in one place that is accessible 24/7/365. This is
the problem. Just take a look at my site and see. http://www.thecampuscenter.com
everything in one place and for free no seat charges no cost.
5. mberman54 - July 20, 2010 at 08:05 am
I'll throw in an IT prefessional's point of view:
It's our job to be futurists in this area. Pin one of us down and we'll
admit that we don't know which of the tools we advocate for today will still
be around in 10 years, but we also know that if they're not around, the
functions will be subsumed into other things. We also know, from supporting
our student populations, that the students are trending strongly towards a
preference for online communications. Morningsider made the important point
that many faculty don't know how to use, or are uncomfortable, with these
tools. From experience I can promise you that they will get easier to use
over time, but in the meantime we're here to help you, and if you want to
reach your students, you'll find them online.
6. infogoon - July 20, 2010 at 08:05 am
@beveridge - There are many single sign-on
technologies that would help with that. Industry standards like LDAP and
Kerberos are supported by most systems (email, Blackboard, etc.) and can be
used to synchronize passwords across multiple login environments.
My school decided to bite the bullet and deploy a
solution to mitigate this same problem a few years back. It's a fair amount
of legwork, but not especially cutting edge or difficult for most
environments.
7. infogoon - July 20, 2010 at 08:06 am
(Oh, I forgot to mention - Blackboard does _not_
support LDAP authentication on their lowest tier product, forcing you to buy
a huge and expensive bundle of additional services instead. They're an
exception. We got around the problem by switching to another LMS, since our
contract with them ended during this deployment.)
8. vudutu - July 20, 2010 at 08:17 am
There are a number of problems, the usual budget
issues, management by committee, lack of training, dated and overly complex
systems and tools, poor direction, lack of faculty involvement in
understanding IT and not feeling inclusion in IT decisions.
That all said I believe the biggest issue is
digital immigrants teaching digital natives. The most digitaly enabled and
accepting are the adjuncts, the aging faculty are frozen in the digital
headlights. IT personel, like the younger students live with tech so they
accept it.
9. csgirl - July 20, 2010 at 08:22 am
I'm in computer science, and if anything, tend to
be ahead of our IT staff when it comes to nifty online tools. My teaching is
of course very dependent on technology. My problem is, I can't get IT to
adequately support the tools that I need - software repositories, bug
tracking systems, any IDE other than Visual Studio - so I have to spend a
lot of time doing my own setup and support. I also find that IT is its own
little closed world. They don't have much inkling of the teaching needs of
faculty, so the applications they choose to promote are often not that
useful.
10. jleone - July 20, 2010 at 08:23 am
At RIT, we have a strong ITS and excellent support
services for using technology in the classroom. And while older faculty tend
to be lass facile with technology, it isn't uniformly true. At age 72, I
have pushed myself to stay current with technology. Of course, I teach in
the computing disciplines. We have access to very high quality seminares and
workshops for faculty on our campus. We have access to hi-tech rooms for
recording lectures. Our major problem is the strong push for scholarly
endeavors, a recent (past 10 years) in the direction our institution has
taken.
11. interface - July 20, 2010 at 08:39 am
Every IT department has its favorite platforms;
every IT person has preferred programs and ways of accomplishing any given
task; every administration has different notions of the place of technology
in the classroom. And those favorites and preferences and notions keep
changing. If you're an adjunct working for different institutions, as more
and more of us are, it's tiring and time-consuming and ultimately
counterproductive to try to adjust to them all. One thing's true across the
board: those most enamored of technology are the first to lose sight of the
fact that it's a good servant and a bad master, and that there's no
substitute for the human connection necessary for good teaching.
12. clancymarshall - July 20, 2010 at 08:50 am
The DynamicBooks platform is an e-book that enables
instructors to upload online documents, audio and video and also to edit the
text to make it more relevant for students. What do you think? Will
instructors in 21st Century classrooms customize e-books for their students
or use them as is?
13. 3224243 - July 20, 2010 at 09:21 am
#9 (csgirl) - I'm at a comprehensive state
institution with 8500 students and 300 faculty. All of our general-use
classrooms (appx 100) have a base level of technology with upgrades
performed regularly and newgen technology implemented as budget allows. What
we provide and support is a result of what faculty members request. And, we
do it with 2.5 FTE.
Get off your high horse. You're not the only
instructor on campus and you're not the only one we support.
14. catlkelley - July 20, 2010 at 09:21 am
From the title I thought this article would be
about the classroom itself - i.e. what technologies need to be installed in
a classroom, such as data projectors and smart boards.
In any case, from an IT / teaching support point of
view, I agree with comment #2 above. If 25% (or even 10%) of our faculty
need or want a particular technology, then that is 100% a concern for me. So
I am not at all surprised that the numbers of IT people who find particular
technologies to be "essential" is much higher than the numbers of faculty
who say that about the same technology. I am actually surprised that the
numbers for IT staff aren't higher than they are.
Reading through the comments so far, it is very
clear to me that there is a great deal of variability in the kind of support
that is provided to faculty. And by this I do not mean only the breadth of
technologies available. I mean the support that faculty need to thoughtfully
integrate technology into the curriculum. My office is dedicated to the
concept mentioned by "interface" in comment #11 - namely, technology is a
good servant but bad master. We try to focus on teaching & learning first
and technology only when it will help. It's a difficult thing to do, as we
are also bound to keep up with current trends and new technologies. We'd
like to see adventurous faculty try out the new stuff so that we can gauge
its utility in real life.
15. broekhuysen - July 20, 2010 at 09:44 am
I wonder how many of the faculty members surveyed
are teachers of foreign languages -- I'd be willing to bet that a very
higher percentage of them use technology regularly (as long as they teach in
institutions with the specific professional support they need) -- and not
only in "labs", for doing homework, but as a constant presence in the
classrooom -- if they have the kind of access they need.
16. alex369 - July 20, 2010 at 10:32 am
Let me get this straight: The Chronicle publishes a
free ad for CDW Government Inc., a private company with undisclosed
interests, and there is a serious debate about the company's claims?
17. jeanniec - July 20, 2010 at 10:40 am
@alex369 Agreed. Why is this even posted here?
According to the report you can contact Kelly Caraher CDW-G Public Relations
for more information. Her title says it all.
18. drjeff - July 20, 2010 at 10:44 am
As an IT guy, I couldn't sit here a "listen" to
everyone saying how "easy" it is to do "single sign-on." (This is what IT
folks call integrating things to the point that students -- and faculty --
don't have a separate account on each little fiefdom's system.)
Yes, the technology to do it is reasonably
well-known (even if beyond the least expensive version of Blackboard and
some other products). All you do it install, set up and populate a directory
system (usualy LDAP), then make every system refer to it rather than its own
database. But, because the various systems are, on most campuses, highly
Balkanzed (at least in their ownership), many campuses, like many
corporations, find it exceptionally difficult to get essentially every
department to dedicate the effort (even if fairly small) to support the
project, which is what's necessary to actually make it happen.
In corporations, the CEO or COO usually ends up
"pushing" successful implementations, or else it takes literally years. On a
campus, it often takes the President. The next person in line (on our
campus, it's the Executive VP for Finance and Administration) may or may not
have the necessary "pull" with some of the departments.
Don't forget, we're probably talking about everyone
from the Rec center to the Religious Studies department to the Credit Union,
not to mention Food Services, Computer Science and the LGBTQ Center. Did I
leave out Middle Eastern studies and the repair shop behind the research
labs? You get the idea.
Sure, you (or I) can describe what has to be done
with one sentence. Getting it done? That's going to take a little more.
19. csgirl - July 20, 2010 at 11:29 am
#13, you guys sound seriously overwhelmed, and I
can appreciate that. I used to teach at a comprehensive state U that sounds
remarkably like what you are describing. But that isn't what this article is
talking about. The article seems to be discussing a gap between supremely
knowledgable IT people and Luddite professors who won't adopt the wonderful
technology the IT people recommend (at least, this is how the IT folks see
it). This is the mentality I deal with at my current school, where we have
armies of IT specialists. The problem is, our IT people are spending tons of
time playing with whiz-bang technology that no professor has requested,
congratulating themselves on how "advanced" they are, instead of educating
themselves on the technology that we actually need and use.
20. jboncek - July 20, 2010 at 11:45 am
Technology is sometimes useful, but hardly
essential.
21. lizlanin - July 20, 2010 at 11:58 am
"For professors, learning, developing, and
practicing applications of new learning technologies is a whole other work
effort that goes on top of their existing full time job of being a teacher
and a scholar (and often a researcher)."
Shocker, sounds like my job in the corporate world.
I too have to learn new technologies in order to do my full-time job... why
should professors be any different?
Bob Jensen's threads on collaboration are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Collaboration
Bob Jensen's threads on social networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Update on Lanny Arvan: From SCALE Experiments to Blogs
Years ago economics professor Lanny Arvan directed the famous controlled
SCALE experiments comparing resident full-time students at the University of
Illinois taking onsite versus online courses from the same instructors using
common grade assessment procedures. Thirty courses across multiple disciplines
were examined across five years of experimentation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
In spite of some technology glitches in those olden days, many students tended
to prefer taking the courses online. Typically, students moved from B
grades to A grades in online courses. However, there tended to not be much
difference for D and F students, indicating that lack of motivation and aptitude
cuts across online and onsite pedagogies in mostly the same way.
In one of my technology workshops Dan Stone (then from the University of
Illinois) gave us an overview that I still serve up his PowerPoint and audio
files ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm
"Teaching With Blogs, by Lanny Arvan, Inside Higher Ed, July
27, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/07/27/arvan
“It is my impression
that no one really likes the new. We are afraid of it. It is not only as
Dostoevsky put it that 'taking a new step, uttering a new word is what
people fear most.' Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely
without some stirring of foreboding.”
--Eric Hoffer, Between The Devil And The Dragon
I tried the new in fall
2009,
teaching with student blogs, (look in sidebar and
scroll down) out in the open where anyone who wanted to could see what the
students were producing. The blogging wasn’t new for me. I’d been
doing that for almost five years. Having students
blog was a different matter. I had no experience in getting them to overcome
their anxieties, relaxing in writing online, learning to trust one another
that way. Normally I believe what’s good for the goose is good for the
gander. If I could blog comfortably and get something from that, so could
they. On reflection, however, I was very gentle with myself when I started
to blog. As an experiment to prove to myself whether I could do it, for
three full weeks I made at least one post a day, 500 to 600 words, a couple
of times 1,100 to 1,200 words. I didn’t tell a soul I was doing this. There
was no pressure on me to keep it up. It was out in the open, yet nobody
seemed to be watching. After those three weeks I felt ready. In the
teaching, however, at best I could ask the students to blog once a week. I
gave the students weekly prompts on the readings or to follow up on class
discussion. (See the
class calendar for fall 2009. The prompts
are in the Friday afternoon entries.) If I let them blog quietly to get
comfortable as I had done, the entire semester would expire before they were
ready to go public. There seemed no alternative but to have them plunge in.
