Tidbits on December 18, 2010
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
In this edition of Tidbits I prepared a special
edition of Jack Frost Pictures --- Set 1
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/JackFrostPaint/Set01/JackFrost01.htm
Our closest mountain (Cannon) is about 10 miles to the east.
60 ski trails on Cannon Mountain ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_Mountain
9 lifts (and an aerial tramway) can handle 11,000 skiers per hour
The picture was taken when there was not much snow
But they were making a snow base early in the morning on Cannon Mountain
as I took the two pictures below while seated at my computer
Other Cannon Mountain Pictures ---
http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits071226.htm
"Young skier dies after losing control at Cannon Mountain,"
December 13, 2010---
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/newsstatenewengland/902312-227/young-skier-dies-after-losing-control-at.html
FRANCONIA (AP) – Officials say a 19-year-old
Massachusetts teenager was killed in a skiing accident at New Hampshire’s
Cannon Mountain ski area in Franconia.
Cannon Mountain officials tell WMUR-TV the man from
Wakefield, Mass., was skiing with a friend on the mountain’s Zoomer Lift
Line trail when he lost control about 10:30 Sunday morning, slid into a
closed section of the mountain and then came to rest on a rock.
White
Mountain News ---
http://www.whitemtnews.com/
Video:
A Different Christmas Poem ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_P6yU_ymFM&feature=share
To those who guard us between darkness and despair
Did you ever wonder if the biggest gift to dad from
from Santa every year is a free cleaning of the chimney?
Tidbits on December 18, 2010
Bob Jensen
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
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
A Totally Fascinating Video from MIT's Technology Review
A Lego Reconstruction of the World's Earliest Computer
Before the birth of Christ the Greeks built a mechanical computer.
Now an Apple engineer has made a functional Lego replica.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26124/?nlid=3874
Hans Rosling's Video on Population Growth ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg
An Irish Twelve Days of Christmas - Frank Kelly - With Lyrics
(slow loading but worth the effort) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbejNNCTr7k
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year ---
Click Here
Video: A Different Christmas Poem ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_P6yU_ymFM&feature=share
To those who guard us between darkness and despair
How to Counsel a Student Who's Failing Your Course ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGY8k774mmg
The Power of Love ---
http://www.thepoweroflovemovie.com/
TSA Helps You Make it to Your Flight ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a8jGVXOMsw&feature=player_embedded
Hand Dancing ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4_5k8kWMe8
The new Chrysler transmission ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXW0bx_Ooq4&feature=related
Rape and Censorship in Sweden ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZtc2ma2GEQ
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
National Music Museum ---
http://orgs.usd.edu/nmm/
Superman Symphony's Surprise Grammy Nominations
---
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/10/131963885/superman-symphony-grammy-nominations
Remembering James Moody's Humble Gift For Music
---
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/10/131968314/remembering-james-moody-s-humble-gift-for-music
Best Musical Moments Of 2010: Joyce DiDonato's
Matchless Mahler ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2010/12/10/131848536/best-musical-moments-of-2010-joyce-didonato-s-matchless-mahler
Decadence and Decay: Kurt Weill's 'Mahagonny' ---
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/10/131932982/decadence-and-decay-kurt-weill-s-mahagonny
Hauschka Gets The Most Out Of 88 Keys ---
http://www.npr.org/2010/11/11/131245315/hauschka-gets-the-most-out-of-88-keys
Gene Simmons Military Tribute ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=5MtdIO23MKM
Deck the Halls (for kids of all ages) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0WVfj76bo
The Amazing Grace Christmas Light House ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnk0KjWxgMA
Also see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0IwpRzWL_4&feature=related
TSA Helps You Make it to Your Flight ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a8jGVXOMsw&feature=player_embedded
Video: The Housing Speculative Bubble Explained in Animated
Infographics ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-housing-speculative-bubble-explained-in-animated-infographics/
Hand Dancing ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4_5k8kWMe8
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
Incredible pictures of earth by NASA astronaut Wheelock ---
http://triggerpit.com/2010/11/22/incredible-pics-nasa-astronaut-wheelock/
Three views of the Vertical Farm ---
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/vertical_farming
NAACP: A Century in the Fight For Freedom ---
http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/NAACP/pages/default.aspx
Operation Deep Storm: New Zealand Antarctic Veterans Association ---
http://antarctic.homestead.com/Index.html
Abstract Expressionist New York ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/abexny/
Holocaust: "Everyone would believe my pictures": The
Legacy of Julien Bryan
http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/highlights/bryan/
Hawaii War Records Depository Home ---
http://libweb.hawaii.edu/digicoll/hwrd/HWRD_html/HWRD_welcome.htm
History: Las Vegas [Flash Player]
http://www.lasvegassun.com/history/
Lafayette College Archives Photograph Collection
---
http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/historicalphotos
Windham Textile & History Museum & Visitors
Center ---
http://www.millmuseum.org/Mill_Museum/Welcome.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
Video: A Different Christmas Poem ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_P6yU_ymFM&feature=share
To those who guard us between darkness and despair
Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation January 17, 1964
---
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm
"Ike's Speech," by Jim Newton, The New Yorker, December 21, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/12/20/101220ta_talk_newton
"Improved Reading of Free E-Books, As The Open Library
Launches a New E-Reader," Read/Write Web, December 9, 2010 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/improved_reading_of_free_e-books_as_the_open_libra.php
The Open Library,
an initiative of the
Internet Archive, has just
launched a new version of its online e-book reader, featuring an improved
user interface as well as other new tools. You can use it to read the more
than 2 million books available via The Open Library and the Internet
Archive.
As you search for
books to read on the site, you'll
now find a link to "read the item online." This will launch the redesigned
reader, although you'll still have the options to download the books, read
in other formats, or send to your Kindle.
Continued in article
The Open Library ---
http://openlibrary.org/
National Music Museum ---
http://orgs.usd.edu/nmm/
Amongst the Alternatives to Buy Books on Googole ebookstore
"A Sample of Free Google eBooks from the Google ebookstore," by Jim
Martin, MAAW Blog, December 12, 2010 ---
http://maaw.blogspot.com/2010/12/sample-of-free-google-ebooks-from.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.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
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on December 18,
2010
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations121810.htm
"Walter Williams Memoir," by Thomas Sowell, Townhall, December
7, 2010 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2010/12/08/walter_williams_memoir
Peter G.
Peterson Website on Deficit/Debt Solutions ---
http://www.pgpf.org/
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Forwarded by my friend Jagdish Pathak at the University of Windsor in Canada
The lines of World renowned Poet and also a Nobel laureate, Rabindra Nath
Tagore.
He wrote (copied from Wikipedia English translation of original Bengali
poem)
If they answer not to thy call walk alone,
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou unlucky one,
open thy mind and speak out alone.
If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
O thou unlucky one,
trample the thorns under thy tread,
and along the blood-lined track travel alone.
If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,
O thou unlucky one,
with the thunder flame of pain ignite thy own heart
and let it burn alone.
Julian Assange and other true believers in transparency
argue that they have discovered the very crowbar to pry open the U.S.
government. Unfortunately for them, WikiLeaks will be more like a boomerang—and
the next generation of scholars are the ones who will be hit on the head.
Daniel W. Drezner is a
professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
at Tufts University. His next book, Theories of International Politics and
Zombies, will be published by Princeton University Press in February.
Wouldn't it be a "last laugh" if the second round of WikiLeaks was really a clever idea conceived in
Tel Aviv executed by the CIA?
Are WikiLeaks a U.S./Israel Conspiracy?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2010/TidbitsQuotations121810.htm
Humanity is forgetting its history more rapidly. And
celebrities are losing their fame faster than ever.
Marc Parry, "Scholars Elicit a 'Cultural Genome' From 5.2 Million
Google-Digitized Books," Chronicle of Higher Education, December 16, 2010
---
http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Elicit-a-Cultural/125731/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
It's ironic that the irrelevance of history in our academic disciplines is
transpiring at at time when historical works are increasingly available and
searchable at virtually zero cost. Perhaps one problem is that we're
increasingly discovering how vast the histories of our discipline have become.
Do intermediate accounting instructors even mention the works of O'Neal,
Canning, Paton, and Littleton in this century?
"Is Your Psychology 102 Course Any Good? Here are 22 ways to measure
quality — but some of these measures have quality issues of their own," by
David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Your-Psychology-102-Course/125698/
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
"The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education," by Seth Godin, Chronicle
of Higher Education, May 3, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Coming-Meltdown-in-Higher/65398/
Signs of Changing Times: As the World Turns in Real Life
"P&G Washes Its Hands of Soap Operas and Dives into Social Media,"
ReadWrite Web, December 14, 2010 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pg_washes_its_hands_of_soap_operas_and_dives_into.php
Proctor and Gamble, the company that gave "soap
operas" their name, has withdrawn its sponsorship of the last daytime TV
show. After 77 years of advertising its Tide detergent and Ivory soap on
shows like "Guiding Light" and "As the World Turns," P&G is going online,
specifically it is focusing on the social web.
The company is not deserting TV altogether, at
least not yet, but the amount of money it is still spending on television
commercials is nominal, and its push online is substantial.
"Leaving Facebook: Will Diaspora provide a social-networking haven for
those fed up with Facebook?" by Erika Jonietz, MIT's Technology Review,
December 14, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26904/?nlid=3883&a=f
Last week, I joined
Diaspora ---
https://joindiaspora.com/
Not the Diaspora—I didn't convert to
Judaism or emigrate anywhere. Instead, I accepted a coveted (by geeks)
invitation to sign up for Diaspora, a decentralized, privacy-focused social
network created by four New York University undergrads in response to what
has been seen as Facebook's focus on profits at the expense of users'
privacy.
The foursome officially announced the project on
April 24; they released an
open-source
developer version of the code in mid-September,
and invitations to the website's private alpha (the first phase of testing)
began going out on November 23. Though Diaspora is a little buggy, a little
underpopulated (I have two contacts, compared with hundreds on other sites),
and a little Spartan in the way of features, it is already different in
interesting ways from the sites that came before.
Facebook
is like a casino: garish, crowded, distracting,
designed to lure you in and keep you there far longer than you ever
intended. (The same is true of its predecessor,
MySpace.)
Status updates—not only by actual friends and acquaintances but also from
companies, news outlets, celebrities, sports teams—jockey for space with
videos, ads, games, chat windows, event calendars, and come-ons to find more
people, make more connections, share more data.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Sounds to me a bit like Las Vegas versus Elko. We have friends in Texas (six
couples and a couple of widows) who love to take social networking trips
together and gamble in Nevada. On occasion they will go to Las Vegas and
generally hole up in the
Golden Nugget in downtown LV. But mostly they think Las Vegas is too "garish,
crowded, distracting, designed to lure you in and keep you there far longer than
you ever intended." They prefer to fly into
Elko
most of the time, because they consider the gambling to be better in Elko. As
for me, I prefer the social networking at the
Mustang Ranch (just kidding of course).
Bob Jensen's threads on the pros and cons of social networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
On The Dark Side ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
"Why Can't Kmart Be Successful While Target and Walmart Thrive?" by by
Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi, Harvard Business Review Blog, December
15, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/12/why_cant_kmart_be_successful_w.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Assignment
Make a list of what you think are the top 10 Web products with the fastest
growth in 2010?
Then read the tidbit below. I'd not even heard of half of Richard's picks.
"Richard MacManus' Top 10 Web Products of 2010," Read/Write Blog,
December 13, 2010 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/richard_macmanus_top_10_web_products_of_2010.php#more
Nightmares of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
"The Web-reliant Cr-48 starts up in an instant, and comes with "free" 3G. But
Google's online app store needs work," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology
Review, December 9, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/26118/?nlid=3869
Have you ever thought of possibly becoming one of maybe only 10 people in
the world who, possibly for that reason, studied diligently to become fluent in
in one of the 3,524 endangered languages?
It might have to be a labor of love because of the many reasons some
languages are becoming endangered.
"U. of Cambridge Web Site Aids Study of Endangered Languages," byAisha Labi,
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 9, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/u-of-cambridge-web-site-aids-study-of-endangered-languages/28616?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Audio Capturing Without a Microphone When Recording Parts of Camtasia
videos
Note that in the video below, the explanation begins 1:10 (70 seconds) into the
video at the top of this Camtasia helper page ---
http://www.techsmith.com/learn/camtas...
.
The above video explains how to record some audio in Camtasia without having to
run that audio through a microphone such as when you want to embed part of a
YouTube video in your Camtasia video.
Note that this may not work in Windows XP systems. In days of old some of my my
embedded clips of video had poor sound quality due to having to hold my
microphone near the speakers. Of course it was possible to edit in avi clips
recorded on other capture software, but this was a pain.
Over the years this has been my major complaint with Camtasia video recording.
Windows 7 users can now more easily work around the problem.
Also note this has never been a problem in Camtasia video recording on a Mac.
Here's a link that provides other tips on how to improve audio quality in
Camtasia videos
http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/docs/onlinehelp/enu/700/Get_Great_Sound_with_Camtasia_Studio_7.pdf
December 7, 2010 message from Mike Curtis
Mike Curtis, an employee of TechSmith, replied to
Audio Without a Microphone in Camtasia Studio?, a question about TechSmith.
Good news! As someone who had to explain how to "trick" Windows or provide
various levels of work-arounds if one wanted to record their system audio
(sound from the speakers) I was so excited when CS version 7.0 made it easy.
Check out the 1:10 section of this video:
http://www.techsmith.com/learn/camtas..
If you have Windows XP though, you may still have
issues and have to do it "the old way" depending on your sound card.
Camtasia for Mac also makes it easy to capture system audio.
Using Excel Pivot Tables and Charts When Analyzing Financial Students
A professor of finance recently called for some suggestions about assigning
Excel projects in an investments course (December 4, 2010)
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
The comment I posted to the above professor's Financial Rounds blog is as
follows:
"TechCrunch reports on Skype’s Big Move to the Web," by Rick Lillie,
Thinking Outside the Box Blog, December 5, 2010 ---
http://iaed.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/techcrunch-reports-on-skypes-big-move-to-the-web-1252010/
TechCrunch reported today that Skype is making its
move to web-based products and services. This will certainly liven things up
as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and tons of start-up companies make the leap
into the cloud.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
Regression Towards the Mean ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_to_the_mean
"The Truth Wears Off Is there something wrong with the scientific method?"
by Johah Lehrer, The New Yorker, December 12, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer
Jensen Comment
This article deals with instances where scientists honestly cannot replicate
earlier experiments including their own experiments.
Bob Jensen's threads on internal and external validation in research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Advances in Multivariate Data Visualization
This is neat: Dynamic Multivariate Data Visualization and Filtering
World Bank Data Visualizer ---
http://devdata.worldbank.org/DataVisualizer/
Click on the arrow buttons to change variable selections
Check and uncheck nation selections
Remember to click the Play button when you change the
variables and country selections
I found it fascinating to compare economic variables for the BRIC nations
compared with the U.S.
You can choose from a variety of economic variates
Brazil, Russia,
India and China, (the BRICs)
sometimes lumped together as BRIC to
represent fast-growing developing economies, are selling off their
U.S. Treasury Bond holdings. Russia announced earlier this month it
will sell U.S. Treasury Bonds, while China and Brazil have announced
plans to cut the amount of U.S. Treasury Bonds in their foreign
currency reserves and buy bonds issued by the International Monetary
Fund instead. The BRICs are also soliciting public support for a
"super currency" capable of replacing what they see as the ailing
U.S. dollar. The four countries account for 22 percent of the global
economy, and their defection could deal a severe blow to the
greenback. If the BRICs sell their U.S. Treasury Bond holdings, the
price will drop and yields rise, and that could prompt the central
banks of other countries to start selling their holdings to avoid
losses too. A sell-off on a grand scale could trigger a collapse in
the value of the dollar, ending the appeal of both dollars and bonds
as safe-haven assets. The moves are a challenge to the power of the
dollar in international financial markets. Goldman Sachs economist
Alberto Ramos in an interview with Bloomberg News on Thursday said
the decision by the BRICs to buy IMF bonds should not be seen simply
as a desire to diversify their foreign currency portfolios but as a
show of muscle.
"BRICs Launch Assault on Dollar's Global Status," The Chosun IIbo,
June 14, 2009 ---
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/06/12/2009061200855.html
|
This might be a great way to compare selected XBRL subsets of corporate
financial statements ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm#TimelineXBRL
Video: The Housing Speculative Bubble Explained in Animated Infographics
---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-housing-speculative-bubble-explained-in-animated-infographics/
Multivariate data visualization has always fascinated me and has been a
subject of my research and scholarship over the years ---
Visualization of Multivariate Data (including faces) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm
December 6, 2010 reply from Julie Smith David (Arizona State University)
For those who enjoy visualization,
http://dailyinfographic.com/
is a great site for getting information
delivered in a visual format.
Enjoy!
December 7, 2010 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
Bob,
The World Bank data visualisations look suspiciously
similar but a lot less sophisticated than the well-known
Rosling's visualisations in public health.
Rosling's lectures are available at
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
The software used is available for download at
gapminder.org ---
http://www.gapminder.org/
Regards,
Jagdish
--
Jagdish Gangolly (gangolly@albany.edu)
Department of Informatics
College of Computing & Information
State University of New York at Albany
7A, Harriman Campus Road, Suite 220
Albany, NY 12206
Phone: (518) 956-8251, Fax: (518) 956-8247
On average I get about 30 requests per day to
add links to my Website pages. For example, I think Lexis/Nexis must pay
many different people to send me daily requests.
.
The most frequent requests I'm getting these
days are sites that peddle links to colleges and universities. Most are
obviously promoters of for-profit colleges.
.
What I've noticed is that these for-profit
university promotion sites are getting more creative. For example, if you're
Chapman University it may pay to sneak Chapman in at Rank 9 of the Top
Graduate Schools in the United States ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
.
.
By the way this is not a new tactic. It has
been used by some otherwise respected well known universities.. About 30
years ago I was invited to lecture at Tulane University. An Associate Dean
proudly showed me the Tulane MBA Program's latest promotional magazine.
Included was a ranking of the Top 10 MBA programs in the United States that
had Tulane at a relatively high rank (Rank 3 as I recall).
I asked him who did the ranking, and this
Associate Dean said he did the ranking. I asked him the criteria for the
ranking outcomes. He said it was just his personal opinion. Details like
that were not included in this promotional magazine.
Bob Jensen
Glen Gray forwarded these gift suggestions for iPad and iPhone users ---
http://www.cio.com/article/643763/12_iPhone_and_iPad_Accessories_That_Define_You
Watch the CNN Video
"Make certain when you sign those papers that you
didn't rely on accountants."
Rep.
Charlie Rangel, Recently censured member the U.S. House of
Representatives
http://goingconcern.com/2010/12/from-now-on-charlie-rangel-wont-be-relying-on-accountants/
Watch the Video
"Make certain that you rely on Turbo Tax, because then you have something
non-human to blame for underpayment of your taxes."
Timothy Geithner,
Secretary of the U.S. Treasury
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKVxGlkPRlo
"New copyright-like rights considered harmful," by Mike Linksvayer,
Creative Commons, December 13th, 2010 ---
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/25560
Bob Jensen's threads on the dreaded DMCA are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
"How I became a con artist: I scammed department stores and gyms and
book chains. You'd be surprised how easy it was to lie -- and get away," by
Jason Jellick, Salon, November 29, 2010 ---
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/11/29/life_as_an_amateur_con/index.html
I got my start in my late teens. My mother had a
consignment shop/bridal store, which every so often garnered the odd
donation of designer clothes. Since this wasn't exactly the kind of place
someone came to buy Tommy Hilfiger jeans or a Ralph Lauren sweater, my
mother gave me the pick of the donations. Once in a while, I'd find
something that fit me, but most of the time, I was hunting for returnables,
clothes I could pass off as having been bought somewhere else.
In those days, J.C. Penney had the loosest return
policy. No receipt? No tags? No problem. They gave the item a once-over and
found something comparable in quality to gauge the price. Most stores issued
a gift card to a customer without any real evidence of purchase; J.C. Penney
always gave cash.
This was in the mid-1990s, before you had to show
ID, sign a slip of paper and answer a battery of questions from the always
skeptical supervisor. It was just you, the cashier -- and a question of
control. You always had to know who was going to be behind that register.
That was the golden rule: know your mark. Know whom you could work over and
whom you couldn't.
This was something I learned from watching my
mother, who knew all too well how to root out a good con. Her defining scam
was the Christmas special, when, on the day after Christmas, she'd gather up
the presents from under the tree and return them to the stores along with
the masses -- poor Mommy forced to return all of her thoughtful gifts. But
unlike most of those people, she'd circle back to the stores (once the shift
change had taken effect) and repurchase those same presents for vastly
reduced prices. Was this out of necessity? Was it out of some need to
display her cunning? Looking back, I suspect my mother had become convinced
of some higher moral agenda, in which the weak (the middle class) outfox the
strong (the rich). All I know is that we always got what we wanted for
Christmas.
My mom sold the consignment shop when I was in my
20s. By then, I'd decided to become a writer, having fallen in love with
"The Catcher in the Rye" at the age of 17. A college student lacking the
funds to feed my literary appetite (and with a habit of underlining passages
that eliminated the public library as an option), I stopped returning
clothes -- and started returning books.
This scam demanded a little more effort. It
required "the pre-con, " as I called it, when I scoured my local Salvation
Army and Goodwill for 75 cent paperbacks with sharp, clean edges and
un-blemished pages. I'd buy 15 or 20 at a time and then organize them into
semi-thematic groups to sell back to one of the chain bookstores. It was
best to keep certain types of books together -- self-help with chick lit,
biography with history, science fiction with mystery. Trying to return
Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein with, say, a book from the Harry
Potter series could elicit enough suspicion to blow the return. Instead, I
kept things simple and precise -- three or four books that fit with whatever
persona I was trying on that day -- and I'd use the store credit to buy the
paperbacks I really wanted. I must have pocketed $150 to $200 in books every
month for the better part of a year.
My biggest single score came when I discovered a
dollar store that sold remainders. I bought a hardcover about Richard Nixon
with a list price of $35, walked it to the bookstore and left with a gift
card for the full amount. Then I went back to the dollar store and bought
all eight remaining copies, returning them sporadically over the next year.
I did have two basic rules: I only conned
corporations, never individuals -- and I did not shoplift. Shoplifting
wasn't any worse morally; I just thought it was too easy. Instead, I was
after a challenge. Sure, it was nice to get a few bucks or a gift card, but
the real thrill came from my ability to manipulate, to outwit a large
corporation. I wasn't just stealing; I was striking a blow for the common
man against Big Business.
It was around this time that I began telling my
friends about my exploits. But instead of being disdainful or horrified, I
saw a look of amazement and envy in their eyes, and it fed my desire to try
new cons. I discovered the McDonald's drive-thru could be exploited if you
happened to be out with your hungry 6-year old nephew sans wallet and
sounded particularly desperate. I discovered that if you called the front
desk of a certain five-star hotel and told them that every time you turn on
the TV you were assaulted by images of pornography -- and your wife is
pregnant and she doesn't want to see this crap, for Chrissakes -- they'll
gladly upgrade you to a suite at no extra charge. But what I really learned
is that people will believe just about anything you tell them, if you
channel the right persona.
I discovered just how susceptible people were to
the right persona when, for over a year, I attended my local gym in
California without becoming a member. I never knew what I was going to say
to the worker at the front desk. This is because when you're conning
someone, you must always give the illusion that your mind is on something
else. Affable indifference works well. For the gym, I used athletic focus.
Never once did I approach the front desk walking. I was always running,
always in the zone, always pumped. I'd have my earphones in, music blaring,
and say that I'd just taken a run around the block (interval training); I'd
have my basketball shoes in hand and feign anxiety as I approached: Did the
game start already? I'd shake my head impatiently and say that I had to feed
the parking meter, briefly criticizing the city's parking regulations, and
every time, the worker would sympathize, hand me a towel and tell me to have
a good workout.
Yes, it was all about persona, and every encounter
enabled me to tweak my persona -- a regimen of creation and re-creation, a
perpetual self-sharpening: Hi, I bought this book the other day and I got it
home and found that there was writing inside! (Of course, beforehand, I'd go
hide the remaining copies of said book so the cashier would be forced to
give me a store credit); hi, I bought this shirt the other day and the
cashier said that it wouldn't shrink if I washed it, but it shrunk; hi, you
know, I'm not really sure, I'm just making this return for my wife … my
mother … my sister … my sick grandmother; hi, I got this as a graduation
gift … a christening gift … a shower gift ... a birthday gift; hi, I forgot
my key card upstairs in my room, is it possible to get another one to get
into the fitness center?; hi, no, I'm sorry, but I don't have my receipt;
hi, well I would like to speak to the manager, please.
And each one of these gambits required a follow-up
if the situation didn't go as planned:
So this is the kind of product you sell in your
store? I don't think I want to exchange it because it'll just shrink again;
ummm? I think it'll probably be better if I just get them a store credit,
that way they can pick out what they want; my name? Jack O'Brien. But the
room may be under my mother's name -- oh, for some reason she kept her
maiden name, I don't know why ... yeah, Burblonsky, that's her; look, I'm
not trying to pull one over on you (said with a laugh to underscore the
absurdity of the idea), I would like to just return this item and pick out
something else; I work hard for my money; THIS IS RIDICULOUS!
Things changed after Minnesota. My wife, Kate, and
I were driving back east from California and were on our way to see my
friend Lisa in Minneapolis. We rarely saw each other, and I wanted to look
nice for the visit. Kate had never met Lisa, so she wanted to look nice,
too.
We didn't look nice. We didn't smell nice. We
needed a shower and, of course, I had a con in mind.
In the first hotel, we hit a snag. We asked to see
a room and had fully expected the woman at the desk to give us a key, but
she didn't. She walked us to the room and stood by as we inspected. Kate
looked scared.
After making a show of looking around, I asked if
breakfast was included. Kate looked at me like I was crazy. It was 1 p.m.,
and we were due in Minneapolis in two hours.
"OK, it's perfect," I said.
The woman led us to the door, and before we left
the room I said: "Could my wife stay here? She's pregnant, and her feet are
killing her."
The woman was sympathetic and as she and I boarded
the elevator, I figured Kate would already be in the shower.
When we got to the front desk, I said I'd left my
wallet in the car. When I came back inside, I said that my wife had it in
her purse, upstairs. This all took about 10 minutes -- more than enough time
for a person to shower, but when I reached the room, I found Kate sitting on
the corner of the bed, terrified.
"I can't do this," she said.
Continued in article
This is an interesting follow-up to the above Salon article.
The article below contains self-confessions of a jewelry salesman turned
philosopher
"The Lie Guy," by Clancy Martin, Chronicle of Higher Education's
Chronicle Review, December 5, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Lie-Guy/125582/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/11/29/life_as_an_amateur_con/index.html
"In Fraud the Big Boys Walk Free," by Via Zamansky & Associates,
Sleight of Hand Blog, December 15, 2010 ---
http://sleightfraud.blogspot.com/2010/12/in-fraud-big-boys-walk-free.html
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Evaluating Teachers: The Important Role of Value-Added ---
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2010/1117_evaluating_teachers/1117_evaluating_teachers.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
"Is Economics Ready for a New Model?" by Justin Fox, Harvard
Business Review Blog, December 2, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2010/12/economics-ready-for-new-model.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Economic theories based on rational behavior have
been called into doubt by recent events. A few maverick scholars "are
stepping up the hunt for new models that could more accurately describe the
real world." Some look to psychology for answers; others are interested in
importing approaches from the physical sciences.
Sound like something you might have read in
Tuesday's Wall Street Journal? It does in fact accurately describe
Mark Whitehouse's article, headlined, "Economists'
Grail: A Post-Crash Model." But it also describes
(and the quote is taken from)
a 1988 article in Fortune by Gary Hector.
If you want to learn about the subject, in fact,
Hector's article is probably better — it's clearer in its descriptions of
the relevant theories. But it's 22 years old. Have we learned
nothing in the intervening two decades?
In the sense that financial markets and the economy
in general are far more fragile than most mainstream economists contemplated
before 2008, there was a bit of unlearning done in the 1990s and
early 2000s. The 1987 stock market crash was a scare. So were the currency
and debt crises of 1997 and 1998, and the stock market collapse of
2000-2002. None of them brought economic devastation in the U.S. and Europe,
though (and Japan's long struggles were seen as the product of peculiarly
Japanese economic traits). The conviction spread that, thanks in part to
financial innovation, the world's developed economies had become more
resilient even as financial markets became more volatile. Alan Greenspan
was the most prominent cheerleader for this idea,
but he sure wasn't alone. I know
I believed it.
I don't really buy that anymore, and I don't think
all that many economists do, either. But does that mean their theories and
their way of going about their work are about to undergo wholesale change?
To get an idea, it's helpful to go back to that
1988 Fortune article. It focused on three young economists who were
arguing that emotion and error played a big role in financial market
fluctuations than was countenanced in then-standard theories of the market.
Their names:
Robert Shiller,
Lawrence Summers, and
Richard Thaler. Thaler and Shiller are now among
the most prominent economists on earth, best-selling authors, and regular
betting favorites for (albeit not yet actual winners of) the economics
Nobel. Summers, meanwhile, is the second most powerful economic official in
the U.S. —
at least for another couple of weeks.
Did these three men turn economics upside down? No.
But they — mainly Shiller and Thaler, as Summers didn't spend a whole lot of
time on the practice of academic economics over the past two decades — have
definitely helped open the discipline to new ideas about market volatility
and the strange quirks of human behavior. You can find lots of scholars at
top economics departments who study why bubbles and crashes happen, and how
psychology and genetics shape individual decisionmaking. What you won't find
is many who think the entire infrastructure of rationality-based economics
needs to be tossed out.
The other big idea in the 1988 article was chaos
theory. The hope, expressed in the piece mainly by
William "Buz" Brock of the University of
Wisconsin, was that economists would soon be able to use tools developed by
physicists, biologists and other hard scientists to predict market behavior.
Chaos — and the broader catch-all, complexity — became an enormously
fashionable economic topic for a few years.The physicist-founded Santa Fe
Institute in New Mexico was the center of this work. Most of the economists
involved, though, eventually concluded that chaos and complexity theory held
few answers for them and physicists were on the whole too ignorant of and
arrogant about economics to be much help. So they moved on (Brock's Santa Fe
affiliation ended in 2002).
In recent years
J. Doyne Farmer, a
Los-Alamos-National-Laboratory-scientist-turned-hedge-fund-manager-turned-Santa-Fe-Institute-professor,
has bent over backwards not to be ignorant and arrogant about
economics. He's co-authored papers with economists from Yale, MIT, and other
perfectly respectable places, and learned a remarkable amount about the
nitty-gritty of financial market functioning. Have economists begun to move
in his direction? Farmer, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal
article — and in a
panel
discussion I did
with him over the summer — is a bit frustrated
with how economists remain stuck on old, static ways of modeling reality.
And economists
are dubious of his
proposals for massive agent-based computer models of the economy.
So if you're looking for a revolution in economics,
you'll probably have to wait a long, long while. But evolution,
sure, there's some of that. And lots of cycling back and forth between the
belief that, in a market-based economy, everything will always work out for
the best, and the concern that markets — especially financial markets —
might have a natural tendency to self-destruct from time to time.
Bob Jensen's threads on theory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Securities Docket’s free webcasts are held regularly and feature leading
attorneys and industry professionals in the securities litigation, SEC
enforcement and white collar areas ---
http://www.securitiesdocket.com/webcasts/
"Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online" by Marc Parry, Chronicle
of Higher Education, December 12, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Blind-Students-Demand-Access/125695/
Jensen Comment
I just don't think colleges are taking advantage of some of the technology
advances to aid online use by various types of handicapped students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
Are first year students suddenly shying away from business studies in your
college?
"Souring on Business?" by Dan Barrett, Inside Higher Ed, December 13,
2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/13/business
But beneath such anecdotes lies a more notable and
widespread change, according to researchers from the Higher Education
Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Researchers gathered data from nearly 220,000 first-year students at almost
300 colleges, and asked what major and career path they planned to pursue.
Results in 2009 revealed that 14.4 percent of first-year students planned to
major in business -- a more than 3 percentage-point drop since 2006 -- and a
low not seen since the Ford Administration. "They will likely be graduating
with higher debts and have shifted majors and career aspirations away from
business fields," researchers wrote in their
summary of findings from the American Freshman
survey.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It would be interesting to observe what majors are choosing in place of
business. I suspect that many are tracking job growth disciplines like nursing
and other medical career options. I also suspect that grade averages have become
so vital to success in life that some students are tracking into disciplines
where top grades are easier to obtain. Business degrees have become very
competitive in terms of top grades.
"Life As We Don't Know It: NASA's discovery of an 'exotic' DNA
changes everything," by Michio Kaku, The Wall Street Journal,
December 6, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989004575652641694036252.html
When NASA announced last week that it would unveil
a new discovery "which would impact the search for evidence of
extraterrestrial life," it sparked a firestorm of speculation, with
journalists and scientists clamoring to know whether NASA had finally
discovered alien life in space. So great was the media stampede that even
the White House and members of Congress were calling on NASA to clarify.
As expected, NASA scientists did find alien
life—not in space, but in California, in the form of an exotic microbe with
DNA never seen before that feeds on arsenic, a poison. After all the hoopla,
science-fiction buffs considered this announcement to be a resounding dud.
But to the scientific community, this was a spectacular result. It means
that every biology textbook now has to be revised. Even the very definition
of life may have to be changed.
All DNA on the earth is basically the same. By
rearranging the components of DNA, you can convert the DNA of yeast into
that of rabbits, elephants and even humans. But for the first time in
history, scientists have found a new type of DNA that does not incorporate
the usual six elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and
sulfur. These microbes have replaced the phosphorus atom in their DNA with
arsenic, a sleight-of-hand once thought to be impossible.
These micro-organisms were found near Yosemite, in
Lake Mono. The run-off from the Sierra Nevada mountains gives rise to
unusually high concentrations of arsenic in the lake. Scientists first
isolated these bacteria and then gradually replaced the phosphorus in their
environment with arsenic. Most organisms die when exposed to these toxic
levels. But some of these microbes had mutated so that they actually thrived
on arsenic. Incredibly, scientists then found that the arsenic was being
incorporated directly into their DNA.
The discovery raises the possibility that "shadow"
life may exist on earth—and perhaps even on other planets. There might be
other microbial life forms out there that have, over billions of years, been
forced to modify basic DNA in order to survive in toxic environments. There
will now be a surge of scientific interest in finding new variations in the
DNA molecule, and also finding new organisms that exploit these mechanisms.
Arsenic-based DNA are, one hopes, not the only exotic forms of DNA in the
universe.
The real lesson here is that extreme forms of life
can sometimes thrive in extreme environments that are usually too toxic or
unsuitable for life. When searching the moons of Saturn or extra-solar
planets hundreds of light years from earth, scientists cannot assume that
life will mimic the chemistry found on earth. We have to be open-minded
about what kinds of life can exist in the harshest of environments. (After
all, our own DNA may have first originated at the bottom of the oceans, near
volcano vents emitting a noxious brew of toxic chemicals.)
When the two Viking probes landed on Mars in 1976,
soil samples of the Martian desert were analyzed for the presence of organic
compounds, such as hydrocarbons. Disappointingly, none were found. But in
light of this discovery, scientists should have broadened their definition
of the chemicals of life. This new understanding of DNA may impact directly
on NASA's current multibillion-dollar program to find life on Mars. This may
also affect the current investigation of the moon of Saturn, Titan, which
has a methane-like atmosphere, or the moon of Jupiter, Europa, which has a
vast liquid ocean under its icy surface.
Continued in article
"E-Mail is the Big Security Culprit," by Jerry Trites, IS Assurance
Blog, December 10, 2010 ---
http://uwcisa-assurance.blogspot.com/
A new report from software vendor
Awareness Technologies points to personal email
services like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail as being "increasingly
responsible for the accidental or deliberate loss of customer and corporate
data."
Some companies ban such personal email services, but many do not. These
services are all web based, and subject to a high degree of pressure from
hackers, who have developed techniques to capture login IDs and passwords
and then go in and seize the data either in the body of the messages or in
attachments to them.
The findings resulted from a survey of data breaches at more than 10,000
sites. The survey also indicated that most of the data breaches could be
traced back to the fault of employees, who were either poorly trained or
gullible enough to fall for phishing expeditions.
One approach is to ban the use of personal email services on corporate
computers, but this doesn't work well in today's environment since many
employees mix their personal and business accounts. In addition, they often
use their own personal computers or other devices for business purposes, and
this is a growing trend.
Another approach is to embrace the use of personal email services and train
the employees in their proper use and awareness of the threats that exist.
Since breaches arising from personal email services now outnumber those
arising from the abuse of USB ports, previously the leader, email controls
are more important than ever before.
For a report on the Survey,
please check out this link.
Bob Jensen's threads on networking and computing security are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
December 14, 2010 message from David Albrecht
We've talked about class evaluations. Here's a new take. Apparently first
study of its kind:
David Albrecht
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20101213/NEWS02/12130319/1001/NEWS/UNI-professor-finds-students-stretch-truth-on-teacher-evals
Students stretch truth on teacher evaluations, UNI
professor's study finds
By STACI HUPP • shupp@dmreg.com • December 13, 2010
Dennis Clayson's college students have picked apart everything from his
"impossible" tests to his choice of neckties.
The University of Northern Iowa marketing professor says he doesn't take
criticism personally when students grade him on teacher evaluations, but he
has wondered: Do they always tell the truth?
The answer is no, Clayson and a Southeastern Oklahoma State University
marketing professor found, in what they say is the first study of its kind.
About a third of students surveyed at both schools admitted they had
stretched the truth on anonymous teacher evaluations, which teachers at
colleges circulate at semester's end. A majority, 56 percent, said they know
other students who have done the same. Twenty percent of participants
admitted they had lied on the comments section of the evaluations.
The good news: Students fib in some cases to make their instructors look
good, the study shows. The bad news: More often, they do it to punish
professors they don't like.
"Students are very generous, but they'll zap you," said Clayson, whose study
will be published next year in Marketing Education Review, an education
journal. He said the study was produced at no charge.
The findings are sure to stoke an age-old debate over the fairness of
teacher evaluations, which factor into pay raises and promotion and tenure
decisions. The paper forms are as much of a classroom tradition at
semester's end as final exams, which take place this week at Iowa's
state-run universities.
Clayson has spent years evaluating teacher evaluations, which direct
students to assign a number grade - 1 to 5, for example - on topics ranging
from how much they learned in class to how accessible a professor was.
Evaluations also generally set aside room for written comments. Among the
worst comments Clayson has seen: "Die, you son of a bitch."
The stakes are even higher in classes where instructors dumb down their
classes or inflate grades to boost the odds that students will like them.
The practice is widely acknowledged by professors and has been studied by
researchers, including Duke University statisticians who found professors
who give better grades get higher marks on evaluations.
Paul Trout, a retired Montana State University professor, said he became a
vocal critic of teacher evaluations when he noticed he was teaching fewer
and shorter books in his English classes.
"I was more and more concerned about the grades I gave out, more concerned
about how I was coming across to my students," he said. "I started to
realize that all these things seem to circulate around the teaching
evaluation form."
Trout remembers one student who stopped coming to his class after a month
but showed up at the end of the semester "to throw whatever he could at me
on those evaluation forms."
Katherine van Wormer, a UNI social work professor, said students have taken
aim at her political views and her jokes. Van Wormer doesn't believe
students are dishonest, but she said their evaluations should not be
anonymous.
"It's encouraging people to stab others in the backs," she said.
Trout believes professor evaluations are a public relations tool designed to
assure parents, taxpayers, politicians and donors that faculty members are
held accountable.
Dan King, director of the American Association of University Administrators,
said the forms are a more accurate way to gauge professors than, for
example, asking their faculty counterparts to observe a few classes.
"The student has seen the professor's performance class in and class out,"
King said. "The student is one of the consumers of education, so it's
reasonable to ask, at the end of a course, 'What did you learn, and could it
have been done more effectively or more efficiently from your perspective?'
"
(continued)
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"The Feds Stage a Sideshow, While the Big Tent Sits Empty," by Jesse
Eisinger, The New York Times, December 8, 2010 ---
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/where-are-the-financial-crisis-prosecutions/
Thank you Nadine Sabai for the heads up.
Jesse Eisinger is a reporter for ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit
newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
You may have noticed that prosecutors are in
something of a white-collar slump lately.
The stock options backdating prosecutions have
largely been a bust, and not because it wasn’t a true scandal. The
Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department investigated
more than 100 companies. Over 100 took accounting restatements. Yet only a
handful of executives went to prison, with some prominent cases fizzling
out. Prosecutors also stumbled in other high priority corporate fraud
prosecutions, like the KPMG tax shelter and the stock-exchange specialists
cases.
The most spectacular prosecutorial flameout was the
case against the Bear Stearns hedge fund managers, including Ralph Cioffi.
The consequences of that disaster are still reverberating. The United States
attorney’s office in Brooklyn rushed to haul low-level executives in front
of a jury based on a few seemingly incriminating e-mails. The defense was
easily able to convince jurors that these represented only out-of-context
glimpses of fear as markets swooned, not a conspiracy to mislead.
Now we have a supposedly new push: the insider
trading scandal.
The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet
Bharara, and United States Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. are hyping
their efforts. “Illegal insider trading is rampant and may even be on the
rise,” Mr. Bharara pronounced in a speech in October. The feds are raiding
hedge funds and publicly celebrating their criminal investigations related
to insider trading.
The story line is that Wall Street now lives in
fear. Hedge fund managers’ phones may be tapped, any stray remark is suspect
and old trades are being exhumed so that the entrails can be examined.
In fact, plenty of people on Wall Street are happy
about the investigation. The ones with clean consciences like the idea that
the world of special access to favorable tips is being cleaned up.
But others are pleased for a different reason: They
realize the investigation is a sideshow.
All the hype carries an air of defensiveness.
Everyone is wondering: Where are the investigations related to the financial
crisis?
John Hueston, a former lead Enron prosecutor,
wonders, “Have they committed the resources in the right place? Do these
scandals warrant apparent national priority status?”
Nobody from Lehman, Merrill Lynch or Citigroup has
been charged criminally with anything. No top executives at Bear Stearns
have been indicted. All former American International Group executives are
running free. No big mortgage company executive has had to face the law.
How about someone other than Fabrice Tourre, known
as the Fabulous Fab, at Goldman Sachs? How could the Securities and Exchange
Commission merely settle with Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo, and for a
fraction of what he made as chief executive?
The world was almost brought low by the American
banking system, and we are supposed to think that no one did anything wrong?
The most common explanation from lawyers for this
bizarre state of affairs is that it’s complicated to make criminal cases in
corporate fraud. Getting a case that shows the wrongdoer acted with intent —
and proving it to a jury — is difficult.
But, of course, Enron was complicated, too, and
prosecutors got the big boys. Ken Lay was found guilty (he died before he
served his time). Jeff Skilling is in prison, though the end result was
bittersweet for prosecutors when much of his conviction was overturned by
the Supreme Court. Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom and Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco
are wearing stripes.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"A Novel Way to Sidestep Investor Suits," by Floyd Norris, The New
York Times, December 2, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/business/03norris.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1
One of the great legal fictions of Wall Street is
that mutual funds are independent of the companies that create and run them.
It is true such funds have their own boards,
nominally elected by fund shareholders, but in practice the funds are run
and marketed by the management company. That is a fact that most investors
take for granted.
But it is not a fact the courts should pay much
attention to, at least in the opinion of Janus Capital Group, which runs the
Janus family of funds. On Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear an appeal by
Janus, which seeks to avoid responsibility for a fraud committed at several
of its funds.
The case stems from a scandal that got a lot of
attention seven years ago, one involving “market timing” of funds. Janus
told investors it did take steps to prevent such trading, in which big
traders buy or sell fund shares based on outdated values, and thereby profit
at the expense of other investors in the fund. But Janus secretly cut deals
with some hedge funds to allow such trading in order to increase the assets
on which it could collect management fees.
The basic facts are not in dispute. Janus settled
with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 and paid $100 million in
penalties. At the time, an S.E.C. enforcement official said it was clear to
the commission that Janus “violated an investment adviser’s fiduciary duty
to investors.”
In its settlement with the S.E.C., Janus agreed
that its Janus Capital Management subsidiary, known as J.C.M., would “cause
the Janus funds to operate” in accordance with governance policies that
would prevent such violations in the future.
It did not claim that J.C.M. had no control over
the funds. But in its brief with the Supreme Court, Janus says that “J.C.M.
is neither a primary actor nor a primary violator with respect to the
statements” in the prospectuses. “The statements in the Janus Funds’
prospectuses were made by the trust comprising the Janus Funds — a separate
legal entity, with its own board of trustees and legal counsel — not by
J.C.M.”
After Janus’s actions were disclosed in September
2003 by Eliot Spitzer, then the attorney general of New York, its stock
price plunged, and investors who owned the stock sued. Seven years later, an
index of money-management company stocks that includes Janus is up about 15
percent from just before the disclosure. Janus, the worst performer in the
group, is down about 40 percent.
The suit has moved slowly. A district court judge
dismissed the case, agreeing with Janus that the company was not responsible
for what was in the prospectuses. The suit was reinstated by the United
States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. If the Supreme Court upholds
that decision, the class-action suit can proceed to trial. It is more likely
that it would be settled.
The decision by the Supreme Court to even hear the
appeal took some by surprise. The court asked the Justice Department to
comment, and the department advised against hearing the case. After the
court agreed to hear the case, the S.E.C. and the Justice Department urged
the justices to rule against Janus.
That the case could get this far may be an
indication of the hostility the courts have shown to securities class-action
suits in recent years. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that private suits —
as opposed to suits brought by the S.E.C. — could not be filed against those
who merely aided and abetted someone else’s fraud. In a major case decided
in 2008, the court said that two companies that had helped a cable company
rig its books could not be sued by investors damaged by the fraud.
The issues presented by the Janus case make clear
that it is not always easy to distinguish whether someone is a primary
player in a fraud, or simply helped. That distinction is, however, critical
under the Supreme Court precedents.
Janus argued in its Supreme Court brief that it was
“not a primary actor because it did not issue the securities” offered by the
inaccurate prospectuses. Instead, it only “provided investment advisory
services” pursuant to a contract. Janus places great reliance on the fact
the prospectus speaks of Janus as a contractor, not the principal.
Groups representing accountants and brokerage
firms, as well as an insurance company that provides insurance for lawyers,
want the court to use the case to make clear that such people as lawyers,
underwriters and accountants cannot be viewed as primary actors, and thus
are immune from private suits even if they were actively involved in a
fraud.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
From the Scout Report on December 3, 2010
CircleCalc ---
http://www.circlecalc.com/
Basic geometry calculations can be tricky to some,
and this handy application is quite useful in such matters. CircleCalc is a
high precision calculator of many stripes, and visitors can use the program
to perform hundreds of calculations quickly. Visitors can use the
application to save entries, reorder numbers, and also take advantage of
scientific notation. This version is available as an app for the iPhone and
iPad.
Scribe 3.5 ---
http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/scribe/
Scholars young and old will appreciate the latest
version of Scribe, which is a cross-platform note-taking program designed
especially with historians in mind. Scribe allows users to manage research
notes, quotes, thoughts, ruminations, and digital images. Users can also use
Scribe to assemble, print, and export bibliographies. Additionally, visitors
can find and highlight a particular word within a note or article. This
version is compatible with all operating systems.
U.S. House approves historic settlement in case involving African
American farmers and Native Americans U.S. House Approves Black-Farmer,
Indian Settlements
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-11-30/u-s-house-approves-black-farmer-indian-settlements.html
A small slice of justice
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/28/AR2010112803915.html
Statement from Agriculture Secretary Vilsack on Final Passage of the
Claims Settlement Act
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentidonly=true&contentid=2010/12/0627.xml
Black farmers: justice delayed
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/08/black_farmers
Postcard from the first annual Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners
Conference
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-11-30-notes-from-the-first-annual-black-farmers-and-urban-gardeners-co
National Black Farmers Association
http://www.blackfarmers.org/
On December 6, 2010 Google's eBookstore Went
Live with More Than Three Million Titles ---
http://books.google.com/ebooks
After more than a year since we first heard the rumors, Google has entered the
world of e-books. Today, the company launched its e-book marketplace with more
than 3,000,000 titles on the shelves that will be available to nearly anyone
with a smartphone, laptop, tablet, netbook or desktop computer.
For example, type in the search word
"accounting"
Many accounting textbooks are available, but I have not yet done any price
comparisons.
Some of the most popular textbooks that are not available anywhere for
electronic downloading are not available for Google eBooks.
Amongst the Alternatives to Buy Books on Googole ebookstore
"A Sample of Free Google eBooks from the Google ebookstore," by Jim
Martin, MAAW Blog, December 12, 2010 ---
http://maaw.blogspot.com/2010/12/sample-of-free-google-ebooks-from.html
On December 6, 2010 Google's eBookstore Went
Live with More Than Three Million Titles ---
http://books.google.com/ebooks
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
"Improved Reading of Free E-Books, As The Open Library Launches a New
E-Reader," Read/Write Web, December 9, 2010 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/improved_reading_of_free_e-books_as_the_open_libra.php
The Open Library, an initiative of the
Internet Archive, has just launched a new version
of its online e-book reader, featuring an improved user interface as well as
other new tools. You can use it to read the more than 2 million books
available via The Open Library and the Internet Archive.
As you search for
books to read on the site, you'll now find a link
to "read the item online." This will launch the redesigned reader, although
you'll still have the options to download the books, read in other formats,
or send to your Kindle.
Continued in article
The Open Library ---
http://openlibrary.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Evaluating Teachers: The Important Role of Value-Added ---
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2010/1117_evaluating_teachers/1117_evaluating_teachers.pdf
60 Ways RAND Has Made a Difference
http://www.rand.org/about/history/60ways/
National Association of Community College Teacher Education Programs ---
http://www.nacctep.org/
Video: The Housing Speculative Bubble Explained in Animated Infographics ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-housing-speculative-bubble-explained-in-animated-infographics/
"Is Your Psychology 102 Course Any Good? Here are 22 ways to measure
quality — but some of these measures have quality issues of their own," by
David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Your-Psychology-102-Course/125698/
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
"The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education," by Seth Godin, Chronicle
of Higher Education, May 3, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Coming-Meltdown-in-Higher/65398/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
60 Ways RAND Has Made a Difference
http://www.rand.org/about/history/60ways/
Avian Influenza and Wild Birds in Africa: Ecology & Monitoring ---
http://wildbirds-ai.cirad.fr/index.php
Wei-Wen Yu Center for Cold-Formed Steel Structures ---
http://www.ccfssonline.org
Operation Deep Storm: New Zealand Antarctic Veterans Association ---
http://antarctic.homestead.com/Index.html
Three views of the Vertical Farm ---
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/vertical_farming
Future Agricultures ---
http://www.future-agricultures.org/
Regression Towards the Mean ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_to_the_mean
"The Truth Wears Off Is there something wrong with the scientific method?"
by Johah Lehrer, The New Yorker, December 12, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer
Jensen Comment
This article deals with instances where scientists honestly cannot replicate
earlier experiments including their own experiments.
Bob Jensen's threads on internal and external validation in research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on free online science,
engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Social Science and Economics Tutorials
From the Pew Center: Environmental Crossroads ---
http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_category.aspx?ID=110
Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom ---
http://crf.hudson.org/
60 Ways RAND Has Made a Difference
http://www.rand.org/about/history/60ways/
Drew Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round ---
http://www.aladin0.wrlc.org/gsdl/collect/pearson/pearson.shtml
Video: The Housing Speculative Bubble Explained in Animated Infographics ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-housing-speculative-bubble-explained-in-animated-infographics/
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation January 17, 1964 ---
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm
"Ike's Speech," by Jim Newton, The New Yorker, December 21, 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/12/20/101220ta_talk_newton
Eisenhower National Historic Site ---
http://www.nps.gov/history/museum/exhibits/eise/index.html
NAACP: A Century in the Fight For Freedom ---
http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/NAACP/pages/default.aspx
National Music Museum ---
http://orgs.usd.edu/nmm/
Holocaust: "Everyone would believe my pictures": The Legacy of Julien
Bryan
http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/highlights/bryan/
Drew Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round ---
http://www.aladin0.wrlc.org/gsdl/collect/pearson/pearson.shtml
Hawaii War Records Depository Home ---
http://libweb.hawaii.edu/digicoll/hwrd/HWRD_html/HWRD_welcome.htm
Abstract Expressionist New York ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/abexny/
History: Las Vegas [Flash Player]
http://www.lasvegassun.com/history/
Online Nevada Encyclopedia ---
http://www.onlinenevada.org/
Lafayette College Archives Photograph Collection ---
http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/historicalphotos
Operation Deep Storm: New Zealand Antarctic Veterans Association ---
http://antarctic.homestead.com/Index.html
Windham Textile & History Museum & Visitors Center ---
http://www.millmuseum.org/Mill_Museum/Welcome.html
The Textile Collection ---
http://www.vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/ST.html
Video: The Housing Speculative Bubble Explained in Animated Infographics ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-the-housing-speculative-bubble-explained-in-animated-infographics/
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
National Music Museum ---
http://orgs.usd.edu/nmm/
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
From the University of North Carolina
Writing Center Handouts ---
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/
The Writing Center at Harvard University ---
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/resources.html
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
December 3, 2010
December 4, 2010
December 6, 2010
December 7, 2010
December 11, 2010
December 14, 2010
December 15, 2010
December 16, 2010
December 17, 2010
'Eliminating tooth decay: Breakthrough in dental plaque research,"
PhysOrg, December 7, 2010 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-tooth-breakthrough-dental-plaque.html
"Spinal Cord Injury Patient Treated With Non-Matched Adult Stem Cells:
Medistem Reports First Human Use of Universal Donor Combination Adult Stem Cell
Therapy in Spinal Cord Injury," Medistem, December 10, 2010 ---
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Spinal-Cord-Injury-Patient-Treated-With-Non-Matched-Adult-Stem-Cells-1367051.htm
Professor loses precious little time in class while smashing a student's
cell phone ---
http://www.funnieststuff.net/viewmovie.php?id=2094
2010 Darwin Awards to the Low End of the Gene Pool ---
http://www.darwinawards.com/
Video: Funny Animal Voiceovers ---
http://www.wimp.com/animalvoiceovers/
Video: TSA Helps You Make it to Your Flight ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a8jGVXOMsw&feature=player_embedded
I rewrote this from the Italian version forwarded by Ed Scribner
Ole enters Sven's barbershop for a shave.
While Sven is foaming him up, Ole mentions the problems he has getting a close
shave around the cheeks.
Sven said, "Lucky, I'm got just the ting", taking a small wooden ball from a
nearby drawer. "Just place dis between your cheek and gum."
Ole places the ball in his mouth, and Sven proceeds with the closest shave
Ole has ever experienced.
After a few strokes, Ole asks, "Thib, what if I swallow dis ball?"
"No problem," says Sven. "Jus do like everyone else. Bring it back tomorrow
or the day after!"
Ole wasn't smart enough to worry about whether the ball in his mouth had been
disinfected.
Adjunct Accused of Removing His Clothes During Class ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/adjunct-accused-of-removing-his-clothes-during-class/28990
My wife audited two art courses at Trinity that used nude models, but I had to
wait in the hall to meet her after class.
I'm trying to think of accounting courses where removing clothes might
benefit the learning of accountancy. The trick is to make students learn
something they will never forget. .
"Last on, First off." .
"Naked shorts don't qualify for hedge accounting special treatment under FAS
133." .
"There's the mean of accounting stereotypes and then there are those outer
tails." .
"These taxes take the shirt right off your back." .
"You wanna see accelerated depreciation?" .
"Paton Place." .
"Estimate the fair value." .
"Here's an example of a XBRL tag."
"Some things just don't meet the materiality threshhold."
"Note that the debits and credits are on opposite sides."
Auntie Bev Gives Thanks for a Great 2010
As we progress through the year 2010, I want to thank all of you for your
educational e-mails over the past year. I am totally screwed up now and have
little chance of recovery.
I no longer open a bathroom door without using a paper towel, or have the
waitress put lemon slices in my ice water without worrying about the bacteria on
the lemon peel.
I can't use the remote in a hotel room because I don't know what the last person
was doing while flipping through the adult movie channels.
I can't sit down on the hotel bedspread because I can only imagine what has
happened on it since it was last washed.
I have trouble shaking hands with someone who has been driving because the
number one pastime while driving alone is picking one's nose.
Eating a little snack sends me on a guilt trip because I can only imagine how
many gallons of trans fats I have consumed over the years.
I can't touch any woman's purse for fear she has placed it on the floor of a
public bathroom.
I MUST SEND MY SPECIAL THANKS to whoever sent me the one about rat poop in the
glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope
that needs sealing.
ALSO, now I have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason.
I no longer have any savings because I gave it to a sick girl (Penny Brown) who
is about to die for the 1,387,258th time.
I no longer have any money, but that will change once I receive the $15,000 that
Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are sending me for participating in their special
e-mail program.
I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for
me, and St. Theresa's Novena has granted my every wish.
I can't have a drink in a bar because I'll wake up in a bathtub full of ice with
my kidneys gone.
I can't eat at KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks
with no eyes, feet or feathers.
I can't use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo
on a hot day.
THANKS TO YOU I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an
e-mail to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes.
BECAUSE OF YOUR CONCERN, I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove
toilet stains.
I no longer buy gas without taking someone along to watch the car so a serial
killer doesn't crawl in my back seat when I'm filling up.
I no longer drink Pepsi or Fanta since the people who make these products are
atheists who refuse to put 'Under God' on their cans.
I no longer use Cling Wrap in the microwave because it causes seven different
types of cancer.
AND THANKS FOR LETTING ME KNOW I can't boil a cup of water in the microwave
anymore because it will blow up in my face. Disfiguring me for life.
I no longer go to the movies because I could be pricked with a needle infected
with AIDS when I sit down.
I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with a perfume
sample and rob me.
I no longer receive packages from UPS or Fed Ex since they are actually Al Qaeda
agents in disguise.
And I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number
for which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica , Uganda , Singapore ,
and Uzbekistan .
I no longer buy cookies from Neiman-Marcus since I now have their recipe.
THANKS TO YOU I can't use anyone's toilet but mine because a big black snake
could be lurking under the seat and cause me instant death when it bites my
butt.
AND THANKS TO YOUR GREAT ADVICE I can't ever pick up $2.00 coin dropped in the
parking lot because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting to
grab me as I bend over.
I no longer drive my car because buying gas from some companies supports Al
Qaeda, and buying gas from all the others supports South American dictators.
I can't do any gardening because I'm afraid I'll get bitten by the Violin Spider
and my hand will fall off.
TEXTING ABBREVIATIONS FOR SENIORS
BTW ...................Bring The Wheelchair
BYOT .................Bring Your Own Teeth
DWI ....................Driving While Incontinent
FWB ...................Friend With Beta-blockers
FWIW .................Forgot Where I Was
FYI .....................For Your Indigestion.
GOML ................Get Off My Lawn
GTG ...................Gotta Groan
IMHMO ...............In My HMO
IMHO ..................Is My Hearing-Aid On?
JK .......................Just Kvetching
LOL ....................Living On Lipitor
LWO ...................Lawrence Welk's On
OMG ..................Ouch, My Groin!
ROFL - CGU …..Rolling On The Floor Laughing - Can't Get Up
RULKM ..............Are You Leaving Kids Money?
SUS ...................Speak Up, Sonny
TGIF ...................Thank Goodness It's Four (Four O'clock - Early Bird
Special)
WIWYA ...............When I Was Your Age
WTF ...................What's Today's Fish?
YYY ....................Yadda, yadda, yadda
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accountancy Discussion ListServs:
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a
ListServ (usually for free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc
Roles of a ListServ ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
|
CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation
Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/MicrosoftInv
Your students may also want to learn how to prepare their own pivot tables and pivot charts.
Go to the ExcelPivotTable01.wmv video listed at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
Bob Jensen
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/