Tidbits
on January 18, 2010
Bob Jensen
This was
taken from our front yard before we had so much snow
The hill in the foreground is called Ore Hill and once was a source of iron ore
The ore was carried on backs of mules down to the Franconia smelter source of
iron for fine Franconia Stoves
Iron
Ore ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070924.htm
Here's a picture of Ore Hill
in autumn
I took this shot of Mt Washington after we had more snow
Canon
Mountain (ten miles distant) is out closest mountain with operating ski lifts.
However, a neighbor down the road has a couple of former Killington Ski Resort
gondolas
About a half mile down the
road from our cottage is this small Episcopalian Church
It is only open in the summertime using visiting speakers
Up here it's claimed that this is the most photographed church in New England
Erika and I are members of
the small Sugar Hill Community Church that meets year around
In the late 1800s my
grandparents Regina and Julius Jensen gave a corner of their Seneca, Iowa farm
for a new country church and cemetery. It was named the Blakjer Church and has
since been
moved to the a nearby town park in Lone Rock, Iowa
Here's a picture before the move as it looked on the corner of our Jensen Family
Farm
My grandparents and several other relatives are still buried at the site
Here's a picture of the
Blakjer Church after the
2002 move
It's not had a congregation for over five decades
The Sunset Hill House Hotel down the road from our present home maintains
cross-country ski trails. Here are markers for some of the trails
Here's the road that now leads to our cottage and beyond to the Sunset Hill House Hotel
We live at 190 Sunset Hill Road where I try to find the mail box before Mary
delivers our mail
I spent four hours pushing a snow thrower. It doesn't pull itself through high
drifts.
Harry Howe tempted me with a new fangled snow thrower ---
http://www.popsci.com/node/30913
But David Fordham provided me with the real corker ---
http://cob.jmu.edu/fordham/Snow1.htm
This is the Sunset Hill House Hotel overlooking three mountain ranges in the
White Mountains
Here's the Arab mare that used to reside at the Sunset Hill House Hotel
Lonnie thinks coyotes chased her colt in broad daylight until the colt broke a
leg
This is our front yard being blown over with a strong and frigid north wind
We get very strong winds
The horse did not much like these winds
This picture of Erika in San Antonio was taken when my parents were still living
On the left are horseman Cousin Don and his wife Ladonna from Armstrong, Iowa
When I received the AAA Outstanding Educator Award in San Antonio in 2002,
Don, Ladonna, and some of their family drove down to Texas to join in the
celebration.
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/AAAaward_files/AAAaward02.htm
A Blast from the Past
In 1990 our Executive Committee of the American Accounting Association
met in Amsterdam to meet with European accounting leaders.
Our trip was funded with money raised by Deloitte's Jerry Searfoss
so that AAA members did not have to fund this memorable trip.
The picture below shows how people in Holland commute to the train stations
The most visible faces in our sightseeing group are
Corine Norgaard, then Executive Director of the AAA Paul Gerhardt,
eventual FASB Board Member Gerhard Mueller, and lovely Erika
The mountain/ice climbing Swede in the red jacket is Corine's finance professor husband Dick Norgaard
Erika would not let the guy below go window shopping
Prostitutes are displayed in some store front windows in Amsterdam
Holland Slide Show ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/Holland.pps
And Another Holland Slide Show ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/FlowerGarden.pps
2010 Chinese Ice Festival ---
http://www.slideshare.net/pacific2000/the-harbin-festival-china-2010
Great
Advice Comes With Great Snow Pictures (slide show) ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SnowPictures.pps
Tidbits
on January 18, 2010
Bob Jensen
Now in
Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on January 18, 2010
To Accompany the January 14, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/2010/TidbitsQutations100118.htm
Tidbits
on January 14, 2009
Bob Jensen
For
earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have
key words to enter --- Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob
Jensen's Home Page is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
CPA
Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Cool
Search Engines That Are Not Google ---
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
World
Clock and World Facts ---
http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf
U.S.
Debt/Deficit Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Free
Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to an opening
advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com]
Free online 800 telephone numbers ---
http://www.tollfree.att.net/tf.html
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number
without spaces, dashes, or parens
Daily News
Sites for Accountancy, Tax, Fraud, IFRS, XBRL, Accounting History, and More ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Cool
Search Engines That Are Not Google ---
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Education Technology Search ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Distance Education Search ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Search for Listservs, Blogs, and Social Networks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Bob
Jensen's essay on the financial crisis bailout's aftermath and an alphabet soup
of appendices can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Free
Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
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
Online
Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Video: Larry Summers: Innovation and
Economic Growth ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-larry-summers-innovation-and-economic-growth/
What toddler does not love a
lawn sprinkler (especially a moose toddler)? ---
http://www.wimp.com/babymoose/
Singing Insects
of North America ---
http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/buzz/
Walt
Mosberg Video Reviews of New Devices
Google's Nexus One
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_One
Video: The Wall Street Journal Technology Editor Walt Mossberg Reviews the
Nexus One (Google Smartphone) ---
http://online.wsj.com/video/mossberg-google-nexus-one-heats-up-phone-space/CC1A608F-7C23-4886-8F1F-4A312DEAF344.html
Cloud Computing ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
The Litl ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litl
Video: The Wall Street Journal Technology Editor Walt Mossberg Reviews The Litl
(cloud computer) ---
The somewhat negative review by Walt video follows the above Nexus One video.
Other device reviews follow in succession: New Bayer diabetic test meter)
the Barnes & Noble Nook Book Reader, .Intel e-Reader for
sight-impaired readers, . . . . .
http://online.wsj.com/video/mossberg-google-nexus-one-heats-up-phone-space/CC1A608F-7C23-4886-8F1F-4A312DEAF344.html
Binary
Explosives Video ---
Click Here
Snopes
says the authenticity of this is undetermined.
MIT Video
on how to photograph the earth ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=491
World's
tallest building opens in Dubai ---
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8439618.stm
Free music
downloads
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Best
Dance Scenes: Top 10 Movie Dancing Moments ---
http://insidemovies.moviefone.com/2009/09/25/best-dance-scenes-top-movie-dancing/
The
50 Best Movie Dance Scenes of All Time---
http://www.vat19.com/blog/2008/07/the_best_movie_dance_scenes.html
Dancing Dog ---
Click Here
Old Cats, New Lions
Celebrate Woody Shaw ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98532760
Pocket Elvis for the iPhone
http://www.macworld.com/article/145521/2010/01/pocketelvis.html
Ode to Forgetfulness ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=7lSliucgygc
Thanks Maria. This is well filmed.
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
2010 Chinese Ice Festival ---
http://www.slideshare.net/pacific2000/the-harbin-festival-china-2010
Ever see a 12 story building just fall over rather gently?
Click Here
David Douglas Duncan (art history) ---
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/ddd/
Gypsies (Romanies)
and Travelers ---
http://www.utoledo.edu/library/carlson/exhibits/DX2009/index.html
Year 2009
in Pictures (Time Magazine slide show) ---
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1946595,00.html
Design Observe ---
http://www.designobserver.com/
Design Build Network (architecture) ---
http://www.designbuild-network.com/
Drawing Out Meaning: 500 Years of Architectural History
http://www.architecture.com/LibraryDrawingsAndPhotographs/OnlineWorkshops/DrawingOutMeaning/DrawingOutMeaning.aspx
Design USA: Contemporary Innovation [Flash Player]
http://exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Design-USA/
Multimedia from Stanford University
(engineering, architecture)
R. Buckminster Fuller Digital Collection ---
http://collections.stanford.edu/bucky/bin/page?forward=home
Oyez Baseball http://baseball.oyez.org/
Glory Days: New York Baseball,
1947-1957 ---
http://www.mcny.org/glorydays/
Elvis fans are all shook up for the King's 75th birthday Elvis
fans mark 75th birthday at his beginning
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010800953.html?hpid=moreheadlines
Elvis Fans Flock to Australian Outback for Annual Festival
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/arts-and-entertainment/Elvis-Fans-Flock-to-Australian-Outback-for-Annual-Festival-80990917.html
Elvis, the young King
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-elvis-photos8-2010jan08,0,5003931.story
Selections from "Elvis at 21": Photographs by Al Wertheimer
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-elvis-grammy-museum-pictures,0,3892519.photogallery
Elvis Presley at 75: Songs We Love
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122312475
National Portrait Gallery: Echoes of Elvis
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/elvis/index.html
Hubble Catches End of Star-Making Party in Nearby Dwarf Galaxy
---
http://www.physorg.com/news182710468.html
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
Read.gov ---
http://www.read.gov/
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
What They're Reading on College Campuses (not necessarily online or free)
---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-Theyre-Reading-on/63471/
Now in
Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on January 18, 2010
To Accompany the January 14, 2010 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/2010/TidbitsQutations100118.htm
Fraud Updates have been posted up to December 31, 2009 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
IRS Commish Finds the Tax
Code Complex, Doesn’t Do His Own Taxes: Calls the U.S. Tax Code a "flippin’
mind job.”
Calib Newquist, Going Concern, January 14, 2010 ---
http://goingconcern.com/2010/01/irs-commish-doesnt-do-his-own.php
Jensen Comment
It could be that Doug Shulman is afraid he'll goof big time like Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner using TurboTax by himself.
"Colleges Lag in
Technology and Teaching Quality, a Top Education Official Says," by Josh
Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Colleges-Lag-in-Technology-and/20419/
History and Strategy of Poker
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker
Warning: Gambling online is not recommended since the games tend to be
rigged according to an expose on CBS Sixty Minutes
Interestingly many of the online games are run by Canadian Native Americans not
subject to gambling laws in Canada.
CBS Sixty Minutes tied some online cheating to organized crime located
--- Guess? Would you believe Las Vegas.
"Online Poker Study: The
More Hands You Win, the More Money You Lose (even if the games are honest)
," Science Daily, January 13, 2010 ---
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100112152410.htm
The likely reason, said Cornell sociology doctoral
student Kyle Siler, whose study analyzed 27 million online poker hands, is
that the multiple wins are likely for small stakes, and the more you play,
the more likely you will eventually be walloped by occasional -- but
significant -- losses.
This finding, Siler said, "coincides with
observations in behavioral economics that people overweigh their frequent
small gains vis-à-vis occasional large losses, and vice versa." In other
words, players feel positively reinforced by their streak of wins but have
difficulty fully understanding how their occasional large losses offset
their gains.
Continued in article
"How
Poker Can Make You a Better Investor,"
by Bob Frick, Kiplinger, January 7, 2010 ---
http://www.kiplinger.com/features/archives/how-poker-can-make-you-a-better-investor.html?kipad_id=x
Ever watch professional poker players calculating
the odds, then coolly dissecting their opponents? Many of the same skills
the top players use can help you be a better investor. Success at both
investing and gambling, it turns out, has much to do with controlling
emotions. And playing a little poker can help you recognize, and avoid,
emotional traps that endanger your most important stack of chips -- your
portfolio. But you need to know what to look for.
The psychological issues that drive investing and
gambling decisions aren’t merely similar. They are “identical,” says Andrew
Lo, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for
Financial Engineering and one of the leaders in the field of behavioral
finance (listen to
our podcast with Lo). It’s easy to find investment
professionals and professional poker players who agree. Says poker pro
Daniel Negreanu, who holds four World Series of Poker bracelets and two
World Poker Tour Championship titles: “Having emotional stability and
emotional control is key to both investing and poker.”
Can you gain that control at a poker table? Aaron
Brown is among many who think so. Brown is a onetime finance professor and
former portfolio manager for Prudential Securities who is now a risk manager
for hedge funds. He’s also the author of The Poker Face of Wall Street
(Wiley, $17). Says Brown: “People tell me playing poker is risky.
Investing for a financial lifetime without playing poker is risky. I’d much
rather make these mistakes at the table.”
And by mistakes, Brown means the common emotional
errors that plague investors. The burgeoning fields of investor
psychology and behavioral finance are uncovering more about these
errors all the time, and they are the subject of a
year-long series co-produced by Kiplinger’s
and Nightly Business Report on PBS.
By playing some poker, “you can find out your
tendencies to make emotional mistakes, and then you can guard against them,”
says Frank Murtha, a behavioral-finance consultant with a PhD in counseling
psychology (his dissertation explored the effect of psychological errors in
gambling). Murtha helps clients from investment banks, financial-services
companies and trading firms to avoid making psychological errors.
He’s also co-founder of
MarketPsych, which offers
psychological-training services to traders and money managers and which
offers a number of online tests that any investor can take to better
understand his or her own psychological makeup.
Most investors make few investment decisions over a
year, or even over a lifetime. But experts agree that just a few hours of
playing poker will take you through literally dozens of financial decisions
-- potentially a lifetime’s worth if you were making those decisions about
your portfolio. By playing poker while keeping in mind the psychological
errors that are also common to investing, you can get a lifetime’s worth of
training in one evening.
What are these errors? We’ve picked five of the
most common, and all can be found both in investing and in gambling. Click
on each one below to learn how they appear in poker and investing and to
find out how you can use poker to help train yourself not to make these
errors.
Greed
Overconfidence
Regret
Seeing patterns
Holding on to losers
More on Poker and Investing
How Texas Hold 'Em Simulates Investing
How Deepak Chopra Helped Me Become a Better Poker Player
SPECIAL REPORT: Your Mind, Your Money
Next page: GREED
Bob
Jensen's personal finance and investment helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Education
Technology Award Winners
"Teaching Toolbox: 57 Ways
to Upgrade Education," by Tanya Roscorla, Converge Magazine, January
4, 2010 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/edtech/The-2009-Edublog-Awards.html?elq=4768d02be55741bb9e3e0bc860e41996
This year, spruce up your teaching toolbox with some of the top education
blogs, tweets, wikis and more, as voted on by educators in the
Edublog Awards.
On these sites, you'll be able to connect with other educators, see
what's going on in classrooms around the world and find out what technology
tools you can use in your classroom.
Best individual blog
- Winner:
Free
Technology for Teachers
Google certified teacher Richard
Byrne reviews free technology resources and shows educators how they
can integrate those resources into their teaching. He also won the best
resource sharing blog award.
- First Runner Up:
Kathy Schrock's
Kaffeeklatsch
Technology administrator Kathy Schrock covers ed tech tools, techniques
and tricks of the trade.
- Second Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo's Websites Of The Day For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif.. He provides links to sites that help
educators teach English to non-native speakers. He also won best
resource sharing blog award.
Best individual tweeter
- Winner:
web20classroom
From Winston-Salem, N.C., technology educator Steven W. Anderson
interacts with other educators by sharing links to online resources and
participating in conversations about real issues in education.
- First Runner Up:
russeltarr
Russel Tarr teaches history in Toulouse, France.
- Second Runner Up:
courosa
Alec Couros teaches educational technology and media in Regina,
Saskatchewan, Canada.
Best group blog
- Winner:
MacMillian Dictionary Blog
As the English language constantly changes, five authors take the pulse
of the living language and share how it is used around the world.
- First Runner Up:
I.N.K.:
Interesting Nonfiction for Kids
Authors and illustrators give readers a behind-the-scenes look at how
they research, write and integrate art into their books.
- Second Runner Up:
SCC English
The English Department of St. Columba's College in Whitechurch, Dublin
16, Ireland posts news, poems, drama, essays, podcasts, book
recommendations and more.
Best new blog
- Winner:
Kirsten Winkler
Kirsten Winkler started blogging about online education in January and
takes readers on a quest to find better education.
- First Runner Up:
Look At My Happy
Rainbow
A male kindergarten teacher shares stories from his classroom in Maine.
As for the blog title, one of his students shouted, "Look at my happy
rainbow!" one day after he drew a rainbow with four or five crayons in
one hand.
- Second Runner Up:
Teach
Paperless
Shelly Blake-Plock shows educators how to teach with interactive
technology and provide real-world learning opportunities for their
students.
Best class blog
- Winner:
Billings Middle School Tech Class Blog
From Seattle, Technology Integration Coordinator Jac de Haan shines
a spotlight on students' adventures with digital tools and discussions
about the social, political, environmental and moral impacts of
technology.
- First Runner Up:
Mrs.
Yollis' Classroom Blog
Third graders from Linda Yollis' class learn and share what they're
learning on their blog.
- Second Runner Up:
English With
Rosa
Rosa Fernández Sánchez helps her students from Coruña, Galicia, Spain,
practice English.
Best student blog
- Winner:
Civil War
Sallie
A Boyd's Bear named Sallie Ann travels to classrooms, museums and
battlefields to learn about the United States Civil War, and then shares
what she learns on her blog. The person who created Sallie Ann is a
student from St. Patrick School in Carlisle, Pa.
- First Runner Up:
Universo
Eighteen-year-old Néstor Aluna Maceda Pacheco writes about botany from
Rio Blanco, Veracruz, México.
- Second Runner Up:
Moo
A college student majoring in photography shares photos and commentary.
She also happens to be the daughter of
The
Scholastic Scribe, which earned first runner up in the best teacher
blog category.
Best resource sharing blog
- Winner:
Free
Technology for Teachers
Voted the best resource sharing blog for the second straight year.
Google certified teacher Richard
Byrne reviews free technology resources and shows educators how they
can integrate those resources into their teaching. He also won the best
individual blog award.
- First Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif.. He provides links to sites that help
educators teach English to non-native speakers.
- Second Runner Up:
Jane's
E-Learning Pick of the Day
Social learning consultant Jane Hart features an ed tech tool each day.
Most influential blog post
- Winner: "Heads
in the Cloud" from Anseo.net
This post shows how one school uses cloud computing through Google Apps
as a communication tool for the staff and board of management.
- Joint First Runners Up:
"This,
This, That" from
Dear
Kaia and Skyelar
Three-year-old Kaia explored the desert near her home in Qatar, took
photos of what she saw and created a photo essay that she posted on her
blog. She wrote the post with her dad, teacher Jabiz Raisdana, who then
sent it out to his Twitter network.
The link made its way into the Twitter stream of technology teacher
William
Chamberlain, who asked the eighth grade students in his class to
comment on the blog post.
The story doesn't end there. The eigth-graders had some questions about
Kaia and her dad's life in Doha, Qatar, so Raisdana skyped into their
class. The students also created video comments that they sent to Kaia (read
the complete story on Raisdana's blog).
On top of that, professor John Strange from the University of South
Alabama saw the post and passed it on to the students in his educational
media class. They commented on Kaia's photo essay as well and wrote more
than 50 blog posts in response to the photo essay (read
this part of the story in Raisdana's words).
"Tech
addiction 'harms learning' ... really??? $24.99 and I am no wiser"
from
Wishful Thinking in Medical Education
After seeing tweets about a BBC News Education story in her
Twitter stream, general practitioner and clinical lecturer Ann Marie
Cunningham checked out the research that prompted the above headline.
She had to pay to find out what was in the report "Techno Addicts: Young
Person Addiction to Technology, and what she found was 'poor research.'
She gives her analysis in this blog post.
Jensen Comment
My threads on educator use of Twitter are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet-based discussion
- Winner:
#edchat
Through Twitter, educators discuss real education issues on Tuesdays at
noon EST and 7 p.m. EST using the hashtag "edchat."
- First Runner Up:
Blogworthy Tweets
English teacher Claudia Ceraso from Buenos Aires, Argentina, publishes
some of her tweets on the blog
ELT notes.
- Second Runner Up:
#teachertuesday
Every Tuesday on Twitter, educators and others recommend teachers to
follow through the hashtag #teachertuesday.
Best teacher blog
- Winner:
Two
Writing Teachers
Ruth Ayres and Stacey Shubitz share their tools, ideas and experiences
with educators who teach kids how to write.
- First Runner Up:
The
Scholastic Scribe
A high school journalism teacher writes about life inside and outside of
her District of Columbia classroom. She is the mother of the college
student behind
Moo, who earned first runner up in the best student blog category.
- Second Runner Up:
Cool Cat
Teacher
Vicki A. Davis from Camilla, Georgia, shares her experiences with
technology as well as how students are collaborating globally through
activities including the
Flat Classroom Project.
Best librarian / library blog
- Winner:
Never Ending Search
Joyce Valenza writes about technology, research, search engines and more
from Springfield Township High School in Oreland, Pa. Check out the
school's cool
virtual library.
- First Runner Up:
Bright Ideas
The School Library Association of Victoria run this blog, where school
library staff can share how they use the latest research tools in their
libraries.
- Second Runner Up:
Library Media Tech Musings
Gwyneth A. Jones passes on education links and resources, among other
things, with a sprinkle of snark, as she puts it.
Best educational tech support blog
- Winner:
iLearn Technology
Technology teacher Kelly Tenkely wants to help teachers "fall in love
with technology the way that their students have," and she does that by
giving them ideas for how to integrate new technology into their
classrooms.
- First Runner Up:
Langwitches
This blog follows Silvia Tolisano as she discovers the magic of learning
on her journey as a technology integration facilitator.