The uncertainty about how
best to assist the students once they had taken the plunge created an
important symmetry between the students and me; we both were to learn about
how to do this well, often by first doing it less well. Though it was an
inadvertent consequence, of all my teaching over the past 30 years I believe
this course came closest to emulating the
Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education by
Chickering and Gamson. I learned to comment on the student posts, not with
some pre-thought-through response based on what I anticipated they’d write,
but rather to react to where they appeared to be in their own thinking.
(This
post provides a typical example. The student
introduced time management as a theme. My comment aimed to make her think
more about time management.) As natural as that is to do in ordinary
conversation, I had never done it before when evaluating student work.
Indeed, I didn’t think of these comments as evaluation at all. I thought of
them as response. In the normal course of my non-teaching work I respond to
colleagues all the time and they respond to me. This form of online
interaction in the class made it more like the rest of my interactions at
work.
Most of the students were
quite awkward in their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a
seminar on "Designing for Effective Change" for the
Honors Program, but lacking experience in
this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception
of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated
mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class there was a need for
them to unlearn much of their approach which had been finely tuned and was
quite successful in their other classes. They needed to take more
responsibility for their choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on
which to write, I also gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so
long as they could create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of
the early writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the
writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other readers
if they didn’t first please themselves. It was a message they were not used
to hearing. So it took a while for them to believe it was true. In several
instances they tried it out only after being frustrating with the results
from their usual approach. This,
as Ken Bain teaches us,
is how students learn on a fundamental level.
I'm crustier now than I
was as a younger faculty member. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to deal
with the emotion that underlies giving feedback to students when that
feedback is less than entirely complimentary to them. Yet given their
awkward early attempts at writing posts that’s exactly what honest response
demanded. It’s here where having the postings and the comments out in the
open so all can see is so important, before the class has become a
community, before the students have made up their minds about what they
think about this blogging stuff. Though both the writing and the response
are highly subjective, of necessity, it is equally
important for the process to be fair. How can a
student who receives critical comments judge those comments to be fitting
and appropriate, rather than an example of the insensitive instructor
picking on the hapless student? Perhaps a very mature student can discern
this even-handedly from the comments themselves and a self-critique of the
original post. I believe most students benefit by reading the posts of their
classmates, making their own judgments about those writings and then seeing
the instructor’s comments, finally making a subsequent determination as to
whether those comments seem appropriate and helpful for the student in
reconsidering the writing.
A positive feedback loop
can be created by this process. The commenting, more than any other activity
the instructor engages in, demonstrates the instructor’s commitment to the
course and to the students. In turn the students, learning to appreciate the
value of the comments, start to push themselves in the writing. Their
learning is encouraged this way. Further, since the blogging is not a
competition between the students and their classmates, those who like
getting comments begin to comment on the posts of other students. The
elements of the community that the class can become are found in this
activity.
Since on a daily basis I
use blogs and blog readers in my regular work, one of the original reasons
for me taking this approach rather than use the campus learning management
system was simply that I thought it would be more convenient for me. Also,
given my job as a learning technology administrator, I went into the course
with some thought that I might showcase the work afterward. Openness is
clearly better for that. However in retrospect neither of these is primary.
The main reason to be open is to set a good tone for the class. We want
ideas to emerge and not remain concealed.
Yet there remains one
troubling element: student privacy. Is open blogging this way consistent
with
FERPA? As best as I’ve been able to determine, it
is as long as students “opt in.” (I did give students the alternatives of
writing in the class LMS site or writing in the class wiki site. No student
opted for those.) My experience suggests, however, that is not quite
sufficient. If most students opt in, peer pressure may drive others to opt
in as well. More importantly, however, students choose to opt in when they
are largely ignorant of the consequences. Might they feel regret after they
better understand what the blogging is all about?
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on blogs are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
"The Senior Professor: Deadwood or Iceberg?" by David D. Perlmutter,
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 25, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Senior-Professor-Deadwood/123634/
"Deadwood Resentment Syndrome" is a real condition
prevalent among academics—it just hasn't been clinically established yet.
In a typical case, a young language scholar might
explain his bitterness toward the head of his promotion-and-tenure committee
like this: "I'm better than him at everything he is judging me on. My
teaching evaluations are higher than his, undergraduates flock to my
classes, I get lots of doctoral advisees, I am publishing like crazy. He is
deadwood compared to me. So why does he get to vote on my future?"
No assistant professor is immune to such musings.
Because I write a column on promotion and tenure for The Chronicle, I get to
talk to many junior faculty members from all disciplines. While I don't
claim that the deadwood resentment is universal, it is found in biology labs
and cloisters of the humanities; among civil engineers and sociologists.
Accusations of deadwood, however, are too widely applied and do not take
into account other mitigating factors: The senior scholars seen by some
junior faculty members as deadwood may in fact be icebergs whose CV's do not
reveal the many valuable, below-the-surface services they perform or the
nuances of post-tenure-track careers.
The causes of tension between the tenure trackers
and those who vote on tenure are not mysterious. Publishing and grant
expectations have shot up drastically in the last generation. To take an
example from my own field, when I went on the job market in 1995, I was
A.B.D. and had published two refereed articles in decent journals. Just last
year, in contrast, one of our tenure-track hires had been principal
investigator or co-principal investigator for several grants, and was author
or co-author of five good research articles—all while she was a doctoral
student. She is our new normal.
Adding to the problem is a brew of concurrent
demands on junior faculty members. They pursue home and family happiness as
well as rewarding careers. The job market in many fields is so constricted
that the tenure track feels to many like their one shot at making it in our
profession. The promotion-and-tenure process has always been fraught with
tension, but now more than ever the "life or death" analogy is used to
describe it.
When I talk to assistant professors (and not a few
grad students) who may be showing symptoms of deadwood resentment, I don't
deny or dismiss their beliefs and feelings. A comparison of credentials of
members of the promotion-and-tenure committee with those of many junior
scholars can become a Plutarchian exercise of trying to find differences
between two people. But there are counterarguments to offer, especially when
young scholars start throwing around—in private, among themselves, or online
pseudonymously—terms like "deadwood" to describe their elders.
No one denies that there are professors among the
tenured class who have surrendered their honor, put their feet up, and
coasted through the middle and latter parts of their careers, mistranslating
"tenure" to mean protection from any accountability and "academic freedom"
to mean "I can do anything I want," including failing to prepare for class,
blowing off office hours, and publishing fitfully. The hotshot assistant
simmers in silence while—from her point of view—a desiccated stump in the
next office scrutinizes her teaching evaluations or article-impact factors.
To begin, there is the problem of how to compare
scholars from different eras. Publishing more articles to get tenure today
does not mean that one is necessarily better or has achieved more than the
full professor who published fewer articles to get tenure in 1980. The
number of journals has expanded greatly, and there is an increasing stress
on producing "least publishable units"—that is, articles that cover narrower
ground than their predecessors of a generation ago.
Second, the eras of then and now are not
equivalent. An astute sports fan recognizes that Mickey Mantle is not,
retroactively, any worse a hitter because he might have more trouble with
today's pitching. The Great Mick did what he had to do in the 1960s under
the system and expectations of his time. Likewise, people who got tenure in
the 1980s or even 90s may have had a quantitatively lower bar than today's
new scholars, but there is no reason to believe they would not adapt to
today's expectations if they had to.
Another aspect of the poverty of simple comparison
was pointed out to me early in my own career by a senior colleague: "We
expect a lot of you, but then you get a lot of support we didn't get." Many
full professors are somewhat startled by the extent of research support that
today's junior scholars receive in many fields at research universities. The
expansion of doctoral programs, increases in research financing, and new
grant possibilities all mean that an assistant professor in 2010 has, in
general, much more of a support system than the previous generation of
scholars did.
Moreover, the argument that is sometimes made to
explain the decreased studying time of students—the rise of enabling
technologies—applies to the current tenure-tracker as well. The iPad, iPod,
laptop, netbook, and desktop computer and their software may frustrate and
distract us at times, but they represent an exponential leap in saving work
time if one so chooses. For example, as an undergraduate in the early 1980s,
I was hired by a doctoral student to help enter the data for her
dissertation. My job was to read aloud the numbers on computer cards so she
could type them into a newfangled statistical program on a mainframe. What
took around 50 hours then requires a single keystroke today.
It is also unfair to criticize someone for failing
to do what you have not yet attempted. The probationary faculty member who
complains about the post-tenure productivity of senior scholars has not yet
demonstrated he or she can do better. As the author now of about 30 outside
evaluations for tenure, and a participant in innumerable discussions about
tenure standards, I think it is generally agreed that a key marker that you
deserve promotion and tenure is the near certainty of scholarly productivity
after tenure. Simply publishing the minimum number of articles, scoring
adequate teaching evaluations, and putting in the least possible service is
not enough.
Then there is the even more delicate issue of
compensation. I once attended a conference of associate deans that was
discreetly titled "Motivating Midcareer Faculty." Practically everyone in
the room was from a public university, and the No. 1 lamentation from the
participants was that we had very few carrots and fewer sticks to motivate
anyone. Nearly all the supremely productive junior, midcareer, senior, and
even emeritus faculty members we knew produced because they wanted to,
because they loved the work.
It is impossible, however, to have 100-percent
buy-in to a system based essentially on voluntary goodwill. People who have
been working for decades at one institution, unless they have gone into
administration or been lucky with counteroffers, are probably suffering from
market-driven salary compression. In some departments, newly hired assistant
professors not only get a great deal of research support, but also may make
as much as or more than some seniors. It can be demoralizing to know that no
matter how hard you work, you will never be valued at what you think you are
worth. Many unproductive faculty members appear to use this logic: "Suppose
I start publishing and put lots of extra effort into my teaching; then I'll
earn an extra 1 percent. Whoopee."
Which brings us to the iceberg analogy. When I
first accepted the position of head of an academic unit, a dean told me,
"Get ready to live in a world where 90 percent of the good you do is never
recognized by anyone." But to some extent the various elements of a senior
scholar's workload are equally invisible. Most obviously, many perks
associated with hiring dissipate after tenure: Lower teaching loads, lighter
service requirements, even the patronizing but useful kindliness of the
department chair might cease once you become "one of us." A newly tenured
colleague described how, the week after the joyous letter from the provost
arrived, he got almost a dozen individual e-mails notifying him of
additional service or duties requested for the year to come.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on tenure are in various modules at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Question
Can you imagine sending a TAR submission out to the AECM for refereeing or maybe
the AAA Commons?
"Leading Humanities Journal Debuts 'Open' Peer Review, and Likes It,"
by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 26, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Leading-Humanities-Journal/123696/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Getting published in a humanities journal usually
works like this: Submit an article, then hope for the best as the editors
send it to a few hand-picked specialists for critique. The reviewers and the
authors are not supposed to know one another's identity.
But now scholars are asking whether this
double-blind peer-review system is still the best way to pass judgment. The
Internet makes it possible to share work with many people openly and
simultaneously, so why not tap the public wisdom of a crowd? One of the top
journals in literary studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, decided to put
that question to the test.
For this year's fall issue, a special publication
devoted to Shakespeare and new media, the journal offered contributors the
chance to take part in a partially open peer-review process. Authors could
opt to post drafts of their articles online, open them up for anyone to
comment on, and then revise accordingly. The editors would make the final
call about what to publish (hence the "partially open" label). As far as the
editors know, it's the first time a traditional humanities journal has tried
out a version of crowd-sourcing in lieu of double-blind review.
The verdict from several scholars who took part:
mostly a thumbs up, with a few cautionary notes and a dollop of "It's about
time" mixed in.
"It was on the whole a successful experiment," said
Martin Mueller, a professor of English and classics at Northwestern
University, who took part as a reviewer.
Michael Witmore, a professor of English at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, co-authored an article on the use of
statistical analysis and a text-tagging database to reveal linguistic
patterns in Shakespeare. He and his co-author "got some terrific ideas and
some citations" from the comments of the six or so people who actively
responded to the article, he said. "It produced a more interesting paper."
Scholars and editors in the sciences have been
trying out open peer review for some time, with not entirely rosy results.
The journal Nature did a test run in 2006. In a
published overview, the editors concluded the
venture had not been a success. Many authors expressed interest but few
participated, and the quantity and quality of the comments were
disappointing.
Interviews with participants in Shakespeare
Quarterly's open peer-review trial, however, suggest this attempt went
much better than Nature's did. At least one participant pointed out
that the humanities' subjective, conversational tendencies may make them
well suited to open review—better suited, perhaps, than the sciences.
Katherine Rowe, chair of the English department at
Bryn Mawr College, guest-edited the special issue. She and the editorial
board decided that the issue's new-media theme offered a chance to
investigate how scholarly authority works in a networked environment.
"This was genuinely an experiment," Ms. Rowe said.
"We didn't know what would result."
The journal's publisher, the Johns Hopkins
University Press, supported the idea. MediaCommons, a digital scholarly
network set up to encourage such experiments and conversations, agreed to
host the
project. So Ms. Rowe and other editors put out a
call for papers, culled submissions, then offered authors still in the
running a chance to post drafts online. All accepted.
Rounding Up
Experts
Ms. Rowe invited about 90 scholars, including
Northwestern's Mr. Mueller, to comment. Anybody willing to publish thoughts
under his or her own name could join in, but the guest editor wanted
recognized authorities as part of the field.
"'What's the nature of expertise?' is one of the
questions that really gets opened up by an open process," Ms. Rowe said.
"Everybody wanted to be sure that experts would be involved." By her count,
about 40 commenters, invited and self-selected, finally participated.
All told, four articles and three review essays
were posted on MediaCommons during a two-month review period this past
spring. (The articles and comments remain archived on the MediaCommons
site.) As it turned out, all seven submissions will appear in the issue.
Some of the authors acknowledged doubts going into
the experiment. Would open review be rigorous enough? Was it risky to post
work in progress? But "the results were terrific," said Mr. Witmore, who
wrote his paper on Shakespearean linguistic analysis with Jonathan Hope, a
reader in the English department of the University of Strathclyde, in
Glasgow. "It's very different from getting a two-paragraph reader's report
from a journal," Mr. Witmore said. "In this case, what you get is individual
readers from a wide range of subspecialties zooming in on a particular
paragraph, saying 'Tell me more about this' or 'Why did you do this?' It
seemed more like a dialogue."
Another scholar, Alan Galey, submitted an article
about Shakespeare and the history of information. An assistant professor on
the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, he worried that an
article vetted this way might carry less professional weight—a matter of
particular concern to a junior professor going for tenure. "It was very much
going on faith in a way," he said.
Mr. Galey's dean told him to make sure the process
would be rigorous and fair. The stature of the journal also helped reassure
him on that point. So did Ms. Rowe's willingness to answer questions and her
decision to invite established scholars to join in. Many crowd-sourcing
experiments depend on scale, Mr. Galey pointed out, but this relied "on
relationships among scholars where you know you can trust somebody. It
wasn't a Wild West by any means. It was as controlled a process as
traditional peer review. It was just controlled in a different way."
Mr. Galey wound up feeling that the experiment paid
off. "I got better feedback from this process than I've had from any other
peer-review process," he said.
Another participant, Ayanna Thompson, an associate
professor of English at Arizona State University, wrote an article focused
on race in performance-based teaching of Shakespeare. She called the
experiment "a fascinating process." But she also found it stressful, and saw
evidence that some old ways die hard.
Better Feedback
On the positive side, she got lots of feedback—"the
equivalent of eight single-spaced pages of comments," she told The
Chronicle via e-mail. She felt that the lack of anonymity encouraged
reviewers to engage with the material "in a much more thoughtful and
thorough way than in blind reviews because their names were attached to the
comments." That helped her clarify and revise sections of her argument. But
going through a public critique "was a stressful experience, and I kept
saying to myself, 'I'm glad I have tenure,'" she said.
She also discovered that academic status still
played a role. "The people who were commenting online were very established,
senior scholars. In fact, several junior scholars notified me offline that
they had comments, but that they did not want to post them in case they
contradicted the senior scholars," she said. "So while the process was
supposed to democratize the review process, it did keep some of the old
hierarchies in place."
Still, Ms. Thompson is glad she took part. "The
revised article is much stronger for the feedback, and I feel lucky to have
received so much deep engagement with my work," she said.
David Schalkwyk is editor of the journal and
director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library. He called the
experiment a success and said that Shakespeare Quarterly plans to try
it again for its future special issues, whose focused topics are most likely
to attract a critical mass of knowledgeable reviewers.
The system did, however, come at a cost from an
editor's perspective, he said. For instance, editors and writers had to keep
tabs on the evolving discussion and build in extra time for revisions;
authors also tended to make their articles longer and longer in response to
multiple comments. "I think we underestimated the amount of time that was
required," Mr. Schalkwyk said.
That's what keeps him from adopting the approach
for every issue. He said, "My reservation about applying open peer review to
normal issues is entirely practical. It's not philosophical. If I could do
it, I would."
For Mr. Mueller, the reviewer from Northwestern,
the journal's experiment was welcome—and past due. "I think it will take a
decade for scholarly communication to find ways of fitting itself into this
new technological environment," he said. "It takes time. The human problems
always take more time to manage and solve than the technological problems."
Jensen Comment
Years ago I sent a message to the AECM regarding a submission that I was asked
to referee for three different journals. I worked hard on writing down the
reasons I recommended rejecting the paper for The Accounting Review.
Within a few months another U.S. journal requested that I referee the paper (the
only change in the paper was a revised title to the paper). I recommended
rejection and forwarded a photocopy of my earlier rejection decision. In less
than a year I received a request from a foreign journal to referee the same
paper (even the title was not changed for the third round).
What this shows me is how the refereeing process, on occasion, can be far
more narrow than we think even among the global explosion of publishing
alternatives even within one academic discipline. The poor guys that authored
this submission could not get away from me. Actually, I think the system was
being unfair to them.
Since these were blind reviews, I really never learned who the authors were
on the submission.
When I was a relatively young PhD and still full of myself, the Senior
Editor, Charlie Griffin, of The Accounting Review sent me a rather large
number of accountics papers to referee (there weren't many accountics referees
available 1968-1970). I think it was at a 1970 AAA Annual Meeting that I
inadvertently overheard Charlie tell somebody else that he was not sending any
more TAR submissions to Bob Jensen because "Jensen rejects every submission." My
point in telling you this is that having only one or two referees can really be
unfair if the referees are still full of themselves.
Bob Jensen's threads on The Accounting Review's double blind
refereeing process (with nearly 600 referees to choose from and only two who
normally even see a submission) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
There are now
nearly 7,000 accounting education videos on YouTube, most of which are in very
basic accounting.
But there are nearly 150 videos in advanced accounting.
There are nearly
70 videos on XBRL.
YouTube Education
Channels ---
http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400
"YouTube Better at Funny Cat Videos Than Educational Content, Professors
Say," by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 26, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/YouTube-Better-at-Funny-Cat/25768/#lastComment
While many students turn to YouTube when looking
for help with their homework, it can be hard to find good-quality
educational clips there, according to two professors who did a preliminary
analysis of several video search engines.
The two researchers, Jeffrey R. Bell, a professor
of biological sciences at California State University at Chico, and Jim
Bidlack, a biology prfessor at University of Central Oklahoma, entered
scientific terms into several video search engines and analyzed the top 20
results from each one to compare their relevance and educational usefulness.
Students were also shown some of the resulting videos and asked to rate
their effectiveness at explaining the concept involved.
The professors found that YouTube favored videos
made by students as class projects, perhaps because those videos attracted
more comments than professionally made ones, said Mr. Bell in an interview.
Google Video
returned the most high-quality videos in the top 20
search results, the professors said. (Google owns YouTube but also operates
Google Video, which includes videos across the Web rather than just those on
YouTube, which hosts videos from users.
"You go into YouTube and you put in "mitosis,"
you're going to get 3,000 videos back," said Mr. Bell. "But no one looks at
all of that. You're only going to look at the top 10, so the ranking
algorithm is really important."
The professors presented their findings during a
poster session at last week's
Emerging
Technologies for Online Learning symposium, run
jointly by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group to support teaching with
technology, and two providers of educational software and resources. The
professors say they plan to expand their study and hope to publish the
results.
Jensen Comment
I posted the following comment at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
What the authors are indirectly concluding is that
some of the top researchers in our most prestigious universities are lousy
teachers.
The videos that I've watched to date are only the
top researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. I thought they had a lot
to say although they were not always the most dynamic speakers. Some were
pretty good.
What's lacking is the music and the graphics arts
and the comedy found on Comedy Central. Take your pick.
YouTube Education
Channels ---
http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400
Bob Jensen's
threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"What Can We (live teachers) Add?" by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Financial
Accounting Blog, July 22, 2010 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-do-we-add.html
Over the last few years, my wife and I have become
big fans of the video classes produced by The Teaching Company. Two or three
times per week, we will watch a 30 or 45-minute video lecture on art or
literature or history or religion prepared by a college teacher. I am amazed
by how much I now know about topics that once were totally foreign to me.
In watching these videos, I am occasionally
reminded of a question that comes up in colleges now and then: Do we need
live instructors? Why don’t we find the very best college teachers and film
their classes? Then, put those videos up on the Internet and everyone (or,
at least, our students) can learn the material without the need of a
classroom or a teacher.
Well, the easy answer to that query is that a
college education has to be more than the conveyance of information to a
passive student taking notes. So, doesn’t that automatically raise the next
question that we need to address as teachers: What are we adding in our
classes that goes beyond the conveyance of information to a passive student?
If the answer is nothing, then maybe we should all be replaced by videos.
As you get ready for the fall semester, ponder how
you are going to add value to your students. --“I’m going to tell them some
interesting stories.” -- A video can tell them hundreds of interesting
stories. --“I’m going to tell them about the history of my discipline.” -- A
video can tell them about the history of your discipline. --“I’m going to
walk them step-by-step through the essential core of the disciple.” - A
video can walk students through the essential core of the discipline.
Those are all important to a class but they could
just as easily be done by a person on video. What are you going to do this
coming semester in your classes that a video could not do?
We live in a time when too many people believed
that they could not be replaced until they were replaced. My assumption is
that if you add real value to a process, you become essential. Otherwise,
someone will eventually catch on that you can be replaced.
There are many, many ways that teachers add value
to the students in their classes. How will you do that in the coming fall?
What will you do that couldn’t be replaced by a video?
Jensen Comment
Believe it or not, I think the most important thing we can add is to be live
role models day-to-day for our students. We can be role models regarding what it
means to be professionally competent (without necessarily awing them in every
class). We can be role models for such other things in life as empathy, caring,
ethics, human frailty, and yes even fashion.
Fashion?
Professors who show up in class wearing T-shirts, jeans, and open toe sandals
really turn me off. Perhaps that's because I'm an old farm boy who, at one time,
was awed by male professionals who wore white shirts and neckties to work. Our
most scruffy professors will spiff up when applying for a job or make a speech
at a local Rotary Club luncheon. What makes our students less important
day-to-day?
But the most important thing we add is to awe our students with both our
professional competence combined with professional honesty in admitting things
we cannot answer. Watching a talking head on television can be really
educational, but having a live teacher fumble about out loud while trying to
reason out a brilliant answer can be even more educational (even if it is more
time consuming). Teachers demonstrate how real-world thinking takes us down
blind alleys and stumbling blocks of dumb ideas. Students leave our courses with
a better understanding of what a non-perfect world of reasoning is really like
(as long as our stumbling really gets eventually us to the best answers).
The latest exchange of AECM messaging regarding the question raised by Tom
Selling about sales discounts provides a perfect example of great teachers
stumbling about trying to find the best answer. If Carla had been the first to
respond it would've been disappointing to the AECM learning process.
What is sad in teaching, as illustrated by many lurkers on the AECM, is
the hesitancy of some teachers to be fearful of subjecting their incomplete or
flawed reasoning to students and peers. The classic case is the teacher who
delivers only canned lectures and cases in which he or she only delivers perfect
reasoning that are much like prepared answers being read from a teleprompter.
This can make students fearful that they can never be as smart as their teachers
who always seem to know the best answers.
I love teachers who have the confidence to even provide answers they know are
wrong and then testing how students discover the errors and are willing to point
them out. This, by the way, is part of the BAM pedagogy ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Probably the best teaching lies in asking the best questions without telling or
even knowing the best answers.
Questions
Does your university need a new Dean of Social Networking?
Does your technology support group need a new specialist on social networking?
Does your department need a new faculty specialist on social networking in your
discipline?
What is the huge new social networking purchase by Blackboard?
This week Facebook announced how many users?
a. 5 million
b. 50 million
c. 500 million
d. 1 billion
e. 5 billion
To put the number of Facebook
users into perspective note that:
Population of the United States = 309 million give or take
http://www.poodwaddle.com/clocks2.htm
"How Social Networking Helps Teaching (and Worries Some Professors),"
by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Social-Networking-Helps/123654/
Professors crowded into conference rooms here this
week to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in their classrooms,
though some attendees raised privacy issues related to the hypersocial
technologies.
About 750 professors and administrators attended
the conference on
"Emerging
Technologies for Online Learning," run jointly by
the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group to support teaching with technology,
and two other educational software and resource providers.
A session on Facebook held Thursday morning
attracted a standing-room-only crowd, with people packed into the room and
huddled in the doorway. One benefit of the popular social network is that,
unlike course-management systems such as Blackboard, students already know
how to use it, said the presenter, Denise Knowles, a Web-application
specialist at Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, Calif. She encouraged
professors to use Facebook to send out announcements for their courses and
to design assignments where students post responses using the service.
But she also recommended that professors set up two
Facebook accounts—one for communicating with students and another for
personal connections. That way, professors can clearly keep their
professional identities walled off from other important aspects of their
lives. "We need our privacy," she said. "I don't want people seeing pictures
of my children, and I don't want people seeing pictures of my life."
Not everyone is so cautious, however. Tanya M.
Joosten, a lecturer in the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's department
of communication, gave out her Facebook address during her session. She said
she uses privacy settings in the service to control what various "friends"
can see, and she suggested that professors set up a separate page on
Facebook for a course, which allows students to connect to the page without
seeing the personal information of the professor or others who have "liked"
the page. Then professors can post updates to the course Facebook page,
which are automatically pushed to the pages of students who follow it.
"It's coming right down to them in a medium that
they're already using anyway," she said. A
survey she did of her own students showed that 83
percent approved of professors pushing class updates via Facebook. "I've
never seen ratings so high in any emerging technology project I've done,"
she said.
3 Unusual Ideas
This year's conference dealt with three themes: the
use of mobile technologies like iPhones; online video and other
high-bandwidth tools; and social-networking platforms such as Facebook, said
Jeremy W. Kemp, co-chair for the conference and a lecturer at San Jose State
University.
Among the more unusual suggestions during
presentations:
- Ask students to do role-playing exercises on
Facebook or Twitter. For instance, students in an American-history
course could each be required to set up a Facebook page for a historical
figure and periodically post "status updates" of things the famous
people did. Similarly, Utah State University organized a Civil War
re-enactment on
Twitter.
- Learn how to use the tracking feature of
YouTube to see how many students tune in to
videos of lectures that professors post. Sam McGuire, an assistant
professor of music at the University of Colorado at Denver, said by
doing so, he learned that some students came back months later to watch
his videos.
- Send students one-minute video reminders about
class assignments using a free service called
Eyejot.
Traci LaBarbera Stromie, an instructional designer at Kennesaw State
University near Atlanta, said video messages, rather than e-mail
reminders, could "keep students more engaged" in the class.
Technology Does
Not Equal Learning
Some attendees stressed that there is a danger that
professors would use new technologies just because they seemed cool, rather
than for any specific learning goal.
"Everybody talks about using technology, but what
is the effect on learning?" said Shari McCurdy Smith, associate director of
the Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service at the University of
Illinois at Springfield, in an interview after the Facebook session. "I
think this is a great concern I hear a lot."
She said she has seen some evidence that technology
is improving learning, but more research should be done.
The attendance and interest in Facebook surprised
her, though. After all, just a few years ago, it seemed that most professors
complained about how much time their students frittered away on the service,
she said.
As customers make or break
brands online, companies rush to hire social media directors...and figure out
what they do
"Twitter, Twitter, Little Stars," by Felix
Gillette, Business Week, July 15, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_30/b4188064364442.htm?link_position=link1
Opportunities in corporate social media are popping up faster than cat
videos on YouTube (GOOG). In addition to Petco, in the past few months,
Sears Holdings (SHLD), Panasonic (PC), the Fifth Third Bank (FITB), the
National Association of Homebuilders, Citigroup (C), Electronic Arts (ERTS),
AT&T (T), Fiji Water, Godaddy.com, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship
have all sought or hired social media experts. In Las Vegas, Harrah's
Entertainment recently circulated a job listing for a "corporate social
media rock star." In Chicago, Buick went looking for a handful of "social
media ambassadors" to help manage Tweet to Drive, which allows customers to
schedule test drives from home via Twitter. At the same time, traditional
public relations and marketing powerhouses such as Ogilvy & Mather are
bulking up their expertise to fend off social-media-focused startups.
"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
Bob Jensen's threads on social networking are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
"How Big Banks Fail and What to Do about It," Stanford GSB News,
July 2010 ---
Click Here
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/Duffie_book_610.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=knowledgebase-july2010
In a new book Professor Darrell Duffie describes
the financial network of incentives and financial contracts that lead to
run-on-the-bank calamities during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The
Stanford Graduate School of Business finance professor argues that placing
the global financial system on a sounder footing depends on an understanding
of how the largest and most connected banks — the major dealer banks — can
make a sudden transition from weakness to failure.
July 2010
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—In a
forthcoming book, Stanford Graduate School of Business finance expert
Darrell Duffie goes behind the scenes to describe the financial network of
incentives and financial contracts that lead to run-on-the-bank calamities
during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. He argues that success in placing
the global financial system on a sounder footing going forward depends on an
understanding of how the largest and most connected banks — the major dealer
banks — can make a sudden transition from weakness to failure.
In How Big Banks Fail and What To Do About It, to
be published by Princeton University Press in July, Duffie, the Dean Witter
Distinguished Professor of Finance, describes the failure mechanics of
dealer banks in clinical detail. He also outlines improvements in
regulations and market infrastructure that are likely to reduce the risks of
these failures and reduce the damage they cause to the wider financial
system when they do fail. The dealer banks are at the center of the plumbing
of the financial system. Among other crucial activities, they intermediate
over-the-counter markets for securities and derivatives. Although the
financial crisis has passed, the dealer banks remain among the most serious
points of weakness along the backbone of the financial system.
Once the solvency of a dealer bank is questioned,
its relationships with its customers, equity investors, secured creditors,
derivatives counterparties, and clearing bank can change suddenly. The
incentives at play are similar to those of a depositor run at a commercial
bank. That is, fear over the solvency of the bank leads to a rush by many to
reduce their potential losses in the event that the bank fails. At first,
the bank must signal its strength, giving up some of its slim stocks of
remaining capital and cash, for to do otherwise would increase perceptions
of weakness. Finally, it is impossible for the bank to stem the tide of cash
outflows. The bank fails.
The key mechanisms of a dealer-bank failure, such
as the collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2008, depend on
special institutional and regulatory frameworks that influence the flight of
short-term secured creditors, hedge-fund clients, derivatives counter-
parties, and most devastatingly, the loss of clearing and settlement
services. Dealer banks, sometimes referred to as "large complex financial
institutions" or as "too big to fail," are indeed of a size and complexity
that sharply distinguish them from typical commercial banks.
Even today, the failure of a dealer bank would pose
a significant risk to the entire financial system and the wider economy.
Current regulatory approaches to mitigating bank
failures do not adequately treat the special risks posed by dealer banks,
writes Duffie. Some of the required reforms are among those suggested in
2009 by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and in the U.S. Restoring
American Financial Stability Bill. Other needed reforms to regulations or
market infrastructure still do not receive adequate attention. A January
2010 speech by Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, shows
that some regulators are aware of the significant changes still required.
Bob Jensen's threads on the Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
There were an estimated 130 million works licensed
under Creative Commons
Creative Commons ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
Creative Commons Home Page ---
http://creativecommons.org/
"Response to ASCAP’s deceptive claims," by Eric Steuer, Creative
Commons, June 30th, 2010 ---
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/22643?utm_source=ccorg&utm_medium=postbanner
Last week, the American Society of Composers,
Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent a fundraising letter to its members
calling on them to fight “opponents” such as Creative Commons, falsely
claiming that we work to undermine copyright.*
Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses –
plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can use
to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights.
Without copyright, these tools don’t work. Artists and record labels that
want to make their music available to the public for certain uses, like
noncommercial sharing or remixing, should consider using CC licenses.
Artists and labels that want to reserve all of their copyright rights should
absolutely not use CC licenses.
Many musicians, including acts like
Nine Inch Nails,
Beastie Boys,
Youssou N’Dour,
Tone,
Curt Smith,
David Byrne,
Radiohead,
Yunyu,
Kristin Hersh, and
Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to
share with the public. These musicians aren’t looking to stop making money
from their music. In fact, many of the artists who use CC licenses are also
members of collecting societies, including ASCAP. That’s how we first heard
about this smear campaign – many musicians that support Creative Commons
received the email and forwarded it to us. Some of them even included a
donation to Creative Commons.
If you are similarly angered by ASCAP’s deceptive
tactics, I’m hoping that you can help us by
donating to Creative Commons – and sending a
message – at this critical time. We don’t have lobbyists on the payroll, but
with your support we can continue working hard on behalf of creators and
consumers alike.
Sincerely,
Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
"MIT Tops List of
College Copyright Violators," by Erica R. Hendry,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3833/mit-tops-list-of-college-copyright-violators
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's threads on the dreaded DMCA ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
Question
What will be the impact of this Department of Education report on for-profit
universities?
"Splitting the Difference on Gainful Employment," by Jennifer Epstein,
Inside Higher Ed, July 23, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/23/gainful
The U.S. Department of
Education today released its long-awaited proposed regulations to define
“gainful employment,” the mechanism that makes non-liberal arts offerings at
for-profit colleges eligible for federal financial aid.
Striking a middle ground
between aggressively attacking for-profit higher education and backing down
under the sector’s intense lobbying pressure, the rule creates multiple
paths to eligibility and takes aim at only the most egregious of bad actors.
“Overall I firmly believe
that for-profit schools are doing a good job of preparing students” for the
work force, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said, and “the many good actors
should be protected from being tainted or being tarnished”
by the misdeeds of a small minority.
“These schools -- and
their investors -- benefit from billions of dollars in subsidies from
taxpayers, and in return, taxpayers have a right to know that these programs
are providing solid preparation for a job,” he said. The gainful employment
metrics aim to do just that by considering graduates’ ability to repay
student loan debt as a reasonable indicator of whether a vocational program
does what Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 says it must do to
qualify for federal student aid: prepare students for “gainful employment in
a recognized occupation.”
The regulations will be
open to public comment for 45 days after they are published in the
Federal Register in a notice of proposed rule making. After that, the
department will make revisions with the goal of publishing a final rule by
Nov. 1, along with
regulations on 13 other issues related to the integrity of the Title IV
program, so that it can go into effect on July 1,
2011.
While the devil of the
regulation is in the details -- and the department declined to release full
regulatory language to reporters and sources Thursday ahead of the rule's
release today -- what was disclosed appears in many ways to be a compromise
between consumer advocates’ push for tough limits on student debt and the
fears of for-profits that the rules would amount to a sector killer. As the
department said more than a year ago as it began the rule making process,
the proposal's emphasis is on excessive debt.
Department officials
project that if the regulations went into effect now, about 40 percent of
programs would remain fully eligible for Title IV financial aid, while
another 55 percent would face restrictions on enrollment growth and
increased debt disclosure requirements, the department estimates.
Based on current data, 5
percent of programs -- serving 8 percent of students -- would face
extinction. Those that do will have between now and the 2012-13 academic
year to make changes before risking loss of Title IV funds. (And, in that
academic year, no more than 5 percent of programs nationwide could be found
to be ineligible for federal aid.)
For a program to be fully
eligible for Title IV aid, its graduates would need to have a
debt service-to-income ratio under 8 percent of
their total income or 20 percent of their discretionary income. Or, of
former students who entered federal loan repayment in the four most recent
fiscal years, at least 45 percent would have to be paying down principal on
their student loan debt. Forbearances and deferments (other than for
program completers who qualify for public service loan forgiveness) would be
considered nonpayments. Unless it passed at least one of the debt-to-income
ratio tests as well as the loan repayment test, a program would have to
disclose all of that data to current and prospective students.
Programs completely
ineligible for federal aid would be those where fewer than 35 percent of
former students are repaying their loans, and where graduates have a
debt-to-income ratio greater than 12 percent of their total income and 30
percent of discretionary income. The department estimates that 5 percent of
vocational programs serving 8 percent of students would lose their Title IV
eligibility.
If these programs made no
changes -- such as lowering their prices or placing students in
higher-paying jobs -- by mid-2012, they would no longer be able to accept
aid dollars for new students and would only be able to accept federal aid
from current students for one additional year.
Between full eligibility
and total ineligibility, the department estimates, are 55 percent of
programs, which would face restrictions of their enrollment growth and be
required to demonstrate employer support while warning students of their
high debt levels and low repayment rates. (See chart for details.) Even if
fewer than 35 percent of former students are repaying the principal on their
federal loans, a program could still be Title IV-eligible so long as the
debt-to-income ratio is below 12 percent of total income or 30 percent of
discretionary income
The previous version of
the rule --
released in January ahead of the third and final
round of a negotiated rule making process that also encompassed revisions to
the department’s regulations surrounding 13 other areas related to the
integrity of the Title IV program -- relied primarily on an 8 percent
debt-to-total income ratio to determine Title IV eligibility.
Under that proposal,
income data were to have come from generalized information from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics. Among the many criticisms that proposal faced was the
concern that it would disproportionately threaten bachelor’s, master’s and
doctoral degree programs, while favoring shorter certificate and associate
degree programs.
A student who earned an
associate degree in accounting would have less debt than someone with a
bachelor’s degree or M.B.A., and yet graduates of all three would be
considered to have the same income. The proposed rule instead uses income
data of a program’s actual graduates -- allowing for differences in program
length and quality. The use of a debt-to-discretionary income ratio would
also compensate for such differences.
Early Reactions
Perhaps in a sign of a
successful compromise, the proposed regulations didn’t seem to fully satisfy
anyone outside the department.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit universities are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
This is one of the few times I've seen a Harvard accounting faculty member
contribute to the daily Harvard Business Review Blog that has a steady
flow of contributions form management, marketing, and finance faculty that
sustain this blog.
"Dodd-Frank Financial Commentary from HBS Faculty," Harvard
Business Review Blog, July 20, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2010/07/dodd-frank-commentary-from-hbs.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
A Much, Much, Much Better Commentary
"Five Major Defects of the Financial Reform Bill," by Nobel Laureate
Gary Becker, Becker-Posner Blog, July 11, 2010 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2010/07/five-major-defects-of-the-financial-reform-bill-becker.html
A 2300 page bill is usually an indication of many
political compromises. The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill is no exception,
for it is a complex, disorderly, politically motivated, and not well thought
out reaction to the financial crisis that erupted beginning with the panic
of the fall of 2008. Not everything about the bill is bad-e.g., the
requirement that various derivatives trade through exchanges may be a good
suggestion- but the disturbing parts of the bill are far more important. I
will concentrate on five major defects, including omissions.
1. The bill adds regulations and rules about many
activities that had little or nothing to do with the crisis. For example, it
creates a consumer financial protection bureau to be housed at the Fed that
is supposed to protect consumers from fraud and other abusive financial
practices. Yet it is not apparent that many consumers were victimized during
the financial boom years, or that consumer behavior had anything of
importance to do with the crisis. For example, consumers who took out
subprime mortgages that required almost no down payments and had low
interest rates were not victimized since these conditions enabled them to
cheaply own houses, at least for a while. The “victims” were the banks, and
especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that were foolishly willing to hold
such risky mortgages.
The bill gives the Fed authority to limit
interchange or “swipe” fees that merchants pay for each debit-card
transaction, although these fees had not the slightest connection to the
financial crisis. Such price controls are in general undesirable, and hardly
seem to require the attention of the Federal Reserve. The bill also gives
the SEC authority to empower stockholders to run their own candidates for
corporate boards of directors. Corporate boards often receive some blame for
the crisis-mainly unjustified in my opinion- but stockholder election of
some members will not improve corporate governance, and will probably make
that worse.
2. The Dodd-Frank bill gives several government
agencies considerable additional discretion to try to forestall another
crisis, even though they already had the authority to take many actions. The
Fed could have tightened the monetary base and interest rates as the crisis
was developing, but chose not to do so. The SEC and various Federal Reserve
banks-especially the New York Fed- had the authority to stop questionable
lending practices and increase liquidity requirements. These and other
government bodies did not use their authority to try to head off the crisis
partly because they got caught up in the same bubble hysteria as did banks
and consumers. In addition, regulators are often “captured” by the firms
they are regulating, not necessarily because the regulators are corrupt, but
because they are mainly exposed to arguments made by the banks and other
groups they are regulating.
