Tidbits on December 18, 2010
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

 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

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

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

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