- Second Runner Up:
Life Feast
Ana Maria Menezes shares what she's learning about using Internet tools
to enhance her classes and change up the daily routine for her EFL
students in Brazil.
Best elearning / corporate education blog
- Winner:
MPB
Reflections — 21st Century Teaching and Learning
From Teaching Without Walls, co-owner and educational consultant
Michelle Pacansky-Brock posts her thoughts about changes in higher
education, with an emphasis on online learning.
- First Runner Up:
Angela Maiers
After a 20-year career in education, Angela Maiers became an independent
consultant who focuses on literacy education, and through her blog, she
encourages teachers to be great learners.
- Second Runner Up:
e-learning, conocimiento en red y web colectiva
This blog covers e-learning, network knowledge and the collective Web.
Best educational use of audio
- Winner:
Xyleme Voices
Podcasts
A podcast library on the evolution of training, featuring interviews
with top industry analysts, consultants and practitioners in the field
of learning.
- First Runner Up:
Musical Blogies
Ignacio Valdés posts audio and video of his students, who play music
from a secondary education institution in the Spanish principality of
Asturia.
- Second Runner Up:
My Audio School
Children can download more than 150 classic books and listen to more
than 200 radio and television broadcasts on My Audio School. While this
Web site was originally designed to help dyslexic students, it can be
used for any students.
Best educational use of video / visual
- Winner:
Bitácora de
Aníbal de la Torre
Aníbal de la Torre compiles short educational videos on his blog from
Palma del Rio, Cordoba, Spain.
- First Runner Up:
The Longfellow Ten
Middle school students create and share stop-motion films that depict
academic terms and concepts. They're definitely not boring.
- Second Runner Up:
Inanimate Alice
Through text, sound, images and games, writer Kate Pullinger and digital
artist Chris Joseph tell the story of a girl named Alice and her
imaginary digital friend, Brad. Pullinger teaches creative writing and
new media for De Montfort University in Leicester, United Kingdom.
Best educational wiki
- Winner:
Greetings From The World
Teachers and students tell others about their countries by sharing
glogs on this
wiki.
- First Runner Up:
Soar 2
New Heights
A fourth-grade class shares books and themes that they enjoy.
- Second Runner Up:
HUMS3001:
Censorship and Responsibility
From the University of South Wales, the students in Ben Miller's class
on censorship and responsibility work together to build the pages in
this wikispace.
Best educational use of a social networking service
- Winner:
English
Companion Ning
English teachers help each other on this network, which high school
English teacher and author Jim Burke created.
- First Runner Up:
EFL Classroom
2.0
This Ning provides a space for English language teachers and students to
ask questions, share answers and find resources to help them learn.
- Second Runner Up:
RSC Access and
Inclusion Ning
The Regional Support Centre for North and East Scotland allows educators
to discuss, share and join with other colleagues as they work with
learners who need additional support in higher education.
Jensen Comment
My threads on educator social networking are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Best educational use of a virtual world
- Winner:
Virtual Graduation at the University of Edinburgh
While some education students graduated at McEwan Hall in November,
other students graduated online in
Second Life. Those
students completed their Master of Science in E-learning, which is a
distance learning program.
- First Runner Up:
Virtual
Round Table Conference
This Ning is dedicated to a virtual conference on language learning with
technology that
LANCELOT School coordinated.
- Joint Second Runners Up:
ISTE's Second Life Island
Second Life
Education New Zealand
Jensen Comment
My threads on Second Looks and virtual learning are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
Lifetime achievement
- Winner:
Karl Fisch
Karl Fisch has been teaching for 21 years and is currently director of
technology at
Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. He was previously a middle
and high school math teacher.
- First Runner Up:
Will Richardson
Will Richardson is the "learner in chief" at Connective Learning and
author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for
Classrooms.
- Second Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif. On his blog, he provides links to sites
that help educators teach English to non-native speakers.
For more ways to learn online, check out these resources:
Bob Jensen's threads on educator blogs,
social networks, and tweets are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks
of the Trade (including Edutainment) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on education
technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
David Albrecht Goes Green
"Questions From A Future Blogger," by David Albrecht, The Summa,
January 14, 2010 ---
http://profalbrecht.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/questions-from-a-future-blogger/
Accounting and/or financial blogs are a big deal.
As the world evolves and becomes faster paced, long-lived jobs will
disappear. We accountants will adapt by piecing together a career from many
project-length opportunities. I believe it will be a matter of professional
life or death for accountants to get on top of evolving current events and
stay there. For there to be life, we all need to make life-long learning a
lifestyle.
The ability to think will separate thrivers from
survivors and hangers-on. We accountants will need to think critically
(buzzword for analyze and understand what is going on), creatively
(inventing solutions) and practically (applying cutting edge skills to
implement solutions).
How will we get learn to think these ways and grow
our thinking? Independent blogs commentaries like The Summa, and re: The
Auditors, and TaxGirl. Blogs provide input to fuel critical thinking, seeds
for creating thinking, and energy for practical thinking.
So, I want to encourage accounting/financial
blogging. Then along came this e-mail. from a Summa reader, asking about my
blogging process. Although I don’t reveal his identity, I’m already aware of
his writing and his unifying message. He has a lot to contribute, and I
think he should blog. So, I wrote this blog piece. His comments/questions
are in emphasized green, answers in normal font.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on listservs, blog, social networks, tweets, and open
sharing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Was the
9/11 damage to the Pentagon caused by something other than the hijacked jet
liner?
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pentagon.asp
"Sticking to Diets Is About More Than Willpower -- Complexity Matters,"
Science Daily, January 12, 2010 ---
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100112085516.htm
Many
people think the success of dieting, seemingly a national obsession
following the excesses and resolutions of the holiday season, depends mostly
on how hard one tries -- on willpower and dedication. While this does
matter, new research has found that a much more subtle aspect of the diets
themselves can also have a big influence on the pounds shed -- namely, the
perceived complexity of a diet plan's rules and requirements.
Cognitive scientists from Indiana University and
the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin compared the
dieting behavior of women following two radically different diet plans and
found that the more complicated people thought their diet plan was, the
sooner they were likely to drop it.
"For people on a more complex diet that involves
keeping track of quantities and items eaten, their subjective impression of
the difficulty of the diet can lead them to give up on it," reported Peter
Todd, professor in IU's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Jutta Mata, now a professor of psychology at
Stanford University, said this effect holds even after controlling for the
influence of important social-cognitive factors including self-efficacy, the
belief that one is capable of achieving a goal like sticking to a diet
regimen to control one's weight.
"Even if you believe you can succeed, thinking that
the diet is cognitively complex can undermine your efforts," she said.
Dieting is not all in one's head -- environment
matters, too, the professors say. The physical environment has to be set up
properly, such as putting snack foods out of sight to avoid mindless eating.
But the cognitive environment, they say, must also be appropriately
constructed, by choosing diet rules that that one finds easy to remember and
follow.
For people interested in following a diet plan,
Mata suggests they take a look at several diet plans with an eye toward how
many rules the plans have and how many things need to be how many things
need to be kept in mind.
"If they decide to go with a more complex diet,
which could be more attractive for instance if it allows more flexibility,
they should evaluate how difficult they find doing the calculations and
monitoring their consumption," she said. "If they find it very difficult,
the likelihood that they will prematurely give up the diet is higher and
they should try to find a different plan."
About the study: The study examined both the
objective and subjective complexity of two diet plans. Brigitte, the
cognitively simpler of the two, is a popular German recipe diet that
provides shopping lists for the dieters, thus requiring participants to
simply follow the provided meal plan. Weight Watchers assigns point values
to every food and instructs participants to eat only a certain number of
points per day. The 390 women involved were recruited from German-language
Internet chat rooms dealing with weight management and were already in the
midst of using one of the two diet plans. They answered questionnaires at
the beginning, mid-point and end of an eight-week period.
While losing weight initially isn't rocket science,
keeping it off remains a challenge to dieters. It generally is believed that
the longer people can adhere to their diet plan, the more successful they
will be long-term with their weight loss maintenance. And the more like
rocket science one's diet plan feels, Todd and Mata report, the less likely
that long-term adherence and maintenance is to succeed.
Jensen Comment
I wonder if these findings extrapolate to the current problems of Tiger Woods?
The only way to really make this perfect would be to make it eight digits of
8 in front of the decimal point
Yale University received a pledge of $8,888,888
from Chinese investor Lei Zhang to help build a new business-school campus and
to fund international scholarships.
Oliver Staley, "Yale Alumnus Gives Lucky $8,888,888 for
Business-School Campus," Business Week, January 8, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-06/yale-alumnus-gives-lucky-8-888-888-for-business-school-campus.html?link_position=link3
Facebook is friending college
researchers -- and helping pay for their education -- in the hope that academics
will help the company improve its popular social network. The company on Friday
announced a new
fellowship program to support five docotoral
students, who will be asked to work with Facebook developers
"Facebook Announces Fellowship Program ," by Jill Laster, Chronicle of Higher
Education, January 8, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Facebook-Announces-Fellowship/19565/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
"The Year
(2010) Ahead in IT," by Lev S. Gonick, Inside Higher Ed, January 7,
2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/01/07/gonick
Bob Jensen's threads on
education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
"E-Readers Everywhere: The Inevitable Shakeout: Samsung, Plastic
Logic, enTourage Systems, Hearst, and Spring Design launched e-readers at CES
against Sony, Amazon, and even Apple's rumored tablet," by Douglas
MacMillan, Business Week, January 11, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2010/tc20100111_277237.htm?link_position=link1
Johnny Makkar is intent on buying a digital book
reader. Yet he won't consider any of the more than two dozen new devices
introduced in recent months, many of them at the just-completed Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas. For Makkar, a resident of Fairlawn, N.J.,
with a background in marketing, only two manufacturers will do, and one has
yet to unveil a reader. "I want the e-book buying process to be as
effortless as possible," says Makkar, 26. "Only Apple (AAPL)
or Amazon (AMZN)
are going to be able to provide that."
Standing out may prove challenging for many new
entrants to the market for e-readers, expected by Forrester Research
(FORR)
to double to 6 million devices this year. "Half the
e-readers that have been announced [at CES] won't be around a year from
now," says Forrester analyst James McQuivey.
At CES, some e-reader hopefuls played to niche
audiences;
Plastic Logic pitched its QUE to business users.
Others played up tech breakthroughs; Spring Design introduced a dual-screen
device called Alex. All are vying against Sony (SNE),
which pioneered e-readers with its first device in
2005, and Amazon, which has been selling versions of its Kindle for just
over two years. Forrester expects Kindle sales to reach 3 million and Sony
to sell from 1.5 million to 2 million e-book readers in 2010.
Even the established vendors could lose buyers this
year. Apple is expected to put out a tablet computing device that many
analysts expect to include the ability to read digital books. "We are in a
market where consumers no longer believe in one device serving one industry
or one function," says Forrester's McQuivey. Single-purpose products such as
the Kindle might be ignored by customers who prefer a multipurpose device
from Apple.
Plastic Logic's QUE: an "unmet need?"
Upstarts may benefit from focusing on specific
kinds of customers. For instance, enTourage Systems said school textbook
publishers will custom-format several books for its new device, the eDGe,
which was demonstrated at CES. With its QUE proReader, Plastic Logic
included a large touchscreen reader and the ability to store and view
business documents such as those made with Microsoft (MSFT)
Excel and Adobe Systems (ADBE)
PDF software. "If I'm starting from scratch, I'd
probably go after one of the niches," says Citigroup (C)
analyst Mark Mahaney.
Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta says the
company doesn't intend to compete with the existing e-reader makers. "Amazon
proved that you could build a business out of this," Archuleta says. "Our
concept was always to meet this unmet need and create this new category that
we didn't think anybody was focused on."
Continued in article
Amazon claims sales of e-books surpassed sales of physical books
That's somewhat amazing since many physical books (especially popular textbooks)
are not yet available as e-books
"Amazon's Kindle Reader cuts book shipping: Book sales in the United States
surged during the holiday season, but in a dramatic shift for the shipping
world, retailer Amazon.com said this week sales of e-books for the first time
surpassed sales of physical books," Journal of Commerce, December 2009
---
http://joc.com/print/415491
Book sales in the United States surged during the
holiday season, but in a dramatic shift for the shipping world, retailer
Amazon.com said this week sales of e-books for the first time surpassed
sales of physical books.
Amazon’s peak in e-book sales occurred on Christmas
day as gift recipients used their new Kindle reading devices to make
purchases from among the 390,000 books available in Amazon’s Kindle Store.
The Kindle electronic reader, which allows users to
download books and other media from a variety of sources, was “the most
gifted item ever in our history,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
Overall retail spending the first of November
through Dec. 24 increased 3.6 percent compared with last year, according to
MasterCard’s SpendingPulse survey, which tracks cash as well as credit
purchases. The online portion of sales jumped 15.5 percent compared with
last year to account for 10 percent of all retail sales, the survey said.
Another retailer industry watcher said online
spending in the United States grew 10 percent in November over a year ago.
The comScore research firm said online sales reached $12.3 billion in
November, and the group said visits to the Web site of Wal-Mart grew 62
percent and visits to the Target site grew 43 percent over last year.
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic readers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
Non-Refereed
Index of Null Effects and Replication
Failures in All Fields of Psychology ---
http://www.jasnh.com/m9.htm
The iNERF is an index comprising short
descriptions of experiments or replications that did not meet the
traditional level of significance. All fields of psychology are encouraged
to post their null findings. The purpose of the iNERF is to provide
researchers with an opportunity to disseminate information about their null
studies without having to take up precious time writing up a full
manuscript. This is an online collection so you can quickly and easily see
what others in your field have tried. The iNERF is separate from JASNH the
journal, which contains full articles and is peer reviewed. Be aware that
the studies found in the iNERF are not peer reviewed, may be missing crucial
details, and are not necessarily convincing in providing support for a null
effect.
Refereed
The Journal of Articles in Support
of the Null Hypothesis ---
http://www.jasnh.com/index.htm
Welcome to the Journal of Articles in
Support of the Null Hypothesis. In the past other journals and reviewers
have exhibited a bias against articles that did not reject the null
hypothesis. We seek to change that by offering an outlet for experiments
that do not reach the traditional significance levels (p < .05). Thus,
reducing the file drawer problem, and reducing the bias in psychological
literature. Without such a resource researchers could be wasting their time
examining empirical questions that have already been examined. We collect
these articles and provide them to the scientific community free of cost.
AACSB Data at a Glance ---
http://www.aacsb.edu/dataandresearch/dataglance.asp
Faculty may have to contact a AACSB Member-Dean of the College of Business for
access to much of this data.
If the data have not been updated for 2009, the data may be misleading since
2009 had such an impact on college budgets.
Note that there is a database for AACSB-accredited online business programs.
Also note that the AACSB does not accredit doctoral programs. There are no
online accredited doctoral programs to my knowledge ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
The data includes:
Global Business School Characteristics
- Average operating budgets
- Teaching, intellectual contributions, and service priorities
- AACSB member institutions by country
Global Business School Student Data
- Percent of MBA graduates by gender
- School (masters-level) admissions profiles
- Undergraduate enrollment percentages by citizenship
Global Business School Faculty and Administration Data
- Percent of academically qualified and professionally qualified
faculty
- Percent of deans by gender
- Average faculty salaries in the US
- Percent of tenured faculty
Global Business School Programs
- Doctoral programs by discipline
- Degree program levels offered
- AACSB-accredited schools with online MBA
programs
AACSB Examines Graduate Enrollment by Discipline at Member Schools,
January 2010 ---
http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/datadirect.asp
Business School Faculty Trends—Changes by Discipline, January 2010 ---
http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/faculty-trends.asp
The economic crisis in 2009 may have changed some of the data reported here,
especially the number of faculty in finance where student employment
opportunities took a huge hit in 2009.
Talk About Moral Hazard
"A Novel Idea to Keep Students in College: Failure Insurance," by David
Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Novel-Idea-to-Keep-Students/63493/
Jensen Comment
This is a little like flood insurance in that only people in high risk flood
zones want to purchase flood insurance such that the only deep pockets insurer
that takes on flood insurance is the government. College failure insurance will
most likely have to be underwritten by government.
I agree with most of the comments at the end of the above article.
Proposed Changes in Humanities Doctoral Programs as Tenure Track Openings
Decline
"No Entry," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/04/nojobs
"Ph.D. Supply and Demand," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, January
11, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/11/grad
Student Evaluation of the Second Life
3-D Learning Aid
Bob Jensen's threads on virtual learning
and the 3-D use of Second Life are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
A veteran user of
Second Life in financial accounting classes summarizes student evaluations at
http://www.mydebitcredit.com/2010/01/08/second-life-what-do-the-students-think/
Steven is an
avatar in these applications. You can read a bit more about how he does this in
his messaging at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
January 8. 2010
message from Steven Hornik
[shornik@BUS.UCF.EDU]
I've written a
blog post about how my students have assessed Second Life since Fall 2007
when I first began using it. The post only examines one question from a
semester end survey that I ask the students to complete. It may not be
classified as rigorous empirical research but I think it's interesting
nevertheless. Here's the link if anyone's interested:
http://www.mydebitcredit.com/2010/01/08/second-life-what-do-the-students-think/
Enjoy your weekend,
Steven
_________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life:
Robins Hermano ---
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
"City Tech Gets a ‘Second Life’," by Converge Staff , Converge
Magazine, January 4, 2010 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/edtech/City-Tech-Gets-a-Second-Life.html?elq=4768d02be55741bb9e3e0bc860e41996
At Brooklyn's
New York City
College of Technology (City Tech), faculty and
students aren't just attending classes on campus, they're attending
virtually as well — in
Second Life.
Several classes are involved with developing the City
Tech's presence in Second Life, a virtual digital world created by its more
than nine million “residents.” In this world, alter egos (avatars) they have
constructed live, play and work in immersive environments — artificial,
interactive, computer-created scenes or “worlds” within which users can
immerse themselves and interact with others. In Second Life, students can
manipulate their avatars’ movements to walk around in, fly through and
thoroughly explore such virtual environments as the Sistine Chapel, foreign
cities, lecture halls and workplaces.
On “CityTech Island,” City Tech's Second Life site, students from various
academic disciplines not only observe, but also, along with their
professors, help create that world, which challenges them to use and master
3-D modeling skills in some cases or
script-writing skills
in others.
“Some consider Second Life only a game,” says City Tech Entertainment
Technology Professor David Smith, “but we see it as a huge outlet for
creative activity, allowing students and faculty to work on projects as a
team.”
Second Life's introduction
Smith introduced Second Life to the college and
uses it in the Introduction to Interactive Technology, Design Process course
and for his senior students’ final projects.
City Tech professors currently using Second Life in their classes, in
addition to Smith, are Isaac Barjis and Walied Samarrai (biological
sciences); Reneta Lansiquot (English) and Jenna Spevack (entertainment
technology). All of them have presented papers on their work or have reached
out to involve segments of the larger community — Brooklyn artists, for
example.
Spevack and her Introduction to Media Design Process students planned,
designed and developed the virtual "Brooklyn
is Watching" Museum. It houses photos of
artwork created by the Brooklyn is Watching Project, which invites
interaction between the thriving art communities of Second Life and
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The Project and Museum will continue to evolve
during the spring 2010 semester.
CityTech Island features a virtual laboratory where professor avatars
lecture and conduct experiments. Biology students can take a special ride —
inside a virtual cell. At the International Summer Simulation
Multiconference, held in Istanbul, Smith, Barjis and Samarrai presented a
research paper, “Modeling and Simulation of 3-D Virtual Cell as a Game,” to
an audience of top simulation and modeling researchers.
Actively engaged students more apt to learn
Their paper, published in Simulation Journal,
proposed Second Life as a tool enabling students to enter, observe and visit
a cell’s components, ask questions and interact with those components as one
would in a video game. “Students can tour the cell, take a quiz and test
their knowledge after and before the tour,” Samarrai explained. “We are
working now on other processes such as transportation and diffusion of
molecules, ions and water across the cell membrane.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on virtual learning and Second Life are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
Free Primer: Learning How To Use Decision Trees! ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/free-primer-learning-how-to-use-decision-trees/
Accounting for co-operation and commitment
versus command and control?
Without having read this book (yet) it would
seem that it must overstate the case. Organization behavior and leadership and
financial structures do not change that quickly without a greater shock than the
2009 recession and efforts made by governments to save the previous structures.
However, our present managerial accounting systems are built upon the foundation
of "command and control," and may take some new foundational building for
whatever is meant by "co-operation and commitment."
As a rule I avoid what I call these Harvard
Business School types of books on leadership (that often preach more than teach
based upon substantive research), but the book below does have a provocative
summary.