Despite the fact that regulators failed to use the
powers they already had, the bill mainly adds not clear rules of behavior
for banks, but additional governmental discretionary power. For example, the
bill creates the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a nine-member panel
drawn from the Fed, SEC, and other government agencies, that is supposed to
monitor Wall Street’s largest companies and other market participants to
spot and respond to any emerging growth in systemic risk in the economy.
With a two-thirds vote this Council could impose higher capital requirements
on lenders and place hedge funds and dealers under the Fed’s authority.
Given the regulators reluctance to use the power they already had to
forestall the crisis, it seems highly unlikely that this Council will act
decisively prior to the emergence of a crisis, especially when a two thirds
majority is required.
3. Insufficient capital relative to bank assets was
an important cause of the financial crisis. The bill does reduce the ability
of banks to count as bank capital certain risky assets, such as trust
preferred securities, and gives the Fed authority to impose additional
capital and liquidity requirements on banks and non-bank financial
companies, including insurers. I would have preferred a simple rule that
raised capital requirements of banks relative to their assets, especially
capital of larger and more interconnected banks. As suggested by Raghu Rajan
and the Squam Lake group of economists, the bill probably should have
required larger banks to issue “contingent” capital, such as debt that
automatically converts to equity when the banks are experiencing large
losses, or when a bank’s capital to asset ratio falls below a certain level.
4. One of the most serious omissions is that the
bill essentially says nothing about Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. In 2008 these
organizations were placed into conservatorship of the Federal Housing
Finance Agency. During the run up to the crisis, Barney Frank and others in
Congress encouraged Freddie and Fannie to absorb most of the subprime
mortgages. In 2008 they held over half of all mortgages, and almost all the
subprimes. They have absorbed even a larger fraction of the relatively few
mortgages written after 2008. Freddie and Fannie deserve a considerable
share of the blame for the crisis, but they continue to have strong
political support. I would like to see both of them eventually dissolved,
but that is unlikely to happen. Instead we are promised that they will be
dealt with in future legislation, but I am skeptical that anything will be
done to terminate either organization, or even improve their functioning.
5. Many proposals in the bill will have highly
uncertain impacts on the economy. These include, among many other
provisions, the requirement that originators of mortgages and other assets
retain at least 5% of the assets they originate, that many derivatives go on
organized exchanges (may be an improvement but far from certain), that hedge
funds become more closely regulated, and that consumer be “protected” from
their financial decisions.
Most of these and other changes in the bill are not
based on a serious analysis of what contributed to the financial crisis, but
rather are the result of political and emotional reactions to the crisis.
Usually, such reactions do more harm than good. That is likely to be the
fate of the great majority of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank bill.
Bob Jensen's threads on the economic crisis are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
"How "journolists" tried to suppress the news," by James Taronto,
The Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703724104575379200412040286.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
The "Journolist" scandal has deepened with new
revelations that participants in the now-defunct email list for
ideologically approved journalists--no conservatives allowed--engaged in
efforts to suppress news damaging to then-candidate Barack Obama.
The Daily Caller reports ABC News's "tough
questioning" of Obama at a 2008 debate with Hillary Clinton "left many of
[the Journolist participants] outraged":
"George [Stephanopoulos]," fumed Richard Kim of
the Nation, is "being a disgusting little rat snake."
Others went further. According to records obtained
by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential
campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect
their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time,
Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon
and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama
had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the
damage.
Most damning is a long quote from a Spencer
Ackerman, who worked for something called the Washington Independent:
I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think
you need to. It's not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright's defense.
What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the
left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a
plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out
in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a
state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
And I think this threads the needle. If the right
forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what
we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of
them--Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares--and call them racists. Ask: why
do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who
unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them*
sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and
self-destruction.
Smashing somebody's [sic] through a plate-glass
window seems like an odd way to thread a needle, but atrocious prose is the
least of the problems here. The problem here isn't bias, either. Assuming
Ackerman was an opinion writer rather than a straight-news reporter, he was
entitled not only to hold his opinions but to express them.
But Ackerman was not engaging in a public debate;
he was privately strategizing about how to suppress the news. And his fellow
journolists, while disagreeing with him, did so "only on strategic grounds":
"Spencer, you're wrong," wrote Mark Schmitt, now
an editor at the American Prospect. "Calling Fred Barnes a racist
doesn't further the argument, and not just because Juan Williams is his
new black friend, but because that makes it all about character. The
goal is to get to the point where you can contrast some _thing_--Obama's
substantive agenda--with this crap." . . .
Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also
disagreed with Ackerman's strategy. "I think it's worth keeping in mind
that Obama is trying (or says he's trying) to run a campaign that avoids
precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this
into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly.
After all, why vote for him if it turns out he's not going [to] change
the way politics works?"
But it was Ackerman who had the last word. "Kevin,
I'm not saying OBAMA should do this. I'm saying WE should do this."
If anybody on the list objected in principle to
Ackerman's idea of slandering people, including a fellow journalist, as
racist, the Caller missed that part of the story. (We'll be happy to report
it if a Journolist member would care to supply us with the evidence.) What
Ackerman proposed was to carry out a political dirty trick in order to
suppress the news and thereby aid a candidate for public office. That's
about as unethical as journalism can get.
The final product of this debate was a
pathetic "open letter," which, as
we
noted at the time, was signed by 41 self-described
"journalists and media analysts," nearly all of whom were affiliated with
universities, left-wing publications or left-wing think tanks. The letter
does seem to have been more of a collaborative effort than we guessed back
then: the Caller lists eight people who contributed to its drafting. Even
so, what self-respecting journalist shares a byline with 40 other guys?
"The letter caused a brief splash and won the
attention of the New York Times," the Caller reports, but thereafter was
deservedly forgotten until now. Obama weathered the Wright revelations, but
it seems a stretch to give Journolist the credit (or, if you prefer, the
blame) for that. On the other hand, are there other stories they did succeed
in suppressing? We cannot know as long as the full Journolist archives are
secret.
These revelations also belie Journolist
founder (and now Washington Post commentator)
Ezra Klein's defense of the enterprise back in
March 2009:
As for sinister implications, is it "secret?" No.
Is it off-the-record? Yes. The point is to create a space where experts
feel comfortable offering informal analysis and testing out ideas. Is it
an ornate temple where liberals get together to work out "talking
points?" Of course not. Half the membership would instantly quit if
anything like that emerged.
This statement is true only if parsed as a denial
that an email list is an ornate temple. Plainly the list was a forum where
liberals got together to work out talking points, as evidenced by that "open
letter." Worse, it was a forum where people employed as journalists
conspired to suppress the news--and, by doing so "off the record," used
journalistic ethics as cover.
In 2009 Klein wrote that Journolist's policy of
excluding conservatives was "not about fostering ideology but preventing a
collapse into flame war. The emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology."
"Call them racists." That's empiricism for you!
Equal Opportunity Destroyer
The NAACP's double secret resolution condemning
"racist elements" in the Tea Party has led, indirectly, to the firing of a
U.S. Department of Agriculture official for expressing allegedly racist
views. The twist: The ex-official, Shirley Sherrod, is black and was
speaking at an NAACP event.
Sherrod's downfall occurred yesterday, after Andrew
Brietbart posted a video excerpt of Sherrod's speech on BigGovernment.com.
Acording to the video, Sherrod told this story at an NAACP banquet on March
27:
The first time I was faced with having to help a
white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking, but he was
trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing. But
he had come to me for help. What he didn't know while he was taking all
that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to
decide just how much help I was going to give him.
I was struggling with the fact that so many black
people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help
a white person save their land. So, I didn't give him the full force of
what I could do. I did enough so that when he--I assumed the Department
of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department
of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to
help him.
So I took him to a white lawyer that had attended
some of the training that we had provided, because Chapter 12 bankruptcy
had just been enacted for the family farmer. So I figured if I take him
to one of them that his own kind would take care of him.
That's when it was revealed to me that it's about
the poor versus those who have, and not so much about white--it is
about white and black, but it's not--you know, it opened my eyes,
because I took him to one of his own.
CNN reports what happened next:
Sherrod, who resigned Monday as the department's
director of rural development for Georgia, told CNN she had four calls
telling her the White House wanted her to resign.
"They asked me to resign, and in fact they
harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point,
Georgia, yesterday," she said. The last call "asked me to pull to the
side of the road and do it [resign]," she said.
"I don't feel good about it, because I know I
didn't do anything wrong," she said. ". . . During my time at USDA, I
gave it all I had."
The NAACP issued a statement in support of
Sherrod's sacking:
"Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had
it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a
white farmer in need of assistance because of his race," said Benjamin
Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the civil rights group. "We are
appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against
farmers of color and female farmers."
It seems to us that Sherrod got a bum deal in all
this. While her description of her attitude toward the white farmer is
indeed appalling, even in Breitbart's video it is clear by the end that the
story was one of having learned the error of her ways. Her evident
continuing resentment of "those who have" is to her discredit, but it's not
as invidious as racial resentment.
Further, Sherrod tells CNN that the
incident occurred in 1986, when she was working for a nonprofit, long before
she went to work for the USDA. (This is consistent with the story she tells
in the video.
Chapter 12 bankruptcy was indeed enacted in 1986.)
CNN even tracks down the white farmer's wife, Eloise Spooner, who credits
Sherrod with "getting in there and doing all she could do to help us."
It seems clear that both the administration's
decision to put her out to pasture and the NAACP's to accuse her of racism
were political ones. And in a way it's progress that charges of racism have
become an equal-opportunity destroyer. We hope, however, that the lesson the
president and his supporters, including the NAACP, take from all this is to
be more circumspect about leveling the charge against their opponents.
Suing for Votes
"President Obama and his political aides privately
acknowledge that the government's decision to sue Arizona over its new
immigration law is helping to fuel an anti-immigration fervor that could
benefit some Republicans in elections this fall," the Washington Post
reports:
But White House officials have concluded that,
over the long term, the Republicans' get-tough message is a major
political miscalculation. They predict it will ultimately alienate
millions of Latinos, the fastest-growing minority group in the nation.
West Wing strategists argue that the president's
call for legislation that acknowledges the role of immigrants and goes
beyond punishing undocumented workers will help cement a permanent
political relationship between Democrats and Hispanics -- much as civil
rights and voting rights legislation did for the party and African
Americans in the 1960s.
As a result, although the president is unlikely to
press for comprehensive immigration reform this year, he has urged his
allies to keep up the pressure on Republican lawmakers.
The Democrats' evaluation of the political effects
of all this seem right to us. Most of the country is with Arizona, but
Hispanics are not, and they are likelier to have longer memories of what
they perceive as a discriminatory effort at their expense.
But the administration's cynicism is also striking.
In the Post's telling, Obama is merely giving lip service to comprehensive
immigration reform in order to win votes, no matter that the
administration's divisive actions have destroyed any prospects for its
passage. And one subject the story never takes up is the merit of the
Arizona lawsuit. It's hard to escape the suspicion that the Justice
Department is being inappropriately politicized.
Administration Hits Reset Button
- "Biden: Expect a November 'Shock' by
the Democrats"--headline,
USA Today website, July 18
- "Parachuting Donkey Shocks Russian
Beachgoers"--headline,
Agence France-Presse, July 20
The Two Leaders Agreed to Exercise More and Watch Their Salt Intake
"As Cameron and Obama Meet, BP Will Be Top
Issue"--headline, New York Times, July 20
Life Imitates 'South Park'
- "Upon
investigation, Kyle and Cartman find that [Magic] Johnson sleeps
regularly with huge piles of cash in his bedroom, because he does not
trust banks, which eventually prove to have the ability to neutralize
HIV. Laboratory scientists experiment with a concentrated dose of 'about
$180,000 shot directly into the bloodstream' on the boys, which forces
the HIV to disintegrate."--Wikipedia page on "Tonsil
Trouble," aired March 12, 2008
- "In another
piece of progress against AIDS, a separate, large study in Malawi
sponsored by the World Bank, and made public on Sunday, found that if
poor schoolgirls and their families received small monthly cash
payments, the girls had sex later, less often and with fewer partners. A
year and a half after the program started, the girls were less than half
as likely to be infected with the AIDS or herpes viruses than were girls
whose families got no payments."--New
York Times, July 20, 2010
The Lonely Lives of Scientists
"Scientists Develop Mobile Phone That Doesn't Need
Reception"--headline, Turkish Weekly, July 20
Where Did They Go?
"California Blacks Split Over Marijuana
Measure"--headline, New York Times, July 20
Though It's Even Harder With a Narrow One
"It's Hard to Paint Everyone With a Broad
Brush"--headline, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 19
World's Oddest Namesake
"British Teenager Named After Hotel Balcony
Fall"--headline, Daily Telegraph (London), July 19
Though Not as Bad as Hotel Balcony Fall
"Sex Pistols Was a Rotten Name: Johnny"--headline,
Daily Telegraph (Australia), July 19
What About Trees?
"Law Bans 'Debarking' of Canines and Cats"--headline,
Boston Globe, July 20
'Oh,' She Said, 'but They're Such Intelligent, Friendly Creatures!'
"Dolphin Charged With Battery Against
Girlfriend"--headline, Associated Press, July 19
Questions Nobody Is Asking
- "Hillary's New
Hairstyle: 'Do or Don't? (PHOTOS, POLL)"--headline,
Puffington Host, July 19
- "Can a Squirrel
Get Heat Stroke?"--headline,
Toronto Star, July 16
- "Facebook as
Popular as Filing Taxes--What?"--headline,
PCWorld.com, July 20
- "No Holds
Barred: What's Up With Tom Friedman?"--headline,
Jerusalem Post, July 19
- "Want to Join
the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement?"--headline,
Grist.org, July 19
- "Lada Gaga the
New Face of Tea?"--headline,
ITN website
(Britain), July 20
- "Who Is Barack
Obama?"--headline,
Washington Post, July 20
Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking
- "How Steve Jobs
Turned a Finger Spot Into a Death Grip"--headline,
Fortune.CNN.com, July 19
- "Why Fairs
Continue to Draw Steady Crowds Across West Michigan"--headline,
Grand Rapids Press, July 20
- "Why Lindsay
Lohan Should Record in Prison"--headline,
Broward/Palm Beach (Fla.) New Times website,
July 20
It's Always in the Last Place You Look
"Bowls of Human Fingers and Teeth Found in Mayan
Tomb"--headline, LIveScience.com, July 19
News of the Tautological
"CRIME REPORT: Man Tries to Flee After Hit-and-Run
Accident"--headline, Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.), July 19
News of the Scatological
"Islamic Body: Cat Poo Coffee OK"--headline,
News24.com (South Africa), July 20
News You Can Use
- "Review: Justin
Bieber Fever Not Worth Catching in Oakland"--headline,
Oakland Tribune, July 18
- "The Secret to a
Good Bee Beard: Queen Bee and Vaseline"--headline,
Toronto Star, July 18
- "Rent a Friend
for Ł6.50 an Hour"--headline,
Daily Telegraph (London), July 19
- "Please Remain Calm: The Earth Will
Heal Itself"--headline,
Globe and Mail (Toronto), July 19
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "Detroit Cops
Probe Fatal Nightclub Shooting"--headline,
Detroit Free Press, July 19
- "Biden: Pelosi
Most Powerful Person in U.S. Politics--Except Obama"--headline,
Roll Call, July 19
- "UN Still
Corrupt"--headline,
Commentary website, July 20
- "Top Judiciary
Republican to Oppose Kagan"--headline,
Associated Press, July 20
If You Have a Self-Esteem Problem, Vote for Me
Sen. Carte Goodwin will be out of a job come November.
The West Virginia Democrat was sworn in today to fill Robert Byrd's empty
nest, the same day the Legislature in Charleston passed a law setting an
August primary, which means the special election won't have to wait till
2012.
Gov. Joe Manchin, who appointed Goodwin, announced
that he'll seek the seat:
"I only hope I would be able to follow in his
footsteps and continue to help the people of West Virginia," Manchin
said of Byrd, who died last month at age 92.
"I intend, with the opportunity, to work as hard
in Washington as I've worked in West Virginia," he said. "I believe in
you more than you believe in yourself."
That's an odd message, isn't it? We guess if
Virginia is for lovers, West Virginia is for self-loathers.
Browser Readability Tool and Sunlight Designs
July 16, 2010 message from Bill Ellis
[bill.ellis@FURMAN.EDU]
If you want your web pages to only display what you
want to read, this is an incredible tool. It strips a web page of all but
what you want to read. Go to this web site, check the settings you desire,
and drag the Readabiity box to your browser toolbar. When you are viewing a
page click on the Readabiity box on your browser toolbar and the page you
are viewing is cleaned of all but what you want to read.
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
I found Readabiity at:
http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/
Sunlight is a site promoting cutting-edge technology
and ideas to make government transparent and accountable.
You’ll enjoy their design contest. I particularly thought the IRS web page
redesign, US Passport application redesign and How Laws are made to be
excellent examples of clear communications.
http://sunlightlabs.com/contests/designforamerica/
Bill Ellis, CPA, MPAcc
Furman University
Accounting UES
864-908-4743
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled
Plutarch
Bob Jensen's threads on Tricks and Tools of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
National Endowment for Financial Education ---
http://www.nefe.org/
Mission
The mission of the National Endowment for Financial
Education is to help individual Americans acquire the knowledge and skills
necessary to take control of their financial destiny. NEFE’s mission is
grounded in the belief that regardless of background or income level,
financially informed individuals are better able to:
- Take control of their circumstances,
- Improve their quality of life, and
- Ensure a stable future for themselves and
their families.
Guiding Principles
NEFE’s guiding principles are stated in eight
initiatives.
These initiatives:
- Describe how NEFE achieves its mission, and
- Outline the goals and standards that guide the
foundation’s activities.
Every project or program undertaken by NEFE must
fit within the scope of at least one initiative.
NEFE accomplishes its mission primarily by
partnering with other
organizations to:
- Provide practical, reliable, and unbiased
financial education to members of the public.
- Accomplish research in the field of financial
literacy education.
- Create demand for financial education.
NEFE’s activities place special emphasis on those
who face financial challenges that are not being addressed by others. Among
our target audiences are:
- Youth,
- Low-income individuals and families, and
- People in difficult or unusual life
circumstances.
NEFE’s partnerships and the foundation’s own
efforts result in a wide range of free and low-cost activities and
materials, including:
New activities are covered in each issue of the
foundation’s newsletter,
NEFE Digest, and in the
New at NEFE
section.
Organizational Structure
The National Endowment for Financial Education is a
nonprofit 501(c)(3) foundation governed by a volunteer
Board of Trustees and led by president and CEO
Ted Beck.
A staff of fewer than 25 individuals guides NEFE’s
public-service work at its headquarters in Denver, Colorado. To learn more,
visit the
History
section of this Web site.
NEFE organizes its activities into four
action areas, which flow from the foundation’s mission and
initiatives.
NEFE defines its action areas as:
- Education Programs. Although
not restricted to a particular age group, the Education Programs area
has been oriented primarily to providing financial planning information
to youth, including NEFE’s longest-standing public service effort, the
NEFE High School
Financial Planning Program® (HSFPP).
-
Strategic Programs and Alliances. This
action area works to help Americans improve the quality of their lives
through financial education provided in
cooperation with
other nonprofit organizations and foundations, and occasional corporate
sponsors.
- Multimedia Access. This
action area represents NEFE’s commitment to sharing its expertise in
financial planning education with all those who might benefit from it,
including
consumers,
educators, and the
media.
- Innovative Thinking. The goal
of this action area is to inspire creative ideas and new perspectives on
personal finance, to communicate them broadly, and to assist in their
actualization where appropriate. This action area supports
fellowships programs,
grantmaking, and
research and strategic activities.
Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance and budgeting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
From the Scout Report on July 23, 2010
Quizlet ---
http://quizlet.com/
The school year isn't so far away, and educators
may want to take a close look at this most helpful web application. Quizlet
allows students and teachers to create flashcard sets with little fuss, and
they can also share their flashcards with friends via email, Facebook, or
MySpace. The site has a great "How do I??" section that provides many
answers to how to best use the program. Quizlet is compatible with all
operating systems.
Wallwisher
http://www.wallwisher.com/
Want to make an online notice board? It's never
been easier than with Wallwisher, which is a new application that offers a
number of excellent features. Visitors can use the application to put up
just about any item on their wall, including video clips, audio files,
drawings, photographs, and so on. "Walls" can be set so only certain
individuals can have access to them, and visitors do not need to sign up an
account to get started. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.
Preserved cadaver exhibits banned in Seattle Seattle council bans
exhibits like 'Bodies'
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2012391385_bodies19m.html
Exhibition or freak show? 'Bodies?The Exhibition' cashes in our own
curiosity
http://www.seattlepi.com/visualart/286689_bodies28.html
Anatomy of a controversy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/19/AR2005081902055.html
Missouri congressman concerned about origin of bodies at exhibit
currently in Cleveland
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/07/lawmaker_concerned_about_origi.html
20/20: Inside the Bodies Exhibit
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4300207
Photographic History of Human Dissection
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/29/dissection
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks 22
National Endowment for Financial Education ---
http://www.nefe.org/
Education Tutorials
National Endowment for Financial Education ---
http://www.nefe.org/
Internet Public Library (from the University of Michigan) --- http://www.ipl.org/
20,000 electronic texts, and an annotated guide to web sites
Ipl2: Literary Criticism ---
http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/guide.html
Hispanics, High School Dropouts and the GED ---
http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/122.pdf
Modeling Hispanic Serving Institutions
A new report released Wednesday, “Modeling
Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs): Campus Practices that Work for Latino
Students,” explores strategies used by institutions
with significant Latino enrollments. The report was released by Excelencia in
Education and examined six community colleges and six public universities — in
California, New York and Texas.
Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/19/report
Jensen Comment
In particular note the "Lessons Learned" section on Page 19.
Short Video That's Very Sweet
"Anything Is Possible When You're in the Library," Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 15, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Anything-Is-Possible-When/25584/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
On Wednesday night
we posted
a video of the Old Spice Guy
plugging libraries. Today one of our interns sent us this brilliant Old
Spice parody filmed at Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library.
More like this. Please.
Jensen Comment
More information is available along with the video at the BYU site ---
http://universe.byu.edu/node/9676
How Scholars Search the Web ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Restore the Gulf ---
http://www.restorethegulf.gov
Link TV (global television links) ---
http://www.linktv.org/
The Encyclopedia Arctica ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/ocn238796413/index.html
Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. ---
http://www.arcus.org/
The Encyclopedia Arctica ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/ocn238796413/index.html
Alternative Farming Systems Information Center: Publications ---
http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/pubsindex.shtml
Asia Society: Water: Asia's Next Challenge [Flash Player] ---
http://sites.asiasociety.org/taskforces/water/interactive/
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
Government Accountability Office (GAO) Podcast [iTunes]
http://www.gao.gov/podcast/watchdog.xml
The Sad State of Government Accounting and Accountability ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
New Rules Project ---
http://www.newrules.org/
National Endowment for Financial Education ---
http://www.nefe.org/
Southern Spaces Journal ---
http://www.southernspaces.org/
The Walkable and Livable
Communities Institute, Inc. ---
http://www.walklive.org/
Restore the Gulf ---
http://www.restorethegulf.gov
Link TV (global television links) ---
http://www.linktv.org/
Hispanics, High School Dropouts and the GED ---
http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/122.pdf
Alternative Farming Systems Information Center: Publications ---
http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/pubsindex.shtml
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
New Rules Project ---
http://www.newrules.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
National Endowment for Financial Education ---
http://www.nefe.org/
The Bridges Organization (mathematics and art) ---
http://bridgesmathart.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Japanese Surrender Video ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vcnH_kF1zXc&feature=player_embedded
The Encyclopedia Arctica ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/ocn238796413/index.html
The Robert Louis Stevenson Website ---
http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/
Internet Public Library (from the University of Michigan) --- http://www.ipl.org/
20,000 electronic texts, and an annotated guide to web sites
Ipl2: Literary Criticism ---
http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/guide.html
Picasso: Peace and Freedom ---
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/Picasso/roomintro.shtm
Minerva: The International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology ---
http://minervamagazine.com/
Leon Helguera Collection of Colombiana ---
http://helguera.library.vanderbilt.edu/
Dashboard: Indianapolis Museum of Art [Flash Player]
http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/
Southern Spaces Journal ---
http://www.southernspaces.org/
Restore the Gulf ---
http://www.restorethegulf.gov
University of California Digital Map Collection ---
http://library.berkeley.edu/EART/browse.html
Eastern Washington University Digital Collections ---
http://econtent.library.ewu.edu/
The Batik Guild (art on cloth) ---
http://www.batikguild.org.uk
The Global Art Initiative ---
http://globalartinitiative.org
Art Through Time: A Global View ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series211.html
Short Video That's Very Sweet
"Anything Is Possible When You're in the Library," Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 15, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Anything-Is-Possible-When/25584/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
On Wednesday night
we posted
a video of the Old Spice Guy
plugging libraries. Today one of our interns sent us this brilliant Old
Spice parody filmed at Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library.
More like this. Please.
Jensen Comment
More information is available along with the video at the BYU site ---
http://universe.byu.edu/node/9676
How Scholars Search the Web ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Gospel Music History Archive: Center for Religion & Civic Culture ---
http://crcc.usc.edu/initiatives/gmha/
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 16, 2010
July 17, 2010
July 19, 2010
July 20, 2010
July 21, 2010
July 21, 2010
July 22, 2010
July 23, 2010
July 24, 2010
July 26, 2010
July 27, 2010
July 28, 2010
July 29, 2010
Johnny Carson Takes a Japanese Bath ---
http://www.funnieststuff.net/viewmovie.php?id=1220
Now that we’re so heavy into networking and company Websites, I thought I would
forward some of the top links that were, in turn, sent to me by Paula.
You might send us some similar Website links tof real companies.
From:
Paula
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2010 5:48 PM
To: Jensen, Robert
Subject: Fwd: FW: Company Names
For you wordsmiths who
are preparing a website -- take care!
All of these are legitimate companies, who didn't spend quite enough
time considering how their online name might appear!
These are not made up. Check them out yourself!
1. 'Who Represents' is where you can find the name of the agent that
represents any celebrity. Their Web site is:
www.whorepresents.com
2. 'Experts Exchange' is a knowledge base where programmers can
exchange advice and views at:
www.expertsexchange.com
3. Looking for a great pen? Look no further than ' Pen Island .' It
can be found at:
www.penisland.net
4. Need a therapist? Try 'Therapist Finder' at:
www.therapistfinder.com
5. Then there's the 'Italian Power Generator' company. Check it out
at:
www.powergenitalia.com
6.'IP computer' software, there's always the
site we recommend to Aggie dorm residents:
www.ipanywhere.com
7. And the designers at 'Speed of Art' await you at their wacky Web
site:
www.speedofart.com
"In Case You Thought Things Were Getting Too Serious…," by Daniel
Braddock, Going Concern, July 22, 2010 ---
http://goingconcern.com/2010/07/in-case-you-thought-things-were-getting-too-serious/
Here are some
accounting jokes for you. Why? Because this is a
blog, dammit; we need to lighten things up around
here.
Human
Resources:
Explanations that employees might say when they’re
caught sleeping at their desks.
1. “They told me at the blood bank this might
happen.”
2. “This is just a 15-minute power nap like they
raved about in that time management course you sent
me to.”
3. “Whew! Guess I left the top off the liquid paper.
You probably got here just in time.”
4. “This is in exchange for the six hours last night
when I dreamed about work.”
5. “It’s okay … I’m still billing the client.”
6. “I wasn’t sleeping! I was meditating on the
mission statement.”
7. “I was doing a yoga exercise to relieve
work-related stress.”
8. “Rats! Why did you interrupt me? I almost had
figured out a solution to our biggest company
problem.”
9. “The coffee machine’s broken.”
10. “Amen.”
Jensen Comment
Can you think of better answers?
I can only stay awake when I'm watching porn on the
computer
SEC Employee
I'm getting ready for an all-nighter devoted to
solving a client's problem (with a company billing rate of $10,000 per
hour)
Accenture Employee
An intern kept me awake all night.
Bill Clinton
I delivered speeches in 18 different cities
yesterday.
Barach Obama
I made a tiring "house" call.
Elliot Spitzer
I had an exhausting swim late last night.
Ted Kennedy
I was rubbing elbows with the stars last night.
Jack Kennedy
Wait until you have to stand in for the President of
the United States.
Robert Kennedy
Questions
Should you think twice before shaking hands with an Aggie?
Is this the living end of achieving favorable cost volume variances?
"Texas A&M Can't Spare a Square," by Iza Wojciechowska, Inside
Higher Ed, July 22, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/22/tp
Jensen Comment
I think Aggie alumni should seriously think about making some kind donations
in kind to the Texas A&M Foundation --- I mean semi-truckloads should be headed
for College Station.
And do you suppose the big Aggies versus Longhorns game next November will be
a wipeout? If the game is held in Texas Stadium, the young men and women seen
stuffing their pockets with toilet paper to take home will be Aggie students.
There won't be any squares left after the first quarter of the game in Texas
Stadium.
I kid you not --- back on our Iowa farm we did not waste money on TP. And
contrary to Iowa folklore, we also did not use corn cobs in the outhouse. At a
Jensen family reunion a few years ago, we all chuckled when thinking back to how
Sears Catalog pages were ultimately put to use out back behind the
quarter-moon door.. However, as a young boy I quickly tore out the women's
underwear sections and preserved those pages in the hay loft. "Those were the
days my friend, I thought they'd never END."
"Update: “Wonder Cloth” by ACS – Great way to keep your monitor screen
clean, by Rick Lillie, Thinking Outside the Box Blog, July 20, 2010
---
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Gift Suggestions for Texas A&M Students
Send your favorite Aggie one wonder cloth and 100 rolls of toilet paper.
"Texas A&M Can't Spare a Square," by Iza Wojciechowska, Inside
Higher Ed, July 22, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/22/tp
From:
Beverly K
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 8:41 AM
To: ;
Cc: Dr Steve & Gail
Subject: Best Poem in the world
Importance: High
>
BEST POEM IN THE WORLD
>
>
I was shocked, confused, bewildered
>
As I entered Heaven's door,
>
Not by the beauty of it all,
>
Nor the lights or its decor.
>
But it was the folks in Heaven
>
Who made me sputter and gasp--
>
The thieves, the liars, the sinners,
>
The alcoholics and the trash.
>
There stood the kid from seventh grade
>
Who swiped my lunch money twice.
>
Next to him was my old neighbor
>
Who never said anything nice.
>
Herb, who I always thought
>
Was rotting away in hell,
>
Was sitting pretty on cloud nine,
>
Looking incredibly well.
>
I nudged Jesus, 'What's the deal?
>
I would love to hear Your take.
>
How'd all these sinners get up here?
>
God must've made a mistake.
>
'And why's everyone so quiet,
>
So somber - give me a clue.'
>
'Hush, child,' He said, 'they're all in shock.
>
No one thought they'd be seeing you.'
>
>
JUDGE
NOT!!
>
> Remember....Just
going to church doesn't make you a
>
Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car ..
>
>
Every saint has a PAST...
>
Every sinner has a FUTURE!
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accountancy Discussion ListServs:
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a
ListServ (usually for free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc
Roles of a ListServ ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
|
CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation
Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu