Tidbits on March 15, 2011
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
This week I made a special
photograph file of my Sunrise and Sunset Favorites Set 01
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/SunriseSunset/01/SunriseSunsetFavoritesSet01.htm
My desk faces eastward toward the
White Mountains
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Mountains_%28New_Hampshire%29
I watch nearly every sunrise while working on my computer
The flash reflection in the window points to the north side of Franconia Notch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconia_Notch
An early morning vapor trail of fighter jets
from a training base in Vermont
Every sunrise is different in every season of the year
Below is a typical sunrise of inspiration and faith
Picture Granite Frosting on an Angel Food Cake
Early March this year was a bit too memorable. Nightly temperatures plunged to
near zero Fahrenheit. Rain and sleet formed a ten-inch slab of ice atop our deep
snow. This destroyed our town's snow plows and transmissions on big trucks,
downs power lines, and ruins both downhill and cross-country skiing.
About 200 yards behind the cottage our power
transformer blew like the Fourth of July sending giant blue fireballs toward the
heavens while I was chiseling ice in the driveway. Soon the power company will
try to drag in a new transformer on a giant toboggan. We're thankful for our
wonderful home generator, but we're not thrilled with the soaring price of
propane that powers this generator. Life is, shall we say, a little too cool
while Erika recovers painfully from spine surgery.
Ice climbers now have walls of ice nearby that
rival those in Norway ---
http://www.climbing.com/news/hotflashes/awesome_big-wall_ice_in_norway/
And to think that it's 80 degrees in San
Antonio where we used to live --- the spring season for Blue Bonnet wild
flowers. Our wild flowers up here wake up in June if we're lucky.
This week I made a special
photograph file of my Sunrise and Sunset Favorites Set 01
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/SunriseSunset/01/SunriseSunsetFavoritesSet01.htm
White
Mountain News ---
http://www.whitemtnews.com/
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on March 15, 2011
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/TidbitsQuotations031511.htm
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
The Secret of Happiness --- Expect Success
(watch at least to the point of great choreography)
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? (hilarious as well as to the
point)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Thank you Jim Martin for the heads up!
The Secret of Happiness --- Expect Failure
(watch at least to the point of the section on self help books)
Alain de Botton: The Glass of Life is Half Empty ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/alain_de_botton.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Kasparov Talks Chess, Technology and a Little Life at Google
---
Click Here http://www.openculture.com/2011/02/kasparov_talks_chess_technology_and_a_little_life_at_google.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The Amazing Terry Fator (this is Crazy)---
http://www.rulesdontapply.com/fator.htm
Watch the fantastic Elvis ending.
North Platte Nebraska in WW III ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=07DGeLvDw8I
Free Movies by Category ---
http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline
The Smithsonian Wildlife Photo Archive ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/the_smithsonian_wildlife_photo_archive.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
National Geographic Video: Animals, Travel, Kids ---
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/
The Skin Gun ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI
Moof (music sharing) ---
http://moof.com/
Please drive more carefully ---
ttp://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=-qvXbIenivk
Incredible Time Lapse Video of NYC ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/the_big_apple_in_incredible_time_lapse_video.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
National Academy of Sciences: Distinctive Voices @ The Jonsson
Center [Real Player]
http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Jonsson_main
U.S. Taxpayers are Paying to Restore Mosques around the World
---
http://www.wsbtv.com/video/25764282/index.html
Journal of Accountancy Video on How to Combat IT
Security Threats ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Multimedia/
Memories of W.P.I.X New York !!! ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njs9NuDopC4&feature=player_embedded
Is your life stuck in the mud --- a creative idea on how to
get moving
Here is what a REAL Norwegian does when his tractor gets
stuck! ---
http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?viral_id=28504&page=1
USC Shoah Foundation Institute [civil rights, bigotry]
http://college.usc.edu/vhi/
Discovery’s Final Launch Viewed from Airplane ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/02/discoverys_final_launch.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
A Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra ---
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdO3u6ORlGM
The Amazing Terry Fator (this is Crazy)
---
http://www.rulesdontapply.com/fator.htm
Watch the fantastic Elvis ending.
The Diamonds Were Part of My History ---
http://www.flixxy.com/the-diamonds-little-darlin-1957-2004.htm
Hillary Clinton Calls Al Jazeera 'Real News,'
Criticizes U.S. Media (VIDEO) ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/03/hillary-clinton-calls-al-_n_830890.html
Vaudeville! ---
http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ema02/easton/vaudeville/vaudeville.html
Fred Astaire Golfing ---
http://www.stracka.com/golf-blogs/blogs_post.asp?id=3357105
American Routes [music] ---
http://americanroutes.publicradio.org/
Tulane Special Collections: Carnival Exhibit ---
http://specialcollections.tulane.edu/Carnival.html
The Blues, Black Vaudeville, and the
Silver Screen, 1912-1930s
http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/douglass/
North Korea's Cinema of Dreams ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/north_koreas_cinema_of_dreams.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Video Lecure by Nobel LaureateRobert Merton
The Future of Finance
MIT World
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/881
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
Japan Earthquake: Before and After ---
http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm
Account of an American evangelist in
Christchurch. Lots of pictures.
http://www.ariseinstitute.com/news/posts/frontline-report-february-22-christchurch-earthquake.html
Thank you for the heads up David Albrecht
Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit
---
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/
In Focus: The Tree (Getty Museum) ---
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/focus_trees/
Japan Scenes, Before and After ---
http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm
The 1940s (slide show advances automatically) ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/12e67abcf8a5fae7
Kilauea Volcano Pictures: Hawaii Eruption Spurts
Lava ---
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/pictures/110307-hawaii-volcano-erupts-kilauea-lava/?now=2011-03-07-00:01
A Directory of Bookmarks from my Good Friend in
Romania ---
Dream vs. Reality of Life ---
http://dansomnea.tripod.com/TOUR/
Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery [Flash
Player] ---
http://www.nasm.si.edu/pioneers/?hp=b
Birtual Sistine Chapel ---
http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html
National Naval Aviation Museum [Flash Player] ---
http://www.navalaviationmuseum.org/
The War of the Rebellion Atlas (amazing Civil War
atlas) ---
http://contentdm.baylor.edu/cdm4/index_19wor.php?CISOROOT=/19wor
ICA: Mark Bradford (contemporary art) ---
http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/bradford/
Museum of Contemporary Art:
Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson ---
http://www.mcachicago.org/eliasson/
From the Harvard Business School
Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit ---
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/
Florida State Parks ---
http://www.floridastateparks.org/default.cfm
The Smithsonian Wildlife Photo Archive ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/the_smithsonian_wildlife_photo_archive.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
National Geographic Video: Animals, Travel, Kids ---
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/
The Allure of the Automobile (museum)
http://www.high.org/main.taf?p=3,1,1,17,1
Automobile in American Life and Society ---
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/
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
Mark Twain Lives (in animation) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/mark_twain_lives_in_animation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Byrd Polar Research Center Archival Program ---
http://library.osu.edu/find/collections/byrd-polar-archives/
From the Harvard Business School
Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit ---
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/
Automobile in American Life and Society ---
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/
Footnote.com (history) ---
http://www.footnote.com/
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on March 15, 2011
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/TidbitsQuotations031511.htm
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
Question
How many legal moves are there in the game of chess?
Video: Kasparov Talks Chess, Technology and a Little Life at Google
---
Click Here http://www.openculture.com/2011/02/kasparov_talks_chess_technology_and_a_little_life_at_google.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Recalls.gov
http://www.recalls.gov/
The Secret of Happiness --- Expect Success
(watch at least to the point of great choreography)
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? (hilarious as well as to the
point)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Thank you Jim Martin for the heads up!
The Secret of Happiness --- Expect Failure
(watch at least to the point of the section on self help books)
Alain de Botton: The Glass of Life is Half Empty ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/alain_de_botton.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
A Directory of Bookmarks from my Good Friend in Romania ---
Dream vs. Reality of Life ---
http://dansomnea.tripod.com/TOUR/
A roundup of posts on Apple software and
products
"From the Archives: Apple Edition," by Natalie Houston, Chronicle of
Higher Education, March 14, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/from-the-archives-apple-edition/31807?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
"A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I," by Thomas
Benton, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 8, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Perfect-Storm-in/126451/
Unsurprisingly, Academically Adrift: Limited
Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reveals that at least 45 percent of
undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex
reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36
percent showed no progress in four years." And that's just the beginning of
the bad news.
Meanwhile, in his State of the Union address,
President Obama included a call for more Americans to go to college in order
to make us more competitive in a global context. This is "our generation's
Sputnik moment," he said.
Many professors will recall that the arms race with
the Soviet Union motivated a surge in support for higher education that
lasted until the end of the 1960s. It was a rising tide that lifted all
boats, including the arts and humanities. Fifty years later, perhaps the
most visible remnant of the original "Sputnik moment" is the belief that
everyone should go to college.
But that raises the question: What good does it do
to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already
there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the
quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
Arum and Roksa point out that students in math,
science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly
career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by
the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study.
Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who
interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading,
writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly
if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
Of course, those of us who teach at selective
liberal-arts colleges have known that all along. But even students at
expensive, elite institutions are not achieving as much as they should.
Students are adrift almost everywhere, floating in the wreckage of a perfect
storm that has transformed higher education almost beyond recognition.
Politicians and the public are quick to blame
college faculty members for the decline in learning, but professors—like all
teachers—are working in a context that has been created largely by others:
Few people outside of higher education understand how little control
professors actually have over what students can learn.
Here are some reasons:
Lack of student preparation.
Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic
area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities. So
college professors routinely encounter students who have never written
anything more than short answers on exams, who do not read much at all, who
lack foundational skills in math and science, yet are completely convinced
of their abilities and resist any criticism of their work, to the point of
tears and tantrums: "But I earned nothing but A's in high school," and "Your
demands are unreasonable." Such a combination makes some students nearly
unteachable.
Grade inflation. It has become
difficult to give students honest feedback. The slightest criticisms have to
be cushioned by a warm blanket of praise and encouragement to avoid
provoking oppositional defiance or complete breakdowns. As a result, student
progress is slowed, sharply. Rubric-driven approaches give the appearance of
objectivity but make grading seem like a matter of checklists, which, if
completed, must ensure an A. Increasingly, time-pressured college teachers
ask themselves, "What grade will ensure no complaint from the student, or
worse, a quasi-legal battle over whether the instructions for an assignment
were clear enough?" So, the number of A-range grades keeps going up, and the
motivation for students to excel keeps going down.
Student retention. As the
college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle
to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it
necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be
retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and
on to the teacher. Faculty members can work with an individual student, if
they have time, but the capabilities of the student population as a whole
define the average level of rigor that is sustainable in the classroom. At
some institutions, graduation rates are so high because the academic
expectations are so low. Failing a lot of students is a serious risk,
financially, for the college and the professor.
Student evaluations of teachers.
Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most
faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what
students think of them. The common wisdom, for the untenured, at
least—whether it is true or not—is to find ways to keep the students happy:
Expect little, smile a lot, gesture freely, show movies, praise them
constantly, give high marks, bring cookies on evaluation day. Wise
administrators may read confidential evaluations in context, but students
can now use the Internet to retaliate against professors in ways that can
damage their ability to sustain minimal enrollments in their classes.
Enrollment minimums. Students
gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy,
particularly in general education. Some students may rise to a challenge;
many won't. They'll drop, withdraw, or even leave a college that they find
too difficult. If you are untenured and your courses do not attract enough
students, then you can become low-hanging fruit for nonrenewal. If you are
tenured, then it means being "demoted" to teach service courses. In such
contexts, the curriculum—populated by electives and required courses
competing for the lowest expectations—is driven increasingly by student
demand rather than by what a community of scholars believes undergraduates
should know.
Lack of uniform expectations. It
is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds
the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do
that. A course in which the professor assigns a 20-page paper and 200 pages
of reading every week cannot compete with one that fills the same
requirement with half of those assignments. Faculty members cannot raise
expectations by themselves, nor can departments, since they, too, are
competing with one another for enrollments.
Contingent teaching. Perhaps the
most damaging change in higher education in the last few generations has
been the wholesale shift in the composition of the teaching staff. Formerly,
full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties
to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only
were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep
understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional
mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students
and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at
multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by
student-satisfaction surveys.
Time constraints. Contingent
faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that
are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners. One would think
that tenured faculty members, at least, would have the time to focus on
student learning, but, as the proportion of tenured professors has declined,
the service expectations on the ones remaining have increased considerably,
turning a growing number of tenured professors into part-time
administrators. At the same time, research expectations for tenure-track
faculty members have escalated steadily. Teaching becomes a distraction from
the activities that are most highly rewarded. The easiest way to save time
in the classroom is to limit assignments that require personalized feedback
and to give grades that are higher than students expect.
Curricular chaos. Many colleges
are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking
faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of
logical development in the sequencing of courses. Add to that a lack of
consensus about what constitutes a given scholarly field and a lack of
permanent faculty members to provide coverage of a discipline. As a result,
some majors have become an almost incoherent grab bag of marketable topics
combined with required courses that have no uniform standards. Students are
now able to create a path through majors that allows them to avoid obtaining
what were once considered essential skills and disciplinary knowledge.
Demoralized faculty members.
Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be
suffering from a lack of self-confidence. It starts in graduate school, when
we begin to fear we are destined for unemployment, when we compare our pay
with that of comparably educated professionals, and when we realize that—for
all the sacrifices that we've made, often with idealistic motives—we are
held in slight regard. Many people even think of us as subversives who "hate
America." During the latest economic crisis—perhaps the endpoint of a
40-year slide—many of us have felt as if we've become expendable, if we are
employed at all. That makes it hard for us to make strong demands on our
students, or, perhaps more important, to stand up for any kind of change in
our institutions.
I have presented the issues affecting undergraduate
learning as a list, but it makes more sense to think of them as a Venn
diagram of overlapping and mutually reinforcing circles. Of course, they do
not amount to a complete overview of the problem; I have tried to represent
a cluster of concerns that I believe are common among faculty members in the
U.S. educational system.
As Arum and Roksa note, any attempt to shift the
responsibility for raising standards entirely onto college teachers is bound
to fail, because we "operate in broader social, fiscal, regulatory, and
political contexts. The responsibility for change rests not only with
college campuses but beyond." The authors propose "externally mandated
accountability systems on public colleges and universities," similar to No
Child Left Behind, but they also note that the causes of the declining
educational outcomes are broader than anything that can be dealt with by the
government or educational institutions alone. Education is a billion-dollar
tail on a trillion-dollar dog.
Continued in article
The
problem is that our students choose very bland, low nourishment diets in our
modern day smorgasbord curricula. Their concern is with their grade averages
rather than their education. And why not? Grades for students and turf for
faculty have become the keys to the kingdom!
Bob Jensen
"Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything?" by Richard Arum and
Josipa Roksa. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Undergraduates-Actually/125979/
Drawing on survey responses, transcript data, and
results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (a standardized test taken
by students in their first semester and at the end of their second year),
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa concluded that a significant percentage of
undergraduates are failing to develop the broad-based skills and knowledge
they should be expected to master. Here is an excerpt from Academically
Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press),
their new book based on those findings.
Continued in article
"New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges' Doorsteps," by David
Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/New-Book-Lays-Failure-to-Learn/125983/
On January 19, ABC News used this report to really lambast the ineffectiveness
of higher education institutions. Like all empirical research into tough issues,
critics will certainly find flaws in this study. But the conclusion cannot be
ignored. With grade inflation combined with or caused by teaching evaluation
impacts on tenure and performance evaluations, we can hardly attribute the
explosion in A and B grades to better learning.
Bob Jensen's threads on our compassless colleges are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz
The Good Old Days Weren't All That "Good"
"To Bathe or Not to Bathe: Coming Clean in Colonial America," by
Edwards Park, Colonial Williamsburg, Autumn 2000 ---
http://www.colonialwilliamsburg.com/foundation/journal/Autumn00/bathe.cfm
Artificial Intelligence ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
"Watson Is Far From Elementary: Question-answering machines like
IBM's 'Jeopardy!' champion will eventually force us to change what we learn and
how we think," by Stephen Baker, The Wall Street Journal, March 14,
2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704570904576180954262138300.html
In the weeks since IBM's computer, Watson, thrashed
two flesh-and-blood champions in the quiz show "Jeopardy!," human
intelligence has been punching back—at least on blogs and opinion pages.
Watson doesn't "know" anything, experts say. It doesn't laugh at jokes,
cannot carry on a conversation, has no sense of self, and commits bloopers
no human would consider. (Toronto, a U.S. city?) What's more, it's horribly
inefficient, requiring a roomful of computers to match what we carry between
our ears. And it probably would not have won without its inhuman speed on
the buzzer.
This is all enough to make you feel reinvigorated
to be human. But focusing on Watson's shortcomings misses the point. It
risks distracting people from the transformation that Watson all but
announced on its "Jeopardy!" debut: These question-answering machines will
soon be working alongside us in offices and laboratories, and forcing us to
make adjustments in what we learn and how we think. Watson is an early
sighting of a highly disruptive force.
The key is to regard these computers not as human
wannabes but rather as powerful tools, ones that can handle jobs currently
held by people. The "intelligence" of the tools matters little. What counts
is the information they deliver.
In our history of making tools, we have long
adjusted to the disruptions they cause. Imagine an Italian town in the 17th
century. Perhaps there's one man who has a special sense for the weather.
Let's call him Luigi. Using his magnificent brain, he picks up on
signals—changes in the wind, certain odors, perhaps the flight paths of
birds or noises coming from the barn. And he spreads word through the town
that rain will be coming in two days, or that a cold front might freeze the
crops. Luigi is a valuable member of society.
Along comes a traveling vendor who carries a new
instrument invented in 1643 by Evangelista Torricelli. It's a barometer, and
it predicts the weather about as well as Luigi. It's certainly not as smart
as him, if it can be called smart at all. It has no sense of self, is deaf
to the animals in the barn, blind to the flight patterns of birds. Yet it
comes up with valuable information.
In a world with barometers, Luigi and similar
weather savants must find other work for their fabulous minds. Perhaps using
the new tool, they can deepen their analysis of weather patterns, keep
careful records and then draw conclusions about optimal farming techniques.
They might become consultants. Maybe some of them drop out of the weather
business altogether. The new tool creates both displacement and economic
opportunity. It forces people to reconsider how they use their heads.
The same is true of Watson and the coming
generation of question-answering machines. We can carry on interesting
discussions about how "smart" they are or aren't, but that's academic. They
make sense of complex questions in English and fetch answers, scoring each
one for the machines' level of confidence in it. When asked if Watson can
"think," David Ferrucci, IBM's chief scientist on the "Jeopardy!" team,
responds: "Can a submarine swim?"
Continued in article
Mr. Baker is the author of "Final Jeopardy—Man vs. Machine and the
Quest to Know Everything" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
Best Undergraduate Business Schools According to Business Week ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/special_reports/20110303best_undergrad_bschools.htm?link_position=link1
Bob Jensen's threads on the controversies of media rankings of colleges ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"Newer Nuclear Reactors May Not Have Failed in Japan," by Kevin Bullis,
MIT's Technology Review, March 15, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/35100/?nlid=4239&a=f
From Huffington Post
The most creative and manipulative accountants in the public sector would not
have used adopted the ploys used by governmental accountants and teachers'
unions to hide horrible performance?
"[R]eally, when you get down to it, the guys at
Enron never would have done this.
Bill Gates
Remedying state budget crises will take better
accounting, better tools, and more respect for leaders who step up to address
these problems, Gates argued. "We need to reward politicians," he said.
"Whenever they say there are these long-term problems, we can't say, 'Oh, you're
the messenger with bad news? We just shot you.'"
"Bill Gates On States' Accounting: 'The Guys At Enron Never Would Have Done
This'." by Bianca Boscar, Huffington Post, March 3. 2011 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/03/bill-gates-ted-2011_n_830972.html?ir=Business
During a second appearance onstage at the annual
TED conference, Bill Gates spoke out against worsening state budget deficits
caused by accounting "tricks" he said would make Enron's former executives
blush.
The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said
state budgets have received a puzzling lack of scrutiny and have been
"riddled with gimmicks" aimed at deferring or disguising the true costs of
public employees' health care and pension obligations, citing California's
ongoing budget crisis as an example of creative deficit spending and the
subsequent cuts to education spending as an unacceptable cost.
"[R]eally, when you get down to it, the guys at
Enron never would have done this. This is so blatant, so extreme," Gates
said of state governments' accounting practices generally. "Is anyone paying
attention to some of the things these guys do? They borrow money -- they're
not supposed to, but they figure out a way -- they make you pay more in
withholding to help their cashflow out, they sell off the assets, they defer
the payments, they sell off the revenues from tobacco."
Gates argued that government accounting practices
should be more like private accounting. "The amount of IQ and good numeric
analysis both inside Google and Microsoft and outside ... really is quite
phenomenal. Everybody has an opinion. There's great feedback and the numbers
are used to make the decision," he said. "If you go over to the education
spending and health care spending ... you don't have that type of
involvement on a number that's more important in terms of equity and in
terms of learning."
The former Microsoft chief executive, now the
co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said youth and education
programs stand to lose the most as a result of the gaping holes in state
budgets.
"It really is the young versus the old to some
degree. If you don't solve what you're doing in health care, you're going to
be deinvesting in the young," Gates said. "With the kind of cuts we're
talking about, it will be far, far harder to get these incentives for
excellence or to move over to use technology in the new way."
Remedying state budget crises will take better
accounting, better tools, and more respect for leaders who step up to
address these problems, Gates argued. "We need to reward politicians," he
said. "Whenever they say there are these long-term problems, we can't say,
'Oh, you're the messenger with bad news? We just shot you.'"
The bottom line, according to Gates: "We need to
care about state budgets because they are critical for our kids and our
future."
Get the latest updates from TED
here.
Jensen Comment
Take Home 1
Bill Gates claims that good teachers are the most important ingredient of
learning in schools (although I don't think he underestimates the even greater
importance of the home environment). He therefore recommends both increasing
class sizes of good teachers and rewarding them accordingly for the added effort
needed to handle larger classes. Bob Jensen conditionally supports this if the
good teachers get the added support needed such as multiple teachers aids and
software support.
Take Home 2
Get the bad teachers out of the system and, at a minimum, stop rewarding them
with automatic raises based on seniority alone. Bob Jensen thinks that
protectionism of bad teachers or uncaring teachers or absentee teachers is
probably the most harmful program of teachers' unions when coupled with
protectionist game playing by unions to protect bad schools along with bad
teachers.
Take Home 3
Bill Gates claims it has never been demonstrated that advanced degrees in
education that are automatically rewarded with lifetime pay raises are
instrumental in improving teaching and learning. Bob Jensen agrees. I've
witnessed to many masters programs in education that are tantamount to summer
vacations for teachers.
Bob Jensen's threads on the controversies of higher education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the horrid state of governmental accounting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
From the Harvard Business School
Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit ---
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/
Jensen Comment
When teaching about accounting for liabilities and credit cards, it might be
interesting to introduce students to the history of liabilities ---
Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit ---
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
"Milgram's obedience studies - not about obedience after all?"
Research Digest, February 2011 ---
Click Here
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2011/02/milgrams-obedience-studies-not-about.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BpsResearchDigest+%28BPS+Research+Digest%29
Bob Jensen's threads on research replication ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Evil Empire Ethics Dilemmas in Star Wars and in Libya
"Consulting for the Evil Empire," by Jimmy Guterman, Harvard Business
Review Blog, March 4, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2011/03/consulting_for_the_evil_empire.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Who would your college's graduates prefer for a 2011 commencement speaker?
Charlie Sheen ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Sheen
There are a few things that I noted. Firstly, in high school Charlie was a
pretty good baseball player. But he had poor attendance, lousy grades, and did
not graduate. Secondly, I never truly made the connection, until now, with how
his father adopted the stage name "Sheen."
Given the latest outrageous media frenzy, Charlie may become a highly sought
after graduation speaker at major universities. If you took a vote in your
university, who do you think would garner the most votes as a graduation speaker
--- President Obama, Larry Summers, Oprah, or Charlie Sheen?
"Students Demand Charlie Sheen as Commencement Speaker," Inside Higher
Ed, March 3, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/03/03/qt#252849
Jensen Comment
There seems to be quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that graduates prefer
comedians as commencement speakers. One of the more popular commencement
speakers in history was Erma Bombeck ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erma_Bombeck
This seems to indicate that the "grass is always greener over the septic tank"
--- especially when our graduates prefer Charlie.
McNutt Describes How Cowboys, Engineers, and Scientists Plugged the BP Oil
Leak ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/McNutt_vonGugelberg2011.html?cmpid=alumni&source=gsbtoday
Spending policies designed to reinvigorate the flat
U.S. economy have only added to the nation's economic woes. Minarik said debt
has reached an amount equal to 60% of the Gross Domestic Product, which
describes the value of all goods and services the nation produces. That spending
has placed the United States alongside some other developed countries that are
struggling with ballooning debt rates — nations including Portugal, Italy,
Ireland, Greece, and Spain. "That shows the degree of risk we face," he
explained
Video
"A Sobering Look at Today's Federal Debt," Stanford Graduate School of
Business, February 10, 2011 ---
http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/sobering-look-todays-federal-debt?cmpid=alumni&source=gsbtoday
Stanford Graduate School of Business students who
came to the Schwab Center on Jan.19 to learn about the perils facing today’s
economy got a sobering history lesson.
At the end of World War II, the United States had
accumulated substantial debt. But our country's economy still took off,
fueled by soldiers returning home to join the workforce and by new
manufacturing technologies honed during wartime that could instead be used
to more efficiently build consumer goods. With the productive capacity of
other nations weakened by war, the United States quickly became the go-to
source for cars and other products.
Compare that scenario to events playing out today.
The nation again has a hefty debt; it has reached
$14 trillion according to the federal government. But this time, U.S.
products are facing stiff competition from abroad. On top of that, there’s a
lingering global recession. And many highly trained Baby Boomers are taking
their much-needed professional talents with them into retirement.
"This is not your grandfather’s economy," Joseph
Minarik, senior vice president and director of research at the Committee for
Economic Development public policy organization, told students. "This is not
an economy that could grow out of an enormous debt at the end of World War
II. This is an economy that will have to struggle to turn the situation
around."
Minarik was part of a panel of seven economic
experts from the GSB and beyond who discussed their agenda-setting ideas
during "The Federal Budget and an Innovative Economy." The program was
sponsored by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, student leaders of
the GSB's Public Management Program, and the Washington, D.C.-based
Committee for Economic Development policy research group.
Spending policies designed to reinvigorate the flat
U.S. economy have only added to the nation's economic woes. Minarik said
debt has reached an amount equal to 60% of the Gross Domestic Product, which
describes the value of all goods and services the nation produces.
That spending has placed the United States
alongside some other developed countries that are struggling with ballooning
debt rates — nations including Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain.
"That shows the degree of risk we face," he explained.
When the economy improves and the current low
interest rates rise, so will the government's obligations on that debt. By
the middle of the century, Minarik warned, "We are not going to collect
revenues that will be enough to even pay the interest on the federal
government's accumulated debt. That's how bad the federal budget outlook
is."
However, the panel also proposed solutions.
Boosting productivity is a mandatory step to
strengthen the economy, said Lenny Mendonca, director in the San Francisco
office of management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
That won't be easy with a shrinking labor force,
said Mendonca, who received his MBA and certificate in public management
from the GSB in 1987. "In the next decade, we will be two million technical
and analytical workers short of what we will need for even the modest growth
we expect," he said.
An alternative could be boosting productivity in
areas that have not yet shown productivity gains. For example, while growing
international competition has forced private sector businesses to become
more productive, areas including education, health care, and the public
sector have remained productivity "laggards," Mendonca said. "It's a big
drag on the economy."
New technology isn't needed to increase
productivity levels for those areas, he said: "It's applying technologies
that we have today more broadly and sharing best practices."
Other strategies include upgrading the nation's
outdated infrastructure to be more energy efficient, enabling goods and
services to be transferred more cheaply. "It's hard to move the full economy
when we have these four very large anchors — health care, education, the
public sector, and energy infrastructure — dragging behind us," Mendonca
said.
Controlling corporate salaries would also have a
positive impact, said Daniel Van Dyke, senior vice president and risk
manager for Wells Fargo Bank and another panelist. Mortgage brokers might
not have pushed risky investments that nearly brought down the economy if
they'd "had some skin in the game" that linked their personal earnings to
their investments, he said.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on entitlements are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting and how
it hides debt ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
"How Not to Lay Off Teachers: New evidence supports merit-based
dismissals. Cuomo ducks and covers," The Wall Street Journal, March
9, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704288304576171063977893764.html
The problem isn't unique to New York, and neither
is the public sentiment. The federal stimulus dollars that allowed school
districts to delay inevitable belt-tightening are running out. The steep
deficits that states now face mean that teacher layoffs this year are
unavoidable. Parents understandably want the best teachers spared. Yet in 14
states it is illegal for schools to consider anything other than a teacher's
length of service when making layoff decisions.
It gets worse. "Many people don't realize that
teachers are not evenly distributed nationwide," says Tim Daly of the New
Teacher Project, which has released a new report on the nationwide impact on
quality-blind layoffs. "Fourteen states have these rules but about 40% of
all teachers work in those states, and they're the states with the biggest
budget deficits." In addition to New York, the list includes California, New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.
The unions that support these laws insist that
seniority is the only "fair" way to reduce the teaching work force, whose
growth in many states has outpaced student enrollment over the past decade.
In fact, states already have some objective measures of teacher performance,
even if they aren't used when making layoff decisions. All states, for
example, possess performance evaluations and teacher attendance data that
could potentially inform layoff decisions.
The real problem is the underlying assumption that
seniority is a decent proxy for performance. Not surprisingly, research
shows that if you look at all first-year teachers as a group, they're not as
good as the second-year teachers as a group. But research also shows the
folly of basing layoffs on a single variable.
"You don't lay off cohorts; you lay off individual
teachers," says Mr. Daly. "So using research about teachers as a group is
misleading with respect to any individual teacher." Citing two recent
studies on seniority-based layoffs, Mr. Daly explains that "only about 20%
of the teachers who have the least seniority are also among the least
effective teachers in a district. About 80% of the time, there's a teacher
who's worse that you could have laid off but didn't because they had more
seniority."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
What's not clear to me is what happens when there are closings of entire schools
such as what will happen in Detroit this year. Are the most senior teachers
redistributed among the remaining schools such that the younger and perhaps
better teachers are laid off in the surviving schools? I don't know the
teacher's union rules on this issue. If the individual schools themselves
control the selection of new teachers, it seems a little unfair to force these
schools to take some redistributed teachers and fire teachers previously hired
by the surviving schools.
Can an older Detroit teacher be forced upon an East Lansing or Okemos school
district?
Can an older Milwaukee teacher be forced upon a Madison school district?
I assume school districts have no forced redistribution from outside the
district, but I could be wrong.
Bob Jensen's threads on tenure are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TeachingVsResearch
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MicroLevelResearch
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#JointAuthorship
An Illustration of Future Free TV News on the Web
Non-Profit CEO Gets 10 Year Prison Sentence ---
http://nonprofittimes.tv/non-profit-times-tv-march-9th-2011
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Book on Return on Investment of the Social Media:
The Thank You Economy
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=358&bpid=26492&nlid=4222
March 11, 2011 reply from David Albrecht
OK, I'm ordering this book (the 12th book I've ordered
this year). I have a tremendous stack of unread books on my night stand.
From a quoted review on the Amazon site for this book (
http://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Economy-Gary-Vaynerchuk/dp/0061914185/
- There is enormous ROI in social media. It's
like my famous saying though, "What's the ROI of your mother?" The data
isn't as black and white like it has been in the past. I firmly believe
that the brands that have a soul and a heart and understand how to scale
this will win.
I really agree with this statement. After viewing the
picture of data visualization from the link that Ed Scribner passed along
last night (here's the original release on it:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/visualizing-friendships/469716398919
), I can't help but think that the lighted areas in
that picture are primed to be the winners in the coming Internet or Social
Media economy. The areas not highlighted (Russia, northern South America,
much of Africa) are going to be losers.
I also think that in the future, Social Media will be a key to faculty
productivity and success. This runs counter to today's reality, where
faculty are behind the times in social media literacy and usage.
More later.
Dave Albrecht
College Tuition: Higher Grades versus Economy?
"Audio: How Students Are 'Buying Down' to Their 'Next Best' College
Choices," by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 1,
2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Students-Are-Buying-Down/126548/
John T. Lawlor is a trend watcher in higher education. He's the founder
of the Lawlor Group, a Minneapolis-based market-research firm that
specializes in the private-college sector, which turns out a list of
higher-education trends around this time of year, as prospective students
are mulling their college choices.
The big trend he sees is "buying down"—that is, parents and students who
are settling for second best or second choice, if the price is more
appealing. And that trend is catching on not just among squeezed
middle-class families, but also among the rich, he says in a Chronicle
podcast on this page.
"I have a friend who, as they say in the development circles, 'has
capacity,'" Mr. Lawlor says to illustrate his point. "He's paying $52,000
for a college education for his daughter, and he simply said, 'I can't
believe I'm paying this. This isn't an Ivy League school.' This is a person
who has ability to pay, and if he is saying this, I think a lot of other
people are saying it."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The countervailing force here may be that at cheaper universities (such as
the University of Virginia) it may be harder to maintain a 3.9 grade average
than at Harvard (where over 90% of the graduates are sometimes graduating cum
laude). So students sometimes game for grades by choosing an expensive private
university and then fill in cheaper transfer credits if they earn A grades for
the cheaper transfer gredits.
Why do you think the private universities are so popular given that online
degrees are available from most state universities?
"Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private
College: A 50-year rise in grade-point averages is being fueled by private
institutions, a recent study finds," by Catherine Rampell. The New York Times,
April 19, 2010 ---
http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109339/want-a-higher-gpa-go-to-a-private-college?mod=edu-collegeprep
“Gaming for GPA” by Bob Jensen
So your goal in education is a gpa
That’s as close as possible to an average of A;
First you enroll in an almost unknown and easy private college
Where your transcript records accumulated knowledge.
But take the hardest courses in prestigious schools
Where you accumulate transfer credit pools;
Then transfer the A credits to your transcript cool
And bury the other credits where you were a fool.
And when the Great Scorer comes to write against your name
It’s not a question of whether you won or went lame;
You always win if you know how to play the game
And for a lifetime there’s no transcript record of your shame.
Business Week's Slideshow on Where the Richest People Live ---
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/mar2011/bw2011031_078990.htm?link_position=link13
America's Most Expensive Blocks by State (note the arrows in the upper right
corner) ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/20110227/america-s-most-expensive-blocks/slides/2
Jensen Comment
This most certainly does not tell us where some of the richest people live most
of the time. Many rich people do not buy the most expensive homes. Instead they
"live" in luxury hotels, yachts, and expensive rental properties owned by real
estate corporations. For many years Mamie Eisenhower lived in the
Waldorf-Astoria luxury hotel. A very wealthy woman lived full time on the QE2
cruise liner while it was still in operation. Before he died of a sudden heart
attack, Ken Lay was looking forward to joining his friend Jeff Skilling in Club
Fed.
And where would you say Ted Turner "lives?" He has at least 15 ranches and
owns nearly 2 million acres in various parts of the world, especially in
Australia. He also has various homes to go to when he moves about. "Turner's
biggest ranch is
Vermejo Park Ranch in New Mexico. At 920 square miles (2,400 km2),
it is the largest privately owned, contiguous tract of land in the United
States," but this does not mean he spends much time at this ranch ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Turner
"Motorola's Xoom Starts Tablet Wars With iPad ," by Walter S.
Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703775704576162434292664662.html
After months of speculation, the tablet wars begin
in earnest this week. Motorola is releasing its Xoom tablet on Feb. 24, and
I consider it the first truly comparable competitor to Apple's hit iPad.
That is partly because it is the first iPad challenger to run Honeycomb, an
elegant new version of Google's Android operating system designed especially
for tablets.
Both Motorola's hardware and Google's new software
are impressive and, after testing it for about a week, I believe the Xoom
beats the first-generation iPad in certain respects, though it lags in
others. Like the iPad, the Xoom has a roomy 10-inch screen, and it's about
the same thickness and weight as the iPad, albeit narrower and longer. And,
like the iPad's operating system, Honeycomb gives software the ability to
make good use of that screen real estate, with apps that are more
computer-like than those on a smartphone.
The Xoom has a more potent processor than the
current iPad; front and rear cameras versus none for the iPad; better
speakers; and higher screen resolution. It also can be upgraded free later
this year to support Verizon's faster 4G cellular data network (though
monthly fees may rise.)
Is the Motorola Xoom tablet the first formidable
competitor to the iPad? Its high price is its Achilles heel, says Walt
Mossberg, but the Google Android Honeycomb operating system delivers. Plus:
a market for cell phone re-sales emerges.
Motorola is taking aim at the iPad just as Apple is
expected to announce, next week, a second-generation of its tablet. Little
is known about this second iPad, but it's widely expected to take away at
least one of the Xoom's advantages over the original iPad—cameras—and is
rumored to be thinner and lighter, since weight was one of the most common
complaints about the generally praised first iPad.
The iPad has way more tablet-specific apps—around
60,000 versus a handful—and, in my tests, much better battery life. Plus,
whatever the specs say, it's a fast device with a beautiful screen that
delights people daily. But, overall, the Xoom with Honeycomb is a strong
alternative to the original iPad, and one that will only improve over time.
Unfortunately for consumers looking for iPad
alternatives, the Xoom has an Achilles' heel: price. While iPads come in a
range of models priced all the way up to $829—none of which requires a
cellphone contract—Apple's entry price for the iPad is just $499. By
contrast, the base price of a Xoom without a cellphone contract is $800—60%
more. And even with a Verizon two-year contract at $20 to $80 a
month—depending on the data limit you choose—the least you can pay for a
Xoom is $600, or 20% more before counting the contract costs.
In fairness, the iPad model with the same memory as
the Xoom and a 3G cellular modem like the Xoom's is $729, which is a closer
comparison. But it is still less than $800, and consumers still focus on
that $499 iPad entry price (for a Wi-Fi-only model.)
As much as I like the Xoom and Honeycomb, I'd
advise consumers to wait to see what Apple has up its sleeve next before
committing to a higher price for the Motorola product.
Meanwhile, here's what I found in testing the Xoom.
Hardware
Though it works fine in portrait, or vertical,
mode, the Xoom is mainly designed as a landscape, or horizontal, device. The
screen is long and narrow, proportioned to best fit widescreen video. The HD
screen boasts a resolution of 1280 by 800, versus 1024 by 768 for the iPad.
. . .
Software
Perhaps even more impressive than the hardware is
the Honeycomb software, which, for now, Google won't offer on cellphones,
only tablets, of which the Xoom is the first.
I've always felt that Android had a
rough-around-the edges, geeky feel, with too many steps to do things and too
much reliance on menus. But Honeycomb eliminates much of that. Actions like
composing emails, or changing settings are much more obvious and quicker.
The smart but cluttered notification bar has been moved to the lower right
and simplified. A tap on it pops up relevant information.
There is still a separate email app for Gmail, as
opposed to other email services you may use. But, now, as on the iPad, email
is presented in multiple columns and is more attractive and easier to use.
The browser is especially impressive, with PC-like
features, such as visible tabs for open pages and the ability to open a
private browsing session. Apps like Maps and YouTube have 3-D views. There's
a movie-editing app and live widgets for the home screens that show email
previews or video frames.
There are some downsides. The ability to play Flash
video—a big Android selling point—won't work on the Xoom at launch. It will
take some weeks to appear. And I found numerous apps in the Android Market
that wouldn't work with the Xoom. I couldn't locate a working video download
or rental service, though Google says these will be available soon.
Some apps for phones, like the popular game Angry
Birds, filled the screen beautifully and worked fine.
Bottom line: The Xoom and Honeycomb are a promising
pair that should give the iPad its stiffest competition. But price will be
an obstacle, and Apple isn't standing still.
Jensen Comment
Meanwhile the Kindle market still booms for the specialized electronic book
reader that excels in light weight and outdoor daylight reading and most
certainly on low price. But the Kindle is not a tablet computer. But if you have
a great laptop computer, the Kindle may be all you need until victory is
declared in the tablet wars.
Spent: A Poverty A Game 23% of America Does Not Need to Play
Adrienne Gonzalez, Jr. Deputy Accountant, February 26, 2011 ---
http://www.jrdeputyaccountant.com/2011/02/game-23-of-america-does-not-need-to.html
Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Business Week's rankings of the best part-time business programs
(slide show, click on the arrows) ---
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/11/1105_best_part_time_business_schools/index.htm?campaign_id=bschools_related
These are the Top 10
Rank 1 Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Rank 2 UCLA (Anderson)
Rank 3 UC Berkeley (Haas)
Rank 4 University of Nebraska
Rank 5 University of Michigan (Ross)
Rank 6 Elon University (Love)
Rank 7 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)
Rank 8 Rice University (Jones)
Rank 9 Indiana University Southeast
Rank 10 Drexel University (LeBow)
Jensen Comment
Interestingly, some of the top-ranked research business schools (like University
of Texas at Austin, Chicago, Emory, USC, Case Western, Maryland, Wake Forest,
and Southern Methodist) that also have part-time programs received lower ranks
for their part-time programs. However, most received higher regional rankings.
I don't know how many part-time programs are ranked, but the lowest ranked
university in the slide show has Rank 55.
I did not even know that some prestigious universities like Rice And Chicago
even had part-time programs.
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies in general are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
An Australian group
has created
UniLeaks, a WikiLeaks-styled website where people
may leak documents about higher education. An explanation on the website
states that it will accept and distribute "restricted or censored material
of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance which is in
some way connected to higher education, an agency or government body working
in partnership with an institution, e.g., a university." The site adds, "We
absolutely do not accept rumor, opinion, other kinds of first-hand accounts
or material that is publicly available elsewhere."
Jensen Comment
It will be interesting to to watch as Unileaks proceeds to accept rumor,
opinion, and material published elsewhere.
Seems to me like Unileaks is admittedly
"accepting material publicly available elsewhere" ---
http://unileaks.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7:head-of-rmit-security-caught-posting&catid=8:oplss&Itemid=38
And what has Uhnileaks done to verify claims of the anonymous tipster named
chickenlittle?
A Sickening Appeal for Submissions to Unileaks
Dear Vice Chancellor,
http://unileaks.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9:opluk&catid=8:oplss&Itemid=38
This is an open letter addressed to the University
Vice-Chancellors of the UK: a previous letter was
addressed to your counterparts in Australia. We wish
to inform you, as we have them, of the establishment
of a new website, titled Unileaks. As its name might
suggest, Unileaks will publish leaked documents
regarding the higher education sector: in Australia,
the UK, and elsewhere.
Aside from the superb work carried out by the
publisher Wikileaks, the establishment of
Unileaks has been inspired in large part by recent
events in the UK. Namely, the actions students have
undertaken in response to the government's austerity
measures. The strikes, occupations and other,
creative forms of resistance to neoliberalism
generated by young people in the UK - many still in
high school - have taken place against a background
of general demoralisation within the higher
education sector, and in the absence of any real or
effective opposition from licensed bodies (student
and trade unions). Nevertheless, it would seem that
a new generation is refusing to assume
responsibility for the apparent failure of
neoliberalism. We note with great interest the
development of the anti-cuts movement in the UK and
we look forward to learning more, both from its
successes and from its failures.
The necessity of bypassing moribund political and
social institutions - and the ability of
politically-engaged and technologically-savvy youth
to do just that - finds its parallel in the world of
publishing. In this sense, movements for change in
the UK (and elsewhere in the world, especially in
the Middle East), act in ways similar to how
computer networks respond to blockages in the flow
of information on the internet.
What cannot be published in the corporate or state
media will be published elsewhere, just as anger and
resentment at social injustice can only be bottled
up for so long before it explodes...
We are already in contact with individuals from the
institutions over which you preside, and we look
forward to bringing details of the ways in which -
under your management - academic inquiry is being
channelled and human knowledge shaped in order to
suit the needs of those in and with financial,
legal, commercial and political power.
Sincerely,
Unileaks.
Jensen Comment
Note the quotation
"Aside from the superb work carried out by the publisher Wikileaks" in the above
letter."
Is this what members of the Academy really feel about publishing correspondence
stolen in violation of the law?
Is this what members of the Academy really feel about Web publishing that got
people tortured or killed?
Bob Jensen has difficulty calling this "superb work" carried out by the
publisher of Wikileaks.
To me Unileaks sounds mostly like a site
where frustrated university employees can lambast and embarrass their employers
without taking any responsibility for false or exxagerated claims. What a
haven for tenure rejects and students who flunk courses!
This is even more irresponsible than
RateMyProfessor.com.
But lets never forget that "superb work" carried
out by the publisher of Wikileaks where anonymous tipsters do not have to take
any responsibility for the damage they do to others.
The Devil made me do it.
"Wrapping Tangle-Free Cords with Devil Horns," by Mark Sample, Inside
Higher Ed, February 24, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/wrapping-tangle-free-cords-with-devil-horns/30976?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Property Tax Relief for the Rich and Famous
"Tax breaks on real estate deals for people like A-Rod cost city 900M a year,"
by Juan Gonzalez, NY Daily News, February 25, 2011 ---
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/02/25/2011-02-25_tax_breaks_on_real_estate_deals_for_people_like_arod_cost_city_900m_a_year.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+nydnrss/home+%28Home%29
Yankees star
Alex Rodriguez will pay virtually no property tax
for a $6 million apartment he is buying on the upper West Side.
Rodriguez will be billed around $1,200 this year in
real estate tax for his 3,000-square-foot, five-bedroom penthouse with
spectacular views of the
Hudson River.
Over the next 10 years Rodriguez and his fellow
residents will continue to receive huge discounts on their tax, a city
housing official said.
For Rodriguez, a full tax bill would be at least
$60,000 annually, the latest city assessment records show.
A spokeswoman for Extell, the company that built
the 2-year-old luxury Rushmore Towers near the West Side Highway, declined
to discuss the taxes on the slugger's new bachelor pad.
But the only two penthouses that went into contract
this month at the Rushmore, each of which was listed at more than $6
million, have been assessed at a little over $100 per month in taxes, one
real estate expert told the Daily News.
So how is it possible that tens of thousands of
ordinary city residents struggle each year with soaring tax bills for their
co-ops, condos and homes, while the Yankees' $33-million-a-year star gets to
pay next to nothing?
Well, Rodriguez and many other well-heeled New
Yorkers have learned to take advantage of a little-known tax abatement
program that has existed for decades.
The politicians and real estate insiders call it
the "421A" program. It grants as much as a 98% percent tax abatement for up
to 25 years to condo owners in newly built housing.
The bulk of the 421A benefit has gone to luxury
housing in
Manhattan, though a few reforms by City Hall and
the Legislature in 2007 at least required developers to build 20% affordable
housing to qualify for the tax abatement.
This year alone, the 421A program will cost our
city more than $900 million in lost revenues, the
Independent Budget Office says.
That's money that could prevent layoffs of
firefighters and teachers. That could fund senior citizen centers and pay
for after-school programs.
Continued in article
"Bing's Travel Search, So Much Better Than Google, Gets Even Better,"
by Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb, February 25, 2011 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bings_travel_search_so_much_better_than_google_get.php
Google does almost nothing interesting in travel
search. Bing
offers a much more compelling travel search experience
and today
added a new little feature that makes me want to
use it even more.
Search on Bing for the phrase "fly to..." and the
name of a major destination city and you will now see an automatic display
of the best dates to fly from where you are to that place, with the lowest
price for a round trip ticket and advice about whether the price is likely
to go up or down if you waited to buy the ticket later. It's really cool.
Bob Jensen's travel helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Travel
Video Lecture by Nobel Laureate Robert Merton
The Future of Finance
MIT World
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/881
In his keynote address, Robert Merton chooses not
to focus on the financial crisis. It is clear to him there were “fools and
knaves,” as well as “many structural elements that would have happened even
if people were well behaved and well informed” -- risks are simply “embedded
in our systems.” Instead, Merton explores how financial engineering is
essential in preparing for the inevitable next crisis, and in solving
critical challenges. “The world has changed; we can’t go back. Let’s talk
about what we should do going forward.”
To illustrate society’s need for financial
innovation, Merton uses “a live case study:” the vast problem of retirement
funding. In the past decade, stock market declines and falling interest
rates have hit mainstream employer pension plans hard. Municipal pension
plans may be underfunded to the tune of three trillion dollars. (“It makes
the S&L crisis look like nothing.”) But people seek, and are due, “the
standard of living during retirement they enjoyed in the latter part of
their work life.”
Generally, determining this standard of living
means adding up likely medical, housing and general consumption costs, and
Merton describes how to target such retirement income. The main ways to
achieve the desired goal are by saving more, working longer or taking more
risk. Merton would like to design a software-based tool for ordinary people,
simple on the user end, complex on the provider end, which would serve as a
“next generation pension solution,” offering a way to manipulate the key
variables in retirement income and demonstrate potential financial outcomes.
This tool would help users continuously optimize risk to help them reach
their retirement funding goals.
There are regulatory obstacles now to the
implementation of such a method on a widespread basis, and a gap between how
managers, advisers and financial institutions think about pension assets,
and what Merton has in mind. Nevertheless, he says, “What we need to do for
most of the people who don’t have extra money and must do the most with
their assets is deliver a simple, easy to use, and if they don’t use it
still gets them there, solution.” Merton acknowledges those who think the
giant problem of pension funding can be solved by what’s already available
-- bond and equity markets, bank loans – and who hanker “to get rid of all
the complexity, go back to 1930, ’50 or ’80.” From his perspective, this
means “throwing away a lot of what you could do, because the market-proven
strategies people have developed and used…can do a much better job for
people.”
Jensen Comment
Contributing to the pension crisis has been a willingness of the accounting and
auditing profession to allow both the public and private sectors to deceive
taxpayers and investors about the extend to which contracted pension obligations
are off the balance sheet and not even disclosed properly.
The sad state of governmental accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Off Balance Sheet Financing (OBSF) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#OBSF2
"The Present and Future of Digital Publishing," by Joshua Gans,
Harvard Business Review Blog, February 24, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/here_is_what_we_know.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm
CommerceConnect (business helpers from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce) ---
http://commerceconnect.gov/
Bob Jensen's small business helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#SmallBusiness
With all the good, though, there are some negative
aspects to online presences. It’s important to recognize that whatever we write
online is for public consumption, that we are not simply chatting with friends
and family when we post.
Billie Hara
The kind of vocalizations that caused the
above-named individuals to be fired are common in high stress professions, as
they can defuse anger or frustration. Speaking these words can be a way to
commiserate with colleagues, or they can become “in jokes” among friends.
These exchanges can be OK when we are face-to-face with others, as we have body
language and voice inflections to help us understand the meaning and context
behind the statements. Online is a different situation, however.
Billie Hara
"Think Before You Tweet (or Blog or Update a Status)," by Billie Hara,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 24, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/think-before-you-tweet-or-blog-or-update-a-status/30949?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Earlier this week, Miriam Posner, Stewart Varner,
and Brian Croxall wrote “Creating
Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics.” They
had some terrific recommendations about how to establish an online presence
and how to keep that presence active and positive. Good stuff!
Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written before about the
networking wonders and creative collaborations that can happen via online
forums. We meet people from different disciplines in various parts of the
world, and we connect because we share interests and goals. With all the
good, though, there are some negative aspects to online presences. It’s
important to recognize that whatever we write online is for public
consumption, that we are not simply chatting with friends and family when we
post.
Today I want to veer off their post just a bit and
write about something that might detract from a positive and professional
online presence, a presence that we so meticulously create and maintain,
comments made online that publicly disparage students and colleagues. These
comments can be intentional—meant to demean or criticize—or they can be
random comments made in jest.
Take, for example, the case of
Dr. Gloria Gadsden, an associate professor at East
Stroudsburg University. About a year ago, Dr. Gadsden wrote on Facebook
that she had a good day at school, and “didn’t want to kill even one
student,” adding “Friday was a different story.” She wrote this
comment—surely in jest—in a space that she believed to be private. However,
it wasn’t. A third party read her comment and notified university
authorities. Dr. Gadsden was suspended, and ultimately reinstated, after
the incident, but the hit to her professional reputation is clear.
A few more cautionary tales:
- In the U.K., thirteen
Virgin Atlantic Airlines crewmembers were fired after
they made fun of passengers and jokes about airline safety on Facebook.
- In June of 2010, a
Pittsburgh Pirates’ mascot was fired after
posting a negative comment about the contract extension of two team
managers. Andrew Kurtz, 24, was fired within hours of posting the
comment, “Coonelly extended the contracts of Russell and Huntington
through the 2011 season. That means a 19-straight losing streak. Way to
go Pirates,” to his Facebook page.
- At a Dallas radio station, The Ticket, producer
Mike Bacsik was suspended after making some
unfortunate Twitter comments after a night drinking with friends. The
station noted that Bacsik “had been ‘a good employee’ . . . and [his]
final public communication while a Ticket employee reflected poorly on
the station.”
- Lastly, do you know what it means to be “dooced”?
If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you’ve heard the word.
It’s now slang for “fired.” Heather Armstrong, of the blog
Dooce.com,
was fired from a job she held after she wrote satiric accounts about her
bosses and colleagues on her blog.
The kind of vocalizations that caused the
above-named individuals to be fired are common in high stress professions,
as they can defuse anger or frustration. Speaking these words can be a way
to commiserate with colleagues, or they can become “in jokes” among
friends. These exchanges can be OK when we are face-to-face with others, as
we have body language and voice inflections to help us understand the
meaning and context behind the statements. Online is a different situation,
however.
Continued in article
David Albrecht wrote:
"I don't see anything wrong with Tom's
comments. It is opinion, and Tom's opinion, and Tom's blog. I think
that rumor creation is a valid function for a blog."
David Albrecht
Jensen Comment
If this is what you are going to teach in your CPE session at the AAA annual
meetings in Denver then I want no part of that session. That is an absurd
statement that might fly in a teen's blog, but rumor mongering should be
screamed down by any and all members of the Academy David.
Blogging is now part and parcel to freedom of speech. But with freedom comes
responsibility, especially in the Academy.
It's a violation of the code of ethics of professional journalism to create
rumors that are not verified (usually by at least two independent sources). I
contend that members of our Academy have, at a minimum, a responsibility to
adhere to the code of ethics of journalism. In fact I would hope the we even
have a higher standard in the Academy to name our sources before spreading
rumors, especially rumors about people that can affect their professional
futures as well as guide student opinions.
The higher standard in the Academy is that professors, unlike journalists,
should be bound to cite their sources or to provide normative logic that adheres
to the standards of logic in philosophy and mathematics. That entails
defending assumptions upon which deductions are based.
I also disagree that time pressures of the author are justifiable reasons for
not investigating facts before shooting off at the hip. Tom had ample
opportunity to investigate facts that he simply did not do before letting off a
salvo and naming names.
"In Tom's column, he quotes Edith
Orenstein as saying that the quantity of comment letters should be a
factor. I believe this is not a good idea. There are better ways of
figuring out the prevalence of a particular view, such as sampling and or a
vote."
David Albrecht
Jensen Comment
I think open lines of communication are essential for standard setters, and I
applaud both the FASB and the IASB for issuing exposure drafts before and both
inviting comments and publishing comments before finalizing standards. Having
said this, the standard setters are not responsible for either the quality of
the comments coming in or the strategies (such as cookie cutter comments) of
people from around the world who send in comments.
The standard setters are responsible for studying all comments submitted and
then deciding themselves what comments add value to the deliberations. For
example, if standard setters have overlooked some significant costs of adhering
to parts of a standard then the comment letters helped to correct this
oversight.
Blogging is now part and parcel to freedom of speech. But with freedom comes
responsibility, especially in the Academy.
Bob Jensen's threads on social networking and blogging are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Organizing Your Blogs on Your Website
Hi XXXXX,
My basic Website model is the journal-ledger model. As I write essays or scan
the Web and find interesting tidbits I "journalize" them in a rolling time
sequence in one or more of my three main blogs:
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
Then I post the journalized tidbits into "ledgers" that are really category
documents in my two Websites. For example, many of these "ledgers" are listed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Sadly, I did not begin 30 years ago with a ledger scheme. The ledger categories
and documents grew ad hoc over those three decades. If I started over from
scratch today I would have a much more organized "ledger."
In some instances I prepare ledger mapping documents such as my education
technology document map at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
I also have a category map at my home page
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
Some of the "ledger" documents are documents and videos that I prepared for
courses that I was teaching for Trinity University and courses that I was
teaching in my international consulting. Examples can be found in the files
listed at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/
In particular, look at my dog and pony show on accounting for derivative
financial instruments and hedging activities
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Calgary/CD/
The majority of documents, however, are comprised heavily of quotations from my
Web searches that over the last two decades have probably averaged about 5-6
hours per day. This is the tough and time consuming part of what I did to build
two massive Websites.
Often a large document on my Website began as a small seed sent to me by
somebody (a student, a professor, a banker, a security analyst, a reporter,
etc.) who asked me a question. Then over the months and years I just kept adding
to my "answer." An example on one such large document that commenced as a seed
question asked by a professor is my document at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
The above document commenced by a professor's question regarding what caused the
economic collapse in 2008?
The above document also illustrates how disorganized most of my Web documents
become due to my tendency to merely post tidbits in the document without really
writing a paper or even a book on the topic where I would organize and integrate
the tidbits in a much more readable manner.
The Importance of Webcrawlers
My Website is now so huge that I, like any other users, must rely heavily upon
Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wolfram Alpha, or some other search engine. Fortunately
these search engines can find various documents where I've posted tidbits of
particular interest. Suppose you want to find what I've written or posted about
"interest rate swaps." You can go to Google's Search Engine and enter the terms
"Bob Jensen" AND "Interest Rate Swaps" with quote marks and note the hits that
emerge.
Webcrawler search engines in many ways make up for lack of organization at
Websites. Also when authors remove documents from their Websites, the
Webcrawlers may have cached versions of those documents that can still be
viewed.
There are many things that I would like to do that I just cannot find time
for at the moment. I would like to start a YouTube channel so that I could make
much of my work on accounting theory, frauds, and education technology available
in video. But there just is not enough time in my day to make videos of my old
stuff while I'm out surfing for new stuff. Finding the new stuff is my priority!
There's an old saying that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
I have a lot of good intentions for organizing my two Websites. But the
organization is in reality remains a mess. But with the Webcrawler search
engines and my limited search helpers thousands of users do manage to find some
things of value in my Web scrap books. That's really what my Websites have
become --- scrap books of my professional and in some cases even my personal
life.
I think back over the years to some really organized professors like Steve
Zeff who, even back in his early days at Tulane University, had an office that
looked more like a library with books and papers cataloged by the same system as
the catalog system used in the campus library. Compared to Steve's magnificent
and efficient office, my offices over the years have been more like a pile of
rubble. A goodly share of my life was wasted searching for things that I
should've filed away neatly at home or in my campus office.
But professors who are really, really organized like Steve Zeff or Dan Jensen
often do not have great Websites. Perhaps this is because demanding too much
order in a Website takes too much time and these professors, unlike me, cannot
live with disorganization in their lives. My advice is to at least post the
stuff in a relatively disorganized way at your Website just so it's at least on
file for the Webcrawlers to find.
And you, like me, may also discover that it's more important to surf for new
tidbits than it is to rewrite and organize your tidbits in a way that would make
your campus reference librarian proud of you. My campus reference librarian
shakes his head at me.
In 2009 New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut hit residents with the highest
state taxes, but with the enormous tax hikes in such states as Illinois and
California, the top honors may shift in 2011. In 2011 states like New York are
going to tax the incomes of people who own property in New York but spend very
little, if any, time in New York. It would seem that owning second homes in New
York has become a rather dumb decision for people actually living in other
states. The new words of advice: Sell that Sucker in New York!
Note that the "tax burdens" on individuals include state income taxes,
property taxes, and sales taxes as well as other tax burdens. In many states if
they don't get you one way, they hit you in another way. For example, having no
income or sales taxes may shift much of the burden to property taxes. However,
the high tax states in general may be high in most of the types of tax.
California, however, gives some property tax relief to long-time owners because
of the infamous Proposition 13.
The calculations are quite confusing since sales, lodging, and property taxes
on out-of-state visitors and second home owners are reallocated back to states
of residence in somewhat complicated formulas.
"State-Local Tax Burdens Fall in 2009 as Tax Revenues Shrink Faster than
Income: New Jersey’s Citizens Pay the Most, Alaska’s Least," Special
Report 109, The Tax Foundation, February 2011 ---
http://taxfoundation.org/files/sr189.pdf
Table 1
State and Local Tax Burdens by Rank Fiscal Year
2009
State-Local State Tax Burden Rank
U.S. Average 9.8%
New Jersey 12.2% 1
New York 12.1 2
Connecticut 12.0 3
Wisconsin 11.0 4
Rhode Island 10.7 5
California 10.6% 6
Minnesota 10.3 7
Vermont 10.2 8
Maine 10.1 9
Pennsylvania 10.1 10
Massachusetts 10.0% 11
Maryland 10.0 12
Illinois 10.0 13
Arkansas 9.9 14
Nebraska 9.8 15
North Carolina 9.8% 16
Oregon 9.8 17
Ohio 9.7 18
Kansas 9.7 19
Utah 9.7 20
Michigan 9.7% 21
Hawaii 9.6 22
Delaware 9.6 23
Iowa 9.5 24
Indiana 9.5 25
North Dakota 9.5% 26
West Virginia 9.4 27
Idaho 9.4 28
Washington 9.3 29
Kentucky 9.3 30
Florida 9.2% 31
Georgia 9.1 32
Virginia 9.1 33
Missouri 9.0 34
Montana 8.7 35
Mississippi 8.7% 36
Oklahoma 8.7 37
Arizona 8.7 38
Colorado 8.6 39
Alabama 8.5 40
New Mexico 8.4% 41
Louisiana 8.2 42
South Carolina 8.1 43
New Hampshire 8.0 44
Texas 7.9 45
Wyoming 7.8% 46
Tennessee 7.6 47
South Dakota 7.6 48
Nevada 7.5 49
Alaska 6.3 50
Dist. of Columbia 9.6% (24)
Notes: As a unique state-local entity, D.C. is not included in rankings, but
the figure in parentheses shows where it would rank. The local portions of tax
collection figures for fiscal year 2009 rely on projections of local government
tax revenue Sources: Tax Foundation calculations using data from multiple
sources, primarily Census Bureau, Rockefeller Institute, Bureau of Economic
Analysis, Council on State Taxation, and Travel Industry Association.
Bob Jensen's threads on taxation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#010304Taxation
"What Keeps Us (teachers) from Being Great?," by Joe Hoyle, February 21, 2011 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-keeps-us-from-being-great.html
“Assume that you make the personal decision that,
over the next 12 months, you would like to become a slightly better teacher.
Maybe it was your Valentine's Day resolution for 2011. Let’s assume, for
example, that you currently view yourself as a B teacher and you’d like to
feel like a B+ teacher by this day in 2012. Seems like a reasonable goal. My
question is this: What would be the most important thing that would keep you
from achieving that goal? I’m just looking for one thing but I’ll accept
more than one thing. I’m not asking for a lot of thinking—just tell me what
comes to your mind right off the top of your head.
“Notice that I didn't ask what keeps most people from getting better over
the next 12 months -- I want to know what would keep you from getting better
over the next 12 months.”
What was the purpose of this question? That is simple – it seems to me that
if we come face to face with the thing that is holding us back we can decide
if we really want to be held back in that way. I’m a big believer that
self-reflection can make us better (in many, many ways).
So, how would you have answered my question? Be honest with yourself—what is
keeping you from being a better teacher over the next 12 months? Once you
have identified your own personal wall, you can decide whether you are
willing to be limited in that way. Maybe you are but maybe not. You can’t
address the wall preventing you from going forward if you never identify it.
Here’s what my colleagues had to say (I’m going to paraphrase these a bit).
Maybe some of these apply to you. Maybe they will make you think more about
your own teaching and what really does prevent you from getting better over
the next 12 months.
I’ll let you guess which one of these I wrote.
1---Lack of willpower to review every lecture carefully before class, when I
might tell myself I already know the material well.
2---If something is working (albeit not as successfully as I would like), it
is difficult to try something new for fear that it will get worse. That is,
my natural reaction is to dig in and do what I’ve been doing more intently
rather than make changes that have an uncertain result.
3---The quality of my teaching is directly related to the amount of time
that I put into it. It is my opinion that to be an effective teacher most
people need just two things: 1.) a real desire to be an effective teacher;
and 2.) the willingness to put the time into it that is required. If you are
truly committed to being an effective teacher (i.e. you want to improve from
a B to a B+), then you’ve met the first criterion. All you really need then
is a willingness to put in the time. The time to prepare more for each and
every class, the time to meet with students during and outside of office
hours, the time to create materials (problem sets, extra questions, study
materials, etc.) to supplement the class. So the only thing that really
“prevents” me from improving my own teaching is that I don’t put in the
extra time. Why not? Every extra hour I devote to teaching is an extra hour
I cannot spend on something else. One less hour on research. One less hour
on committee/service work. One less hour with my family.
4---I think the lack of feedback that I get from the students on what works
and what doesn’t would be the thing.
5---For me, the most difficult part of the teaching process is being able
(or maybe willing) to be well prepared for each and every class. When I
really prepare, class usually goes well. It is just hard to take the time to
be that well prepared on a very consistent basis.
6---I think at this point in my career I have taught so many courses for the
first time that I haven’t been able to fully develop any course. It helps me
to see what works and then make changes and try different methods. So I
would say too many preps too close in time would prevent me from achieving
that goal. Also, there is always the issue of finding that perfect balance
between the time spent on research and teaching.
7---If I push my students to do better, they will start coming by and asking
questions and wanting assistance and I just don’t have the time necessary to
do that. I’d really like for them to do better without me having to do any
additional work.
8---I am pulled in so many directions and believe if I had more dedicated
time to focus on teaching techniques--rather than on completing tasks--then
I would be a better teacher.
9---The weight and importance we put on the teaching effectiveness questions
found on the student course evaluations in combination with the three-year
evaluation window. This greatly reduces my incentive to experiment with new
ideas and teaching techniques.
10---I don’t seem to know what I might do to improve or change. Thus, I am
not certain how to get better.
11---I have discovered that, for many things in life, the closer you get to
the ideal, the more effort it takes to squeeze out the last little bit of
excellence. It is easy to be average, quite a bit harder to get to 90%, but
that last 10% is harder than the entire first 90%. And the last 5% is harder
than the first 95% and so on asymptotically approaching 100% (whatever that
is). I have had semesters where I KNOW I wasn’t at my best and I’ve had
times that I knew I was close to doing as well as I can do. The truth is
that the students don’t really notice – or, more accurately, they don’t
appreciate that last 10% as much as they do the first 90%. I put in a good
bit of time and energy already and probably get 85-90% of what I’m capable
of consistently. On the other hand, reviewers for journals and my scholarly
colleagues DO notice that last 5% effort. Similarly, I think my colleagues
here do as well when we speak of school and university service work. I’m
also confident that my friends and family notice my investments in them as I
consider work/life balance. With this in mind, if I have an extra hour or
two (my most scarce resource), where do I invest that time (i.e., marginal
investment). Should I put it into making improvements to my classroom work
(likely to go largely unnoticed) or should I put it into making my
scholarship, university or family life better (likely to be noticed and
sincerely appreciated)? So, my greatest obstacle to improved teaching is the
competing demands and the return I get out of investments in those projects
relative to the returns I get from teaching.
12---First -- Lack of knowledge. For example, I would like to help my
students write better, but I really don’t know how to do it. Second -- Fear
of failure. I’m a B teacher and I have an extremely risk-averse personality.
Any change that has the potential to improve the class also has the
potential to mess up what is already working reasonably well.
13---My spontaneous answer is not being able to “read” the student’s
learning process as well as I would like to. Some students seem to be doing
fine when you interact with them but then their exams and assignments
disappoints you. Other students seem inactive but they surprise you when
they deliver strong exam results and great assignments. Thus, not fully
understanding the student’s learning process might be what hinders me from
reaching the next level as a lecturer.
14---The way to improve teaching is to know your students just slightly
beyond their names (for example, know their major or graduation year or area
where they are from…nothing that is especially difficult to find out)
because then the teacher can engage them in class because they have become
more “real” to you. What will prevent me from doing it is the fact that it
is so easy to not do it and it sounds so trivial to be beneficial.
15---For me, the pressure put on the teaching effectiveness questions on the
teaching evaluations. I often feel that I am at the mercy of the students
and their push-back.
16---It seems that no matter what attempts I make, if it requires the
students to “get into it”, they resist. I sometimes feel like we have
established an unrealistic, romanticized vision of what our student body is
really like. As a result, perhaps I have unrealistic expectations of their
intrinsic interest in engaging in the learning process. Or maybe the problem
is that I am approaching this the wrong way.
17---I don’t think there is anything in my way other than I don’t listen
enough. Sometimes we get into our routine, thinking that what we have done
in the past is still as good as it once was – and don’t listen or respond
when change is called for. I also have to constantly remind myself that
teaching is ONLY about student learning. It doesn’t matter if students like
me or don’t, it doesn’t matter if I’ve been fabulously entertaining or not –
all that matters is that I have created an environment where they are
maximizing their learning.
18---My deficiencies boil down to a small number of root causes. The central
of these causes are disorganization and poor time management.
Recognize yourself and your own walls?
What is keeping you from becoming better as a teacher and moving on toward
greatness?
Perhaps the first thing you need to do is identify what is holding you back
and then deciding whether you want to be held back.
Jensen Comment
To these I would add the following:
- Stop being a chicken about teaching evaluations when assigning grades.
Limit the A grades to a top percentile such as 15%-20% and make top students
work harder for their A grades.
- Stop worrying about what disgruntled students will write in teaching
evaluations because they think you made the course too tough. Think of how
much harder students worked when teaching evaluations were private
communications between students and teachers such that these evaluations
were not shared with administrators and RateMyProfessor.
- Consider becoming less of a teacher and more of a learning facilitator
who makes students learn more on their own ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Be prepared that it's much more difficult to be a learning facilitator than
a great lecturing professor.
- Get to know each of your students on a first name basis if at all
possible. Keep in mind, however, that some of your great colleagues may be
better hand holders for students than you in your role as a tougher and
perhaps more expert SOB. A great education department needs both hand
holders and tough SOBs that make students take on more responsibilities for
their own learning.
From the Scout Report on February 25, 2011
icloud ---
http://www.icloud.com/en
It's nice to have documents, images, and other
items from one's home computer easily accessible, and icloud makes this
possible, as it is essentially a virtual desktop with 3GB of available
storage. After visitors sign up for a free account, they can store their
documents and also collaborate with others via icloud. Visitors are also
welcome to sign up for more storage, but there is a fee associated with this
memory availability. This version of icloud is compatible with all operating
systems.
Mint ---
http://www.mint.com/026d/
Many people like to keep tabs on their finances,
and the Mint program may prove to be quite useful for those looking for such
a resource. After signing up, the program can incorporate financial
information from a variety of sources to make it all accessible in one
place. The program also works on mobile devices, and users can see what's
happening with their budget and financial goals. This program is compatible
with all operating systems.
Continuing investigation into Chinese drywall focuses in on Florida No
end to Chinese drywall woes
http://orlandoweekly.com/news/no-end-to-chinese-drywall-woes-1.1106005
Tainted Drywall
http://www.propublica.org/topic/tainted-drywall/
Habitat for Humanity Remediates Homes With Toxic Chinese Drywall
http://www.neworleans.com/news/local-news/561699.html
CDC won't study effects of Chinese drywall exposure
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02-09/us/chinese.drywall.cdc_1_chinese-drywall-allison-grant-cdc?_s=PM:US
Recalls.gov
http://www.recalls.gov/
United States Consumer Product Safety Commission
http://www.cpsc.gov/
"CUNY Adjusts Amid Tide of Remedial Students," by Lisa W. Foebaro,
The New York Times, March 3, 2011 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/nyregion/04remedial.html?_r=1
The City University of New York has long spent much
of its energy and resources just teaching new students what they need to
begin taking college-level courses.
But that tide of remedial students has now
swelled so large that the university’s six community colleges — like
other two-year schools across the country — are having to rethink
what and how they teach, even as they reel from steep cuts in state
and local aid.
About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen
at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction
in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen
have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past
five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with
the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to
1,000.
The reasons are familiar but were
reinforced last month by startling new statistics from state
education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students
who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or
careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In
New York City, that number was 23 percent.
Many of those graduates end up at CUNY, one
of the nation’s largest urban higher-education systems, which
requires its community colleges to take every applicant with a high
school diploma or equivalency degree.
To bring thousands of students up to speed,
those colleges spent about $33 million last year on remediation —
twice as much as they did 10 years ago. They are expanding an
immersion program that funnels hundreds of students exclusively into
remedial classes.
But there is concern that the effort is
diverting attention from the colleges’ primary mission.
“It takes a lot of our time and energy and
money to figure out what to do with all of these students who need
remediation,” said Alexandra W. Logue, the university’s executive
vice chancellor and provost. “We are doing some really good things,
but it’s time that we’re not thinking about our other wonderful
students who are very highly prepared. We need to focus on them,
too.”
At LaGuardia Community College in Queens,
where 40 percent of the math classes are remedial, faculty members
like Jerry G. Ianni have been increasingly dividing their time
between teaching those classes and teaching courses for academic
credit, prompting worries that professors are becoming de facto high
school teachers.
“Most students have serious challenges
remembering the basic rules of arithmetic,” Dr. Ianni said of his
remedial math class. “The course is really a refresher, but they
aren’t ready for a refresher. They need to learn how to learn.”
On a recent afternoon, a half-dozen
students in that class prepared for a test, called a
Compass exam, that would allow those who
passed to start studying college-level math. Without college math
skills, students cannot graduate. Seventeen others in the class had
not even qualified to take the test; they will have to repeat the
course until they qualify or they give up, as history shows many
have.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
How can this be? Students in the NYC schools on average get the highest grades
among all major cities. Why do they need so much remediation?
Wow: 97% of Elementary NYC Public Students Get A or B Grades --- There
must be higher IQ in the water!
"City Schools May Get Fewer A’s," by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times,
January 28, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/education/30grades.html?hpw
Months after handing out
A’s and B’s to 97 percent of New York City elementary schools, education
officials plan to change their methods for grading the city’s public schools,
making it harder to receive high marks.
Under the proposed
changes, schools would be measured against one another, with those where
students show the most significant improvements getting the top grades. There
would be set grade-distribution guidelines, with 25 percent of schools receiving
A’s, 30 percent B’s, 30 percent C’s, 10 percent D’s, and the bottom 5 percent of
schools getting F’s.
Currently, the progress
reports measure improvements, but an unlimited number of schools can receive
high grades.
. . .
Michael Mulgrew, the
president of the United Federation of Teachers, criticized the decision to
reduce the number of schools that receive top grades.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Must be tough getting an A in the fourth grade and an F on the uniform
achievement examination.
This does not seem to embarrass the United Federation of Teachers.
This is a little like those universities (no names mentioned) that graduate
accounting majors almost never take and/or pass the CPA examination even though
they had all A or B grades in accounting.
January 30, 2010 reply from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]
Why are you surprised? NYC school system spends the
most money per student of any school district. Doesn’t high dollars per
student = high achievement? In California, we spend the highest dollars per
prisoner of any state, so we have the “best” prisoners. At least we have the
healthiest prisoners because we spend more dollars per prisoner for health
care than any other state.
Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
College of Business & Economics
|California State University,
Northridge 18111 Nordhoff ST Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f
Hi Barry,
Before your virtual course in 1998, I recall that you were an early adopter of
in-class hand-held clicker response technology (HyperGraphics in those days) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#ResponsePads
What is most remarkable is that you experimented with this virtual course for
on-campus students in 1998 when course delivery software like Blackboard, Moodle,
Camtasia, and YouTube had not yet been invented. Alternatives in the 1990s are
discussed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
I suspect you used ToolBook back in those days. ToolBook can still be used for
such purposes, but TookBook is vastly different in 2011 relative to 1998 and
rarely, if ever, used extensively by accounting faculty in 2011. You and I,
however, were heavy ToolBook users in the roaring 1990s.
Today virtual courses often use several types of pedagogy to choose from.
- Computer Delivery ---
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/rice/virtual/fall98/virtualF98.html
In 2011 it may well be via BlackBoard, Moodle, or related course management
systems ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Blackboard.htm
.
- Video Delivery ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
BYU teaches the first two principles of accounting courses via DVD
variable-speed video in on-campus classes that rarely meet face-to-face.
.
- Hybrid Delivery with instant messaging, video, and student
interaction modules ---
Amy Dunbar commenced with mostly computer delivery but, having discovered
the advantages of Camtasia, has added more and more video modules to her
distance education tax courses ---
http://users.business.uconn.edu/adunbar/videos/GoogleDocs/GoogleDocs.html
.
- Hybrid Delivery with Social
Interaction and Student Blogging ---
"Teaching With Blogs, by Lanny Arvan, Inside Higher Ed,
July 27, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/07/27/arvan
.
“It is my impression that no one really likes the new. We are afraid of
it. It is not only as Dostoevsky put it that 'taking a new step,
uttering a new word is what people fear most.' Even in slight things the
experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.”
--Eric Hoffer, Between The Devil And The Dragon
I tried the new in fall 2009,
teaching with student blogs, (look in sidebar
and scroll down) out in the open where anyone who wanted to could see
what the students were producing. The blogging wasn’t new for me. I’d
been
doing that for almost five years. Having
students blog was a different matter. I had no experience in getting
them to overcome their anxieties, relaxing in writing online, learning
to trust one another that way. Normally I believe what’s good for the
goose is good for the gander. If I could blog comfortably and get
something from that, so could they. On reflection, however, I was very
gentle with myself when I started to blog. As an experiment to prove to
myself whether I could do it, for three full weeks I made at least one
post a day, 500 to 600 words, a couple of times 1,100 to 1,200 words. I
didn’t tell a soul I was doing this. There was no pressure on me to keep
it up. It was out in the open, yet nobody seemed to be watching. After
those three weeks I felt ready. In the teaching, however, at best I
could ask the students to blog once a week. I gave the students weekly
prompts on the readings or to follow up on class discussion. (See the
class calendar for fall 2009. The
prompts are in the Friday afternoon entries.) If I let them blog quietly
to get comfortable as I had done, the entire semester would expire
before they were ready to go public. There seemed no alternative but to
have them plunge in.
The uncertainty about how best to assist the
students once they had taken the plunge created an important symmetry
between the students and me; we both were to learn about how to do this
well, often by first doing it less well. Though it was an inadvertent
consequence, of all my teaching over the past 30 years I believe this
course came closest to emulating the
Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education
by Chickering and Gamson. I learned to comment on
the student posts, not with some pre-thought-through response based on
what I anticipated they’d write, but rather to react to where they
appeared to be in their own thinking. (This
post provides a typical example. The student
introduced time management as a theme. My comment aimed to make her
think more about time management.) As natural as that is to do in
ordinary conversation, I had never done it before when evaluating
student work. Indeed, I didn’t think of these comments as evaluation at
all. I thought of them as response. In the normal course of my
non-teaching work I respond to colleagues all the time and they respond
to me. This form of online interaction in the class made it more like
the rest of my interactions at work.
Most of the students were quite awkward in
their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a seminar on
"Designing for Effective Change" for the
Honors Program,
but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the
students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I
can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting
prose. For this class there was a need for them to unlearn much of their
approach which had been finely tuned and was quite successful in their
other classes. They needed to take more responsibility for their
choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on which to write, I also
gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so long as they could
create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of the early
writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the
writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other
readers if they didn’t first please themselves. It was a message they
were not used to hearing. So it took a while for them to believe it was
true. In several instances they tried it out only after being
frustrating with the results from their usual approach. This,
as Ken Bain teaches us,
is how students learn on a fundamental level.
I'm crustier now than I was as a younger
faculty member. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to deal with the
emotion that underlies giving feedback to students when that feedback is
less than entirely complimentary to them. Yet given their awkward early
attempts at writing posts that’s exactly what honest response demanded.
It’s here where having the postings and the comments out in the open so
all can see is so important, before the class has become a community,
before the students have made up their minds about what they think about
this blogging stuff. Though both the writing and the response are highly
subjective, of necessity, it is equally
important for the process to be fair. How can
a student who receives critical comments judge those comments to be
fitting and appropriate, rather than an example of the insensitive
instructor picking on the hapless student? Perhaps a very mature student
can discern this even-handedly from the comments themselves and a
self-critique of the original post. I believe most students benefit by
reading the posts of their classmates, making their own judgments about
those writings and then seeing the instructor’s comments, finally making
a subsequent determination as to whether those comments seem appropriate
and helpful for the student in reconsidering the writing.
A positive feedback loop can be created by this
process. The commenting, more than any other activity the instructor
engages in, demonstrates the instructor’s commitment to the course and
to the students. In turn the students, learning to appreciate the value
of the comments, start to push themselves in the writing. Their learning
is encouraged this way. Further, since the blogging is not a competition
between the students and their classmates, those who like getting
comments begin to comment on the posts of other students. The elements
of the community that the class can become are found in this activity.
Since on a daily basis I use blogs and blog
readers in my regular work, one of the original reasons for me taking
this approach rather than use the campus learning management system was
simply that I thought it would be more convenient for me. Also, given my
job as a learning technology administrator, I went into the course with
some thought that I might showcase the work afterward. Openness is
clearly better for that. However in retrospect neither of these is
primary. The main reason to be open is to set a good tone for the class.
We want ideas to emerge and not remain concealed.
Yet there remains one troubling element:
student privacy. Is open blogging this way consistent with
FERPA? As best as I’ve been able to determine,
it is as long as students “opt in.” (I did give students the
alternatives of writing in the class LMS site or writing in the class
wiki site. No student opted for those.) My experience suggests, however,
that is not quite sufficient. If most students opt in, peer pressure may
drive others to opt in as well. More importantly, however, students
choose to opt in when they are largely ignorant of the consequences.
Might they feel regret after they better understand what the blogging is
all about?
Continued in article
Other Tricks and Tools of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
From the Scout Report on March 4, 2011
Moof ---
http://moof.com/
Music can be social, and this particular online
"social" music-sharing platform fulfills that exact promise. Visitors can
use this program to export a copy of their iTunes library so that they can
have access to it anywhere. The site includes a tour of the program's
features and a simple form to fill out. This version is compatible with
computers running Mac OS X 10.3 and newer or Windows 2000 and newer.
Space Tourism becomes reality and gives researchers more time in outer
space Space Tourism May Mean One Giant Leap For Researchers [Free
registration may be required]
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/science/space/01orbit.html?hpw
Scientists get tickets to ride with space tourists
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20181-scientists-get-tickets-to-ride-with-space-tourists.html
Space tourism poised to blast off
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41719664/ns/travel-destination_travel/
Oz firms develop first beer that can be consumer in space
http://www.sify.com/news/oz-firms-develop-first-beer-that-can-be-consumed-in-space-news-international-ldbnEpdabje.html
Virgin Galactic
http://www.virgingalactic.com/
From the Earth to the Moon; and Round the Moon by Jules Verne
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/83
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery [Flash Player] ---
http://www.nasm.si.edu/pioneers/?hp=b
The Secret of Happiness --- Expect Success (watch at least to the
point of great choreography)
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? (hilarious as well as to the
point)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Thank you Jim Martin for the heads up!
The Secret of Happiness --- Expect Failure (watch at least to the
point of the section on self help books)
Alain de Botton: The Glass of Life is Half Empty ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/alain_de_botton.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
A roundup of posts on Apple software and
products.
"From the Archives: Apple Edition," by Natalie Houston, Chronicle of
Higher Education, March 14, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/from-the-archives-apple-edition/31807?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Teaching Geoscience Online ---
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/online/index.html
Earth Science Teaching Plans and Classroom Activities ---
http://geology.com/teacher/
Essentials of Geology ---
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/geo/egeo/welcome.htm
Food Security in Asia and the Changing Role of Rice ---
http://asiafoundation.org/publications/pdf/782
National Academy of Sciences: Distinctive Voices @ The Jonsson Center [Real
Player]
http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Jonsson_main
Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery [Flash Player] ---
http://www.nasm.si.edu/pioneers/?hp=b
National Naval Aviation Museum [Flash Player] ---
http://www.navalaviationmuseum.org/
IEEE Global History Network ---
http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Home
The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (furniture design) ---
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/eames/
EPA: Cleaning Up Our Land, Water and Air ---
http://www.epa.gov/cleanup/
Agropolis Museum: Food and agricultures of the world
http://www.museum.agropolis.fr/english/index.html
The Food Museum ---
http://www.foodmuseum.com/
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
Pew Research Center: Labor Unions Seen as Good for Workers, Not U.S.
Competitiveness ---
http://people-press.org/report/705/
CommerceConnect (business helpers from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce) ---
http://commerceconnect.gov/
Chronic Poverty Research Centre ---
http://www.chronicpoverty.org/page/index
Poverty Action Lab ---
http://www.povertyactionlab.org/
ReliefWeb (poverty) ---
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc100?OpenForm
Apps for Development: World Bank ---
http://appsfordevelopment.challengepost.com/challenges/78/
SparkAction (helping children become adults) ---
http://sparkaction.org/
Child Trends ---
http://childtrends.org/
Automobile in American Life and Society ---
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/
USC Shoah Foundation Institute [civil rights, bigotry]
http://college.usc.edu/vhi/
The Allure of the Automobile (museum)
http://www.high.org/main.taf?p=3,1,1,17,1
EPA: Cleaning Up Our Land, Water and Air ---
http://www.epa.gov/cleanup/
Food Security in Asia and the Changing Role of Rice ---
http://asiafoundation.org/publications/pdf/782
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
A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation ---
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html
EPA: Cleaning Up Our Land, Water and Air ---
http://www.epa.gov/cleanup/
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
North Platte Nebraska in WW III ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=07DGeLvDw8I
"Bill Gates Promotes Professor’s Online Course at TED," by Jeff Young,
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 3, 2011 -
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professors-online-lecture-gets-lift-from-bill-gates/30142?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing courses and videos ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Vaudeville! ---
http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ema02/easton/vaudeville/vaudeville.html
Tulane Special Collections: Carnival Exhibit ---
http://specialcollections.tulane.edu/Carnival.html
Mark Twain Lives (in animation) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/mark_twain_lives_in_animation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The Blues, Black Vaudeville, and the
Silver Screen, 1912-1930s
http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/douglass/
Footnote.com (history) ---
http://www.footnote.com/
American Association for State and Local History ---
http://www.aaslh.org/
From Crossroads to Capital: The Founding and Early History of Raleigh, NC ---
http://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/dimp/digital/rhp/
ICA: Mark Bradford (contemporary art) ---
http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/bradford/
Museum of Contemporary Art
Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson ---
http://www.mcachicago.org/eliasson/
From the Harvard Business School
Buy Now, Pay Later: A History of Personal Credit ---
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/
Byrd Polar Research Center Archival Program ---
http://library.osu.edu/find/collections/byrd-polar-archives/
Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery [Flash Player] ---
http://www.nasm.si.edu/pioneers/?hp=b
National Naval Aviation Museum [Flash Player] ---
http://www.navalaviationmuseum.org/
In Focus: The Tree (Getty Museum) ---
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/focus_trees/
USC Shoah Foundation Institute [civil rights, bigotry]
http://college.usc.edu/vhi/
Pew Research Center:
Labor Unions Seen as Good for Workers, Not U.S. Competitiveness ---
http://people-press.org/report/705/
The Labor Trail ---
http://www.labortrail.org/index.html
Automobile in American Life and Society ---
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/
The Allure of the Automobile (museum)
http://www.high.org/main.taf?p=3,1,1,17,1
Central Connecticut State University: Digital Collections ---
http://content.library.ccsu.edu/
Agropolis Museum: Food and agricultures of the world
http://www.museum.agropolis.fr/english/index.html
The Food Museum ---
http://www.foodmuseum.com/
The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (furniture design) ---
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/eames/
A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation (American History) ---
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html
IEEE Global History Network ---
http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Home
The War of the Rebellion Atlas (amazing Civil War atlas) ---
http://contentdm.baylor.edu/cdm4/index_19wor.php?CISOROOT=/19wor
Civil War Traveler ---
http://www.civilwartraveler.com/
Historical Myth a Month (with a Nevada focus) ---
http://nsla.nevadaculture.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=683&Itemid=418
Florida State Parks ---
http://www.floridastateparks.org/default.cfm
The 1940s (slide show advances automatically) ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/12e67abcf8a5fae7
"Un-American Revolutions: Most
rebellions end in carnage and tyranny. So why are Americans cheering on the Arab
revolutionary wave?" by Niall Ferguson, Newsweek Magazine, March 7,
2011, pp. 2-3 ---
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/un-american-revolutions.html
Americans love a
revolution. Their own great nation having been founded by a
revolutionary declaration and forged by a revolutionary war, they
instinctively side with revolutionaries in other lands, no matter
how different their circumstances, no matter how disastrous the
outcomes. This chronic reluctance to learn from history could carry
a very heavy price tag if the revolutionary wave currently sweeping
across North Africa and the Middle East breaks with the same
shattering impact as most revolutionary waves.
Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson hailed the French Revolution. “The French have
served an apprenticeship to Liberty in this country,” wrote the
former, “and now … they have set up for themselves.” Jefferson even
defended the Jacobins, architects of the bloody Reign of Terror.
“The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the
contest,” he wrote in 1793, “and was ever such a prize won with so
little innocent blood? … Rather than [the revolution] should have
failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.”
In
Ten Days That Shook the World, the
journalist John Reed was equally enthusiastic about the Russian
Revolution of 1917, a book for which Lenin himself (“great Lenin” to
Reed) wrote an enthusiastic preface. Reed’s counterpart in China’s
communist revolution was Edgar Snow, whose characterization of
Mao—“He had the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant,
with a lively sense of humor and a love of rustic laughter”—today
freezes the blood.
Time and again,
Americans have hailed revolutions, only to fall strangely silent as
those same revolutions proceeded to devour not only their own
children but many other people’s too. In each case the body count
was in the millions.
So as you watch
revolution sweeping through the Arab world (and potentially beyond),
remember these three things about non-American revolutions:
- They take years
to unfold. It may have seemed like glad confident morning in
1789, 1917, and 1949. Four years later it was darkness at noon.
- They begin by
challenging an existing political order, but the more violence
is needed to achieve that end, the more the initiative passes to
men of violence—Robespierre, Stalin, and the supremely callous
Mao himself.
- Because
neighboring countries feel challenged by the revolution,
internal violence is soon followed by external violence, either
because the revolution is genuinely threatened by foreigners (as
in the French and Russian cases) or because it suits the
revolutionaries to blame an external threat for domestic
problems (as when China intervened in the Korean War).
To which an American
might reply: yes, but was all this not true of our revolution too?
The American Revolution was protracted: five years elapsed between
the Declaration of Independence and Yorktown. It was violent. And it
was, of course, resisted from abroad. Yet the scale of the violence
in the American Revolution was, by the standards of the other great
revolutions of history, modest. Twenty times as many Frenchmen were
killed in battle between 1792 and 1815 as Americans between 1775 and
1783. And, as Maya Jasanoff points out in her brilliant new book,
Liberty’s Exiles, the losers in the American Revolution were not
guillotined, or purged, or starved to death. Most of them simply
left the 13 rebel colonies for more stable parts of the British
Empire and got on with their lives.
Continued in article
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
Music Lesson Plans ---
http://www.lessoncorner.com/Art_and_Music/Music/Classical_Music
American Routes [music] ---
http://americanroutes.publicradio.org/
Moof (music sharing) ---
http://moof.com/
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
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
February 24, 2011
February 25, 2011
February 26, 2011
March 2, 2011
March 3, 2011
March 4, 2011
March 5, 2011
March 8, 2011
March 9, 2011
March 10, 2011
March 14, 2011
March 15, 2011
Take Time to Dance ---
http://www.libertyhigh56.net/special pages/dancing.htm
Forwarded by Paula
In preparation for St Patrick's Day, here is some of what you need to
understand about an Irish Family
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE IN AN IRISH FAMILY
1) You will never play professional basketball.
2) You swear very well.
3) At least one of your cousins is a fireman, cop, bar owner, funeral home
owner or holds political office. And you have at least one aunt who is a nun or
uncle who's a priest.
4) You think you sing very well.
5) You have no idea how to make a long story short!
6) There isn't a big difference between you losing your temper and killing
someone.
7) Many of your childhood meals were boiled. Instant potatoes were a mortal
sin.
8) You have never hit your head on a ceiling.
9) You spent a good portion of your childhood kneeling in prayer.
10) You're strangely poetic after a few beers.
11) Some punches directed at you are from legacies of past generations.
12) Many of your sisters and/or cousins are named Mary, Catherine or Eileen
..... and there is at least one member of your family with the full name of Mary
Catherine Eileen
13) Someone in your family is very generous. It is more than likely you.
14) You may not know the words, but that doesn't stop you from singing.
15) You can't wait for the other guy to stop talking before you start
talking.
16) You're not nearly as funny as you think you are ... but what you lack in
talent, you make up for in frequency.
17) There wasn't a huge difference between your last wake and your last keg
party.
18) You are, or know someone, named Murph.
19) If you don't know Murph, then you know Mac. If you don't know Murph or
Mac, you must know Sully.
20) You are genetically incapable of keeping a secret.
21) You have Irish Alzheimer's... you forget everything but the grudges!
22) 'Irish Stew' is a euphemism for 'boiled leftovers.'
23) Your skin's ability to tan.... not so much.
24) Childhood remedies for the common cold often included some form of
whiskey.
25) There's no leaving a family party without saying goodbye for at least 45
minutes.
26) At this very moment, you have at least two relatives who are not speaking
to each other. Not fighting, mind you, just not speaking to each other.
Forwarded by Auntie
Bev
You may remember the old Jewish Catskill comics: Shecky
Greene, Red
Buttons,Totie
Fields,
Joey Bishop, Milton
Berle,
Jan Murray, Danny
Kaye, Henny
Youngman, Sid
Caesar,
Groucho Marx, Jackie Mason,
Victor Borge,
Woody Allen, George
Burns,
Allan Sherman,
Jerry Lewis, Peter Sellers,
Carl Reiner,
Shelley Berman,
Gene Wilder,
George Jessel,
Alan King, Mel Brooks,
Phil Silvers,
Jack Carter, Rodney
Dangerfield,
Don Rickles,
Jack Benny and
so many others.
And there was not one single swear word in their comedy. Here are a few
examples:
* I just got
back from a pleasure trip. I took my mother-in-law to the airport.
* Someone stole all my credit cards but I
won't be reporting
it. The thief spends less than my wife did.
* We always hold hands. If I let go, she
shops
* My wife and I went back to the hotel where we spent our wedding night; only
this time I stayed in the bathroom and cried
* My wife and I went to a hotel where we got
a waterbed. My wife called it the Dead Sea .
* She was at the beauty shop for two hours.
That was only for the estimate. She got a mudpack and looked great for two days.
Then the mud fell off.
* The Doctor gave a man six months to live.
The man couldn't pay his bill so the doctor gave him another six months.
* The Doctor called Mrs. Cohen saying, "Mrs.
Cohen, your check came back. " Mrs. Cohen answered, "So did my arthritis!
Doctor: "You'll
live to be 60!"
Patient: "I
am 60!"
Doctor: "See! What did I tell you?"
Patient: "I
have a ringing in my ears."
Doctor: "Don't
answer!"
A drunk
was in front of a judge. The judge says, "You've been brought here for
drinking."
The drunk says "Okay, let's get started."
Why do Jewish divorces cost so much?
They're worth it.
The Harvard
School of Medicine did a study of why Jewish women like Chinese food so much.
The study revealed that this is due to the fact that Won Ton spelled
backward is Not Now.
There
is a big controversy on the Jewish view of when life begins. In Jewish
tradition, the fetus is not considered viable until it graduates from medical
school.
Q: Why
don't Jewish mothers drink?
A: Alcohol
interferes with their suffering.
Q: Why
do Jewish mothers make great parole officers?
A: They
never let anyone finish a sentence!
A man called his mother in Florida:
"Mom, how are you?"
"Not too good," said the mother. "I've
been very weak."
The son said, "Why are you so weak?" She
said, "Because I haven't eaten in 38 days."
The son said, "That's terrible.
Why haven't you eaten in 38 days?"
The mother answered, "Because
I didn't want my mouth to be filled with food if you should call."
A Jewish boy comes home from school and
tells his mother he has a part in the play. She asks,
"What part is it?"
The boy says, "I play the part of the Jewish
husband."
"The mother scowls and says, "Go back and
tell the teacher you want a speaking part."
Q: How
many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: (Sigh) "Don't
bother. I'll sit in the dark. I don't want to be a nuisance to anybody."
Short summary of every Jewish holiday:
They tried to kill us. We won. Let's
eat.
Did you hear about the bum who walked up to
a Jewish mother on the street and said, "Lady, I haven't eaten in three days."
"Force yourself," she replied.
Q: What's
the difference between a Rottweiler and a Jewish mother?
A: Eventually,
the Rottweiler lets go.
Q: Why
are Jewish men circumcised?
A: Because
Jewish women don't like anything that isn't 20% off.
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