Selective reviews of The Death of Modern
Management: How to Lead in the New World Disorder," by Jo Owen (Wiley, 2010,
ISBN: 978-0-470-68285-2) ---
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047068285X.html
We are at
the start of a new wave of management. The recent
financial crisis highlighted problems not just in the
economic system, but also in the way that many companies
are governed and managed. Now modern management has
reached its end game and we approach a new era in
leadership. Rather than the certainties of command and
control, this new epoch will be based on co-operation
and commitment. There has been a strategic revolution -
instead of following the rules, we now have to make
them. For some this represents great risk; for others it
is an enormous opportunity.
The
Death of Modern Management is a how-to guide for
surviving and thriving amidst the new uncertainties of
contemporary business.
"...a
joyride through new ideas, memorable stories and superb
writing." Philip Kotler
"Jo
Owen gives a fascinating insight into how 21st century
management now works. It is helpful to have someone
with his experience, intellect and vision explain the
radical changes in a way that makes sense and is
immediately usable."
Juliet Hope, CEO, Startup
“Jo
Owen delivers a robust and wide-ranging assault on the
delusions of management, strategy, finance and marketing
that have created an aura of justified mistrust around
the modern corporation, but does so with wit, lucidity
and lots of enlivening illustrations. The answers for
21st century business are helpfully accessible.”
Professor Nigel Nicholson, London Business School,
author of Managing the Human Animal and Family
Wars
"...offers insights that help encourage different
thinking." Director Magazine
Bob Jensen's threads on the History of
Management Theory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory/00overview/GreatMinds.htm
Also see "Great Minds in Sociology" ---
http://www.sociosite.net/topics/sociologists.php
Finance and
Investing
"10 Classic Books of the 'Naughties'," Seeking Alpha, December 30,
2009 ---
http://seekingalpha.com/article/180263-10-classic-books-of-the-naughties
As we say goodbye to the
“Naughties” I thought it may be interesting to step back and reflect on some
of the significant books of the last decade that really did change the way
we thought about private sector development and its contribution to overall
development. Given the “decade” theme, I’ve limited the selection to ten,
although the books don’t map to each year of the decade. Obviously such an
exercise is pretty subjective so please feedback any glaring
omissions/personal prejudices. So, in order of publication date, rather than
magnitude of contribution we have:
- De
Soto, Hernando (2000) The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism
Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. The
central idea that the poor in developing countries with weak systems of
property rights and stifling bureaucracies are unable to leverage the
value of their (informal) assets has been a big influence on donor PSD
programmes.
-
Easterly, William (2002) The Elusive Quest for Growth:
Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics.
Here at the
World Bank, the battle between “planners” and “searchers” shows no
sign of abating.
- Yunus,
M. (2003) Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle
Against World Poverty. The nobel prize winner who made
micro-finance mainstream. I was tempted to include the more recent
Portfolios of the Poor for its more hard edged analysis of how the
poor spend their money. Yunus’s more recent work focuses on
the concept of social entrepreneurship.
- Kay,
John (2004) The Truth about Markets: Why Some Countries are
Rich and Others Remain Poor. Everything you need to know
about incentive compatability, disciplined pluralism and embedded
markets.
- Wolf,
Martin (2005), Why Globalisation Works. Some
might question whether it actually does after the last couple of years.
But setting out the merits of global integration is an intensely
competitive space occupied also by Stigtitz (2005) “Fair Trade for All”
and Bhagwati (2004) “In Defense of Globalisation” amongst others.
-
Prahalad C.K (2005) The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
Although many have questioned whether there really is a fortune there or
not, this book shows how the poor can be treated as a serious market
players making rational economic decisions, rather than being passive
aid beneficiaries. I think much more PSD work can usefully be done in
relation to wealth creation at the base of the pyramid (BoP). Stuart
Hart’s “Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and
Humanity” is also a close contender in the BoP space, as is Al Hammond’s
“Bottom Four Billion”.
- Levitt
and Dubner (2006) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains
the Hidden Side of Everything. The original
thought-provoking book that put Pop Economics on the map and spawned
lots of imitators including this blog’s own
Undercover Economist (Tim Harford) as well as the
Armchair Economist (Landsberg); and the
Economic Naturalist (Frank).
-
Collier, Paul (2007) The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest
Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. The
four traps that show how development for the world’s poorest means more
than just more aid.
- Stern,
Nicholas (2007), The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern
Review. Depicting climate change as the “greatest and
widest-ranging market failure ever seen” was a huge conceptual step
forward. This perspective makes it much easier to devise and justify PSD
or market based contributions to low-carbon growth. However, recent
events in Copenhagen show we’re still some way away from establishing a
clear global price for carbon.
- Tett,
Gillian (2009), Fool’s Gold: how unrestrained greed
corrupted a dream, shattered global markets and unleashed a catastrophe.
Do you still need to know what this book is about?
Google
Wave ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
Google
Wave
is a self-described "personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by
Google at the
Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009.[1][2]
It is a
web-based service,
computing platform, and
communications protocol designed to merge
e-mail,
instant messaging,
wikis, and
social networking.[3]
It has a strong
collaborative and
real-time[4]
focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example,
spelling/grammar checking, automated
translation among 40 languages,[2]
and numerous other extensions.[4]
Initially released only to developers, a "preview release" of Google Wave was
extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite twenty to
thirty additional users. On the 29th of November 2009, Google accepted most
requests submitted soon after the extended release of the technical preview in
September 2009; these users have around 25 invitations to give.
Google
Wave Overview Video ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw
Google
Wave Security ---
http://googlewavesecurity.com/
"How
to Teach With Google Wave," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher
Education,
January 4, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/How-to-Teach-With-Google-Wave/19501/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
If you're wondering what use Google's new Wave tool might have for teaching, one
online-learning leader has an answer: combining classes from different colleges.
Think of it like bringing in a guest speaker. But with Wave, which is like
e-mail but live and jazzed up with multimedia features, you can build online
communities that link entire classrooms for a week or two. And you can do it
without the administrative headaches of booking rooms or adjusting class
schedules.
Ray Schroeder gave it a try last semester at the University of Illinois at
Springfield,
one of the first colleges to use Wave for online
teaching since the preview version came
out in September. For about two weeks in December, he joined his "Internet in
American Life" course with a class on energy studies at the Institute of
Technology at Sligo, in Ireland. They created a "wave" to discuss the impact of
the Internet on energy sustainability.
But what if you merged a biology class and a philosophy class? You could have
them evaluate a bioethics case study, suggests Mr. Schroeder, director of the
university's
Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service.
Or what about a class on Asian history? You could use
Wave's translation tool and hook up with a group of Chinese students.
It's different than a proprietary learning-management system, Mr. Schroeder
says, "where licensing restrictions limit these kinds of inter-institutional
projects." Already, some college professors and administrators are excited about
Wave's
potential to be a course-management-system killer.
Plenty of other technologies already enable online
collaboration, like wikis and Web conferencing. The difference is that Google
Wave dumps everything into a one-stop Web 2.0 sandbox of audio and video and
text. Also, it's free. And it has a "playback" feature that lets you watch the
history of each posting in a kind of time-lapse animation.
So if a student comes to you whining about how she should get an "A" because she
did all the work in a group project, Mr. Schroeder says, you can check exactly
who did what.
But you'll have to be patient. While students liked the Wave collaboration, they
also complained
January 4,
2009 reply from Rick Lillie
[rlillie@CSUSB.EDU]
Hi Bob,
Thanks for the story about Google Wave. I like what Ray Schroeder did with
Google Wave. His idea is creative and exciting.
I tried using Google Wave with a couple of my accounting blended and online
classes. At this point, I decided not to continue using Google Wave until it
"really" comes online with more of its bells and whistles and technical
support. For now, users are pretty much on their own which makes it difficult
to support students when they encounter problems or have a hard time figuring
out how a Google Wave feature is supposed to work.
Google Wave will be an incredible collaboration tool once its full range of
features are in place. Until then, its usefulness for teaching-learning
purposes is limited. For now, Google Wave is "use at your own risk." Unless an
instructor is fairly confident with his(her) technology skills, I suggest it
might be better to be patient before adopting the tool for course use.
While Google Wave shows great promise, in my opinion, I do not see it as a
course-management-system killer now or in the future. Course management systems
provide an instructor with a structured instant website that offers a variety of
features. Most faculty that I have worked with do not venture beyond the CMS
features. That's too bad.
Google Wave could be described as quasi-organized chaos. It functions a bit
like a threaded discussion board on steroids. When I used Google Wave, I
hyperlinked from the CMS to Google Wave. This made it accessible from within
the CMS and improved what students could do through the CMS.
This approach gave me the best of two worlds. The CMS provided organization.
Google Wave provided the place to explore and interact with others in ways that
the CMS was not designed to do.
There are lots of Web 2.0 technology tools that add really interesting things
to the teaching-learning experience. Figuring out which tool to use at the
right moment is part of the instructional design challenge. I would not yet
consider the CMS to be dead-done-and-buried.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie, MAS, Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA. 92407-2397
Email:
rlillie@csusb.edu
Telephone: (909) 537-5726
Skype (Username): ricklillie
Bob
Jensen's threads on social networking are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Bob
Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"Barnes & Noble Announces Textbook Rental Service," by Jill Laster,
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Barnes-Noble-Announces/20432/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Barnes & Noble's college-bookstore division has entered the growing
field of textbook rental for college students, the bookseller
announced Monday. After testing the waters with a
pilot program, the service has expanded. It will allow students to rent
textbooks through campus-bookstore Web sites at 25 college campuses or
through the Barnes & Noble stores on those campuses. Students can pay for
the service in several different ways, including financial aid and campus
debit cards
Also see
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/12/rent
Jensen Comment
Students should carefully make comparisons between renting versus buying used
and possibly reselling. Campus bookstores will usually buy back books they sold
to students, and there are online buyers of used books.
This is an
early Jensen tidbit on renting.
We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?,"
by Miguel Helft, The New York Times, July 4, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05ping.html?hpw
Cengage Learning
said Thursday
that it would become the first higher education publisher to let students rent
as well as buy print textbooks directly from the source. Cengage said it would
transform its existing online platform, known as
iChapters, into
a broader site that would allow students to rent print textbooks at 40 to 70
percent off retail as well as purchase print and digital texts and other
materials. Publishers have been exploring a range of ways to enter the
burgeoning market
for renting textbooks.
Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/14/qt#205700
Jensen
Test:
Rent Textbooks from Chegg ---
http://www.chegg.com/
Rental prices are about half the so-called purchase price of a new book.
Buying a used book is probably a better idea since it, in turn, can be sold back
into the used market.
Intermediate Accounting ISBN 0470374942 by Kieso et al.
New (Chegg claims the new price is $209
but the price of hardcover is $177 at Barnes & Noble
)
The Amazon Price of a new hardcover is $168 ---
Click Here
Bigwords.com (international edition that differs somewhat in chapter orderings)
lists a price of $53.98
Used prices start at Amazon for about $159 (but watch carefully for the edition
number)
Rent from Chegg ($96.53) ---
http://www.chegg.com/details/intermediate-accounting/0470374942/
Jensen
Comment
To get value for my money, I prefer used houses, cars, and books.
Of course, both Amazon and Google are now selling electronic versions of
textbooks. For Amazon you must have a Kindle reader. For Google, all you have to
have is a computer, although to date Amazon has a wider selection of textbooks
available.
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
Dirty
Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others Into Solving the Wrong
Problems Precisely
by
Ian I. Mitroff and
Abraham Silvers (Stanford University Press;
November 2009, 192 pages; $24.95 but Amazon sells it new for $12.95
People and organizations are perfectly capable of making the most outrageous
missteps. But, how does a person, organization, or society know that it is
committing an error? And, how can we tell that when others are steering us down
wrong paths?
Dirty Rotten Strategies delves into how organizations and interest groups lure
us into solving the "wrong problems" with intricate, but inaccurate, solutions.
Authors Ian I. Mitroff and Abraham Silvers argue that we can never be sure if we
have set our sights on the wrong problem, but there are definite signals that
can alert us to this possibility.
While explaining how to detect and avoid dirty rotten strategies, the authors
put the media, healthcare, national security, academia, and organized religion
under the microscope. They offer a biting critique that examines the failure of
these major institutions to accurately define our most pressing problems. For
example, the U.S. healthcare industry strives to be the most technologically
advanced in the world, but, our cutting-edge system does not ensure top-quality
care to the largest number of people.
Readers will find that far too many institutions have enormous incentives to let
us devise elaborate solutions to the wrong problems. As Thomas Pynchon said," If
they can get you asking the wrong questions, then they don't have to worry about
the answers."
From a political perspective, this book shows why liberals and conservatives
define problems differently, and demonstrates how each political view is
incomplete without the other. Our concerns are no longer solely liberal or
conservative. In fact, we can no longer trust a single group to define issues
across the institutions explored in this book and beyond.
Dirty Rotten Strategies is a bipartisan call for anyone who is ready to think
outside the box to address our major concerns as a society—starting today.
Jensen
Comment
This strikes me a bit like our problem with the billions of dollars spent by
major universities in accountics research that is virtually ignored by the
accounting profession and business firms and investors worldwide for the past
four decades.
What went wrong with accountics research and how did it have some "dirty rotten
strategies?"
At the
same time, it's possible to take the "Dirty Rotten Strategies" thesis too far in
academe and in life. For example, should we eliminate the entire space
exploration program and divert the money to improving high speed rail service
between major urban centers in the United States? History is replete with
examples of where what seemed like a "dirty rotten" waste of money turned out to
have a very high benefit to cost ratios in the long run, e.g., the contributions
of basic particle physics research to the ultimate warming of our New England
houses from the Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.
I'm less
optimistic about the ultimate benefit to cost ratio of accountics research and
manned space exploration, but who knows?
I've been wrong 2,195 times in my life. Accountants keep track of everything.
Isaac
Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method
by Niccolo Guicciardini (MIT Press; October 2009, 422 pages; $55).
A study of Newton's philosophy of mathematics; topics include how the British
scientist distanced himself from Descartes and Leibniz and saw himself as the
heir of the ancients.
"Canada
Gets Good Grades on Education Report Card but a D for Producing Ph.D.'s,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Canada-Gets-Good-Grades-on/19539/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment About Canadian
Contributions to the AECM
I also give an A to the contributions of Jerry Trites to the AECM listserv.
However, virtually all other North American contributions to the AECM are from
the United States. It would be nicer if Canadians added more to our messaging,
especially regarding IFRS replacement of Canadian GAAP. For example, how are
Canadians managing the IFRS content on the Chartered Accountancy Examination
when candidates now applying to take the examination learned mostly Canadian
GAAP.?
"Beyond Critical Thinking," by Michael S. Roth, Chronicle of Higher
Education's Chronicle Review, January 3, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Beyond-Critical-Thinking/63288/
The antivocational dimension of the
humanities has been a source of pride and embarrassment for generations. The
persistence of this reputed uselessness is puzzling given the fact that an
education in the humanities allows one to develop skills in reading,
writing, reflection, and interpretation that are highly prized in our
economy and culture. Sure, specific training in a discrete set of skills
might prepare you for Day 1 of the worst job you'll ever have (your first),
but the humanities teach elements of mind and heart that you will draw upon
for decades of innovative and focused work. But we do teach a set of skills,
or an attitude, in the humanities that may have more to do with our
antipractical reputation than the antivocational notion of freedom embedded
in the liberal arts. This is the set of skills that usually goes under the
rubric of critical thinking.
Although critical thinking first gained
its current significance as a mode of interpretation and evaluation to guide
beliefs and actions in the 1940s, the term took off in education circles
after Robert H. Ennis published "A Concept of Critical Thinking" in the
Harvard Educational Review in 1962. Ennis was interested in how we teach the
"correct assessment of statements," and he offered an analysis of 12 aspects
of this process. Ennis and countless educational theorists who have come
after him have sung the praises of critical thinking. There is now a
Foundation for Critical Thinking and an industry of consultants to help you
enhance this capacity in your teachers, students, or yourself.
A common way to show that one has
sharpened one's critical thinking is to display an ability to see through or
undermine statements made by (or beliefs held by) others. Thus, our best
students are really good at one aspect of critical thinking—being critical.
For many students today, being smart means being critical. To be able to
show that Hegel's concept of narrative foreclosed the non-European, or that
Butler's stance on vulnerability contradicts her conception of
performativity, or that a tenured professor has failed to account for his
own "privilege"—these are marks of sophistication, signs of one's ability to
participate fully in the academic tribe. But this participation, being
entirely negative, is not only seriously unsatisfying; it is ultimately
counterproductive.
The skill at unmasking error, or simple
intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should
be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a
currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to "trouble" ideas.
In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions, or people
fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of
the capacity to learn as much as possible from what they study. In a
humanities culture in which being smart often means being a critical
unmasker, our students may become too good at showing how things don't make
sense. That very skill may diminish their capacity to find or create meaning
and direction in the books they read and the world in which they live. Once
outside the university, our students continue to score points by displaying
the critical prowess for which they were rewarded in school. They wind up
contributing to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or
making meaning, whose intellectuals and cultural commentators delight in
being able to show that somebody else is not to be believed.
I doubt that this is a particularly
contemporary development. In the 18th century there were complaints about an
Enlightenment culture that prized only skepticism and that was satisfied
only with disbelief. Our contemporary version of this trend, though, has
become skeptical even about skepticism. We no longer have the courage of our
lack of conviction. Perhaps that's why we teach our students that it's cool
to say that they are engaged in "troubling" an assumption or a belief. To
declare that one wanted to disprove a view would show too much faith in the
ability to tell truth from falsehood. And to declare that one was receptive
to learning from someone else's view would show too much openness to being
persuaded by an idea that might soon be deconstructed (or simply mocked).
In training our students in the techniques
of critical thinking, we may be giving them reasons to remain guarded—which
can translate into reasons not to learn. The confident refusal to be
affected by those with whom we disagree seems to have infected much of our
cultural life: from politics to the press, from siloed academic programs (no
matter how multidisciplinary) to warring public intellectuals. As humanities
teachers, however, we must find ways for our students to open themselves to
the emotional and cognitive power of history and literature that might
initially rub them the wrong way, or just seem foreign. Critical thinking is
sterile without the capacity for empathy and comprehension that stretches
the self.
One of the crucial tasks of the humanities
should be to help students cultivate the willingness and ability to learn
from material they might otherwise reject or ignore. This material will
often surprise students and sometimes upset them. Students seem to have
learned that teaching-evaluation committees take seriously the criticism
that "the professor, or the material, made me uncomfortable." This complaint
is so toxic because being made uncomfortable may be a necessary component of
an education in the humanities. Creating a humanistic culture that values
the desire to learn from unexpected and uncomfortable sources as much as it
values the critical faculties would be an important contribution to our
academic and civic life.
But the contemporary humanities should do
more than supplement critical thinking with empathy and a desire to
understand others from their own point of view. We should also supplement
our strong critical engagement with cultural and social norms by developing
modes of teaching that allow our students to enter in the value-laden
practices of a particular culture to understand better how these values are
legitimated: how the values are lived as legitimate. Current thinking in the
humanities is often strong at showing that values that are said to be shared
are really imposed on more-vulnerable members of a particular group. Current
thinking in the humanities is also good at showing the contextualization of
norms, whether the context is generated by an anthropological, historical,
or other disciplinary matrix. But in both of these cases we ask our students
to develop a critical distance from the context or culture they are
studying.
Many humanities professors have become
disinclined to investigate with our students how we generate the values we
believe in, or the norms according to which we go about our lives. In other
words, we have been less interested in showing how we make a norm legitimate
than in sharpening our tools for delegitimization. The philosopher Robert
Pippin has recently made a similar point, and has described how evolutionary
biology and psychology have moved into this terrain, explaining moral values
as the product of the same dynamic that gives rise to the taste for sweets.
Pippin argues, on the contrary, that "the practical autonomy of the
normative is the proper terrain of the humanities," and he has an easy task
of showing how the pseudoscientific evolutionary "explanation" of our moral
choices is a pretty flimsy "just-so" story.
If we humanities professors saw ourselves
more often as explorers of the normative than as critics of normativity, we
would have a better chance to reconnect our intellectual work to broader
currents in public culture. This does not have to mean an acceptance of the
status quo, but it does mean an effort to understand the practices of
cultures (including our own) from the point of view of those participating
in them. This would include an understanding of how cultures change. For
many of us, this would mean complementing our literary or textual work with
participation in community, with what are often called service-learning
courses. For others, it would mean approaching our object of study not with
the anticipated goal of exposing weakness or mystification but with the goal
of turning ourselves in such a way as to see how what we study might inform
our thinking and our lives.
I realize that I am arguing for a mode of
humanistic education that many practice already. It is a mode that can take
language very seriously, but rather than seeing it as the master mediator
between us and the world, a matrix of representations always doomed to fail,
it sees language as itself a cultural practice to be understood from the
point of view of those using it.
The fact that language fails according to
some impossible criterion, or that we fail in our use of it, is no news,
really. It is part of our finitude, but it should not be taken as the key
marker of our humanity. The news that is brought by the humanities is a way
of turning the heart and the spirit so as to hear possibilities of various
forms of life in which we might participate. When we learn to read or look
or listen intensively, we are not just becoming adept at exposing falsehood
or at uncovering yet more examples of the duplicities of culture and
society. We are partially overcoming our own blindness by trying to
understand something from another's artistic, philosophical, or historical
point of view. William James put it perfectly in a talk to teachers and
students entitled "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings": "The meanings
are there for others, but they are not there for us." James saw the
recognition of this blindness as key to education as well as to the
development of democracy and civil society. Of course hard-nosed critical
thinking may help in this endeavor, but it also may be a way we learn to
protect ourselves from the acknowledgment and insight that humanistic study
has to offer. As students and as teachers we sometimes crave that protection
because without it we risk being open to changing who we are. In order to
overcome this blindness, we risk being very uncomfortable indeed.
It is my hope that humanists will continue
offering criticism, making connections, and finding ways to acknowledge
practices that seem at first opaque or even invisible. In supporting a
transition from critical thinking to practical exploration, I am echoing a
comment made by my undergraduate philosophy teacher Louis Mink, and echoed
by my graduate mentor, Richard Rorty. Years before Dick Rorty deconstructed
the idea of the "philosopher as referee," Louis Mink suggested that critics
"exchange the judge's wig for the guide's cap." I think we may say the same
for humanists, who can, in his words, "show us details and patterns and
relations which we would not have seen or heard for ourselves."
My humanities teachers enriched my life by
showing me details and pattern and relations. In so doing they also helped
me to acquire tools that have energetically shaped my scholarship and my
interactions with colleagues and students. It is my hope that as guides, not
judges, we can show our students how to engage in the practice of exploring
objects, norms, and values that inform diverse cultures. In doing so,
students will develop the ability to converse with others about shaping the
objects, norms, and values that will inform their own lives. They will
develop the ability to add value to (and not merely criticize values in)
whatever organizations in which they participate. They will often reject
roads that others have taken, and they will sometimes chart new paths. But
guided by the humanities, they will increase their ability to find together
ways of living that have meaning and direction, illuminating paths immensely
practical and sustaining.
Michael S. Roth is an intellectual historian and
president of Wesleyan University. This essay was part of a lecture
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Wesleyan's Center for
the Humanities.
Bob Jensen's threads on critical thinking are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CriticalThinking
January 5, 2009 reply from Barbara Scofield
[barbarawscofield@GMAIL.COM]
At the University of Kentucky in the 1990s I took a
faculty development course in "Integrative Studies," which was required of
the medical students at that time, and then offered one summer to all
faculty. In the discussion segments the faculty participants were asked to
always provide comments that were an addition to the comments of the other
participants. In other words, we couldn't begin with "Yes, but ..." We were
supposed to find common ground and build from there. Some faculty found this
impossible to do, even when the facilitator emphasized it over and over
again. My remembrance is that the business and agriculture faculty had an
easier time with the cooperative nature of the course than the liberal arts
folks.
Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA Chair of Graduate
Business Studies Professor of Accounting The University of Texas of the
Permian Basin 4901 E. University Dr. Odessa, TX 79762
432-552-2183 (Office) 817-988-5998 (Cell)
BarbaraWScofield@gmail.com
The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning
---
Click Here
The Miniature Guide To Critical Thinking Concepts & Tools ---
Click Here
"The Future of Decision Making: Less
Intuition, More Evidence," Simoleon Sense, January 11, 2010 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/the-future-of-decision-making-less-intuition-more-evidence/
Awesome article (covering decision making, Kahneman, etc) via Harvard
Big thanks & h/t to Michael & Stuart
Click Here Fore: The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More
Evidence
Introduction (Via Harvard Blogs)
Human intuition can be astonishingly good,
especially after it’s improved by experience. Savvy poker players are so
good at reading their opponents’ cards and bluffs that they seem to have
x-ray vision. Firefighters can, under extreme duress, anticipate how
flames will spread through a building. And nurses in neonatal ICUs can
tell if a baby has a dangerous infection even before blood test results
come back from the lab.
The lexicon to describe this phenomenon is
mostly mystical in nature. Poker players have a sixth sense;
firefighters feel the blaze’s intentions; Nurses just know what seems
like an infection. They can’t even tell us what data and cues they use
to make their excellent judgments; their intuition springs from a deep
place that can’t be easily examined. . Examples like these give many
people the impression that human intuition is generally reliable, and
that we should rely more on the decisions and predictions that come to
us in the blink of an eye.
Findings (Via Harvard Blogs)
* It takes a long time to build good intuition. Chess
players, for example, need 10 years of dedicated study and competition
to assemble a sufficient mental repertoire of board patterns.
* Intuition only works well in specific environments, ones that
provide a person with good cues and rapid feedback . Cues are
accurate indications about what’s going to happen next. They exist in
poker and firefighting, but not in, say, stock markets. Despite what
chartists think, it’s impossible to build good intuition about future
market moves because no publicly available information provides good
cues about later stock movements. Feedback from the environment is
information about what worked and what didn’t. It exists in neonatal
ICUs because babies stay there for a while. It’s hard, though, to build
medical intuition about conditions that change after the patient has
left the care environment, since there’s no feedback loop.
* We apply intuition inconsistently. Even experts are
inconsistent. One study determined what criteria clinical psychologists
used to diagnose their patients, and then created simple models based on
these criteria. Then, the researchers presented the doctors with new
patients to diagnose and also diagnosed those new patients with their
models. The models did a better job diagnosing the new cases than did
the humans whose knowledge was used to build them. The best explanation
for this is that people applied what they knew inconsistently — their
intuition varied. Models, though, don’t have intuition.
* It’s easy to make bad judgments quickly. We have a
many biases that lead us astray when making assessments. Here’s just one
example. If I ask a group of people “Is the average price of German cars
more or less than $100,000?” and then ask them to estimate the average
price of German cars, they’ll “anchor” around BMWs and other high-end
makes when estimating. If I ask a parallel group the same two questions
but say “more or less than $30,000″ instead, they’ll anchor around VWs
and give a much lower estimate. How much lower? About $35,000 on
average, or half the difference in the two anchor prices. How
information is presented affects what we think.
* We can’t know tell where our ideas
come from. There’s no way for even an experienced person to
know if a spontaneous idea is the result of legitimate expert intuition
or of a pernicious bias. In other words, we have lousy intuition about
our intuition.
Click Here Fore: The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More
Evidence
"Video: Daniel Kahneman - The Psychology of Large Mistakes and Important
Decisions" Simoleon Sense, July 27, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/daniel-kahneman-psychology-of-large-mistakes-and-decisions/
"I was going to say I saw a duckie and a horsie, but I changed my mind."
Computer Trained Yet Deeply Intuitive
Not that Carlsen lacks computational prowess,
though. He often calculates 20 moves ahead and can comfortably play several
games simultaneously while blindfolded simply by hearing each move in
notation. The fear surrounding any such beautiful mind is that a life spent
probing the edges of the infinite — the possible permutations of a chess
game outnumber the estimated number of atoms in the universe — will
eventually lead to madness. Grand masters say Carlsen's precociousness is
reminiscent of Bobby Fischer's. The great American player spent his later
years in isolation, reappearing only to spout anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories. "It's easy to get obsessed with chess," Carlsen says. "That's what
happened with Fischer and Paul Morphy," another prodigy lost to madness. "I
don't have that same obsession."
Remember this Charles Shultz Cartoon
- Lucy Van Pelt: Aren't the clouds
beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton. I could just lie here all
day and watch them drift by. If you use your imagination, you can see
lots of things in the cloud's formations. What do you think you see,
Linus?
-
- Linus Van Pelt: Well, those clouds up
there look to me look like the map of the
British Honduras on the Caribbean. [points
up] That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of
Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and
sculptor. And that group of clouds over there... [points]
...gives me the impression of the
Stoning of Stephen. I can see the
Apostle Paul standing there to one side.
-
- Lucy Van Pelt: Uh huh. That's very
good. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?
-
- Charlie Brown: Well... I was going to
say I saw a duckie and a horsie, but I changed my mind.
"A Bold Opening for Chess Player," by Magnus Carlsen, Time Magazine,
January 11, 2010, Page 43 ---
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1950683,00.html
Vladimir Kramnik, former world chess
champion and current No. 4, is playing in the first round of the London
Chess Classic, the most competitive chess tournament to be played in the
U.K. capital in 25 years. Tall, handsome and expressionless, he looks
exactly as a man who has mastered a game of nearly infinite variation
should: like a high-end assassin. Today, however, he is getting methodically
and mercilessly crushed.
His opponent is a teenager who seems to be
having difficulty staying awake. Magnus Carlsen yawns, fidgets, slumps in
his chair. He gets up and wanders over to the other games, staring at the
boards like a curious toddler. Every now and then, he returns to his own
game and moves one of his pieces, inexorably building an attack so fierce
that by the 43rd move Kramnik sees the hopelessness of his position and
resigns.
Genius can appear anywhere, but the
origins of Carlsen's talent are particularly mysterious. In November,
Carlsen, then 18, became the youngest world No. 1 in the game's history. He
hails from Norway — a "small, poxy chess nation with almost no history of
success," as the English grand master Nigel Short sniffily describes it —
and unlike many chess prodigies who are full-time players by age 12, Carlsen
stayed in school until last year. His father Henrik, a soft-spoken engineer,
says he has spent more time urging his young son to complete his schoolwork
than to play chess. Even now, Henrik will interrupt Carlsen's chess studies
to drag him out for a family hike or museum trip. "I still have to pinch my
arm," Henrik says. "This certainly is not what we had in mind for Magnus."
Even pro chess players — a population
inured to demonstrations of extraordinary intellect — have been electrified
by Carlsen's rise. A grand master at 13 (the third youngest in history) and
a conqueror of top players at 15, he is often referred to as the Mozart of
chess for the seeming ease of his mastery. In September, he announced a
coaching contract with Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest player of all
time, who quit chess in 2005 to pursue a political career in Russia. "Before
he is done," Kasparov says, "Carlsen will have changed our ancient game
considerably."
In conversation, Carlsen offers only
subtle clues to his intelligence. His speech, like his chess, is technical,
grammatically flawless and logically irresistible. He dresses neatly but
shows a teenager's discomfort with formality. (He rarely makes it through a
game without his shirt coming untucked.) He would seem older than 19 but for
his habit of giggling and his coltlike aversion to eye contact.
Carlsen joins chess's élite at a time of
unprecedented change. He is one of a generation of players who learned the
game from computers. To this day, he's not certain if he has an actual board
at home. "I might have one somewhere. I'm not sure," he says. Powerful chess
programs, which now routinely beat the best human competitors, have allowed
grand masters to study positions at a deeper level than was possible before.
Short says top players can now spend almost an entire game trading moves
that have been scripted by the same program and that such play by rote has
removed some of the mystique of chess. He likens chess computers to
"chainsaws chopping down the Amazon." (Read a Q&A with Carlsen.)
But Kasparov says Carlsen's mastery is
rooted in a "deep intuitive sense no computer can teach" and that his pupil
"has a natural feel for where to place the pieces." According to Kasparov,
Carlsen has a knack for sensing the potential energy in each move, even if
its ultimate effect is too far away for anyone — even a computer — to
calculate. In the grand-master commentary room, where chess's clerisy gather
to analyze play, the experts did not even consider several of Carlsen's
moves during his game with Kramnik until they saw them and realized they
were perfect. "It's hard to explain," Carlsen says. "Sometimes a move just
feels right."
Not that Carlsen lacks computational prowess,
though. He often calculates 20 moves ahead and can comfortably play several
games simultaneously while blindfolded simply by hearing each move in
notation. The fear surrounding any such beautiful mind is that a life spent
probing the edges of the infinite — the possible permutations of a chess
game outnumber the estimated number of atoms in the universe — will
eventually lead to madness. Grand masters say Carlsen's precociousness is
reminiscent of Bobby Fischer's. The great American player spent his later
years in isolation, reappearing only to spout anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories. "It's easy to get obsessed with chess," Carlsen says. "That's what
happened with Fischer and Paul Morphy," another prodigy lost to madness. "I
don't have that same obsession." (Read: "Fischer
vs. Spassky: Battle of the Brains.")
Although firmly atop the chess rankings,
thanks in part to his victory in London, Carlsen must now fight his way
through a series of qualifying competitions in order to earn a chance to
play for the world-championship title — the game's highest prize, which is
contested every two or three years. His father says he is more concerned
about "whether chess will make him a happy person." It seems to be doing
just that. "I love the game. I love to compete," Carlsen says. Asked how
long he will continue to enjoy chess and where the game will take him,
Carlsen pauses to ponder the variables. "It's too difficult to predict," he
concludes. So far, at least, he's been making all the right moves.
Bob Jensen's threads on critical thinking, including "beyond critical
thinking" --
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Why Economists Consistently Get it Wrong
"Why Good Spreadsheets Make Bad Strategies," by Roger Martin,
Harvard Business Review Blog, January 11, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/why_good_spreadsheets_make_bad.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
We live in a world obsessed with science,
preoccupied with predictability and control, and enraptured with
quantitative analysis. Economic forecasters crank out precision predictions
of economic growth with their massive econometric models. CEOs give
to-the-penny guidance to capital markets on next quarter's predicted
earnings. We live by adages like: "Show me the numbers" and truisms such as
"If you can't measure it, it doesn't count."
What has this obsession gotten us?
The economists have gotten it consistently wrong.
As late as the first half of 2008, no prominent macroeconomist or important
economic forecasting organization predicted that the economy would not grow
in 2008 (or 2009), let alone that it would crater as disastrously as it did.
But, undaunted, the same economists who totally missed the recession turned
back to the same quantitative, scientific models to predict how the economy
would recover, only to be mainly wrong again. CEOs keep on giving quarterly
guidance based on their sophisticated financial planning systems and keep on
being wrong — and then get slammed not for bad performance but for their
failure to predict performance exactly as they promised mere months earlier.
In this oh-so-modern life, we have
deep-seated desire to quantify the world around us so that we can understand
it and control it. But the world isn't behaving. Instead, it is
showing its modern, scientific inhabitants that quantity doesn't tell us as
much as we would wish. While the macroeconomists would dearly love to add up
all the loans to provide a total for "credit outstanding" and then plug this
quantity into their economic models to be able to predict next year's Gross
Domestic Product, they found out in 2008 that all of those loans weren't the
same — some, especially the sub-prime mortgages, weren't worth the
proverbial paper on which they were written.
And CEOs and their CFOs would love to be able to
extrapolate last month's sales quantity and predict next quarter's sales,
but sometimes they find out that those sales weren't as solid a base for
growth as they might have thought — especially if some of the customer
relationships underpinning them weren't as strong as they might have
imagined.
The fundamental shortcoming is that all of these
scientific methods depended entirely on quantities to produce the answers
they were meant to generate. They were all blissfully ignorant of qualities.
My colleague
Hilary Austen, who is writing a fantastic book on
the importance of artistry, describes the difference between qualities and
quantities in the latest draft:
Qualities cannot be objectively measured, as a
quantity like temperature can be measured with a thermometer. We can
count the number of people in a room, but that tells us little about the
mood — upbeat, flat, intense, contentious — of the group's interaction.
Why are qualities so important? We need to
understand the role of qualities in dealing with the complex, ambiguous and
uncertain world in which we live because understanding, measuring, modeling
and manipulating the quantities just won't cut it. Adding up the quantity of
credit outstanding won't tell us nearly enough about what role it will play
in our economy. Adding up sales won't tell us what kind of a company we
really have. We need to have a much deeper understanding of their qualities
— the ambiguous, hard-to-measure aspects of all of these features.
To obtain that understanding, we need to supplement
the quantitative techniques brought to us through the march of science with
the artistic understanding of and facility with qualities that our obsession
with science has brushed aside. We must stop obsessing about measurement so
much that we exclude essential but un-measurable qualities from our
understanding of any given situation. We must also consider the possibility
that if we can't measure something, it might be the very most important
aspect of the problem on which we're working.
Roger Martin
is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto
in Canada and the author of
The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive
Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009).
Why this applies to accountics research as well ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession
Controversial Tax Court Decision on Tuition Deductions
How One Woman Went to Tax Court and Won Deduction
January 11, 2010 message from Davidson, Dee (Dawn)
[dgd@MARSHALL.USC.EDU]
Nurse Outduels IRS Over M.B.A. Tuition
How One Woman Went to Tax Court and Won Deduction
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703535104574646582965101664.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
By LAURA SAUNDERS A Maryland nurse accomplished
two rare feats in her battle with the Internal Revenue Service: She
defended herself against the agency's lawyers and won, and she got a
ruling that could help tens of thousands of students deduct the cost of
an M.B.A. degree on their taxes. The U.S. Tax Court handed Lori
Singleton-Clarke her victory last month, saying the 47-year-old
Bryantown, Md., woman had properly deducted nearly $15,000 in business
school tuition. The Tax Court ruling should make it easier for many
other professionals to deduct the expense of a Master in Business
Administration degree.
dee davidson
Leventhal School of Accounting
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California
January 11, 2010 reply from Ramsey, Donald
[dramsey@UDC.EDU]
To get to the essence of this concept, you really
need to read the case at
http://www.ustaxcourt.gov/InOpHistoric/SINGLETON-CLARKE.SUM.WPD.pdf
The degree in question was an MBA with a
concentration in Health Care Administration, from the University of Phoenix.
The tax court held that the degree did not qualify her for a new occupation,
but did enhance her skills in her existing job.
An interesting observation was that sometimes an
MBA does qualify one for a new occupation, but not always. The court also
noted that the MBA does not lead to any particular professional license.
I suppose an MBA with a concentration in accounting
might be construed as leading to a professional license, and likely so would
an MAcc. Such graduates, of course, are not all necessarily intending to
seek the CPA, but if they do sit for the CPA exam I suppose that would
likely disqualify the deduction even though the individual might continue
working as an accountant.
Cheers,
DR
(A message from Pod L, 7L13, of the UDC temporary
satellite station in the Intelsat Building) Donald D. Ramsey, CPA,
Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics, School of Business and
Public Administration, University of the District of Columbia, 4200
Connecticut Ave., N. W., Washington, D. C. 20008. (202) 274-7054.
Bob Jensen's taxation helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#010304Taxation
HDTV: That's So Last Decade
"3-D TV, Apple tablet, Google phone among next-generation devices on the
way," by Frank Ahrens, The Washington Post, January 6, 2010 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/05/AR2010010504017.html?wpisrc=nl_tech
The 21st century may finally be starting,
one decade late.
A raft of sci-fi-inspired gadgets and
technologies are being announced this month, promising a future of 3-D
television, super-smart phones and next-generation electronic tablets that
wrap the features of a laptop and a digital book into one wafer-thin
package.
If you think you've heard all this before,
well, you have. Moviegoers were donning 3-D glasses in the 1950s, and
legions of gee-whiz devices have come and gone, with little discernible
improvement of the human condition.
What makes this month notable is the sheer
number of pitches being shouted by tech and media giants ranging from Apple
to Google to Sony to Discovery Communications, in the hope that
recession-weary Americans are ready to start spending their discretionary
income again. These corporate goliaths maintain large cash balances,
enabling them to spend money on product development during downturns while
smaller rivals struggle to stay afloat.
The buzz kicked off Tuesday with the
rollout of Google's Nexus One smartphone, which marks the search-engine
giant's first foray into hardware and represents a broadside aimed at
Apple's popular iPhone.
A flurry of announcements is coming before
the Thursday kickoff of the annual Consumer Electronics Show, the tech
industry's annual bacchanalia of personal-jet-pack futurism and gadget
fetishization. If these devices and technologies pan out, they may represent
significant steps forward, rather than just refinements of existing
technology.
Also on Tuesday, broadcasting giants ESPN
and Discovery each said they will launch 3-D television networks; ESPN's
this year, Discovery's in 2011. To create the unnamed 3-D channel, Silver
Spring's Discovery is forming a joint venture with 3-D theater pioneer Imax
and Sony, which makes cameras that film in 3-D.
Like "Avatar," the blockbuster film
currently in theaters, programming on these two new channels would require
special glasses to achieve the you-are-there benefit of 3-D.
Special glasses? To watch TV at home?
Really?
"Consumers seem quite willing to put on
glasses in a movie theater," Imax chief executive Richard Gelfond said in a
conference call Tuesday. "We're going to create something compelling for
consumers, and they're going to want to put on glasses."
Sony chief executive Howard Stringer
envisioned 3-D TV without the need for glasses "in three to five years."
Set makers, such as Sony, hope 3-D
programming will drive demand for new televisions in the same way that
high-definition broadcasts pushed consumers to junk their old analog TVs.
South Korea's LG Electronics, the world's second-biggest TV maker, said last
month that it hopes to sell 400,000 3-D TVs this year and 3.4 million next
year. Any manufacturer's 3-D set is likely to cost at least $3,000.
But if the transition from analog to HD is
any guide, the migration to 3-D could take years. Discovery launched its HD
channel in 2002, and it took seven years for HD TVs to start selling at a
rate of nearly 30 million units per year.
Further, the upgrade strategy has not
always worked. Years of industry squabbling over a new format for DVDs -- HD
vs. Blu-ray -- finally was settled with Blu-ray as the winner. Yet sales of
Blu-ray DVD players have hardly surged.
A first for Google
Google's Nexus One is a big step forward
because it represents the company's first venture into hardware, as opposed
to its current moneymaker: selling advertising alongside its various
services. Google, which has 66 percent of the global search market, hopes to
expand its empire by claiming the mobile phone market.
Unlike Apple's iPhone, which is limited to
AT&T's network, Google boasts that the Nexus is not tied to any one service
provider. But that freedom comes at a price -- $529 for the phone. A
T-Mobile deal, by comparison, offers it for $179 with a two-year service
contract.
Some analysts see the Nexus as a way for
Google to gain more control over its destiny. As a provider of Web-based
services from e-mail to street maps, the company may have perceived a need
to secure a gateway to the wireless Web, as well as to show off its vision
for the devices that access its services. For instance, the Nexus offers
voice commands for every feature.
"In this day and age, you need to have a
play beyond being just a content company," said Stephen Baker, an analyst
with the NPD Group.
Apple's newest secret
Meanwhile, Apple is fighting to keep its
kingpin title among the tech hipsterati with its newest device, expected to
be unveiled this month: a digital tablet similar in size to the Amazon
Kindle but with more eye-popping features. The Kindle allows customers to
wirelessly buy books over the Internet and read them on a screen a little
larger than a paperback and as thin as a few pages.
Even though Apple's tablet remains cloaked
in the company's typical secrecy, industry insiders expect a full-color
screen that will play videos in addition to displaying type. Though the
tablet is likely to come with a big wow factor, some analysts are warning
that Apple is becoming too insular -- creating its own closed environment,
rather than making products that can work on a number of devices, as Google
is.
"Will Apple's insistence on maintaining
end-to-end control, on trying to shoot the moon by owning every aspect of
the mobile computing business, doom it to failure against a competitor
hell-bent on achieving software ubiquity?" tech analyst and blogger Henry
Blodget wrote Tuesday.
Excited techies, meanwhile, are calling
this year's Consumer Electronics Show the "3-D show."
And unlike the '50s fad, 3-D is here to
stay, said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation,
which released "Monsters vs. Aliens" in 3-D last year. Last year, 3-D put
down a footprint in theaters; this year, Katzenberg said, it's coming to
your home.
Continued in article
"We Are All Gadget Nerds Now," by David Carr, The New York Times,
January 6, 2010 ---
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/we-are-all-gadget-nerds-now/?hp
"Google's Nexus One: Can Openness
Win?" by Peter Merholz, The Harvard Business Review Blog, January 8,
2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/merholz/2010/01/googles-nexus-one-can-openness.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
Walt
Mossberg Video Reviews of New Devices
Google's Nexus One
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_One
Video: The Wall Street Journal Technology Editor Walt Mossberg Reviews the
Nexus One (Google Smartphone) ---
http://online.wsj.com/video/mossberg-google-nexus-one-heats-up-phone-space/CC1A608F-7C23-4886-8F1F-4A312DEAF344.html
Cloud Computing ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
The Litl ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litl
Video: The Wall Street Journal Technology Editor Walt Mossberg Reviews The Litl
(cloud computer) ---
The somewhat negative review by Walt video follows the above Nexus One video.
Other device reviews follow in succession: New Bayer diabetic test meter)
the Barnes & Noble Nook Book Reader, .Intel e-Reader for
sight-impaired readers, . . . . .
http://online.wsj.com/video/mossberg-google-nexus-one-heats-up-phone-space/CC1A608F-7C23-4886-8F1F-4A312DEAF344.html
Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on Tricks and Tools of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
AccountingWeb Ethics Cases ---
Click Here
http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/vuchnich/profit-matters/friday-accounting-ethics-case-proper-use-grant-funding
Note the "Previous entries" links.
Question
What single attribute had the most consensus in building a college leadership
team?
Small-College Presidents Hear Tips on Building a Leadership Team
A gathering here this week sponsored by the Council of
Independent Colleges was a chance for the 355 small-college presidents who
attended to share tips and exchange success stories as well as concerns. The
association's Presidents Institute is the largest meeting in the country of
college presidents all year. One of the most well-attended and candid sessions
here concerned how presidents should approach the difficult task of forming a
senior leadership team—the vice presidents and other top officers who make up a
president's cabinet.
Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 5, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Small-College-Presidents-Hear/63429/
"Recommended by HBR Contributors: January/February 2010,"
by Rasika Welankiwar, Harvard Business Review Blog, January 8, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/recommended/2010/01/recommended-by-hbr-contributor.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
While putting together the January-February issue, we
asked some of our authors and bloggers what they had read — a recent item or
an old gem — that they would recommend to our readers. Here's what they
said:
The Enlightened Eye
by Elliot W. Eisner (Prentice Hall, 1991)
A classic book by Stanford education professor Elliot W. Eisner is emerging
as a must-read. He argues that little of value can be learned about the
student experience, or how to improve it, from quantitative research. The
same applies to business customers. Instead, he encourages the development
of an "enlightened eye" to observe and interpret rigorously without being
confined to the narrow strictures of statistically significant quantitative
tests and measures. To Eisner, qualitative research is the only tool for
deeply understanding the complicated world of people in organizations.
–Roger Martin, author of
The Age of Customer Capitalism
Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow (Penguin, 2004)
I'm plowing my way through various biographies of the Founding Fathers. This
started when we were having such a horrible time in 2006, and I needed to be
reminded that bad situations sometimes turn out all right. That the U.S.
came into existence — with a third of George Washington's troops down to
smallpox and going against the greatest power at the time — is one of those
impossible things that now we see was inevitable. I'm a Hamilton person
myself, and Chernow's book on him is great. Hamilton had a lot of downsides.
He wanted a king. But I think he was audacious in the way he went about
things.
–Condoleezza Rice,
interviewed by HBR
Crude World
by Peter Maass (Knopf, 2009)
With this book, New York Times Magazine writer Peter Maass adds his voice to
others predicting severe economic dislocation after global oil production
passes its peak and enters an inevitable decline — a view of the future that
doesn't sit well with the oil industry. Maass, author of a 1996 book about
the Bosnian conflict, writes beautifully about this ugly stuff: "[Oil] is a
commodity that is extracted, refined, shipped and poured into your gas tank
with few people seeing it. It has no voice, body, army or dogma of its own.
It is invisible most of the time, but, like gravity, it influences
everything we do."
–Rob Toker, coauthor (with Alex Rau and Joanne Howard) of
Can Technology Really Save Us from Climate Change?
Love 'Em or Lose 'Em
by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans (Berrett-Koehler, 1999)
When I was a manager back home in the U.S., I read this book to get ideas
about recognition and reward. Later, as a cross-cultural coach, I bought a
stack of copies for my clients, mainly Europeans managing Americans. They
found it a revelation.
Books on cross-cultural management often don't provide the
same level of psychological insight as when authors write for their own
country. Love 'Em or Lose 'Em reminds the U.S. how extreme its business
culture can be, but also — crucially — helps outsiders to navigate it.
–Erin Meyer, coauthor (with Elisabeth Yi Shen) of
China Myths, China Facts
Revolution in a Bottle
by Tom Szaky (Portfolio, 2009)
Szaky has written the best book on entrepreneurship I've read. This is not
the story of a huge exit, or wow technology, or big money from top-tier VCs.
It's the witty, funny, poignant tale of a young Princeton dropout who finds
himself up to his elbows in worm poop turned fertilizer on the way to
building a pioneering "upcycling" company, TerraCycle. This is how
entrepreneurship happens in the real world: Scrappy, resourceful, hustling,
flexible, idealistic, smart people take on big challenges by thinking
differently, dealing innovatively with crises (bullets whizzing through the
Newark office), and learning as they go.
–Daniel Isenberg,
HBR author and blogger
Before
reading this module you may want to read about Governmental Accounting at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmental_accounting
"Don't
Like the Numbers? Change 'Em If a CEO issued the kind of distorted figures put
out by politicians and scientists, he'd wind up in prison," by Stanford
Economics Professor Michael J. Boskin, The Wall Street Journal, January
13, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704586504574654261655183416.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Politicians and scientists who don't like what their data show lately have
simply taken to changing the numbers. They believe that their end—socialism,
global climate regulation, health-care legislation, repudiating debt
commitments, la gloire française—justifies throwing out even minimum standards
of accuracy. It appears that no numbers are immune: not GDP, not inflation, not
budget, not job or cost estimates, and certainly not temperature. A CEO or CFO
issuing such massaged numbers would land in jail.
The late economist Paul Samuelson called the national income accounts that
measure real GDP and inflation "one of the greatest achievements of the
twentieth century." Yet politicians from Europe to South America are now
clamoring for alternatives that make them look better.
A commission appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggests heavily
weighting "stability" indicators such as "security" and "equality" when
calculating GDP. And voilà!—France outperforms the U.S., despite the fact that
its per capita income is 30% lower. Nobel laureate Ed Prescott called this
disparity the difference between "prosperity and depression" in a 2002 paper—and
attributed it entirely to France's higher taxes.
With Venezuela in recession by conventional GDP measures, President Hugo Chávez
declared the GDP to be a capitalist plot. He wants a new, socialist-friendly way
to measure the economy. Maybe East Germans were better off than their cousins in
the West when the Berlin Wall fell; starving North Koreans are really better off
than their relatives in South Korea; the 300 million Chinese lifted out of
abject poverty in the last three decades were better off under Mao; and all
those Cubans risking their lives fleeing to Florida on dinky boats are loco.
In Argentina, President Néstor Kirchner didn't like the political and budget
hits from high inflation. After a politicized personnel purge in 2002, he
changed the inflation measures. Conveniently, the new numbers showed lower
inflation and therefore lower interest payments on the government's
inflation-linked bonds. Investor and public confidence in the objectivity of the
inflation statistics evaporated. His wife and successor Cristina Kirchner is now
trying to grab the central bank's reserves to pay for the country's debt.
America has not been immune from this dangerous numbers game. Every president is
guilty of spinning unpleasant statistics. President Richard Nixon even thought
there was a conspiracy against him at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But
President Barack Obama has taken it to a new level. His laudable attempt at
transparency in counting the number of jobs "created or saved" by the stimulus
bill has degenerated into farce and was just junked this week.
The administration has introduced the new notion of "jobs saved" to take credit
where none was ever taken before. It seems continually to confuse gross and net
numbers. For example, it misses the jobs lost or diverted by the fiscal
stimulus. And along with the congressional leadership it hypes the number of
"green jobs" likely to be created from the explosion of spending, subsidies,
loans and mandates, while ignoring the job losses caused by its taxes, debt,
regulations and diktats.
The president and his advisers—their credibility already reeling from
exaggeration (the stimulus bill will limit unemployment to 8%) and reneged
campaign promises (we'll go through the budget "line-by-line")—consistently
imply that their new proposed regulation is a free lunch. When the radical
attempt to regulate energy and the environment with the deeply flawed
cap-and-trade bill is confronted with economic reality, instead of honestly
debating the trade-offs they confidently pronounce that it boosts the economy.
They refuse to admit that it simply boosts favored sectors and firms at the
expense of everyone else.
Rabid environmentalists have descended into a separate reality where only green
counts. It's gotten so bad that the head of the California Air Resources Board,
Mary Nichols, announced this past fall that costly new carbon regulations would
boost the economy shortly after she was told by eight of the state's most
respected economists that they were certain these new rules would damage the
economy. The next day, her own economic consultant, Harvard's Robert Stavis,
denounced her statement as a blatant distortion.
Scientists are expected to make sure their findings are replicable, to make the
data available, and to encourage the search for new theories and data that may
overturn the current consensus. This is what Galileo, Darwin and Einstein—among
the most celebrated scientists of all time—did. But some climate researchers,
most notably at the University of East Anglia, attempted to hide or delete
temperature data when that data didn't show recent rapid warming. They quietly
suppressed and replaced the numbers, and then attempted to squelch publication
of studies coming to different conclusions.
The Obama administration claims a dubious "Keynesian" multiplier of 1.5 to feed
the Democrats' thirst for big spending. The administration's idea is that
virtually all their spending creates jobs for unemployed people and that
additional rounds of spending create still more—raising income by $1.50 for each
dollar of government spending. Economists differ on such multipliers, with many
leading figures pegging them at well under 1.0 as the government spending in
part replaces private spending and jobs. But all agree that every dollar of
spending requires a present value of a dollar of future taxes, which distorts
decisions to work, save, and invest and raises the cost of the dollar of
spending to well over a dollar. Thus, only spending with large societal benefits
is justified, a criterion unlikely to be met by much current spending (perusing
the projects on recovery.gov doesn't inspire confidence).
Even more blatant is the numbers game being used to justify health-insurance
reform legislation, which claims to greatly expand coverage, decrease
health-insurance costs, and reduce the deficit. That magic flows easily from
counting 10 years of dubious Medicare "savings" and tax hikes, but only six
years of spending; assuming large cuts in doctor reimbursements that later will
be cancelled; and making the states (other than Sen. Ben Nelson's Nebraska) pay
a big share of the cost by expanding Medicaid eligibility. The Medicare
"savings" and payroll tax hikes are counted twice—first to help pay for expanded
coverage, and then to claim to extend the life of Medicare.
One piece of good news: The public isn't believing much of this out-of-control
spin. Large majorities believe the health-care legislation will raise their
insurance costs and increase the budget deficit. Most Americans are highly
skeptical of the claims of climate extremists. And they have a more realistic
reaction to the extraordinary deterioration in our public finances than do the
president and Congress.
As a society and as individuals, we need to make difficult, even wrenching
choices, often with grave consequences. To base those decisions on highly
misleading, biased, and even manufactured numbers is not just wrong, but
dangerous.
Squandering their credibility with these numbers games will only make it more
difficult for our elected leaders to enlist support for difficult decisions from
a public increasingly inclined to disbelieve them.
Mr. Boskin
is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President
George H.W. Bush
Bob
Jensen's threads on The Sad State of Governmental Accounting and Accountability
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
The Most
Criminal Class is Writing the Laws ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers
Video:
Fora.Tv on Institutional Corruption & The Economy Of Influence
---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-foratv-on-institutional-corruption-the-economy-of-influence/
Why single
out capitalism for immorality and ethics misbehavior?
Making capitalism ethical is a tough task – and possibly a hopeless one.
Prem Sikka (see below)
The
global code of conduct of Ernst & Young,
another global accountancy firm, claims that "no client or external relationship
is more important than the ethics, integrity and reputation of Ernst & Young".
Partners and former partners of the firm have also been found
guilty of promoting tax evasion.
Prem Sikka (see below)
Jensen
Comment
Yeah right Prem, as if making the public sector and socialism ethical is an
easier task. The least ethical nations where bribery, crime, and immorality are
the worst are likely to be the more government (dictator) controlled and lower
on the capitalism scale. And in the so-called capitalist nations, the lowest
ethics are more apt to be found in the public sector that works hand in hand
with bribes from large and small businesses.
Rotten
Fraud in General ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
Rotten Fraud in the Public Sector (The Most Criminal Class Writes the Laws) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop
Congress is our only native criminal class.
Mark Twain ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
Why should
members of Congress be allowed to profit from insider trading?
Amid broad congressional concern about ethics scandals, some lawmakers are
poised to expand the battle for reform: They want to enact legislation that
would prohibit members of Congress and their aides from trading stocks based on
nonpublic information gathered on Capitol Hill. Two Democrat lawmakers plan to
introduce today a bill that would block trading on such inside information.
Current securities law and congressional ethics rules don't prohibit lawmakers
or their staff members from buying and selling securities based on information
learned in the halls of Congress.
Brody Mullins, "Bill Seeks to Ban Insider Trading By Lawmakers and Their Aides,"
The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2006; Page A1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114351554851509761.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
The
Culture of Corruption Runs Deep and Wide in Both U.S. Political Parties: Few if
any are uncorrupted
Committee members have shown no appetite for
taking up all those cases and are considering an amnesty for reporting
violations, although not for serious matters such as accepting a trip from a
lobbyist, which House rules forbid. The data firm PoliticalMoneyLine calculates
that members of Congress have received more than $18 million in travel from
private organizations in the past five years, with Democrats taking 3,458 trips
and Republicans taking 2,666. . . But of course, there are those who deem the
American People dumb as stones and will approach this bi-partisan scandal
accordingly. Enter Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi, complete with talking points
for her minion, that are sure to come back and bite her .... “House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) filed delinquent reports Friday for three trips
she accepted from outside sponsors that were worth $8,580 and occurred as long
as seven years ago, according to copies of the documents.
Bob Parks, "Will Nancy Pelosi's Words Come Back to Bite Her?" The National
Ledger, January 6, 2006 ---
http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_27262498.shtml
And when
they aren't stealing directly, lawmakers are caving in to lobbying crooks
Drivers can send their thank-you notes to Capitol
Hill, which created the conditions for this mess last summer with its latest
energy bill. That legislation contained a sop to Midwest corn farmers in the
form of a huge new ethanol mandate that began this year and requires drivers to
consume 7.5 billion gallons a year by 2012. At the same time, Congress refused
to include liability protection for producers of MTBE, a rival oxygen
fuel-additive that has become a tort lawyer target. So MTBE makers are pulling
out, ethanol makers can't make up the difference quickly enough, and gas
supplies are getting squeezed.
"The Gasoline Follies," The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2006; Page
A20 ---
Click Here
Once again, the power of pork to sustain incumbents gets its best demonstration
in the person of John Murtha (D-PA). The acknowledged king of earmarks in the
House gains the attention of the New York Times editorial board today, which
notes the cozy and lucrative relationship between more than two dozen
contractors in Murtha's district and the hundreds of millions of dollars in pork
he provided them. It also highlights what roughly amounts to a commission on the
sale of Murtha's power as an appropriator: Mr. Murtha led all House members this
year, securing $162 million in district favors, according to the watchdog group
Taxpayers for Common Sense. ... In 1991, Mr. Murtha used a $5 million earmark to
create the National Defense Center for Environmental Excellence in Johnstown to
develop anti-pollution technology for the military. Since then, it has garnered
more than $670 million in contracts and earmarks. Meanwhile it is managed by
another contractor Mr. Murtha helped create, Concurrent Technologies, a research
operation that somehow was allowed to be set up as a tax-exempt charity,
according to The Washington Post. Thanks to Mr. Murtha, Concurrent has boomed;
the annual salary for its top three executives averages $462,000.
Edward Morrissey, Captain's Quarters, January 14, 2008 ---
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/016617.php
The motto of Judicial Watch is "Because no one is above the law". To this end,
Judicial Watch uses the open records or freedom of information laws and other
tools to investigate and uncover misconduct by government officials and
litigation to hold to account politicians and public officials who engage in
corrupt activities.
Judicial Watch ---
http://www.judicialwatch.org/
Judicial
Watch Announces List of Washington's
"Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians" for 2009 ---
http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2009/dec/judicial-watch-announces-list-washington-s-ten-most-wanted-corrupt-politicians-2009
"A Low,
Dishonest Decade: The press and politicians were asleep at the switch.,"
The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703478704574612013922050326.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Stock-market indices are not much good as yardsticks of social progress, but as
another low, dishonest decade expires let us note that, on 2000s first day of
trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 11357 while the Nasdaq
Composite Index stood at 4131, both substantially higher than where they are
today. The Nasdaq went on to hit 5000 before collapsing with the dot-com bubble,
the first great Wall Street disaster of this unhappy decade. The Dow got north
of 14000 before the real-estate bubble imploded.
And it was supposed to have been such an awesome time, too! Back in the late
'90s, in the crescendo of the Internet boom, pundit and publicist alike assured
us that the future was to be a democratized, prosperous place. Hierarchies would
collapse, they told us; the individual was to be empowered; freed-up markets
were to be the common man's best buddy.
Such clever hopes they were. As a reasonable anticipation of what was to come
they meant nothing. But they served to unify the decade's disasters, many of
which came to us festooned with the flags of this bogus idealism.
Before "Enron" became synonymous with shattered 401(k)s and man-made electrical
shortages, the public knew it as a champion of electricity deregulation—a
freedom fighter! It was supposed to be that most exalted of corporate creatures,
a "market maker"; its "capacity for revolution" was hymned by management
theorists; and its TV commercials depicted its operations as an extension of
humanity's quest for emancipation.
Similarly, both Bank of America and Citibank, before being recognized as "too
big to fail," had populist histories of which their admirers made much.
Citibank's long struggle against the Glass-Steagall Act was even supposed to be
evidence of its hostility to banking's aristocratic culture, an amusing image to
recollect when reading about the $100 million pay reportedly pocketed by one
Citi trader in 2008.
The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal showed us the same dynamics at work in
Washington. Here was an apparent believer in markets, working to keep garment
factories in Saipan humming without federal interference and saluted for it in
an op-ed in the Saipan Tribune as "Our freedom fighter in D.C."
But the preposterous populism is only one part of the equation; just as
important was our failure to see through the ruse, to understand how our country
was being disfigured.
Ensuring that the public failed to get it was the common theme of at least three
of the decade's signature foul-ups: the hyping of various Internet stock issues
by Wall Street analysts, the accounting scandals of 2002, and the triple-A
ratings given to mortgage-backed securities.
The grand, overarching theme of the Bush administration—the big idea that
informed so many of its sordid episodes—was the same anti-supervisory impulse
applied to the public sector: regulators sabotaged and their agencies turned
over to the regulated.
The public was left to read the headlines and ponder the unthinkable: Could our
leaders really have pushed us into an unnecessary war? Is the republic really
dividing itself into an immensely wealthy class of Wall Street bonus-winners and
everybody else? And surely nobody outside of the movies really has the political
clout to write themselves a $700 billion bailout.
What made the oughts so awful, above all, was the failure of our critical
faculties. The problem was not so much that newspapers were dying, to mention
one of the lesser catastrophes of these awful times, but that newspapers failed
to do their job in the first place, to scrutinize the myths of the day in a way
that might have prevented catastrophes like the financial crisis or the Iraq
war.
The folly went beyond the media, though. Recently I came across a 2005 pamphlet
written by historian Rick Perlstein berating the big thinkers of the Democratic
Party for their poll-driven failure to stick to their party's historic theme of
economic populism. I was struck by the evidence Mr. Perlstein adduced in the
course of his argument. As he tells the story, leading Democratic pollsters
found plenty of evidence that the American public distrusts corporate power; and
yet they regularly advised Democrats to steer in the opposite direction, to
distance themselves from what one pollster called "outdated appeals to class
grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy."
This was not a party that was well-prepared for the job of iconoclasm that has
befallen it. And as the new bunch muddle onward—bailing out the large banks but
(still) not subjecting them to new regulatory oversight, passing a health-care
reform that seems (among other, better things) to guarantee private insurers
eternal profits—one fears they are merely presenting their own ample backsides
to an embittered electorate for kicking.
"Taxpayers
distrustful of government financial reporting," AccountingWeb,
February 22, 2008 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=104680
The federal government is failing to meet the financial reporting needs of
taxpayers, falling short of expectations, and creating a problem with trust,
according to survey findings released by the Association of Government
Accountants (AGA). The survey, Public Attitudes to Government Accountability and
Transparency 2008, measured attitudes and opinions towards government financial
management and accountability to taxpayers. The survey established an
expectations gap between what taxpayers expect and what they get, finding that
the public at large overwhelmingly believes that government has the obligation
to report and explain how it generates and spends its money, but that that it is
failing to meet expectations in any area included in the survey.
The survey further found that taxpayers consider governments at the federal,
state, and local levels to be significantly under-delivering in terms of
practicing open, honest spending. Across all levels of government, those
surveyed held "being open and honest in spending practices" vitally important,
but felt that government performance was poor in this area. Those surveyed also
considered government performance to be poor in terms of being "responsible to
the public for its spending." This is compounded by perceived poor performance
in providing understandable and timely financial management information.
The survey shows:
The
American public is most dissatisfied with government financial management
information disseminated by the federal government. Seventy-two percent say that
it is extremely or very important to receive this information from the federal
government, but only 5 percent are extremely or very satisfied with what they
receive.
Seventy-three percent of Americans believe that it is extremely or very
important for the federal government to be open and honest in its spending
practices, yet only 5 percent say they are meeting these expectations.
Seventy-one percent of those who receive financial management information from
the government or believe it is important to receive it, say they would use the
information to influence their vote.
Relmond Van Daniker, Executive Director at AGA, said, "We commissioned this
survey to shed some light on the way the public perceives those issues relating
to government financial accountability and transparency that are important to
our members. Nobody is pretending that the figures are a shock, but we are glad
to have established a benchmark against which we can track progress in years to
come."
He continued, "AGA members working in government at all levels are in the very
forefront of the fight to increase levels of government accountability and
transparency. We believe that the traditional methods of communicating
government financial information -- through reams of audited financial
statements that have little relevance to the taxpayer -- must be supplemented by
government financial reporting that expresses complex financial details in an
understandable form. Our members are committed to taking these concepts
forward."
Justin Greeves, who led the team at Harris Interactive that fielded the survey
for the AGA, said, "The survey results include some extremely stark, unambiguous
findings. Public levels of dissatisfaction and distrust of government spending
practices came through loud and clear, across every geography, demographic
group, and political ideology. Worthy of special note, perhaps, is a 67
percentage point gap between what taxpayers expect from government and what they
receive. These are significant findings that I hope government and the public
find useful."
This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive
on behalf of the Association of Government Accountants between January 4 and 8,
2008 among 1,652 adults aged 18 or over. Results were weighted as needed for
age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region, and household income. Propensity
score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be
online. No estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.
You can
read the
Survey Report, including a full
methodology and associated commentary.
"The
Government Is Wasting Your Tax Dollars! How Uncle Sam spends nearly $1 trillion
of your money each year,"
by Ryan
Grim with Joseph K. Vetter, Readers Digest, January 2008, pp. 86-99 ---
http://www.rd.com/content/the-government-is-wasting-your-tax-dollars/4/
1. Taxes:
Cheating Shows. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that the annual net tax
gap—the difference between what's owed and what's collected—is $290 billion,
more than double the average yearly sum spent on the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
About $59 billion of that figure results from the underreporting and
underpayment of employment taxes. Our broken system of immigration is another
concern, with nearly eight million undocumented workers having a
less-than-stellar relationship with the IRS. Getting more of them on the books
could certainly help narrow that tax gap.
Going after the deadbeats would seem like an obvious move. Unfortunately, the
IRS doesn't have the resources to adequately pursue big offenders and their
high-powered tax attorneys. "The IRS is outgunned," says Walker, "especially
when dealing with multinational corporations with offshore headquarters."
Another group that costs taxpayers billions: hedge fund and private equity
managers. Many of these moguls make vast "incomes" yet pay taxes on a portion of
those earnings at the paltry 15 percent capital gains rate, instead of the
higher income tax rate. By some estimates, this loophole costs taxpayers more
than $2.5 billion a year.
Oil companies are getting a nice deal too. The country hands them more than $2
billion a year in tax breaks. Says Walker, "Some of the sweetheart deals that
were negotiated for drilling rights on public lands don't pass the straight-face
test, especially given current crude oil prices." And Big Oil isn't alone.
Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that corporations reap more than $123 billion
a year in special tax breaks. Cut this in half and we could save about $60
billion.
The Tab* Tax Shortfall: $290 billion (uncollected taxes) + $2.5 billion
(undertaxed high rollers) + $60 billion (unwarranted tax breaks) Starting Tab:
$352.5 billion
2. Healthy Fixes.
Medicare and Medicaid, which cover elderly and low-income patients respectively,
eat up a growing portion of the federal budget. Investigations by Sen. Tom
Coburn (R-OK) point to as much as $60 billion a year in fraud, waste and
overpayments between the two programs. And Coburn is likely underestimating the
problem.
The U.S. spends more than $400 per person on health care administration costs
and insurance -- six times more than other industrialized nations.
That's because a 2003 Dartmouth Medical School study found that up to 30 percent
of the $2 trillion spent in this country on medical care each year—including
what's spent on Medicare and Medicaid—is wasted. And with the combined tab for
those programs rising to some $665 billion this year, cutting costs by a
conservative 15 percent could save taxpayers about $100 billion. Yet, rather
than moving to trim fat, the government continues such questionable practices as
paying private insurance companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans an
average of 12 percent more per patient than traditional Medicare
fee-for-service. Congress is trying to close this loophole, and doing so could
save $15 billion per year, on average, according to the Congressional Budget
Office.
Another money-wasting bright idea was to create a giant class of middlemen:
Private bureaucrats who administer the Medicare drug program are monitored by
federal bureaucrats—and the public pays for both. An October report by the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform estimated that this setup costs the
government $10 billion per year in unnecessary administrative expenses and
higher drug prices.
The Tab* Wasteful Health Spending: $60 billion (fraud, waste, overpayments) +
$100 billion (modest 15 percent cost reduction) + $15 billion (closing the 12
percent loophole) + $10 billion (unnecessary Medicare administrative and drug
costs) Total $185 billion Running Tab: $352.5 billion +$185 billion = $537.5
billion
3. Military Mad Money.
You'd think it would be hard to simply lose massive amounts of money, but given
the lack of transparency and accountability, it's no wonder that eight of the
Department of Defense's functions, including weapons procurement, have been
deemed high risk by the GAO. That means there's a high probability that
money—"tens of billions," according to Walker—will go missing or be otherwise
wasted.
The DOD routinely hands out no-bid and cost-plus contracts, under which
contractors get reimbursed for their costs plus a certain percentage of the
contract figure. Such deals don't help hold down spending in the annual military
budget of about $500 billion. That sum is roughly equal to the combined defense
spending of the rest of the world's countries. It's also comparable, adjusted
for inflation, with our largest Cold War-era defense budget. Maybe that's why
billions of dollars are still being spent on high-cost weapons designed to
counter Cold War-era threats, even though today's enemy is armed with cell
phones and IEDs. (And that $500 billion doesn't include the billions to be spent
this year in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those funds demand scrutiny, too, according
to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, who says, "One in six federal tax dollars sent to
rebuild Iraq has been wasted.")
Meanwhile, the Pentagon admits it simply can't account for more than $1
trillion. Little wonder, since the DOD hasn't been fully audited in years.
Hoping to change that, Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation is pushing
Congress to add audit provisions to the next defense budget.
If wasteful spending equaling 10 percent of all spending were rooted out, that
would free up some $50 billion. And if Congress cut spending on unnecessary
weapons and cracked down harder on fraud, we could save tens of billions more.
The Tab* Wasteful military spending: $100 billion (waste, fraud, unnecessary
weapons) Running Tab: $537.5 billion + $100 billion = $637.5 billion
4. Bad Seeds.
The controversial U.S. farm subsidy program, part of which pays farmers not to
grow crops, has become a giant welfare program for the rich, one that cost
taxpayers nearly $20 billion last year.
Two of the best-known offenders: Kenneth Lay, the now-deceased Enron CEO, who
got $23,326 for conservation land in Missouri from 1995 to 2005, and mogul Ted
Turner, who got $590,823 for farms in four states during the same period. A Cato
Institute study found that in 2005, two-thirds of the subsidies went to the
richest 10 percent of recipients, many of whom live in New York City. Not only
do these "farmers" get money straight from the government, they also often get
local tax breaks, since their property is zoned as agricultural land. The
subsidies raise prices for consumers, hurt third world farmers who can't
compete, and are attacked in international courts as unfair trade.
The Tab* Wasteful farm subsidies: $20 billion Running Tab: $637.5 billion + $20
billion = $657.5 billion
5. Capital Waste.
While there's plenty of ongoing annual operating waste, there's also a special
kind of profligacy—call it capital waste—that pops up year after year. This is
shoddy spending on big-ticket items that don't pan out. While what's being
bought changes from year to year, you can be sure there will always be some
costly items that aren't worth what the government pays for them.
Take this recent example: Since September 11, 2001, Congress has spent more than
$4 billion to upgrade the Coast Guard's fleet. Today the service has fewer ships
than it did before that money was spent, what 60 Minutes called "a fiasco that
has set new standards for incompetence." Then there's the Future Imagery
Architecture spy satellite program. As The New York Times recently reported, the
technology flopped and the program was killed—but not before costing $4 billion.
Or consider the FBI's infamous Trilogy computer upgrade: Its final stage was
scrapped after a $170 million investment. Or the almost $1 billion the Federal
Emergency Management Agency has wasted on unusable housing. The list goes on.
The Tab* Wasteful Capital Spending: $30 billion Running Tab: $657.5 billion +
$30 billion = $687.5 billion
6. Fraud and Stupidity.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wants the Social Security Administration to better
monitor the veracity of people drawing disability payments from its $100 billion
pot. By one estimate, roughly $1 billion is wasted each year in overpayments to
people who work and earn more than the program's rules allow.
The federal Food Stamp Program gets ripped off too. Studies have shown that
almost 5 percent, or more than $1 billion, of the payments made to people in the
$30 billion program are in excess of what they should receive.
One person received $105,000 in excess disability payments over seven years.
There are plenty of other examples. Senator Coburn estimates that the feds own
unused properties worth $18 billion and pay out billions more annually to
maintain them. Guess it's simpler for bureaucrats to keep paying for the
property than to go to the trouble of selling it.
The Tab* General Fraud and Stupidity: $2 billion (disability and food stamp
overpayment) Running Tab: $687.5 billion + $2 billion = $689.5 billion
7. Pork Sausage.
Congress doled out $29 billion in so-called earmarks—aka funds for legislators'
pet projects—in 2006, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. That's
three times the amount spent in 1999. Congress loves to deride this kind of
spending, but lawmakers won't hesitate to turn around and drop $500,000 on a
ballpark in Billings, Montana.
The most infamous earmark is surely the "bridge to nowhere"—a span that would
have connected Ketchikan, Alaska, to nearby Gravina Island—at a cost of more
than $220 million. After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Senator Coburn
tried to redirect that money to repair the city's Twin Span Bridge. He failed
when lawmakers on both sides of the aisle got behind the Alaska pork. (That
money is now going to other projects in Alaska.) Meanwhile, this kind of
spending continues at a time when our country's crumbling infrastructure—the
bursting dams, exploding water pipes and collapsing bridges—could really use
some investment. Cutting two-thirds of the $29 billion would be a good start.
The Tab* Pork Barrel Spending: $20 billion Running Tab: $689.5 billion + $20
billion = $709.5 billion
8. Welfare Kings.
Corporate welfare is an easy thing for politicians to bark at, but it seems it's
hard to bite the hand that feeds you. How else to explain why corporate welfare
is on the rise? A Cato Institute report found that in 2006, corporations
received $92 billion (including some in the form of those farm subsidies) to do
what they do anyway—research, market and develop products. The recipients
included plenty of names from the Fortune 500, among them IBM, GE, Xerox, Dow
Chemical, Ford Motor Company, DuPont and Johnson & Johnson.
The Tab* Corporate Welfare: $50 billion Running Tab: $709.5 billion + $50
billion = $759.5 billion
9. Been There,
Done That. The Rural Electrification Administration, created during the New
Deal, was an example of government at its finest—stepping in to do something the
private sector couldn't. Today, renamed the Rural Utilities Service, it's an
example of a government that doesn't know how to end a program. "We established
an entity to electrify rural America. Mission accomplished. But the entity's
still there," says Walker. "We ought to celebrate success and get out of the
business."
In a 2007 analysis, the Heritage Foundation found that hundreds of programs
overlap to accomplish just a few goals. Ending programs that have met their
goals and eliminating redundant programs could comfortably save taxpayers $30
billion a year.
The Tab* Obsolete, Redundant Programs: $30 billion Running Tab: $759.5 billion +
$30 billion = $789.5 billion
10. Living on Credit.
Here's the capper: Years of wasteful spending have put us in such a deep hole,
we must squander even more to pay the interest on that debt. In 2007, the
federal government carried a debt of $9 trillion and blew $252 billion in
interest. Yes, we understand the federal government needs to carry a small debt
for the Federal Reserve Bank to operate. But "small" isn't how we would describe
three times the nation's annual budget. We need to stop paying so much in
interest (and we think cutting $194 billion is a good target). Instead we're
digging ourselves deeper: Congress had to raise the federal debt limit last
September from $8.965 trillion to almost $10 trillion or the country would have
been at legal risk of default. If that's not a wake-up call to get spending
under control, we don't know what is.
The Tab* Interest on National Debt: $194 billion Final Tab: $789.5 billion +
$194 billion = $983.5 billion
What YOU Can Do Many believe our system is inherently broken. We think it can be
fixed. As citizens and voters, we have to set a new agenda before the
Presidential election. There are three things we need in order to prevent
wasteful spending, according to the GAO's David Walker:
• Incentives for people to do the right thing.
• Transparency so we can tell if they've done the right thing.
• Accountability if they do the wrong thing.
Two out of three won't solve our problems.
So how do we make it happen? Demand it of our elected officials. If they fail to
listen, then we turn them out of office. With its approval rating hovering
around 11 percent in some polls, Congress might just start paying attention.
Start by writing to your Representatives. Talk to your family, friends and
neighbors, and share this article. It's in everybody's interest.
Bob
Jensen's threads on The Sad State of Governmental Accounting and Accountability
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
The Most
Criminal Class is Writing the Laws ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers
"How to Guard Against Stimulus Fraud: Based on past experience,
thieves may rip off the taxpayers for $100 billion," by Daniel J. Castleman,
The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703948504574648331267709784.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
The Obama administration—and state and local
governments—should brace themselves for fraud on an Olympic scale as
hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars continue to pour into job creation
efforts.
Where there are government handouts, fraud, waste
and abuse are rarely far behind. The sheer scale of the first and expected
second stimulus packages combined with the multitiered distribution
channel—from Washington to the states to community agencies to contractors
and finally to workers—are simply irresistible catnip to con men and
thieves.
There are already warning signs. The Department of
Energy's inspector general said in a report in December that staffing
shortages and other internal weaknesses all but guarantee that at least some
of the agency's $37 billion economic-stimulus funds will be misused. A
tenfold increase in funding for an obscure federal program that installs
insulation in homes has state attorneys general quietly admitting there is
little hope of keeping track of the money.
While I was in charge of investigations at the
Manhattan District Attorney's office, we brought case after case where
kickbacks, bid-rigging, false invoicing schemes and outright theft routinely
amounted to a tenth of the contract value. This was true in industries as
diverse as the maintenance of luxury co-ops and condos, interior
construction and renovation of office buildings, court construction
projects, dormitory construction projects, even the distribution of copy
paper. In one insurance fraud case, the schemers actually referred to
themselves as the "Ten Percenters."
Based on past experience, the cost of fraud
involving federal government stimulus outlays of more than $850 billion and
climbing could easily reach $100 billion. Who will prevent this? Probably no
one, particularly at the state and local level.
New York, for instance, has an aggressive inspector
general's office, with experienced and dedicated professionals. But, it is
already woefully understaffed—with a head count of only 62 people—to police
the state's already existing agencies and programs. There is simply no way
that office can effectively scrutinize the influx of $31 billion in state
stimulus money.
There is a solution however, which is to set aside
a small percentage of the money distributed to fund fraud prevention and
detection programs. This will ensure that states and municipalities can
protect projects from fraud without tapping already thinly stretched
resources.
Meaningful fraud prevention, detection and
investigation can be funded by setting aside no more than 2% of the stimulus
money received. For example, if a county is to receive $50 million for an
infrastructure project, $1 million should be set aside to fund antifraud
efforts; if it costs less, the remainder can be returned to the project's
budget.
While the most obvious option might be to simply
pump the fraud prevention funds into pre-existing law enforcement agencies,
that would be a mistake. Government agencies take too long to staff up and
rarely staff down.
A better idea is to tap the former government
prosecutors, regulators and detectives with experience in fraud
investigations now working in the private sector. If these resources can be
harnessed, effective watchdog programs can be put in place in a timely
manner. Competition between private-sector bidders will also lower the cost.
Some might object to providing a "windfall" to
private companies. Any such concern is misplaced. One should not look at the
2% spent, but rather the 8% potentially saved. Moreover, consider the
alternative: law enforcement agencies swamped trying to stem the tide of
corruption on a shoestring and a prayer.
There will always be individuals who will rip off
money meant for public projects. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and
Hurricane Katrina hundreds of people were prosecuted for trying to steal
relief funds. But the stimulus funding represents the kind of payday even
the most ambitious fraudster could never have imagined
To avoid a stimulus fraud Olympics that will be
impossible to clean up, it is better to spend a little now to save a lot
later. The savings could put honest people to work and fraudsters out of
business.
Mr. Castleman, a former chief assistant Manhattan district attorney,
is a managing director at FTI Consulting.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob
Jensen's threads on The Sad State of Governmental Accounting and Accountability
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
The Most
Criminal Class is Writing the Laws ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers
"On Eve of NCAA Meeting, College Sports Wrestles With Vexing Questions,"
by Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/On-Eve-of-NCAA-Meeting/63502/
What a difference a year makes.
When leaders of the nation's biggest athletics
programs last met as a group, one year ago, the scope of the economy's
malaise was still unknown. This week, as officials gather again for the
NCAA's annual meeting, in Atlanta, they do so under starkly different
circumstances.
Few athletics departments have escaped the
recession's chill: Midyear state budget cuts and a slowdown in key revenue
streams have combined to create a special kind of pain. To help balance
their budgets, some have eliminated teams, including such formerly
untouchable sports as football and baseball. Others have laid off,
furloughed, or frozen the pay of employees.
Yet the past year has done more than shake the
foundations of all but the wealthiest programs. It has also cast into sharp
relief some pressing—and familiar—questions about the financial
sustainability of big-time college sports. Meanwhile, tensions between
faculty and athletics departments that smoldered even during flush times
grew more heated as the budget situation worsened on many campuses.
For Cary Groth, athletic director at the University
of Nevada at Reno, the recession merely highlighted disparities between
well-off programs and those clamoring to keep up with them.
Revenue-distribution agreements that funnel larger payouts to the six major
athletic conferences, she believes, put programs like hers at a
disadvantage—and heighten temptations at some programs to mortgage the
future to keep up in the present.
"It's an issue of fairness," she told The Chronicle
last year. "What would it be like if you had 119 schools playing on common
ground?"
Troubled Times Last year began with layoffs in a
storied athletics program, at Stanford University, and ended with the
University of Texas's football coach, Mack Brown, passing the $5-million
compensation mark. In between those unlikely bookends was a steady drumbeat
of dire news as athletics departments labored to balance their books.
There were layoffs (at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, and Southern Methodist and Texas A&M Universities, to name a
few) and dozens of dropped teams (at the Universities of California at
Irvine, Maine, Massachusetts, Washington, and many more). At some colleges,
the difficult year further inflamed long-simmering budget woes, leading, in
one case, to a likely—and unusual—move to scale back from Division I to
Division III. Donors guarded their checkbooks (the University of Central
Florida saw a 20 percent decline in fund-raising) many stadiums and arenas
had vacant seats, and debt from costly capital projects bore down heavily as
revenue dried up.
Yet as some programs struggled, for the well-off,
it appeared to be business as usual.
The Southeastern Conference saw the first payouts
from a 15-year, $3-billion deal with CBS and ESPN. The University of
Michigan's athletics department posted a surplus of $9-million, while the
University of Florida increased its athletics budget by $6-million. There
were multimillion-dollar deals for marquee coaches like Mr. Brown and John
Calipari, who inked an eight-year, $32-million contract to coach the
University of Kentucky's men's basketball program. Ribbon-cuttings at
luxurious new facilities (the University of Oregon put the finishing touches
on a sparkling new academic center for athletes) and expansive plans to
build more (the University of Arizona announced it would spend $378-million
over the next 20 years on a dozen major sports projects) further threatened
competitive imbalances among programs.
Not surprisingly, big budgets for sports did not go
over well on some campuses, particularly those reeling from universitywide
retrenchment. Watchdog groups like the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate
Athletics, as well as faculty-led organizations, stepped up their protests.
One of the most vocal objections came from the
faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, where severe budget
cuts, coupled with a 32-percent tuition hike, have roiled the university
system. In October, faculty members at Berkeley approved a nonbinding
resolution to end university subsidies to athletics, which amounted to about
$8-million last year.
Looking For Answers As athletics officials head
into their annual meeting this week, they are unlikely to find solutions to
their financial woes, or to the broader questions that surround college
sports. NCAA rules can do many things—impose academic standards on
scholarship athletes, for instance—but they can't control the vast
commercial forces that, for better or worse, shape today's landscape of
big-time college sports.
Even the NCAA, of course, takes part in the
commercial side of college sports: The association is reportedly in early
talks with broadcasters over the possibility of expanding the men's
basketball tournament, a move that would potentially increase its revenue.
(The NCAA's current deal with CBS for broadcast rights to the tournament is
worth $6-billion.)
What officials will find this week is plenty of
debate and speculation. Scholars will weigh in on questions of college
sports' economic sustainability. College presidents will speak about calming
a fiscal storm they recently admitted to feeling "powerless" to control.
Workshops and panel discussions will offer practical tips on weathering the
recession and other challenges.
What athletics officials might long for the most,
though, is a map to tell them how to navigate the twists and turns ahead. In
Atlanta, at least, they'll find plenty of other weary travelers. But as for
that map? Don't count on it.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education's athletics controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation (Carnegie Foundation
for Excellence in Teaching) ---
Click Here
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/publications/educating-nurses-call-radical-transformation?utm_source=Carnegie+Foundation+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=dd5f60ad0f-Educating_Nurses_blast1_6_2010&utm_medium=email
Abstract: Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical
Transformation explores the strengths and weaknesses in nursing education
and the external challenges the profession faces. It identifies the most
effective practices for teaching nursing and persuasively argues that
nursing education must be remade. Indeed, the authors call for radical
advances in the pathways to nursing licensure and a radical new
understanding of the curriculum.
Based on extensive field research conducted at a
wide variety of nursing schools, and a national survey of teachers and
students administered in cooperation with the National League for Nursing (NLN),
the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) and the National
Student Nurses’ Association (NSNA), Educating Nurses offers recommendations
to realign and transform nursing education.
That Placebo Effect in Research: Dan Ariely on Tennis Shoes and Toilet
Paper
Dan Ariely is James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University
and is head of the eRationality research group at the
MIT Media Lab.
Dan Ariely ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely
Published
works
-
Ariely, Dan (2008).
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.
HarperCollins. pp. 304.
ISBN
9780061353239.
-
Try it, you'll like it: The influence of expectation, consumption, and
revelation on preferences for beer
-
Dishonesty in Everyday Life and Its Policy Implications
-
Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What They Pay
For
-
Tom Sawyer and the Construction of Value
-
Heyman,
James; Ariely, Dan (2004). "Effort
for Payment: A Tale of Two markets". Psychological Science
15 (11): 787-793(7).
http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/2markets.pdf.
-
Ariely, Dan; Wertenbroch, Klaus
(2002). "Procrastination,
Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment".
Psychological Science 13 (3): 219-224.
http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/deadlines.pdf.
-
Ariely, Dan (2001). "Seeing
sets: Representation by statistical properties". Psychological
Science 12 (2): 157-162.
http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/spot.pdf.
-
Ariely, Dan (2000). "Controlling
information flow: Effects on consumers' decision making and preference".
Journal of Consumer Research 27 (2): 233-248.
doi:10.1086/314322.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/314322.
-
Coherent Arbitrariness: Stable demand curves without stable preferences
-
Combining experiences over time: the effects of duration, intensity
changes and on-line measurements on retrospective pain evaluations
-
Ariely, Dan; Zauberman, Gal (2000). "On
the making of an experience: The effects of breaking and combining
experiences on their overall evaluation". Journal of Behavioral
Decision Making 13: 219-232.
http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/expseg.pdf.
"The Science Behind Exercise Footwear," by Dan Ariely, MIT's
Technology Review, January 5, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=355&bpid=24614&nlid=2647
A few weeks ago Reebok unveiled a walking shoe
purported to tone muscles to a greater extent than your average sneaker. All
you had to do was slip on a pair of EasyTone and the rest would take care of
itself.
Exercise without exercise? Great!
Considering the abracadabra-like quality of the
shoe, it’s no surprise that it’s been selling like hotcakes. The question of
course is “ does it work”?
According to
a
recent New York Times article on the topic Reebok
has accumulated “15,000 hours’ worth of wear-test data from shoe users who
say they notice the difference.” (The company also quotes a study as
support, but it’s one they commissioned themselves and only carries a sample
size of five.) The two women quoted in the article further echo this
sentiment.
Reebok’s head of advanced innovation (and EasyTone
mastermind), Bill McInnis, says the shoe works because it offers the kind of
imbalance that you get with stability balls at the gym. Unlike other
sneakers, which are made flat with comfort in mind, the EasyTone is
purposely outfitted with air-filled toe-and-heal “balance pods” in order to
simulate the muscle engagement required to walk through sand. With every
step, air shifts from one pod to the other, causing the person’s foot to
sink and forcing their leg and backside muscles into a workout.
But as the Times article proposes at the end
(without explicitly using the term), the shoe’s success could instead come
from the placebo effect. Thanks to Reebok’s marketing efforts, buyers pick
up the shoes already convinced of their success, a mind frame that may then
cause them to walk faster or harder or longer, thereby producing the
expected workout – just not for the expected reason.
And there are some reasons to suspect this kind of
placebo effect: In a paper by Alia Crum and Ellen Langer. Titled “Mind-Set
Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect.” In their research they told some
maids working in hotels that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good
exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active
lifestyle. Other maids were not given this information. 4 weeks later, the
informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more
exercise than before, their weight was lower and they even showed a decrease
in blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.
So, maybe exercise affects health are part placebo?
Irrationally Yours
Dan
A One-Hour Video on What it Means to
Be Predictably Irrational (July 25, 2008) ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
The video is also at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZv--sm9XXU
This is quite interesting!
From the Financial Rounds Blog on
January 25, 2008 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
"Dan Ariely (Duke University) -
Predictably Irrational
Here's a
video of Dan Ariely (author of "Predictably
Irrational") in his recent talk for the Google Authors program. Ariely
has written a fascinating book about some of the cognitive and behavioral
biases that most of us exhibit. If you listen carefully, you'll find that he
even gives a hint about how to increase your student evaluations ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Summary of what it means to be
"predictably irrational" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational
New York Times Book Review
"Emonomics," by David Berreby, The New York Times, March 16, 2008
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/books/review/Berreby-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
For years, the
ideology of free markets bestrode the world, bending politics as well as
economics to its core assumption: market forces produce the best solution to
any problem. But these days, even Bill Gates says capitalism’s work is
“unsatisfactory” for one-third of humanity, and not even Hillary Clinton
supports Bill Clinton’s 1990s trade pacts.
Another sign that
times are changing is “Predictably Irrational,” a book that both exemplifies
and explains this shift in the cultural winds. Here, Dan Ariely, an
economist at M.I.T., tells us that “life with fewer market norms and more
social norms would be more satisfying, creative, fulfilling and fun.” By the
way, the conference where he had this insight wasn’t sponsored by the
Federal Reserve, where he is a researcher. It came to him at Burning Man,
the annual anarchist conclave where clothes are optional and money is
banned. Ariely calls it “the most accepting, social and caring place I had
ever been.”
Obviously, this sly
and lucid book is not about your grandfather’s dismal science. Ariely’s
trade is behavioral economics, which is the study, by experiments, of what
people actually do when they buy, sell, change jobs, marry and make other
real-life decisions.
To see how arousal
alters sexual attitudes, for example, Ariely and his colleagues asked young
men to answer a questionnaire — then asked them to answer it again, only
this time while indulging in Internet pornography on a laptop wrapped in
Saran Wrap. (In that state, their answers to questions about sexual tastes,,
violence and condom use were far less respectable.) To study the power of
suggestion, Ariely’s team zapped volunteers with a little painful
electricity, then offered fake pain pills costing either 10 cents or $2.50
(all reduced the pain, but the more expensive ones had a far greater
effect). To see how social situations affect honesty, they created tests
that made it easy to cheat, then looked at what happened if they reminded
people right before the test of a moral rule. (It turned out that being
reminded of any moral code — the Ten Commandments, the non-existent “M.I.T.
honor system” — caused cheating to plummet.)
These sorts of
rigorous but goofy-sounding experiments lend themselves to a genial,
gee-whiz style, with which Ariely moves comfortably from the lab to broad
social questions to his own life (why did he buy that Audi instead of a
sensible minivan?). He is good-tempered company — if he mentions you in this
book, you are going to be called “brilliant,” “fantastic” or “delightful” —
and crystal clear about all he describes. But “Predictably Irrational” is a
far more revolutionary book than its unthreatening manner lets on. It’s a
concise summary of why today’s social science increasingly treats the
markets-know-best model as a fairy tale.
At the heart of the
market approach to understanding people is a set of assumptions. First, you
are a coherent and unitary self. Second, you can be sure of what this self
of yours wants and needs, and can predict what it will do. Third, you get
some information about yourself from your body — objective facts about
hunger, thirst, pain and pleasure that help guide your decisions. Standard
economics, as Ariely writes, assumes that all of us, equipped with this sort
of self, “know all the pertinent information about our decisions” and “we
can calculate the value of the different options we face.” We are, for
important decisions, rational, and that’s what makes markets so effective at
finding value and allocating work. To borrow from H. L. Mencken, the market
approach presumes that “the common people know what they want, and deserve
to get it good and hard.”
What the past few
decades of work in psychology, sociology and economics has shown, as Ariely
describes, is that all three of these assumptions are false. Yes, you have a
rational self, but it’s not your only one, nor is it often in charge. A more
accurate picture is that there are a bunch of different versions of you, who
come to the fore under different conditions. We aren’t cool calculators of
self-interest who sometimes go crazy; we’re crazies who are, under special
circumstances, sometimes rational.
Ariely is not out
to overthrow rationality. Instead, he and his fellow social scientists want
to replace the “rational economic man” model with one that more accurately
describes the real laws that drive human choices. In a chapter on
“relativity,” for example, Ariely writes that evaluating two houses side by
side yields different results than evaluating three — A, B and a somewhat
less appealing version of A. The subpar A makes it easier to decide that A
is better — not only better than the similar one, but better than B. The
lesser version of A should have no effect on your rating of the other two
buildings, but it does. Similarly, he describes the “zero price effect,”
which marketers exploit to convince us to buy something we don’t really want
or need in order to collect a “free” gift. “FREE! gives us such an emotional
charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable
than it really is,” Ariely writes. None of this is rational, but it is
predictable.
What the reasoning
self should do, he says, is set up guardrails to manage things during those
many, many moments when reason is not in charge. (Though one might ask why
the reasoning self should always be in charge, an assumption Ariely doesn’t
examine too closely.)
For example,
Ariely writes, we know our irrational self falls easily into wanting stuff
we can’t afford and don’t need. So he proposes a credit card that encourages
planning and self-control. After $50 is spent on chocolate this month — pfft,
declined! He has in fact suggested this to a major bank. Of course, he knew
that his idea would cut into the $17 billion a year that American banks make
on consumer credit-card interest, but what the heck: money isn’t everything.
An Experiment With Toilet Paper and
Other Messages ---
http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
Other videos on being Predictably
Irrational
Great Minds in Management: The
Process of Theory Development ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/GreatMinds.htm
This is a combination of two earlier tidbits about my cool sunglasses that
can shoot up to three hours of video
From QVC, Erika bought me a pair of sunglasses that will also shoot over three
hours of video (wireless). You’ve no reason to be interested in my home movies,
but you might like to see how well the glasses work (next time I will try to do
less heavy breathing):
Unfortunately and truthfully, my wife's favorite cable TV channel is QVC ---
http://www.qvc.com/
QVC generally has high quality merchandise. Erika mostly buys clothes,
gifts, and gadgets for me that I can never find on those rare occasions
where a gadget might be useful.
Her latest purchase is four pairs of sunglasses with a built-in camcorder
---
Click Here
She intends to give them away as gifts this holiday season.
Here is a site with a picture and the following description ---
http://nugossips.com/eagle-i-built-in-videoaudio-recording-camera-sunglass
Eagle-I Built-in Video/Audio Recording Camera
Sunglass is designed with polarized lenses that provide UV protection. The
Eagle-I Camera Sunglass comes with built-in video camera to record video and
audio content for up to three hours on the internal memory. The camera is
positioned over the bridge of the nose for minimal visibility, while still
providing a wide recording range. It is very easy to use, just push a button
to start recording. A slot on the arm of the glasses allows you to input
your own MicroSD memory card for more recording time up to eight hours with
a 2GB MicroSD card, not included. QVC offers Eagle-I Built-in Video/Audio
Recording Camera Sunglass for $79.20
Interestingly, the price above is stated as $79 whereas the QVC site has
them with a crossed out $96 price that makes you think you're getting a
special deal for $87. Erika falls for that every time. What's worse is that
the QVC site also claims the "retail value" is $192. That's stimated the
same way banks are now estimating the value of poisoned loan portfolios.
My cool sunglasses plug into a USB port for battery recharging and video
downloading. Video playback works on either
Quicktime software or my favorite free video software called VLC Media
Player ---
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
My favorite would be Camtasia Producer if this software was not so limited
with respect to what codecs it will play.
Here is my first and only video capture, to date, with my cool sunglasses
---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/VideoCoolSunglasses/Vid0000.3gp
To be honest I would probably use my cool sunglasses more if they only
captured still photos since it's a bit more convenient for me to put still
photos on the Web, and readers of things like
Tidbits probably prefer viewing pictures rather than having to
download my home videos.
Software Advice ---
http://www.softwareadvice.com/
Business Ethics ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_ethics
Lots of Good Links
Government Bonds ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_bonds
Note that in high inflation countries like Brazil, virtually all bonds are
inflation adjusted. Inflation adjusted bonds are much less common in the United
States. However, with weakened-dollar hyperinflation looming in the distant
future for the U.S. (nobody knows when), there may be more demand for
inflation-adjusted long-term bonds.
TIPS ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_security#TIPS
Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (or TIPS)
are the inflation-indexed bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury. The principal
is adjusted to the Consumer Price Index, the commonly used measure of
inflation. The coupon rate is constant, but generates a different amount of
interest when multiplied by the inflation-adjusted principal, thus
protecting the holder against inflation. TIPS are currently offered in
5-year, 10-year and 20-year maturities. Beginning in February 2010, the U.S.
Treasury will once again offer 30-year TIPS bonds.
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on January 15,
2010
U.S., in Nod To Creditors, Is Adding TIPS Issues
by: Min
Zeng
Jan 11, 2010
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Advanced
Financial Accounting, Bonds, Financial Accounting, Investments
SUMMARY: The
government is set to ramp up the sale of bonds that provide protection
against inflation, with its biggest such offering in five years totaling $10
billion of 10-year notes.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Questions
are oriented towards students learning about accounting for investments in
bonds.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory)
Explain the relationship between bond prices and interest rates. How do TIPS
bonds' terms reflect this relationship?
2. (Introductory)
TIPS Bonds' "...value rises along with the increase in consumer prices. The
fixed returns on nominal Treasurys, in contrast, can be eroded over time by
inflations, which especially effects long-term bonds." What then does the
fact that the government is issuing TIPS say about expectations regarding
inflation?
3. (Advanced)
Assume you are the corporate controller for a medium-sized manufacturing
firm. Explain the accounting for an investment in a TIPS bond that your
company expects to hold to maturity.
4. (Advanced)
Now consider the possibility that your company has bought the TIPS bond
knowing it is likely to trade the bond. Does the special feature of the TIPS
bond impact your accounting for this investment? Explain?
5. (Advanced)
What is hedging? Why does the small size of the TIPS market raise "doubts
about how efficient an inflation hedge" it is? In your answer, define market
efficiency as well.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
Jensen Comment
Also see Jim Mahar's June 10, 2009 summary at
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
In particular this references a study by Arnott that asserts that over the past
40 years the stock market underperformed the bond market. In my opinion, if you
into bonds for the next 40 years they'd better be inflation-indexed bonds such
as Treasury TIPs.
Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
"NCAA Upholds Penalties Against Florida State," Inside Higher Ed,
January 6, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/06/qt#216837
The National Collegiate Athletic Association has
upheld a vacation of records penalty against
Florida State University for an “academic fraud” scandal involving 61
athletes in 10 sports. Chief among those affected by the penalty, Bobby
Bowden, former head football coach, must vacate up to 14 wins from 2004
through 2007 in which players who received help cheating on some of their
exams participated. The penalty, which was appealed by Florida State when
the
rules violations were announced last March, has
irked many Seminole fans because it essentially will prevent Bowden from
becoming the all-time winningest coach in college football. (Bowden retired
after Florida State’s bowl game this season as the second-winningest coach
with 389 wins; Joe Paterno, coach at Pennsylvania State University, is still
active and has 394 wins.) In addition to the records vacations in 10 sports,
the NCAA also upheld its penalty against Brenda Monk, the former learning
specialist at Florida State who “knowingly arranged for fraudulent academic
credit for numerous student-athletes and provided improper academic
assistance.” Monk retains a “show-cause penalty,” meaning that any
institution that hires her by 2013 must explain “why it should not be
penalized if it does not restrict [her] from having any contact with
student-athletes.” Randy Spetman, Florida State athletic director, told the
Associated Press that the institution was upset
with the NCAA’s decision. Spetman said, "We believed that our administration
did everything it possibly could to ferret out any and all improprieties in
this matter."
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
Community News
SeeClickFix ---
http://seeclickfix.com/citizens
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting news and taxation news ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
"Chicago's Sample Essay Amuses Some, Offends Others," Inside Higher
Ed, January 4, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/04/qt#216554
The University of Chicago amused some applicants,
but angered others with a sample admissions essay sent out as the deadline
was approaching. As reported by
The New York Times, the essay compared the
college to a lover, saying: "Dear University of Chicago. It fills me up with
that gooey sap you feel late at night when I think about things that are
really special to me about you. Tell me, was I just one in a line of many?
Was I just another supple ‘applicant’ to you, looking for a place to live,
looking for someone to teach me the ways of the world?” Many reactions from
applicants can be seen on the
College Confidential Web site.
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on January 4,
2010
"Harley-Davidson Union Makes Concessions," by: Kris Maher, The
Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703735004574572223566560450.html?mod=djem_jie_360
SUMMARY:
Workers at Harley-Davidson's largest plant agreed to job cuts of nearly 50%,
more flexibility and an unusually long labor deal, in exchange for the
motorcycle maker's commitment to invest $90 million in the plant.
DISCUSSION:
1. Why were the Harley-Davidson employees willing to agree to job
concessions? How does this indicate the employees' highest priorities? What
do they consider to be lesser priorities?
2. What incentives did Pennsylvania offer to the
company in order to retain the job in the state? Why do state and local
governments offer aid to businesses? What is the cost-per-job in this
particular case? Why would the state think this is a good deal?
3. What might this deal mean for labor unions in
other industries or areas of the country? How could this trend impact
employees who are not in a union? How would the negotiation process be
different for union vs. nonunion employees?
TEXT
Employees at Harley-Davidson Inc.'s largest
factory agreed Wednesday to job cuts of nearly 50%, more work-rule
flexibility and an unusually long labor deal, in exchange for the motorcycle
maker's commitment to invest $90 million in the plant.
The unusual seven-year pact at the company's
massive York, Pa., plant represents an acknowledgment by the plant's work
force of the vulnerability of well-paid U.S. manufacturing jobs. Harley had
threatened to move the jobs from York to a new plant in Kentucky if the
union rejected the contract.
The state of Pennsylvania also offered its own
sweeteners: job training, low-interest loans and $15 million for upgrades.
The contract, approved by members of the
International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, paves the way
for Harley to meet a previously stated goal of cutting almost half of the
2,000 nonmanagerial jobs at the plant.
The contract institutes a new category of "casual"
worker to be used on an as-needed basis and who will earn about 30% less
than first-tier production workers. The company eventually expects to employ
about 250 casual and 750 full-time production workers.
The union also agreed to slash the number of job
classifications to five from more than 60 and allow for much greater
flexibility in moving workers from one task to another.
"The agreement is designed to allow York to resize
and become more flexible and more cost-competitive and efficient, all of
which is key to a sustainable future" there, Harley spokesman Bob Klein said
Wednesday.
Keith Wandell, chief executive of Milwaukee-based
Harley-Davidson, told analysts in October that restructuring the York plant
would help the company reach a goal of $120 million to $150 million in
productivity savings.
The new contract signals that job security—even if
it covers fewer jobs—is a top priority for organized labor. It is rare for a
union to agree to both deep job cuts and wage and benefit concessions,
especially given the contract's length, said Gary Chaison, a professor of
industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
"This is tying the hands of the union for a long
time," he said.
Union officials couldn't be reached to comment.
Analysts said the contract reflects the
difficulties facing companies across the economy as well as their unionized
workforces. Harley, which had an 84% skid in third-quarter profits, had
"unprecedented retail sales declines" during the recent downturn, said
Sharon Zackfia, a partner at investment bank William Blair & Co. in Chicago.
"These were changes that had to be made to keep the company viable," she
said.
Even with the concessions, the contract provides
workers pay and benefits that are "among the best in the area," Harley said.
The lowest-paid production technicians in the first
wage tier will earn $24.10 an hour as of February, when the contract takes
effect, while a comparable new hire would earn $19.28 an hour, and a casual
worker would earn $16.75 an hour.
Local business officials in York said they were
relieved that the plant would continue to provide well-paying jobs that feed
into the region's economy, despite the steep job losses.
"It's never good news when a plant has to cut 50%
of its work force," said Bob Jensenius, executive vice president of the York
County Chamber of Commerce. "It is good news that they're going to stay and
will keep 700 employees." The company's plan to invest $90 million in the
plant means that "when the economy recovers more work will be sent York's
way," he said.
In August, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell offered $15
million in "capital assistance" to keep the plant in York. Spokesman Michael
Smith said other money could be tapped through the state's
economic-development or labor and industry departments.
From the Scout Report on January /, 2010
NotesLogExp 2009 ---
http://computclub.110mb.com/
With its very basic design, NotesLogExp 2009 can
help computer neophytes organize any type of information. The simple entry
fields include forms for "Description", "Date", "Comment", "Address", and so
on. Adding information to these fields can help users locate and categorize
information as they see fit. This version is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer.
Advanced SystemCare Free 3.4.2 ---
http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download
In this New Year, it may be time for a computer
cleanup. Advanced System Care offers a path to better overall system
performance, and its user interface is only populated with several buttons.
The application includes spyware removal, registry cleaning, junk file
deletion, and disk defragmentation. You can't schedule scans with this free
version, so users will have to do this manually each time. This version is
compatible with systems running Windows 2000 and newer.
Elvis fans are all shook up for the King's 75th birthday Elvis fans mark
75th birthday at his beginning
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010800953.html?hpid=moreheadlines
Elvis Fans Flock to Australian Outback for Annual Festival
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/arts-and-entertainment/Elvis-Fans-Flock-to-Australian-Outback-for-Annual-Festival-80990917.html
Elvis, the young King
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-elvis-photos8-2010jan08,0,5003931.story
Selections from "Elvis at 21": Photographs by Al Wertheimer
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-elvis-grammy-museum-pictures,0,3892519.photogallery
Elvis Presley at 75: Songs We Love
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122312475
National Portrait Gallery: Echoes of Elvis
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/elvis/index.html
Pocket Elvis for the iPhone
http://www.macworld.com/article/145521/2010/01/pocketelvis.html
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Read.gov ---
http://www.read.gov/
What They're Reading on College Campuses (not necessarily online or free)
---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-Theyre-Reading-on/63471/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Hubble Catches End of Star-Making Party in Nearby Dwarf Galaxy ---
http://www.physorg.com/news182710468.html
Singing Insects of North America ---
http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/buzz/
University of Minnesota's Insect Collection ---
http://www.entomology.umn.edu/museum/index.html
Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States ---
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12621
Climate 1-Stop ---
http://arcserver4.iagt.org/climate1stop/
The World Bank: Climate Change ---
http://beta.worldbank.org/climatechange/
Drawing Out Meaning: 500 Years of Architectural History
http://www.architecture.com/LibraryDrawingsAndPhotographs/OnlineWorkshops/DrawingOutMeaning/DrawingOutMeaning.aspx
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
Video: Larry Summers: Innovation and
Economic Growth ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-larry-summers-innovation-and-economic-growth/
From The New Yorker: Interviews
With the Chicago Economists
"Interview with James Heckman," by John Cassidy, The New Yorker, January
14, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/chicago-interviews/
Women's Law Initiative ---
http://www.womenslaw.org/
Oral History of the U.S. House of Representatives ---
http://oralhistory.clerk.house.gov/
Open Collections Program: Islamic Heritage Project ---
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ihp/
Read.gov ---
http://www.read.gov/
The Great American Migration Slowdown: Regional and Metropolitan Dimensions
---
http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/1209_migration_frey.aspx
Inside Islam: Dialogues and Debates [iTunes]
http://insideislam.wisc.edu/
A Daring Experiment: Harvard and Business Education for Women, 1937-1970 ---
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/daring/
HARLEM: PHOTOGRAPHS OF CAMILO JOSé VERGARA, 1970-2009 ---
https://www.nyhistory.org/web/default.php?section=exhibits_collections&page=exhibit_detail&id=6172560
Human Security Report Project ---
http://www.hsrgroup.org/
Montana Memory Project ---
http://mtmemory.org/
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
National Institute of Corrections Library ---
http://www.nicic.org/Features/Library/
Women's Law Initiative ---
http://www.womenslaw.org/
Human Security Report Project ---
http://www.hsrgroup.org/
World Legal Systems ---
http://www.juriglobe.ca/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Oral History of the U.S. House of Representatives ---
http://oralhistory.clerk.house.gov/
National Institute of Corrections Library ---
http://www.nicic.org/Features/Library/
HARLEM: PHOTOGRAPHS OF CAMILO JOSé VERGARA, 1970-2009 ---
https://www.nyhistory.org/web/default.php?section=exhibits_collections&page=exhibit_detail&id=6172560
Open Collections Program: Islamic Heritage Project ---
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ihp/
Inside Islam: Dialogues and Debates [iTunes]
http://insideislam.wisc.edu/
David Douglas Duncan (art history) ---
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/ddd/
Oyez Baseball http://baseball.oyez.org/
Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947-1957 ---
http://www.mcny.org/glorydays/
Montana Memory Project ---
http://mtmemory.org/
North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Project
http://www.archives.ncdcr.gov/newspaper/index.html
Drawing Out Meaning: 500 Years of Architectural History
http://www.architecture.com/LibraryDrawingsAndPhotographs/OnlineWorkshops/DrawingOutMeaning/DrawingOutMeaning.aspx
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Writing Tutorials
"Words to Banish ... and Words to Use,"
Inside Higher Ed, January 4, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/04/qt#216534
Lake Superior State University on Thursday issued
its annual
"List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and
General Uselessness" and several of the 15 words
are much used in academe, including "teachable moment," "app," "friend" (as
a verb), "tweet" and "transparent/transparency." Several of the other words
relate to the economic downturn and efforts to reverse it. These words
include "shovel ready" and "stimulus." Wayne State University Word Warriors
project meanwhile has released
its annual
list of "expressive words that have fallen out of
use and deserve to return to conversation and prose." Among them:
antediluvian, festoon, mendacity and unctuous.
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/ January 5, 2010
January 6, 2010
January 7, 2010
January 8, 2010
January 11, 2010
January 12, 2010
January 13, 2010
January 14, 2010
January 15, 2010
January 16, 2010
"A Helmet to Prevent Paralysis: Engineers are designing a helmet
that could protect the spine from serious injury," by Lauren Gravitz,
MIT's Technology Review, January 6, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24312/?a=f
Helmets for everything from football and hockey to
motorcycle riding are built to protect the head from impact. Each successive
generation of design is better at dissipating force and protecting against
concussions and other knocks to the skull. But current helmets can still do
little to prevent the spinal injuries that cause paralysis.
Now researchers at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver are working on a design that could protect the spine
during a head-on collision. When a person's head hits a flat object straight
on, the impact normally causes the neck to crumple as it absorbs the brunt
of the force. If a broken vertebra dissects or otherwise damages the
delicate spinal cord, the result can be permanent paralysis. If the head
hits an object at an angle, it can glance off without much damage--that's
why football players are taught to tackle opponents with their heads raised.
"I became interested in whether there was a way to
convert the impact against a flat object into an impact against an angled
object," says
Peter
Cripton, the mechanical engineer and biomechanics
specialist at UBC who led the project. He and his colleagues developed the
"Pro-Neck-Tor"
helmet, which consists of an outer shell that looks
like most helmets on the market today, a rotating inner shell that hugs the
head, and a mechanism that connects the two.
"The main purpose of helmets, whether in sports or
transportation, is always to prevent brain injuries. We're trying to do
something quite different," Cripton says. "We're working toward a helmet
with the same ability to prevent concussion, but also with the ability to
prevent neck injuries." During normal, day-to-day use, the inner shell
remains immobile. But when the helmet hits something with enough force, the
inner mechanism releases, and the inner shell rotates, guiding the head as
if it were hitting an angled surface instead of a flat one.
"Just putting more padding on your head isn't going
to solve the neck injury problem, and it may even make it worse," says
injury biomechanics expert
John
Melvin, an adjunct professor at Wayne State
University in Michigan who's been studying the problem since 1968. "It's a
tough problem, but they're taking a unique approach, and I think it has
potential. It'll have to be evaluated in many, many ways to make sure it's
safe--you don't want to end up causing serious brain injury while preventing
a serious neck injury."
Continued in article
Forwarded by Bill Mister
The Diary of a Snow Shoveler
December 8 6:00 PM. It started to snow. The first snow of the season, and the
wife and I took our cocktails and sat for hours by the window watching the huge
soft flakes drift down from heaven. It looked like a Grandma Moses print. So
romantic we felt like newlyweds again. I love snow!
December 9 We woke to a beautiful blanket of crystal white snow covering
every inch of the landscape. What a fantastic sight! Can there be a more lovely
place in the whole world? Moving here was the best thing I've ever done.
Shoveled for the first time in years and felt like a boy again. I did both our
driveway and the sidewalks. This afternoon the snowplow came along and covered
up the sidewalks and closed in the driveway, so I got to shovel again. What a
perfect life.
December 12 The sun has melted all our lovely snow. Such a disappointment. My
neighbor tells me not to worry, we'll definitely have a white Christmas. No snow
on Christmas would be awful! Bob says we'll have so much snow by the end of
winter, that I'll never want to see snow again. I don't think that's possible.
Bob is such a nice man, I'm glad he's our neighbor.
December 14 Snow lovely snow! 8" last night. The temperature dropped to -20.
The cold makes everything sparkle so. The wind took my breath away, but I warmed
up by shoveling the driveway and sidewalks. This is the life! The snowplow came
back this afternoon and buried everything again. I didn't realize I would have
to do quite this much shoveling, but I'll certainly get back in shape this way.
December 15 20 inches forecast. Sold my van and bought a 4x4 Blazer. Bought
snow tires for the wife's car and 2 extra shovels. Stocked the freezer. The wife
wants a wood stove in case the electricity goes out. I think that's silly. We
aren't in the Yukon, after all.
December 16 Ice storm this morning. Fell on my butt on the ice in the
driveway putting down salt. Hurt like heck. The wife laughed for one hour, which
I think was very cruel.
December 17 Still way below freezing. Roads are too icy to go anywhere.
Electricity was off for 5 hours. I had to pile the blankets on to stay warm.
Nothing to do but stare at the wife and try not to irritate her. Guess I
should've bought a wood stove, but won't admit it to her. God I hate it when
she's right. I can't believe I'm freezing to death in my own living room.
December 20 Electricity's back on, but had another 14" of the damn stuff last
night. More shoveling. Took all day. Darn snowplow came by twice. Tried to find
a neighbor kid to shovel, but they said they're too busy playing hockey. I think
they're lying. Called the only hardware store around to see about buying a snow
blower and they're out. Might have another shipment in March. I think they're
lying. Bob says I have to shovel or the city will have it done and bill me. I
think he's lying.
December 22 Bob was right about a white Christmas because 13 more inches of
the white crap fell today, and it's so cold it probably won't melt till August.
Took me 45 minutes to get all dressed up to go out to shovel and then I had to
poop. By the time I got undressed, pooped and dressed again, I was too tired to
shovel. Tried to hire Bob who has a plow on his truck for the rest of the
winter; but he says he's too busy. I think the jerk is lying.
December 23 Only 2" of snow today. And it warmed up to 0. The wife wanted me
to decorate the front of the house this morning. What is she nuts!!! Why didn't
she tell me to do that a month ago? She says she did but I think she's lying.
December 24 6". Snow packed so hard by snowplow, I broke the shovel. Thought
I was having a heart attack. If I ever catch the man who drives that snowplow
I'll drag him through the snow by his nose and beat him to death with my broken
shovel. I know he hides around the corner and waits for me to finish shoveling
and then he comes down the street at 100 miles an hour and throws snow all over
where I've just been! Tonight the wife wanted me to sing Christmas carols with
her and open our presents, but I was too busy watching for the snowplow.
December 25 Merry freakin' Christmas! 20 more inches of the slop tonight.
Snowed in. The idea of shoveling makes my blood boil. I hate the snow! Then the
snowplow driver came by asking for a donation and I hit him over the head with
my shovel. The wife says I have a bad attitude. I think she's a frickin' idiot.
If I have to watch "It's A Wonderful Life" one more time, I'm going to stuff her
into the microwave.
December 26 Still snowed in. Why the heck did I ever move here? It was all
HER idea. She's really getting on my nerves.
December 27 Temperature dropped to -30 and the pipes froze. Plumber came
after 14 hours of waiting for him. He only charged me $1400 to replace all my
pipes.
December 28 Warmed up to above -20. Still snowed in. THE WITCH is driving me
crazy!!!
December 29 10 more inches. Bob says I have to shovel the roof or it could
cave in. That's the silliest thing I ever heard. How dumb does he think I am?
December 30 Roof caved in. I beat up the snow plow driver. He is now suing me
for a million dollars - not only for the beating I gave him but also for trying
to shove the broken snow shovel down his throat. The wife went home to her
mother. 9" predicted.
December 31 I set fire to what's left of the house. No more shoveling.
January 8 Feel so good. I just love those little white pills they keep giving
me. Why am I tied to the bed?
Jensen
Comment
I just noticed --- they've started me up on white pills.
I spent four hours pushing a snow thrower. It doesn't pull itself through high
drifts.
We can now get out of our driveway. We may just keep on heading south.
Harry Howe tempted me with a new fangled snow thrower ---
http://www.popsci.com/node/30913
But David Fordham provided me with the real corker ---
http://cob.jmu.edu/fordham/Snow1.htm
This one is very well written and will break you up!
Your snow thrower story tops my snow thrower story,
especially your wife's version.
Thank you David.
http://cob.jmu.edu/fordham/Snow1.htm
January 18, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi David
I will tell my story on
the AECM because it makes for an example of the importance of ABC costing
and back flush costing.
Three years ago I
bought a $1,500 deluxe Craftsman that had a cable assembly to turn the chute
(afterwards several Sears repair guys warned me to avoid models with cable
assemblies for the chute).
The chute would only
turn on my snow thrower when the temperature was above 30 degrees. Up here
in the mountains after a snow storm the temperature almost never is above 30
degrees. But there are occasions like yesterday when it hit 32 degrees after
a heavy and relatively wet snow fall.
I'd also purchased the
five-year onsite warranty (surprisingly cheap for $149) which means that,
after I phone Sears, a repair guy will find his way up here about two weeks
after I phone. The first year I met six different repair guys who at one
time or another made eight visits to my house to replace the chute cables.
Keep in mind that if it
was above 30 degrees the machine worked great. If it was below 30 degrees
they couldn't fix the thing, but I nevertheless kept making them come up
here under terms of the warranty contract. I kept begging them to replace
the entire machine with a snow thrower that had a chute-turning rod rather
than cables. But they couldn't convince the dodo heads in warranty service.
The second year Sears
trucks made nine visits to our cottage, and I became quite good friends with
each and every Sears repair guy. I always tipped them for their troubles. On
the last visit in April of 2009 a repair guy, Scott, showed up with a set of
cables about 18 inches long instead of 36 inches long.
The snow thrower has
worked wonderfully ever since.
Scott said that
Craftsman engineers finally figured out that shorter cables not only worked
better --- they also worked in cold weather.
What this teaches
accounting students is how important engineering design is when computing
the cost of a product. This back flush design problem probably cost Sears a
lot of money. Considering that it takes a repair guy around five hours round
trip to reach my house, the repair cost alone is probably $250 or more when
you consider the cost of the technician, the fuel, the new part that was
installed and never worked properly, etc. Multiply $250 by 17 visits, and it
doesn't take long to estimate how much Sears lost by selling me a snow
thrower with an engineering design flaw.
This is why engineering
design is not only important before building a product, it may be more
important after thousands of repairs should signal that there may be an
engineering problem. I don't know why it took Sears two years to figure this
one out. Maybe they figured it out in the first two months but then had to
wait nearly two years for China to make the newly-designed replacement
parts.
Other than that I'm
happy with my snow thrower.
I thought about getting
a blade on my tractor, but I don't want to have to keep the road cleared all
the way to my barn. Also, we get so much snow up here that we run out of
places to push new snow with a blade. The snow thrower blows it to hell and
gone.
And I mainly
like to clean my own driveway for the exercise. It's hard to get good
exercise that makes you sweat outdoors when its below zero. My snow suit has
the sweet smell of successful exercise.
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/
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.
Three Finance Blogs
Jim Mahar's FinanceProfessor Blog ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
FinancialRounds Blog ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Karen Alpert's FinancialMusings (Australia) ---
http://financemusings.blogspot.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accountancy Discussion ListServs:
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a
ListServ (usually for free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc
Roles of a ListServ ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
|
CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation
Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu