Tidbits on May 26, 2011
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
This week I made a special
photograph file of early springtime in the mountains
Click Here
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits//SummertimeFavorites/EarlySpringtime/EarlySpringtimeSet01.htm
Sunrise_Sunset ---
http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/96795/Sunrise_Sunset
May 23, 2011 message from Bob Jensen
Hi Pat and Linda (in a thread about
knitting accountants),
The link below shows my Grandma Jensen, at Iowa's Kossuth County Fair many
years ago, demonstrating how to spin wool into yarn on her spinning wheel
that I remember quite well in our Seneca farm house ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/Years1900-1950/Ancestors01.htm
With the yarn, she could knit sweaters and mittens faster than anybody I
ever knew. My hands never went cold growing up in Iowa. Grandma Jensen
generally knitted in a flurry with three needles at a time.
Regina (Ginny) Jensen was born into a
Knutson
family in Norway before the family emigrated to Iowa in the 1800s in search
of the rich black dirt of the Iowa prairie. She was raised on her family's
farm north of Swea
City. When she became a young woman and a school teacher she married Julius Jensen and moved onto
his farm in Seneca township. My father, Vernon, was the youngest of five
sons that she raised on the Seneca farm. Julius died of pneumonia when my
dad was only two years old. Thereafter my grandmother raised her family by
herself on the Seneca farm.
She cooked three meals each day on a big
Clarion Iron Stove, cleaned clothes on a wash board (there was no
running water on the farm), milked cows, helped harness the draft horses and
mules, and helped deliver calves, colts, lambs, and piglets. Baked chicken
dinners were always fresh soon after she pulled their heads off with one one
experienced flick of the wrist.
I don't know how she found the time to spin her yarn and knit warm clothes
for family and friends amidst all her other duties raising five sons without
so much as a hired hand on that farm. Of course her sons pitched in better
than hired hands and gave thanks in bended knees each and every bountiful
day.
The women I knew on those Iowa farms (that generally did not have running
water or electricity) were tougher than most of the men I ever met in my
entire life. When tragedy struck, such as losing a child or spouse or a
crop, they did not have time to fall apart. They wept a bit while doing
their endless daily chores --- chores like feeding a family and milking the
cows and tending to livestock went on day after day even in the Great
Depression when there was no cash market for the grain and livestock. Times
were tough, but so were the knitters who never quit their chores in good
times and bad times or in darkness or light.
In Norway, Regina's father and uncles made their livings on the cold and
dangerous waters of the North Sea. See their "House Under a Rock" in Norway
---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/Years1900-1950/Ancestors01.htm
These pioneer families would've been very cold in freezing winds of the
North Sea or the howling winds coming down upon Iowa from North Dakota if
these hearty women did not knit day and night to keep the family dressed in
warm woolen mittens and sweaters.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
PS
I brought Erika home from the Boston therapy hospital yesterday. She's
making better progress than her surgeons expected. This may be her best
spine surgery recovery ever in this her 14th spine surgery. Now I have to
put construction tape around her flower gardens to keep her from doing bad
things to her body before she's properly healed. I planted 150 Sun Impatiens
to compete with the weeds --- the weeds are thriving better than ever due to
our wet weather.
This is what I hope my Sun Impatiens will
look like in about six weeks
White
Mountain News ---
http://www.whitemtnews.com/
Tidbits on May26, 2011
Bob Jensen
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
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
Want to Thank Our Military ---
http://media.causes.com/576542?p_id=92681239
NOVA: The Spy Factory ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/spy-factory.html
International Spy Museum ---
http://www.spymuseum.org/
Video: Milky Way Panorama (with a Backstory) --- Click
Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/05/milky_way_panorama_with_a_backstory.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
SkyView Virtual Observatory (NASA) ---
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/titlepage.pl
Dallas Museum of Art - Program Recordings ---
http://www.dallasmuseumofart.org/Research/Archives/index.htm
A Blind Woman Who Makes Quality Quilts ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=7lfaSmDxVZQ
Video: Stanford Graduate School of Business gets a new
building --- the Knight Management Center ---
http://alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/news/knightopening.html
Jacques Demy’s Lyrical Masterpiece, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/05/jacques_demys_lyrical_masterpiece_ithe_umbrellas_of_cherbourgi.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Health on the Net Foundation ---
http://www.hon.ch/home.html
Astonishing World Record Climb ---
Click Here
http://www.tvkim.com/watch/952/kims-picks-astonishing-world-record-climb?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=totd&utm_content=2011-05-09-fifl&utm_campaign=u
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
National Jukebox ---
http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/
Also
Click Here
The Montreal Symphony's Evolution Of Music
(entire concert) ---
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/15/136284053/the-montreal-symphonys-evolution-of-music
A More Spiritual Salome: Massenet's 'Hérodiade'
(hear the introduction to this opera) ---
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/13/136246366/a-more-spiritual-salome-massenets-h-rodiade
Carrie Underwood With Vince Gill (Hymn) ---
http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/ourcountry/94317/carrie-underwoods-how-great-thou-art-moves-the-masses/
The Rhema Marvanne Story (at age seven) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sewa1KkKOfc
Three Teenage Tenors (II Volo) ---
http://www.interscope.com/artist/player/default.aspx?meid=6314&aid=1200
Sunrise_Sunset ---
http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/96795/Sunrise_Sunset
Swan Lake ---
http://www.nzwide.com/swanlake.htm
3 Dreams of Black: A Mind-blowing Interactive Music Video ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/05/3_dreams_of_black.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Google Music (Beta) ---
http://music.google.com/music/usernotinvited
"Google Music vs. Amazon Cloud Drive," by Sarah Parez, ReadWriteWeb, May
10, 2011 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_music_vs_amazon_cloud_drive.php
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
Fenimore Art Museum: The Smith and Telfer
Photographic Collection
http://www.fenimoreartmuseum.org/fenimore/collections/photography
World's Largest Cave Discovered in Viet Nam ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFWhqJeThfc
SkyView Virtual Observatory (NASA) ---
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/titlepage.pl
Georgia Archives Home ---
http://cdm.sos.state.ga.us/index.php
Bacteria Museum ---
http://bacteriamuseum.org/cms/
Memorial University of Newfoundland Digital
Archives Initiative ---
http://collections.mun.ca/
Colorado Plateau Archives (Geology, Art History,
Native Americans) ---
http://archive.library.nau.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/cpa
German Easter Egg Tree ---
http://projects.ajc.com/gallery/view/travel/intdestinations/easter-egg-tree/
Slavery in America: Image Gallery ---
http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/scripts/sia/gallery.cgi
Dallas Museum of Art - Program Recordings ---
http://www.dallasmuseumofart.org/Research/Archives/index.htm
Museum of Art-Rhode Island School of Design ---
http://www.risdmuseum.org/
Design : Talkboard (Graphics Design) ---
http://www.designtalkboard.com/
Costume History Collection ---
http://www.wmich.edu/library/digi/collections/costume/
All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing, and Costume
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/HumanEcol/subcollections/MillineryBooksAbout.html
From the University of Washington
Fashion Plate Collection (women's fashions in history) ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/costumehistweb/index.html
Textiles and Costumes: Henry Art Gallery [Flash Player]
http://dig.henryart.org/textiles/
All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing, and Costume
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/HumanEcol/subcollections/MillineryBooksAbout.h
Daphne Dare Collection (theatre costumes) ---
http://drc.ohiolink.edu/handle/2374.OX/30999
Stage Costumes ---
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/Costume/index.html
History of
Costume
Fashion in Color ---
http://ndm.si.edu/EXHIBITIONS/fashion_in_colors/
Penn Museum: Expedition [archaeology]
http://penn.museum/current-expedition.html
Knitting Together (yarn, lace, fabrics, cloth)
---
http://www.knittingtogether.org.uk/cat.asp?cat=599
Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston ---
http://www.artsandbusinesscouncil.org/
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
Colorado Plateau Archives (Geology, Art History, Native
Americans) ---
http://archive.library.nau.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/cpa
NOVA: The Spy Factory ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/spy-factory.html
International Spy Museum ---
http://www.spymuseum.org/
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 May 26, 2011
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/TidbitsQuotations052611.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
Stanley Fish ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish
For many years, Stanley Fish has been one of my heroes and role models
---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Solitary-Thinker/127464/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
The world needs more Fish tales.
Professor Fish is sometimes incorrectly given credit for the phrase
"political correctness." Perhaps he should be given credit, however, for a
willingness to stand up against the tide of political correctness that swamped
our academy ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Another hero is the independent thinker pushing back against the tide of
political correctness is Harvey Mansfield at Harvard.
This is great material for a Harvard Business School Leadership,
Management, and Ethics Case
Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan,
Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught
since 1962 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Mansfield
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (education research) ---
http://www.edexcellence.net/
Online Instructional Resources: Faculty Development Programs at Michigan
State University ---
http://fod.msu.edu/OIR/index.asp
eLearn Magazine ---
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=57-1#
First Monday ---
http://firstmonday.org/
Educause ---
http://www.educause.edu/
A Must Read
Educause: Emerging Trends in Education Technology ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/09/qt#250713
Educause and the New Media Consortium have released
the
2011 Horizon Report, an annual study of emerging
issues in technology in higher education. The issues that are seen as likely
to have great impact:
- Over the next year: e-books and mobile
devices.
- From two to three years out: augmented reality
and game-based learning.
- From four to five years out: gesture-based
computing and learning analytics.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Accounting, Finance, and Business Graduate Average Salaries are Neither in
the Top Nor the Bottom Top Ten
"Major Decisions," by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, May 24,
2011---
Click Here
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/24/georgetown_study_of_salaries_for_different_majors_finds_big_discrepancy_women_and_minorities_in_low_paying_fields
Jensen Comment
I always advised my students that things other than starting salaries were often
more important. For example, in accounting the most important factors are client
exposure (clients often make the best offers to auditors and consultants), the
professional nature of interesting work, and the amount and quality of the
training are more important for the long haul than starting salaries.
Advancement opportunities are also very important. Consideration should also
be given to travel demands (good news to some graduates and bad news to other
graduates) and pressures such as compensation based upon sales commissions or
other pressure cookers.
Also give consideration to the numbers of opportunities and the locations of
where those opportunities take place. Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering
graduates are paid well, but they are relatively few in number and face only a
limited number of job opportunities and locales. One of my closest friends has a
son who graduated as an engineer from Maine Maritime Academy and received all
sorts of opportunities in the Merchant Marines. However, after recently getting
married the romance of being stationed aboard Far East merchant vessels lost a
lot of its appeal with his young and pretty wife living on a horse farm in
Conway, New Hampshire. If he'd instead become a N.H. CPA he could probably have
great opportunities in the Mt. Washington Valley and live each day on the farm.
And in some cases health and pension plans can be very important. Any career
that provides a lifetime pension after only 20-30 years of service provides a
tremendous opportunity for double dipping later in life. Consider running for
the U.S. Congress where a short four-year stint can get you a lifetime pension
with great medical benefits for a lifetime. Of course there's a lot of crap to
wade through getting nominated and elected.
To me the most important factor is independence and freedom of time control
such as those freedoms afforded to college professors. If I had it to do all
over again I would get a PhD in accounting (since accounting PhDs are in such
short supply for the tremendous needs of the market). I guess in the 1960s I was
the maggot that was dropped by a soaring bird into the sweetest manure pile
around.
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#careers
"Netflix Streaming Now the Largest Source of North American Internet
Traffic," by Audrey Watters, ReadWriteWeb, May 17, 2011 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/netflix_streaming_now_the_largest_source_of_north.php
Netflix
has made it clear that it sees its future in
streaming videos not DVDs and that's having a
massive impact on Internet traffic. According to
Sandvine' latest
Global
Internet Phenomena Report, Netflix now comprises
almost 30% of peak downstream traffic in North America.
But beyond the evening, primetime hours, Netflix
has become the largest source of Internet traffic overall - some 22.2% of
traffic.
Jensen Comment
When I was a little kid we could watch a double feature plus a serial-short for
two bits at our farm town cinema on Saturday afternoons. I think each movie
downloaded these days from Netflix on an optional unlimited plan can be cheaper
than two-for-two bits if you're an movie addict. I wonder if those Johnny Mack
Brown double feature westerns are available. I used to pack a toy gun on each
hip when going to those matinees.
May 18, 2011 reply from Linda Phingst
Hi Bob, very interesting…
Amazing…when they closed down the old Flemington
movie theater a couple of years ago, I was sad and saw the end of an era….
Going to the matinee taught us patience, having
something to look forward to, social skills, saving, endless opportunities
for growth. When you worried about seeing an ‘R’ rated movie and getting
carded.
I hope that is being replaced by something just as
meaningful…..but it is not Netflix Streaming….parenting is becoming an
impossible challenge, as if it wasn’t hard before. Yet parents are becoming
more and more ‘responsible’ for ‘children’s’ actions without any help from
society (or the village.)
No Netflix streaming at our house…..ever!
Well, maybe when they go off to college in six and
eight years…..
Linda
Frenchtown, NJ
Where everything is 10 miles away and a 15 minutes
drive. You feel like driving slow? I got plenty of time…
Just curious, but how many new movies releases are
there now compared to say 1950-60? I know, Google it!
As long as we're into nostalgia, here's the Statler Bros.
"The Strand and Other Memories" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfUihsA_-XU
"Do You Remember These?" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfl5l4ylBN0
Randolph Scott ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Scott
"Does all this new technology make a difference? This new report from
The Chronicle looks at the realities behind the hype," Special Report from the
Chronicle of Higher Education, 2011 (not free at under $10 depending on
option chosen) ---
https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=78055&PK=at2511
Educause: Emerging Trends in Education Technology ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/09/qt#250713
Educause and the New Media Consortium have released
the
2011 Horizon Report, an annual study of emerging
issues in technology in higher education. The issues that are seen as likely
to have great impact:
- Over the next year: e-books and mobile
devices.
- From two to three years out: augmented reality
and game-based learning.
- From four to five years out: gesture-based
computing and learning analytics.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Video: Stanford Graduate School of Business gets a complex of new
buildings--- the Knight Management Center ---
http://alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/news/knightopening.html
From the Absurd Measures of Performance Department
"Johns Hopkins and Texas A&M Were the Least Productive Research
Universities, Study Finds," by Jeffrey Brainard, Chronicle of Higher
Education, May 23, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Johns-Hopkins-Texas-A-M-Were/127603/
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins and Texas A&M
Universities were among the least productive of any at large academic
institutions from 1989 to 2004, measured by the money spent on their
research per paper they published, according to a study to be presented at
an academic conference this week.
The University of Pennsylvania and Harvard
University were among the most productive.
By the same measure, private research universities
were more efficient on average than public ones, and institutions with
medical schools produced more papers than those without.
What's more, the collective productivity of 72 of
the nation's largest research universities dropped significantly in the late
1990s and has not recovered, according to the study's author, Jeffrey M.
Litwin, an associate dean at George Brown College, in Toronto.
Mr. Litwin is to present his findings on Tuesday at
the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research, which will
take place in that city.
The study appears to be the first of its kind to
rank institutions by this measure, which compares a university's total
research spending from all sources against the number of papers its
researchers publish in scholarly journals. Other prominent methods of
evaluating research institutions, like the one released last year by the
National Research Council, have considered, as one of many factors, a
different but related yardstick—the number of papers published per faculty
member.
However, at least one statistician disagrees with
the spending-per-paper approach. Mr. Litwin relied on data that are
"inadequate" to evaluate universities' research productivity accurately,
said Scott L. Zeger, vice provost for research at Johns Hopkins.
In an interview, Mr. Litwin called his method an
improvement over counts of publications per faculty member. That approach is
problematic given the "vast differences in outputs per capita across
disciplines, and even within individual departments," said Mr. Litwin, who
is executive director of the college's capital campaign and holds an M.B.A.
and a doctorate in higher-education management.
Figures on research expenditures offer a way to
smooth the variation and produce a single measure reflecting faculty efforts
on research that is comparable across institutions, Mr. Litwin said. "I
think it's quite a bit more useful for studies in a financial or economic
context," he said. A Drop in Productivity
For his study, Mr. Litwin examined expenditures
data reported by institutions to the National Science Foundation from 1989
to 2004. He examined counts of published studies compiled by Thomson
Reuters, a news and information company. His results are based on 72
institutions that reported the highest research expenditures and that had
comparable data on publications. The median expenditure per paper was
$72,020.
He acknowledged that his study raised several
questions that it did not answer, which he says merit further study. One was
a jump in average expenditures per paper among all institutions, from
$67,000 in 1996 to $85,000 in 2002.Mr. Litwin said neither he nor his
colleagues had an explanation. Nevertheless, he said, "If you have a decline
in productivity, the government isn't getting the same return for its
investment, assuming the quality of publications has been consistent," he
said, "and that's meaningful."
Mr. Litwin conceded that his suggested approach had
methodological limitations. The NSF figures on research expenditures fail to
capture all of a faculty member's time spent on research because they
reflect only research that is separately budgeted by the institution, such
as that financed by external sponsors like the federal government. At
research institutions, faculty members typically split their time between
teaching and research, but the portion of their base pay that represents
compensation for their research was not captured in the NSF figures.
Mr. Zeger, who has overseen research at Hopkins
since 2008 and whose specialty is biostatistics, suggested some other
limitations of Mr. Litwin's measure.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I'm reminded of the oft-quoted problem of managing a socialist economy with
performance targets of nail production that became dysfunctional to supply and
demand. When the performance measure was set at the "number of nails," the nail
factories shifted high gear into producing very small nails and brads, thereby
creating a shortage of larger nails. When the performance measure was set at
"kilograms of nails" the nail factories shifted into producing very large nails
the size of railroad spikes, thereby creating a shortage in smaller nails.
Research performance of a university is a multivariate process with many
intangibles and contingencies. If we reduce this to a many-to-one to misleading
metric such as "number of journal articles published" this can lead to all sorts
of game playing with joint authorships and paper splitting. See
Gaming for Tenure as an
Accounting Professor ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)
Even within the realm of journal articles, not all journal articles are
equivalent within a discipline or between disciplines. What do you have when you
add apples, oranges, peanuts, grains of sand, temples, beer cans, houses, shoes,
ranches, mountains, cities, and worms into a single aggregate total?
And there is the problem of timing. A truly great historian might spend a
lifetime producing a single monumental piece of work whereas a chemist might
publish a research abstract once each month or even more often.
And lastly, when comparing Texas A&M with Harvard, we must realize that
Harvard had a long head start and now has the largest endowment in the world.
Harvard can probably attract the very top researchers of the world to live and
work in the Cambridge area simply because these researchers want to be near
other top Harvard, MIT, and other researchers that have created a very
scholarly environment over centuries of time. Texas A&M most likely finds it a
lot more expensive to attract these same top researchers to a relatively
"upstart university" in the middle of nowhere. Hence the fact that Harvard now
gets more research bang for the buck is hardly surprising at the present time.
However, the fact that Texas A&M is willing to spend more for each big bang will
one day make Harvard wake up and take notice of Texas A&M. I wonder how much it
would cost to move the Boston Symphony Orchestra to Brian, Texas?
And perhaps those Nobel Prize winning scientists who opt for Harvard relative
to Texas A&M just have not had good tax advisors.
"The 10 Most Expensive Colleges In America," by Julie Zeveloff ,
Business Insider, May 17, 2011 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-colleges-2011-4
You want to give your child the best education money
can buy. But is $235,000 for a bachelor's degree really worth it?
The top dollar undergraduate program in America is
Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., which charges $58,716 per term
for tuition, fees, room and board -- plus a few thousand dollars for
textbooks.
Sarah Lawrence president Karen Lawrence
justifies the sticker price by pointing to the
school's small classes where faculty have "twice the student contact as
professors at other institutions."
Of course, Sarah Lawrence isn't the only university
charging students insane prices. We've rounded up the costliest colleges of
all from the latest figures published by the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
The priciest institutions are located in major
cities, where costs-of-living also run high. In fact, three on this list are
located in
New York City, and
three are just a short drive away.
- Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY
- Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.
- Columbia University in New York, NY
- Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD
- Georgetown University in Washington DC
- New York University in New York, NY
- Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif.
- Barnard College in New York, NY
- Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
- Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
The Devil is in the Details Not Discussed in This Report (but then we
never expected these unions to agree on learning assessment details)
"What Faculty Unions Say About Student Learning Outcomes Assessment,"
by Larry Gold (AFT), Gary Rhoades (AAUP), Mark Smith (NEA) & George Kuh (NILOA),
Occasional Paper No. 9 ---
http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/documents/Union.pdf
Faculty unions are under great pressure to become more focused on learning
performance and educational reforms apart from the traditional protectionism and
work rules focus of these unions. This report is an important start down the
assessments road. But when it gets down to details, these unions may never agree
on output assessment details (beyond having teachers subjectively grade their
students without any grade inflation restraints).
To my knowledge faculty unions have not taken any significant initiatives to
stop the greatest educational quality embarrassment at the K-20 levels ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
I would be more supportive of faculty unions if they set out with determination
to reverse the widespread cancer of grade inflation in the United States.
Instead they've contributed to the spread of this deadly disease.
I could be wrong about some of this and would greatly appreciate knowing
about significant efforts of teachers' unions to reverse grade inflation.
This creates perverse incentives for professors to
demand little and give out good grades. (Indeed, the 36 percent of students in
our study who reported spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone
still had an average G.P.A. of 3.16.) On those commendable occasions when
professors and academic departments do maintain rigor, they risk declines in
student enrollments. And since resources are typically distributed based on
enrollments, rigorous classes are likely to be canceled and rigorous programs
shrunk. Distributing resources and rewards based on student learning instead of
student satisfaction would help stop this race to the bottom.
"Your So-Called Education," by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, The New
York Times, May 14, 2011 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212
. . .
In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of
the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading
per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20
pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12
to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college
student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S.
Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.
¶ Not surprisingly, a large number of the students
showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex
reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and
then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that
we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional
0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated
gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent
would not have shown such gains over four years of college.
¶ Why is the overall quality of undergraduate
learning so poor?
. . .
Fortunately, there
are some relatively simple, practical steps that colleges and universities
could take to address the problem. Too many institutions, for instance, rely
primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates
perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good
grades. (Indeed, the 36 percent of students in our study who reported
spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone still had an average
G.P.A. of 3.16.) On those commendable occasions when professors and academic
departments do maintain rigor, they risk declines in student enrollments.
And since resources are typically distributed based on enrollments, rigorous
classes are likely to be canceled and rigorous programs shrunk. Distributing
resources and rewards based on student learning instead of student
satisfaction would help stop this race to the bottom.
Others involved in
education can help, too. College trustees, instead of worrying primarily
about institutional rankings and fiscal concerns, could hold administrators
accountable for assessing and improving learning. Alumni as well as parents
and students on college tours could ignore institutional facades and focus
on educational substance. And the Department of Education could make
available nationally representative longitudinal data on undergraduate
learning outcomes for research purposes, as it has been doing for decades
for primary and secondary education.
Most of all, we
hope that during this commencement season, our faculty colleagues will pause
to consider the state of undergraduate learning and our collective
responsibility to increase academic rigor on our campuses.
Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and
education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, an assistant
professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, are the authors of
“Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.”
Possible details for outcomes assessment are discussed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluations and grade inflation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
"Reader feedback: When student evaluations are just plain wrong," by
Heather M. Whitney, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 17, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/reader-feedback-when-student-evaluations-are-just-plain-wrong/33378?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Farming & Countryside Education ---
http://www.face-online.org.uk/resources-all
"The Risks of Quantification," by William Byers, Harvard Business
Review Blog, May 18, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/05/the_risks_of_quantification.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Quantification — describing reality with numbers —
is a trend that seems only to be accelerating. From digital technology to
business and financial models, we interact with the world by means of
quantification.
While we all interact with the world through
more-or-less inflexible models, mathematics contributes to this lack of
flexibility because it is seemingly precise and objective. Even though
mathematical models can be very complex, you can use them without
understanding them very well. A trader
need not really understand the financial engineering models that he may use
on daily basis. This uncritical acceptance amounts
to the assumption that reality is identical to our rational reconstruction
of reality — for example, that the economy or the stock market is captured
by our latest model.
Hitting the bottom line is certainly easier when you know with precision
what that bottom line is. Numbers give you this precision, making you feel
more secure about where you are going — higher revenues, lower costs.
Defining the risk of an unlikely event may make us feel like we've dealt
with the threat. This is part of the contribution of the "quants"
on Wall Street, people with doctorates in math and
physics. They bring with them a culture of quantification that they carry
over from the mathematical and physical sciences and then apply to economic
and financial situations. The complex mathematical models that they use may
be brilliant, but the better they are the greater their potential is to
misrepresent the actual, human situation that they are looking at. Because
they give people like CEOs and politicians the idea that everything is
understood and under control, these models often have the perverse effect of
generating new, unanticipated problems.
What we misunderstand is that introducing
mathematics and quantification into any situation subtly changes that
situation and this needs to be taken into account. We are attached to our
analytic and computational tools and have become blind to their limitations.
Consider the following four issues:
- Statistical models are all based on
the notion of randomness, but no one can really understand randomness.
Many people use the word random without realizing that random means what
it says — randomness cannot be predicted or controlled. A model of
randomness is no longer true randomness.
- Because they are logically consistent,
mathematical models screen out ambiguity. Ambiguity is real,
but business and financial models have little to no room for it.
Ambiguity arises whenever there are two (or more) courses of action that
are equally important yet conflict with one another. For example, we
need nuclear reactors to solve some of our energy needs and to mitigate
global warming. At the same time, nuclear power, as we see from Japan,
comes with huge downsides. This same ambiguity is at the heart of most
policy and business decisions, but mathematical models have taken out
the ambiguity.
- Putting a situation into numbers
enforces the belief that things are linear and events are necessarily
comparable since for any two numbers one is larger and one is
smaller. Suppose that you modeled teaching on a scale that goes from 1
to 10. You would conclude that a teacher with a score of 8.3 was better
than one with 6.8, but this would inevitably ignore all kinds of
qualitative factors. Models simplify things by ignoring certain aspects
of the situation, but we can never be sure which factors should be
included and which should be omitted.
- Any system that involves human
behavior, like economics or finance, is inherently self-referential.
We are all participants in, not just observers of, these systems.
Self-referential systems are notoriously difficult to control and
predict because they are often chaotic, not deterministic. Most
mathematical models do not take this element of self-reference seriously
and anyhow chaotic systems, by definition, cannot be predicted.
How do we make use of the realization that
uncertainty is inevitable and our best models have blind spots? Simple
acknowledgment that uncertainty is unavoidable already changes things in a
fundamental way. However, this acknowledgment must be authentic and must
overcome our psychological aversion to uncertainty. Uncertainty tends to
make situations more complex and, therefore, projects more costly — another
reason why it tends to be ignored or downplayed.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on what went wrong with accountics research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
"Let's Give the Blind Better Access to Online Learning," by Virginia
A. Jacko, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 8, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Lets-Give-the-Blind-Better/127392/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on learning aids for disabled students can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
Google Music (Beta) ---
http://music.google.com/music/usernotinvited
"Google Music vs. Amazon Cloud Drive," by Sarah Parez, ReadWriteWeb,
May 10, 2011 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_music_vs_amazon_cloud_drive.php
Bob Jensen's links to free online music ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm
"Scrible: A New Tool for Web Annotation," by George Williams,
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/scrible-a-new-tool-for-web-annotation/33240?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
"What use is game theory?" by Steve Hsu, Information Processing,
May 4, 2011 ---
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-use-is-game-theory.html
Fantastic
interview with game theorist Ariel Rubinstein on
Econtalk. I agree with Rubinstein that game theory has little predictive
power in the real world, despite the pretty mathematics. Experiments at RAND
(see, e.g., Mirowski's
Machine Dreams) showed early game theorists,
including Nash, that people don't conform to the idealizations in their
models. But this wasn't emphasized (Mirowski would claim it was deliberately
hushed up) until more and more experiments showed similar results. (Who
woulda thought -- people are "irrational"! :-)
Perhaps the most useful thing about game theory is that it requires you to
think carefully about decision problems. The discipline of this kind of
analysis is valuable, even if the models have limited applicability to real
situations.
Rubinstein discusses a number of topics, including raw intelligence vs
psychological insight and its importance in economics (see also
here). He has, in my opinion, a very developed and
mature view of what social scientists actually do, as opposed to what they
claim to do.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on analytics can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#Analytics
A History of Entrepreneurship
"Who Are The Entrepreneurs: The Elite or the Everyday Man? A History of
Entrepreneurship," by Heather A. Haveman, Jacob Habinek, and Leo A Googman, UC
Berkeley, 2011 ---
http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/392635v2;jsessionid=00ECE18AD2472F4956AAF2D00CC2132E#page-2
Who
Are The Entrepreneurs: The Elite or the Everyday Man? A History of
Entrepreneurship
We trace the social positions of the men and women
who found new enterprises from the earliest years of one industry’s history
to a time when the industry was well established. Sociological theory
suggests two opposing hypotheses. First, pioneering entrepreneurs are
socially prominent individuals from fields adjacent to the new industry and
later entrepreneurs are from an increasingly broad swath of society. Second,
the earliest entrepreneurs come from the social periphery while later
entrepreneurs include more industry insiders and members of the social
elite. To test these hypotheses, we study the magazine industry in America
over the first 120 years of its history, from 1741 to 1860. We find that
magazine publishing was originally restricted to industry insiders, elite
professionals, and the highly educated, but by the time the industry became
well established, most founders came from outside publishing and more were
of middling stature – mostly small-town doctors and clergy without college
degrees. We also find that magazines founded by industry insiders remained
concentrated in the three biggest cities, while magazines founded by
outsiders became geographically dispersed. Finally, we find that
entrepreneurship evolved from the pursuit of a lone individual to a more
organizationally-sponsored activity; this reflects the modernization of
America during this time period. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of
grounding studies of entrepreneurship in historical context. Our analysis of
this “old” new media industry also offers hints about how the “new” new
media industries are likely to evolve.
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Bob Jensen's helpers for small business ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#SmallBusiness
"Controversial Journal Rankings in Australia Affect Research Funds and
Careers," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 8,
2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Controversial-Journal-Rankings/127417/
When Anna Poletti found out she'd had an article
accepted by the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly,
the young Australian scholar of life writing—autobiography, biography,
letters, and other forms of recorded experience—was thrilled. "It got me a
whole lot of attention in the field," she says, because Biography
is highly regarded by her peers.
It is not so esteemed, however, by the Australian
government. A new journal-ranking plan—which helps the government determine
how research money is doled out to universities—has dropped Biography
from the highest ranking, A*, to a lowly C. Judged that way, an association
with Biography looked like more of a career killer than a coup.
"I am actually dragging down the overall score of
my unit by publishing in a C journal," says Ms. Poletti, a lecturer in
English at Monash University—her first tenure-track job.
The ranking is part of an overall evaluation system
devised by the Australian Research Council, an agency that finances
scholarship and innovation in the country through grants and through advice
to other government departments. At stake is a share of about $1.63-billion
(U.S.), which supports a multitude of activities including academic
research, says Margaret M. Sheil, chief executive officer of the council.
The system, called Excellence in Research for Australia, helps the
government decide how much goes to a given research unit at a university.
Journal rankings are not just an Australian
phenomenon. Scholars worldwide are tangling with what Ms. Poletti calls "the
culture of audit." The United States does not have such a ranking system,
but U.S.-based researchers and journal editors find their work drawn into
such assessments anyway.
Biography, for instance, comes out of the
University of Hawaii's Center for Biographical Research. Around the world—in
Britain, South Africa, New Zealand, and elsewhere—cash-strapped governments
are experimenting with schemes to measure the quality of the academic
research they pay to support.
In Europe, the European Science Foundation is about
to release a
new round of journal rankings as part of its
European Reference Index for the Humanities. Ms. Sheil, who talks regularly
with assessors in other countries, has recently traveled to the United
States to discuss Australia's evaluation system.
Continued in article
Journal Ranking Site: Eigenfactor
Eigenfactor
ranks journals much as Google ranks websites.
It is somewhat similar to Thomson Scientific's (ISI) Journal Citation Index
(JCI), though it's dataset is larger.
Some points to note:
* JCI only looks at the 8000 or so journals indexed by Thomson Scientific
while potentially any journal could be included in Eigenfactor.
* The JCI is calculated based on the most recent 2-year's worth of citation
data; Eigenfactor is based on the most recent 5 years.
* In collaboration with
journalprices.com, Eigenfactor
provides information about price and value for thousands of scholarly
periodicals.
* Article Influence (AI): a measure of a journal's prestige based on per
article citations and comparable to Impact Factor. Eigenfactor (EF): A
measure of the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a
given journal in a year.
* The Eigenfactor Web site also presents the ISI Impact Factors, so it's
possible to compare the
ISI's "Impact Factors" with Eigenfactor's "Article Influence"
* Both simple and advanced searching is available: "You can search by
partial or full journal name, ISSN number, or you can view a selected ISI
category, only ISI-listed journals, only non-ISI-listed journals or both
listed and unlisted."
* Eigenfactor is Free!
From the Eigenfactor
Web site:
Eigenfactor provides
influence rankings for 7000+ science and social science journals and
rankings for an additional 110,000+ reference items including newspapers,
and popular magazines.Borrowing
methods from network theory,
eigenfactor.org ranks the
influence of journals much as Google's PageRank algorithm ranks the
influence of web pages. By this approach, journals are considered to be
influential if they are cited often by other influential journals. Iterative
ranking schemes of this type, known as eigenvector centrality methods, are
notoriously sensitive to "dangling nodes" and "dangling clusters" -- nodes
or groups of nodes which link seldom if at all to other parts of the
network. Eigenfactor modifies the basic eigenvector centrality algorithm to
overcome these problems and to better handle certain peculiarities of
journal citation data.
Different
disciplines have different standards for citation and different time scales
on which citations occur. The average article in a leading cell biology
journal might receive 10-30 citations within two years; the average article
in leading mathematics journal would do very well to receive 2 citations
over the same period. By using the whole citation network, Eigenfactor
automatically accounts for these differences and allows better comparison
across research areas.
Eigenfactor.org is
a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in
the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. We aim to develop
novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for
mapping the structure of academic research. We are committed to sharing our
findings with interested members of the public, including librarians,
journal editors, publishers, and authors of scholarly articles.
The Eigenfactor Web site ---
http://www.eigenfactor.org
In my opinion citation indices are quite unreliable since for-profit journal
publishing houses often urge paid editors and referees to push for citations to
journals they publish. Hence, the bibliography of many research papers becomes
somewhat artificial.
For academic accounting research journals see the following (slow
loading):
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#JournalRankings
At the AAA annual meeting in San Francisco in August, 2005, Judy Rayburn
addressed the low citation rate of accounting research when compared to citation
rates for research in other fields. Rayburn concluded that the low citation rate
for accounting research was due to a lack of diversity in topics and research
methods:
Accounting research is different from other business disciplines
in the area of citations: Top-tier accounting journals in total have fewer
citations than top-tier journals in finance, management, and marketing. Our
journals are not widely cited outside our discipline. Our top-tier journals as a
group project too narrow a view of the breadth and diversity of (what should
count as) accounting research.
Rayburn [2006, p. 4]
As quoted at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
Her data was derived from a Texas !&M study headed up by Ed Swanson.
Journal rankings greatly affect tenure and promotion decisions and annual
performance evaluations in virtually all top North American universities. Many
universities, however, have customized rankings developed by their own faculty
members. For example, the University of Texas at Dallas has a very unique
ranking system in its college of business that results in its program ranking in
the top 10 in the nation with respect to research (I'm not certain if UT Dallas
still publishes this controversial ranking system that, in my viewpoint, cherry
picked the journals to receive highest priority).
For a specialized finance journal ranking system see
http://69.175.2.130/~finman/Orlando/Papers/Rank13.pdf
For criticisms see
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2009.00483.x/abstract
The Newness Versus Rigor Tradeoff: The "rigor" bar has been
ratcheting up for the last 20-30 years
"FMA Decisions Are Out," The Unknown Professor, Financial Rounds, May
3 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
. . .
This tale of two papers reminds me of a piece I
read a while back (unfortunately, I can't recall its title). It discussed
how there's a trade-off in research between "newness" and "required rigor".
In other words, if you're working on a topic that's been done to death (e.g.
capital structure or dividend policy), you'll be asked to do robustness
tests out the yazoo. On the other hand, if it's a more novel idea, there's a
lower bar on the rigor side, because the "newness" factor gets you some
slack on the rigor side.
In general, however, the "rigor" bar has been
ratcheting up for the last 20-30 years, regardless of the "newness" factor.
To see this, realize that the average length of a Journal of Finance article
in the early 80s was something like l6 pages - now it's more like 30-40. As
further (anecdotal) evidence, a friend of mine had a paper published on
long-run returns around some types of mergers in the Journal of Banking and
Finance about 9 years back. They made him calculate the returns FIVE
different ways.
Continued in article
I only wish "rigor" in accounting research demanded more independent
validity research and replication ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
May 10, 2011 reply from Dan Stone
Here's a very detailed buyers/users guide to
citation management software, i.e., endnote, zetero, refwords.
http://www.library.wisc.edu/citation-managers/comparison.html
Thanks to the Univ. of Wisconsin (Madison)
librarians for this guide. I'm glad to see their jobs haven't yet been
eliminated (or have they?) by the new governor / administration :)
Dan Stone
Univ. of Kentucky
Video
Quantitative versus Fundamental Value–Let’s get ready to RUMMMBLE!
May 8, 2011
http://blog.empiricalfinancellc.com/2011/05/quantitative-versus-fundamental-value-lets-get-ready-to-rummbbbllle/
Bob Jensen's threads on the Efficient Market Hypothesis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#EMH
Warren
Buffett did a lot of almost fatal damage to the EMH
If you really want to understand the problem you’re apparently wanting to study,
read about how Warren Buffett changed the whole outlook of a great
econometrics/mathematics researcher (Janet Tavkoli). I’ve mentioned this
fantastic book before --- Dear Mr.
Buffett. What opened her eyes is how Warren Buffet built his vast, vast
fortune exploiting the errors of the sophisticated mathematical model builders
when valuing derivatives (especially options) where he became the writer of
enormous option contracts (hundreds of millions of dollars per contract). Warren
Buffet dared to go where mathematical models could not or would not venture when
the real world became too complicated to model. Warren reads financial
statements better than most anybody else in the world and has a fantastic
ability to retain and process what he’s studied. It’s impossible to model his
mind.
I finally grasped what Warren was saying. Warren has such a wide body of
knowledge that he does not need to rely on “systems.” . . . Warren’s vast
knowledge of corporations and their finances helps him identify derivatives
opportunities, too. He only participates in derivatives markets when Wall
Street gets it wrong and prices derivatives (with mathematical models)
incorrectly. Warren tells everyone that he only does certain derivatives
transactions when they are mispriced.
Wall Street derivatives traders construct trading models with no clear idea
of what they are doing. I know investment bank modelers with advanced math
and science degrees who have never read the financial statements of the
corporate credits they model. This is true of some credit derivatives
traders, too.
Janet Tavakoli, Dear Mr. Buffett, Page 19
October 28, 2009 reply from Paul Williams
[Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Bob, et al,
I never cease to marvel at the powers of rationalization defenders of sacred
institutions can muster. The above characterization of EMH was certainly not
the version pedaled by its accounting disciples (notably Bill Beaver) back
in the late 60s and early 70s. An accounting research industry was created
based on a version of EMH that was decidedly more certain that securities
were "properly priced." [Why else do studies to debunk the Briloff effect?].
Given the interpretation offered above,
"Information Content Studies" make no sense. The whole idea of this
methodology was that accounting data that correlated with prices implied
market participants found it useful for setting prices based on publicly
available data, which implied such prices were the ones that would exist in
an idealized world of perfectly informed investors. Thus, this data met the
test of being information and was to be preferred to other "non-information"
to which the market did not react.
But now we are told that this latest version of EMH
does not justify such sanguinity because "...the prices in the market are
mostly wrong...", thus prices are not an indicator of the value of data,
i.e., just because there is a price effect we still don't know if that data
is truly "information." Think of the millions and millions of taxpayer
dollars that have been wasted over the last forty years subsidizing people
to search for something that is indeterminate given the methodology they are
employing.
And for this the AAA awarded Seminal Contributions.
Jim Boatsman had an ingenious little paper in Abacus eons ago titled, "Why
Are There Tigers and Things," that cast serious doubts on the whole
enterprise of "testing" market efficiency. It addressed the issue Carl
Devine harped on about needing an independent definition of "information."
And this is related to the logical slight of hand EMH required of surmising
there is a way to know what the "true" price is since we glibly talk about
over and under and mis-priced securities.
But there is no way to know this, since security
prices are CREATED by the institution of the securities market. There does
not exist a natural process against which market performance can be
compared. "Market value," which is what a price is, is a value established
by the market. The market is all there is. To paraphrase NC's current
governor's favorite expression, "The price is what it is."
It isn't over or under or mis or proper or anything
else, other than what a particular institution created by us at one moment
in time determines it is. If we lived in a society in which mob rule settled
issues of justice, it would make little sense to argue that someone the mob
hung was "not guilty." Of course he was guilty, because the mob hung him!!
Paul Williams
paul_williams@ncsu.edu
(919)515-4436
A Fundamentals Approach to Valuing a Business
In the great book Dear Mr. Buffett, Janet Tavakoli shows how Warren
Buffet learned value (fundamentals) investing while taking Benjamin Graham's
value investing course while earning a masters degree in economics from Columbia
University. Buffet also worked for Professor Graham.
The following book supposedly takes the Graham approach to a new level
(although I've not yet read the book). Certainly the book will be controversial
among the efficient markets proponents like Professors Fama and French.
Purportedly a Great, Great Book on Value Investing
From Simoleon Sense, November 16, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/
OMG Did I Die & Go to heaven?
Just Read, Applied Value Investing, My Favorite Book of the Past 5
Years!!
Listen To This Interview!
I have a confession, I might have read the best
value investing book published in the past 5 years!
The book is called
Applied Value Investing By Joseph Calandro Jr. In
the book Mr. Calandro applies the tenets of value investing via (real) case
studies. Buffett, was once asked how he would teach a class on security
analysis, he replied, “case studies”. Unlike other books which are
theoretical this book provides you with the actual steps for valuing
businesses.
Without a doubt, this book ranks amongst the best
value investing books (with SA, Margin of Safety, Buffett’s letters to
corporate America, and Greenwald’s book) & you dont have to take my word for
it. Seth Klarman, Mario Gabelli and many top investors have given the book a
plug!
Here is an interview with the author of the book, Applied Value Investing
( I recommend listening to this). Who knows perhaps
yours truly will interview him soon.
Miguel
P.S.
A fellow blogger and friend will soon post a review
of this book (hint: Street Capitalist!).
Video:
Warren Buffett's Secrets To Success ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/business-news/nov-24-alice1-2009-11
Bob Jensen's threads on valuation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/roi.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on how the economic crisis may have been a "math
error" are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
Ockham’s (or Occam's) Razor (Law of Parsimony and Succinctness) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ockham's_razor
"Razoring Ockham’s razor," by Massimo Pigliucci, Rationally
Speaking, May 6, 2011 ---
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/05/razoring-ockhams-razor.html
Scientists, philosophers and skeptics alike are
familiar with the idea of Ockham’s razor, an epistemological principle
formulated in a number of ways by the English Franciscan friar and
scholastic
philosopher William of Ockham (1288-1348).
Here is one version of it, from the pen of its originator:
Frustra fit per plura quod potest
fieri per pauciora. [It is futile to do with more things that which can
be done with fewer] (Summa Totius Logicae)
Philosophers often refer to this as
the principle of economy, while scientists tend to call it parsimony.
Skeptics invoke it every time they wish to dismiss out of hand claims of
unusual phenomena (after all, to invoke the “unusual” is by definition
unparsimonious, so there).
There is a problem with all of this, however, of
which I was reminded recently while reading an old paper by my colleague
Elliot Sober, one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers of
biology. Sober’s article is provocatively entitled “Let’s razor Ockham’s
razor” and it is available for download from
his web site.
Let me begin by reassuring you that Sober didn’t
throw the razor in the trash. However, he cut it down to size, so to
speak. The obvious question to ask about Ockham’s razor is: why? On what
basis are we justified to think that, as a matter of general practice,
the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true? Setting aside
the surprisingly difficult task of operationally defining “simpler” in
the context of scientific hypotheses (it can be done, but only
in certain domains,
and it ain’t straightforward), there doesn’t seem
to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the
universe is a simple as it could be.
Indeed, we know it’s not. The history
of science is replete with examples of simpler (“more elegant,” if you
are aesthetically inclined) hypotheses that had to yield to more clumsy
and complicated ones. The Keplerian idea of elliptical planetary orbits
is demonstrably more complicated than the Copernican one of circular
orbits (because it takes more parameters to define an ellipse than a
circle), and yet, planets do in fact run around the gravitational center
of the solar system in ellipses, not circles.
Lee Smolin (in his delightful
The Trouble with Physics)
gives us a good history of 20th century physics,
replete with a veritable cemetery of hypotheses that people thought
“must” have been right because they were so simple and beautiful, and
yet turned out to be wrong because the data stubbornly contradicted
them.
In Sober’s paper you will find a
discussion of two uses of Ockham’s razor in biology, George Williams’
famous critique of group selection, and “cladistic” phylogenetic
analyses. In the first case, Williams argued that individual- or
gene-level selective explanations are preferable to group-selective
explanations because they are more parsimonious. In the second case,
modern systematists use parsimony to reconstruct the most likely
phylogenetic relationships among species, assuming that a smaller number
of independent evolutionary changes is more likely than a larger number.
Part of the problem is that we do
have examples of both group selection (not many, but they are there),
and of non-parsimonious evolutionary paths, which means that at best
Ockham’s razor can be used as a first approximation heuristic, not as a
sound principle of scientific inference.
And it gets worse before it gets
better. Sober cites Aristotle, who chided Plato for hypostatizing The
Good. You see, Plato was always running around asking what makes for a
Good Musician, or a Good General. By using the word Good in all these
inquiries, he came to believe that all these activities have something
fundamental in common, that there is a general concept of Good that gets
instantiated in being a good musician, general, etc. But that, of
course, is nonsense on stilts, since what makes for a good musician has
nothing whatsoever to do with what makes for a good general.
Analogously, suggests Sober, the
various uses of Ockham’s razor have no metaphysical or logical universal
principle in common — despite what many scientists, skeptics and even
philosophers seem to think. Williams was correct, group selection is
less likely than individual selection (though not impossible), and the
cladists are correct too that parsimony is usually a good way to
evaluate competitive phylogenetic hypotheses. But the two cases (and
many others) do not share any universal property in common.
What’s going on, then? Sober’s solution is to
invoke the famous
Duhem thesis.**
Pierre Duhem suggested in 1908 that, as Sober puts
it: “it is wrong to think that hypothesis H makes predictions about
observation O; it is the conjunction of H&A [where A is a set of
auxiliary hypotheses] that issues in testable consequences.”
This means that, for instance, when astronomer
Arthur Eddington “tested”
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity during a
famous 1919 total eclipse of the Sun — by showing that the Sun’s
gravitational mass was indeed deflecting starlight by exactly the amount
predicted by Einstein — he was not, strictly speaking doing any such
thing. Eddington was testing Einstein’s theory given a set of
auxiliary hypotheses, a set that included independent estimates of
the mass of the sun, the laws of optics that allowed the telescopes to
work, the precision of measurement of stellar positions, and even the
technical processing of the resulting photographs. Had Eddington failed
to confirm the hypotheses this would not (necessarily) have spelled the
death of Einstein’s theory (since confirmed
in many other ways).
The failure could have resulted from the failure
of any of the auxiliary hypotheses instead.
This is both why there is no such
thing as a “crucial” experiment in science (you always need to repeat
them under a variety of conditions), and why naive Popperian
falsificationism is wrong (you can never falsify a hypothesis directly,
only the H&A complex can be falsified).
What does this have to do with
Ockham’s razor? The Duhem thesis explains why Sober is right, I think,
in maintaining that the razor works (when it does) given certain
background assumptions that are bound to be discipline- and
problem-specific. So, for instance, Williams’ reasoning about group
selection isn’t correct because of some generic logical property of
parsimony (as Williams himself apparently thought), but because — given
the sorts of things that living organisms and populations are, how
natural selection works, and a host of other biological details — it is
indeed much more likely than not that individual and not group selective
explanations will do the work in most specific instances. But that set
of biological reasons is quite different from the set that
cladists use in justifying their use of parsimony to reconstruct
organismal phylogenies. And needless to say, neither of these two sets
of auxiliary assumptions has anything to do with the instances of
successful deployment of the razor by physicists, for example.
Continued in article
Note the comments that follow
Bob Jensen's threads on theory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm
Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Research Working Paper Series ---
http://web.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/Index.aspx
"Online Courses Should Always Include Proctored Finals, Economist Warns,"
by David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 10, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-courses-should-always-include-proctored-finals-economist-warns/31287?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Online economics students do not absorb much
material from homework and chapter tests during the semester—perhaps because
they expect to be able to cheat their way through the final exam. That is
the lesson from a
study that Cheryl J. Wachenheim, an associate
professor of agribusiness and applied economics at North Dakota State
University, will present in July at the annual meeting of the Agricultural
and Applied Economics Association.
Ms. Wachenheim is no enemy of distance education.
As The Chronicle
reported in 2009, she continued to teach her
online courses even during a National Guard deployment to Iraq. But she has
noticed that her online students perform much worse than their
classroom-taught counterparts when they are required to take a proctored,
closed-book exam at the end of the semester.
In her study—a
previous version of which appeared in the
Review of Agricultural Economics—Ms. Wachenheim looked at the
performance of students in six sections of introductory-economics courses at
North Dakota State. In online sections whose final exam was unproctored and
open book, students’ exam grades were roughly the same as those of
classroom-based students who took proctored, closed-book finals. But online
sections that were asked to take proctored, closed-book final exams
performed at least 15 points worse on a 100-point scale.
Ms. Wachenheim fears that students in those
unproctored online sections really weren’t learning much, even though their
grades were fine. In self-paced courses, many students appeared to cram most
of the homework and chapter exams into the final week of the semester. Few
of them bothered to do the ungraded practice problems offered by the online
publisher.
Then there is the question of cheating. Ms.
Wachenheim’s study did not gather any direct evidence, but she reports
anecdotally that students have told her how they work in groups to compile
huge caches of the publishers’ test-bank questions. She quotes one student
as saying, “We may not learn the material, but we are guaranteed an A.”
Ms. Wachenheim’s findings parallel those of a
2008 study in the Journal of Economic
Education. That study found indirect evidence that students cheat on
unproctored online tests, because their performance on proctored exams was
much more consistent with predictions based on their class ranks and their
overall grade-point averages.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Since proctors are easily distracted and often miss peeking at cribbed notes and
angled vision and pass the trash kinds of cheating, well placed videos can often
be better than proctoring, especially when set up in individual cubicles.
See
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
How Accountants Hide the Pension Bomb in the Public Sectors
"The Hidden State Financial Crisis: My latest research into opaque
state financial statements suggests taxpayers will be surprised by how much
pensions are underfunded.," by Meredith Whitney, The Wall Street Journal,
May 18, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703421204576329134261805612.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Next month will be pivotal for most states, as it
marks the fiscal year end and is when balanced budgets are due. The states
have racked up over $1.8 trillion in taxpayer-supported obligations in large
part by underfunding their pension and other post-employment benefits. Yet
over the past three years, there still has been a cumulative excess of $400
billion in state budget shortfalls. States have already been forced to raise
taxes and cut programs to bridge those gaps.
Next month will also mark the end of the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act's $480 billion in federal stimulus, which has
subsidized states through the economic downturn. States have grown more
dependent on federal subsidies, relying on them for almost 30% of their
budgets.
The condition of state finances threatens the
economic recovery. States employ over 19 million Americans, or 15% of the
U.S. work force, and state spending accounts for 12% of U.S. gross domestic
product. The process of reining in state finances will be painful for us
all.
The rapid deterioration of state finances must be
addressed immediately. Some dismiss these concerns, because they believe
states will be able to grow their way out of these challenges. The reality
is that while state revenues have improved, they have done so in part from
tax hikes. However, state tax revenues still remain at roughly 2006 levels.
Expenses are near the highest they have ever been
due to built-in annual cost escalators that have no correlation to revenue
growth (or decline, as has been the case recently). Even as states have made
deep cuts in some social programs, their fixed expenses of debt service and
the actuarially recommended minimum pension and other retirement payments
have skyrocketed. While over the past 10 years state and local government
spending has grown by 65%, tax receipts have grown only by 32%.
Off balance sheet debt is the legal obligation of
the state to its current and past employees in the form of pension and other
retirement benefits. Today, off balance sheet debt totals over $1.3
trillion, as measured by current accounting standards, and it accounts for
almost 75% of taxpayer-supported state debt obligations. Only recently have
states been under pressure to disclose more information about these
liabilities, because it is clear that their debt burdens are grossly
understated.
Since January, some of my colleagues focused
exclusively on finding the most up-to-date information on ballooning
tax-supported state obligations. This meant going to each state and local
government's website for current data, which we found was truly opaque and
without uniform standards.
What concerned us the most was the fact that fixed
debt-service costs are increasingly crowding out state monies for essential
services. For example, New Jersey's ratio of total tax-supported state
obligations to gross state product is over 30%, and the fixed costs to
service those obligations eat up 16% of the total budget. Even these numbers
are skewed, because they represent only the bare minimum paid into funding
pension and retirement plans. We calculate that if New Jersey were to pay
the actuarially recommended contribution, fixed costs would absorb 37% of
the budget. New Jersey is not alone.
The real issue here is the enormous over-leveraging
of taxpayer-supported obligations at a time when taxpayers are already
paying more and receiving less. In the states most affected by skyrocketing
debt and fiscal imbalances, social services continue to be cut the most.
Taxpayers have the ultimate voting right—with their feet. Corporations are
relocating, or at a minimum moving large portions of their businesses to
more tax-friendly states.
Boeing is in the political cross-hairs as it is
trying to set up a facility in the more business-friendly state of South
Carolina, away from its current hub of Washington. California legislators
recently went to Texas to learn best practices as a result of a rising tide
of businesses that are building operations outside of their state. Over
time, individuals will migrate to more tax-friendly states as well, and job
seekers will follow corporations.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Some accountants naively assume that the new IASB-FASB agreement on fair value
accounting will make pension obligations more transparent, especially if the
GASB follows suit. What they don't really understand is that obligations that
are not recognized in the first place are not going to be made more transparent
with fair value accounting if they're hidden in the first place. For ten years
Arnold Swartzenagger disclosed four kids and hid a fifth kid from his wife and
the rest of the world. With pensions it's more like disclosing one kid and
hiding four from the world.
Arnold pretty well ruined parts of his life when the that which was hidden
was finally revealed. The same thing will happen to local, state, and national
governments in the U.S. if hidden pension obligations are ever revealed. It will
ruin everything in future elections if voters really understand how bad the
hidden entitlements have really become ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Questions
Although all 50 states are in deep financial troubles, what state is in the
worst shape at the moment and is unable to pay its bills?
Hint: The state in deepest trouble is not California, although California is in
dire straights!
How did accountants hide the pending
disaster?
Watch the Video
This module on 60 Minutes on December 19 was one of the most worrisome episodes
I've ever watched
It appears that a huge number of cities and towns and some states will default
on bonds within12 months from now
"State Budgets: The Day of Reckoning Steve Kroft Reports On The Growing
Financial Woes States Are Facing," CBS Sixty Minutes, December 19, 2010 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/19/60minutes/main7166220.shtml
The problem with that, according to Wall Street
analyst Meredith Whitney, is that no one really knows how deep the holes
are. She and her staff spent two years and thousands of man hours trying to
analyze the financial condition of the 15 largest states. She wanted to find
out if they would be able to pay back the money they've borrowed and what
kind of risk they pose to the $3 trillion municipal bond market, where state
and local governments go to finance their schools, highways, and other
projects.
"How accurate is the financial information that's
public on the states? And municipalities," Kroft asked.
"The lack of transparency with the state disclosure
is the worst I have ever seen," Whitney said. "Ultimately we have to use
what's publicly available data and a lot of it is as old as June 2008. So
that's before the financial collapse in the fall of 2008."
Whitney believes the states will find a way to
honor their debts, but she's afraid some local governments which depend on
their state for a third of their revenues will get squeezed as the states
are forced to tighten their belts. She's convinced that some cities and
counties will be unable to meet their obligations to municipal bond holders
who financed their debt. Earlier this year, the state of Pennsylvania had to
rescue the city of Harrisburg, its capital, from defaulting on hundreds of
millions of dollars in debt for an incinerator project.
"There's not a doubt in my mind that you will see a
spate of municipal bond defaults," Whitney predicted.
Asked how many is a "spate," Whitney said, "You
could see 50 sizeable defaults. Fifty to 100 sizeable defaults. More. This
will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."
Municipal bonds have long been considered to be
among the safest investments, bought by small investors saving for
retirement, and held in huge numbers by big banks. Even a few defaults could
affect the entire market. Right now the big bond rating agencies like
Standard & Poor's and Moody's, who got everything wrong in the housing
collapse, say there's no cause for concern, but Meredith Whitney doesn't
believe it.
"When individual investors look to people that are
supposed to know better, they're patted on the head and told, 'It's not
something you need to worry about.' It'll be something to worry about within
the next 12 months," she said.
No one is talking about it now, but the big test
will come this spring. That's when $160 billion in federal stimulus money,
that has helped states and local governments limp through the great
recession, will run out.
The states are going to need some more cash and
will almost certainly ask for another bailout. Only this time there are no
guarantees that Washington will ride to the rescue.
Continued in article
"Public Pensions Cook the
Books: Some plans want to hide the truth from taxpayers," by Andrew Biggs,
The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124683573382697889.html
Here's a dilemma: You manage a public employee
pension plan and your actuary tells you it is significantly underfunded. You
don't want to raise contributions. Cutting benefits is out of the question.
To be honest, you'd really rather not even admit there's a problem, lest
taxpayers get upset.
What to do? For the administrators of two Montana
pension plans, the answer is obvious: Get a new actuary. Or at least that's
the essence of the managers' recent solicitations for actuarial services,
which warn that actuaries who favor reporting the full market value of
pension liabilities probably shouldn't bother applying.
Public employee pension plans are plagued by
overgenerous benefits, chronic underfunding, and now trillion dollar
stock-market losses. Based on their preferred accounting methods -- which
discount future liabilities based on high but uncertain returns projected
for investments -- these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310
billion.
The numbers are worse using market valuation
methods (the methods private-sector plans must use), which discount benefit
liabilities at lower interest rates to reflect the chance that the expected
returns won't be realized. Using that method, University of Chicago
economists Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh calculate that, even prior to
the market collapse, public pensions were actually short by nearly $2
trillion. That's nearly $87,000 per plan participant. With employee benefits
guaranteed by law and sometimes even by state constitutions, it's likely
these gargantuan shortfalls will have to be borne by unsuspecting taxpayers.
Some public pension administrators have a strategy,
though: Keep taxpayers unsuspecting. The Montana Public Employees'
Retirement Board and the Montana Teachers' Retirement System declare in a
recent solicitation for actuarial services that "If the Primary Actuary or
the Actuarial Firm supports [market valuation] for public pension plans,
their proposal may be disqualified from further consideration."
Scott Miller, legal counsel of the Montana Public
Employees Board, was more straightforward: "The point is we aren't
interested in bringing in an actuary to pressure the board to adopt market
value of liabilities theory."
While corporate pension funds are required by law
to use low, risk-adjusted discount rates to calculate the market value of
their liabilities, public employee pensions are not. However, financial
economists are united in believing that market-based techniques for valuing
private sector investments should also be applied to public pensions.
Because the power of compound interest is so
strong, discounting future benefit costs using a pension plan's high
expected return rather than a low riskless return can significantly reduce
the plan's measured funding shortfall. But it does so only by ignoring risk.
The expected return implies only the "expectation" -- meaning, at least a
50% chance, not a guarantee -- that the plan's assets will be sufficient to
meet its liabilities. But when future benefits are considered to be riskless
by plan participants and have been ruled to be so by state courts, a 51%
chance that the returns will actually be there when they are needed hardly
constitutes full funding.
Public pension administrators argue that government
plans fundamentally differ from private sector pensions, since the
government cannot go out of business. Even so, the only true advantage
public pensions have over private plans is the ability to raise taxes. But
as the Congressional Budget Office has pointed out in 2004, "The government
does not have a capacity to bear risk on its own" -- rather, government
merely redistributes risk between taxpayers and beneficiaries, present and
future.
Market valuation makes the costs of these potential
tax increases explicit, while the public pension administrators' approach,
which obscures the possibility that the investment returns won't achieve
their goals, leaves taxpayers in the dark.
For these reasons, the Public Interest Committee of
the American Academy of Actuaries recently stated, "it is in the public
interest for retirement plans to disclose consistent measures of the
economic value of plan assets and liabilities in order to provide the
benefits promised by plan sponsors."
Nevertheless, the National Association of State
Retirement Administrators, an umbrella group representing government
employee pension funds, effectively wants other public plans to take the
same low road that the two Montana plans want to take. It argues against
reporting the market valuation of pension shortfalls. But the association's
objections seem less against market valuation itself than against the fact
that higher reported underfunding "could encourage public sector plan
sponsors to abandon their traditional pension plans in lieu of defined
contribution plans."
The Government Accounting Standards Board, which
sets guidelines for public pension reporting, does not currently call for
reporting the market value of public pension liabilities. The board
announced last year a review of its position regarding market valuation but
says the review may not be completed until 2013.
This is too long for state taxpayers to wait to
find out how many trillions they owe.
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of government accounting and
accountability ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Bob Jensen's threads on pension schemes to hide debt ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory02.htm#Pensions
"Decline of 'Western Civ'?" Inside Higher Ed, May 19,
2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/19/national_association_of_scholars_report_finds_no_mandatory_western_civilization_courses_at_top_universities
Survey courses in
"Western Civilization," once a common component of undergraduate
curriculums, have almost disappeared as a requirement at many large
private research universities and public flagships, according to a
study released Wednesday by the National Association of Scholars.
The report finds that,
since 1968, the number of the selected colleges that require Western
Civilization courses as a component of general education curriculums and
U.S. history as a component of history majors has dropped. This decrease
has coincided with more focus on world history courses.
The association argues
that Western Civilization courses are uniquely capable of introducing
students to key themes of a liberal education. "In the absence of such an
organizing principle the curriculum spins out into an
all-things-to-all-people cornucopia of offerings, many of them exceptionally
narrow in scope and many of them trivial in character," the report states.
Historians and curriculum researchers attribute the
de-emphasis on Western Civilization courses to significant changes in higher
education curriculums, student diversity, university educational goals, and
how history researchers study the world and receive training. They argue
that survey courses and Western Civilization courses might not be the best
model for all students, and that a more complete world history course is
actually better suited for the modern liberal arts education.
To develop the report, NAS examined the curriculums
of a group of 50 "top" universities to compare with data it had on those
colleges from 1968. The association also surveyed another 75 large public
colleges to paint a more complete picture of the higher education world
today.
Fifty years ago, 10 of the 50 "top" colleges
mandated a Western Civ course, while students at 31 of them could choose a
"Western Civilization" course from among a group of courses that would
fulfill general education requirements.
The situation is different today, according to the
report. None of those "top 50" colleges and only one of the 75 public
universities, the University of South Carolina, mandated one semester of
"Western Civ." The association did not count Columbia University and
Colgate University as offering the traditional "Western Civ" course, even
though those institutions require two-semester courses on Western thought,
because those courses include non-Western texts. Sixteen of the "Top 50"
list Western Civ among several choices for a general education curriculum,
as do 44 of the 75 large public institutions.
The association acknowledged that there are limits
to the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. The NAS surveyed only
125 colleges, and the survey didn't measure the extent to which students are
studying the material in question, just not in required courses.
Anthony Grafton, president of the American
Historical Association and a professor at Princeton University, said
demographic changes and university responses to those changes account for
some of the shift documented in the report. The "traditional Western Civ
course" he said, was especially well suited for the student population of
the 1960s. But he said today's student body is radically different and might
not be as interested in such courses. He also attributed the change to an
increasing specialization among professors, which affects how well they can
teach broad survey courses and how much they enjoy doing so. "People do the
best teaching and studying when they study and teach what they love," he
said.
Brandon Hunziker, a history lecturer at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose
Western
Civilization syllabus was cited in the report as
an exemplary model, expressed similar sentiments to Grafton's. "I teach my
course in a more traditional way because that's a story I can tell well," he
said. He said he and his department teach western civilization from a
variety of perspectives and that he doesn't necessarily think his is the
best approach for every teacher and student.
The debate about where Western Civilization and
U.S. history courses fit into the greater higher-education curriculum also
coincides with a debate about how best to teach such material. Whereas many
colleges in the 1960s had standard core curriculums, more and more
universities have moved to a model where students select from a broad range
of courses in thematic areas.
"Whether or not our students are learning American
history is not necessarily best measured by seat time in a large survey
courses," said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical
Association. He said that is a question that will be explored in more detail
by education researchers.
NAS President Peter Wood could cite no evidence
that the removal of Western Civilization courses from university curriculums
has negatively affected students, but did cite
recent studies and publications that have found
that students are learning relatively little in college.
Continued in article
May 19, 2011 reply from David Fordhame
Dave Albrecht wrote: Does anyone else recall their
Western Civ experience?
Dave, indeed I do. It was taught in the first
semester of my freshman year by what has got to be the most boring professor
I ever had in the rest of my 11 years of college, a Mrs. Brown. However, the
textbook was fascinating, and I loved the course. Probably to your horror, I
not only still have the book, but it is right now sitting beside my La-Z-Boy
chair at home because I occasionally still read from it.
I saw Western Civ as a real-live, albeit
historical, version of Peyton Place, Dallas, and other soap-opera tales of
intrigue, scheming, political jockeying, family problems, efforts at success
and recognition, power struggles, tragedy, comedy, drama, uncertainty, dumb
luck (both good and bad), intelligence and genius, and ignorance and
stupidity. Even back when I was only 17 years old, I recognized a lot of
congruence between my Western Civ book and the Chaucer, Shakespeare, Twain,
Dickens, and Thurber chapters of my Humanities literature class (which was
in the hour after Western Civ in the classroom next door). I remember both
of these classes quite well, in great detail.
You don't remember learning about the differences
between Athens and Sparta, about Troy and the Trojan horse, about Socrates
drinking the hemlock for corrupting the youth, about Icarus and Daedalus and
the Iliad and Odyssey? What about the names Carthage, Alexander and
Cleopatra? Romulus and Remus and their "mother"?
Remember: the European Union isn't a new idea. The
Romans had the idea a long time ago. And here we are, two thousand years
later, and we still use the same name as the Roman "senate". Remember good
ol' Julius "crossing the Rubicon", and the circumstances surrounding that
fateful ford? And for drama and intrigue, what about Agrippina and the
suspicious deaths of the powerful men surrounding her throughout her life?
The "story" of Nero and the fiddle and the fire? And why did a guy named
Hannibal ride elephants across the Alps? Why did Constantine move the
capital, and why isn't Turkey today more European as a result? Who were the
Merovingians and the Carolingians? Pepin? Charlemagne? You don't remember
why the Moors were in the Iberian peninsula?
Do you recognize the words "feudal", "fief",
"domain", "vassal", "knight", and "manor lord"? Where does the American word
"county" come from?
What was the importance of wool and cloth to the
rise of modern markets? Why were East Indian spices, silk, and art so
critical to the rise of the corporate form of business ownership? Do you
remember the relationships between Columbus, Ferdinand and Isabella, Henry
VIII, and Maximilian of Austria? What was their common denominator? How the
heck did one guy (Charles V) suddenly (and very peacefully) inherit most of
the known world in the early 1500s, from what had been dozens of different
kingdoms, duchies, domains, and principalities, including the entire Holy
Roman Empire? Why was Cortez taking so much Incan gold back to Spain?
Did you never learn why Brazil speaks Portuguese
instead of Spanish? What is the connection between Gregor Mendel's works and
Adolf Hitler? How did Leeuwenhoek's invention help Fleming invent
penicillin? What was Tycho Brahe's contribution that led to Kepler debunking
Copernicus, and at the same time led to Galileo's getting in hot water with
the pope?
Ever hear of a guy named Martin Luther? How did
Luther's ideas conflict with Calvin, and why didn't they agree to join
forces? Why did they both disagree with Erasmus, when if the three of them
could have agreed on some basic ideas, there probably wouldn't even be a
pope today? If Calvin started Presbyterianism and Luther started
Lutheranism, who started Episcopalianism, and why didn't his daughter marry
Charles V?
You don't remember William of Orange? Gutenberg?
DaVinci? Charles the Bold? Louix XIII? Jacques DeMolay? William Wallace?
These were exciting guys... how can you hear about their histories without
envisioning the fantastic stories behind them. Fact is more exciting than
fiction. And let's not forget the girls: Joan of Arc, Lady Godiva, and more
importantly for accountants, Lady Ada?
What is the difference between a serf and a vassal?
Why were monks the educated members of society? Why were the second, third,
and fourth sons the ones that always joined the military or went into the
priesthood? And even more interesting: how does all this relate to the
observation that northern Europeans had a reasonably balanced diet even in
the wintertime?
Who was Bayes, and what was he doing when he
"invented" statistics? Why did Beethoven write an overture honoring Egmont
and Hoorne? What was Excalibur supposed to have been? What was Ponce De Leon
looking for when he was waltzing around Florida? Why were England, France,
Spain, and the Dutch vying with each other over the new world? And why
wasn't Germany involved in any of this? Where were Norway and Sweden, who
actually started the "global exploration" movement on the high seas, and why
weren't they doing anything in the field at this time?
What is the Magna Carta? Why do we have "trials by
jury"? Why are there two houses in Congress? Why did the pilgrims, who were
supposed to be English, wear Dutch hats?
And all of this leads to the important question
that no one even asks today: Why are Americans so hell-bent on forcing the
rest of the world into democracy? Why do Americans put their own lives on
the line to help other people overthrow their governments (which might even
be functioning just fine and dandy, thank you)? Why did America even declare
war on itself over that very same issue? How come the Europeans aren't quite
as quick to come to the aid of countries like Bosnia and Slovenia?
No, compared to debits and credits, my Western Civ
class came alive, and explained an awful lot of things, even though the
professor was more boring than watching grass grow. Then again, to be quite
honest... "Perhaps it's just my imagination".... eh?
David Fordham
JMU
"Decline of the Humanities," by Stephen Hsu, MIT's Technology
Review, September 25, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=354&bpid=24172&nlid=2385
From an
essay by William Chace, professor of English and former president of
Wesleyan and Emory. The American Scholar
essay ---
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"College Credit for Life Experience: 2 Groups Offer Assessment Services,"
by David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Will-Work-for-Credit/127564/
Add one more thing to the list of tasks that
colleges can outsource.
This time, it's assessing "experiential
learning"—that is, the skills students have gained in the workplace and
other life trials—and determining how many credit hours should be awarded
for that learning. Two fledgling organizations are game.
The idea of handing such decisions to outsiders
might make some faculty members wince. But the services' creators say that
their networks of portfolio evaluators will establish national norms that
will make experiential-learning assessment more clear-cut, rigorous, and
credible. And as the concept gains legitimacy, they say, it could help
hundreds of thousands of people complete college.
"We're taking baby steps with our first 50 or 60
students," says Pamela Tate, president and chief executive of the Council
for Adult and Experiential Learning. "As this comes to scale, I hope that it
will have an enormous impact." Ms. Tate's organization, known as CAEL, is
the driving force behind
Learning Counts, the larger of the two projects.
The second portal, which went online only two weeks
ago, is KNEXT,
a for-profit corporate sibling of Kaplan University.
"This is absolutely the right thing to do for adult students," says KNEXT's
vice president, Brian Oullette. "College-level learning is college-level
learning, regardless of where it's acquired. Adult students deserve to have
that learning recognized and transcripted and to have it count toward a
college degree."
The two services have roughly the same design. Both
of them primarily focus on adult workers who earned a significant number of
college credits years ago but who, for whatever reason, never finished a
degree.
Each service offers interested students a free
telephone-advising session to determine whether their workplace learning
might warrant course credit. Students who pass that threshold are invited to
sign up for an online course that will teach them to prepare portfolios that
reflect their experiential learning. (Each subject area for which the
student wants credit—say, computer science or management or
communications—gets a separate portfolio.) Those portfolios are then
submitted to an evaluator from a national panel of subject-matter experts,
who deems the portfolio worthy (or not) of course credit.
More than 80 colleges have signed up as Learning
Counts
pilot institutions since the service officially
opened its doors in January. Those pilot colleges have pledged to accept the
credit recommendations of the national evaluators, and they have agreed to
award students three credit hours for successfully completing the
portfolio-creation course itself.
KNEXT, meanwhile, has only a handful of
participating colleges at this early date. Beyond Kaplan itself, only
Grantham University and the New England College of Business and Finance have
signed articulation agreements. Mr. Oullette says the project is
aggressively seeking more partners.
In both systems, students are free to submit their
completed portfolios to nonparticipating colleges—but in such cases there is
no guarantee that any course credit will be awarded.
Show, Don't Tell
One of the Learning Counts pilot institutions is
Saint Leo University, in Florida. That institution had a longstanding
program for awarding credit for experiential learning. But its president,
Arthur F. Kirk Jr., says the new national system should be much more
efficient and transparent.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
All to often colleges give credit for life/work experience as a marketing
strategy to attract students into degree programs. The intent is marketing
rather than academics. I'm against all programs giving college credit for
life/work experience that are not competency based, meaning that CLEP-type
examinations should be administered to assess whether applicants have truly
mastered the course content for which college credit is being given without
having to take college courses.
Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ECA
Triple Bottom Reporting
"Sustainability reporting: Seven questions CEOs and boards should ask,"
Ernst & Young, May 2011 ---
Click Here
http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Seven_things_CEOs_boards_should_ask_about_climate_reporting/$FILE/Seven_things_CEOs_boards_should_ask_about_climate_reporting.pdf
1. Who issues sustainability reports?
More than 3,000 companies worldwide, including more
than two-thirds of the Fortune Global 500.
2. Why report on sustainability if you don't
have to?
Increasingly, external stakeholders such as
institutional investors expect it. Reporting can also bring operational
improvements, strengthen compliance, and enhance your corporate reputation.
3. What information should a sustainability
report contain?
Reports should contain key performance indicators
relevant to the reporter’s industry. Four principles for deciding what to
include are materiality, stakeholder inclusiveness, sustainability context,
and completeness.
4. What governance, systems and processes are
needed to report on sustainability?
Governance requires a high-level mandate and clear
reporting lines. Also needed: robust systems and processes that help
companies collect, store and analyze sustainability information.
5. Do sustainability reports have to be
audited?
Not yet. But they are being more closely monitored
than ever before. As this trend continues, users of sustainability
information will come to expect that the information has been validated by a
reliable third party.
6. What are the challenges and risks of
reporting?
Sustainability reporting presents many challenges,
including data consistency, striking a balance between positive and negative
information, continually improving performance and keeping reports readable
and concise.
7. How can companies get the most value out of
sustainability reporting?
Sustainability reports should be mandatory reading
for all employees, and can be a valuable tool for communicating with
external audiences as well. Setting targets in the form of KPIs also forces
the organization to meet publicly stated goals, which makes reporting an
accountability tool.
Download the full report: Seven questions CEOs and
boards should ask about triple bottom line reporting
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on triple bottom reporting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#TripleBottom
"Vermont Gives the 'Public Option' a Clinical Trial The governor claims it
is 'all about containing costs.' The evidence is not encouraging," by David
Gratzer, The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703655404576293020190881258.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
In America's courtrooms, ObamaCare is on trial. A
majority of states have filed lawsuits arguing that its mandate requiring
individuals to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. But in
Vermont, ObamaCare is about to get a trial of a different sort—a clinical
one.
This coming Thursday, Gov. Peter Shumlin will sign
a bill doing what President Obama and his allies have hoped to do all along:
sell a public insurance option alongside competing private insurance as a
first step toward a single-payer, government-run system. Unlike the
president, Mr. Shumlin has been up-front in his support for single-payer
care, even on the campaign trail last fall. At least he can say he has a
mandate from voters to do what he's doing.
The last time Vermont's health system gained
national attention was in 2004, when Howard Dean, then governor of the
state, ran for president. As governor, Mr. Dean expanded public insurance
eligibility, struggling to get as close to single-payer health care as he
legally could. New regulations pushed out private insurers, reducing
competition. Vermont imposed a guaranteed-issue mandate, which requires
insurers to sell to any applicant, and forced insurers to use community
rating, which requires them to offer the same price to everyone, regardless
of age and health. Both measures also appeared in the final ObamaCare law.
The result? The number of uninsured Vermonters
barely budged. But costs sure moved—in the wrong direction. From 1991 to
2004, according to the Kaiser Foundation, Vermont's health costs grew by
7.6% annually. Across the U.S. comparable costs grew only 5.5% on average.
From 2005 to 2008, in data cited by Dr. William Hsaio, a Harvard consultant
studying this for the state, growth in Vermont's health costs grew 8.2%,
against a national average of 5.7%.
The current governor says his plan is "all about
containing costs," echoing Mr. Obama's absurd claim that increased health
spending would mean lower deficits. Mr. Shumlin can talk about government
health care and savings in the same breath because millions of Americans
still believe the myth that socialized health-care models are immune from
cost inflation.
Yet data from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development show that U.S. health inflation rates are
roughly identical to those seen in European and Canadian systems. From 1990
to 2006, U.S. health costs grew an average of 1.66% faster than the economy
vs. 1.62% for OECD nations.
Socialized medicine advocates say the point is moot
because government-run systems start from a cheaper baseline. That's true,
but that advantage is eroding quickly. A recent paper projected that
Canadian health-care costs were growing so fast that they should consume 19%
of GDP by 2031. The chief author of the paper is David Dodge, Canada's
former deputy minister of health and a former governor of the Bank of
Canada.
Single-payer countries also keep costs below U.S.
levels by rationing care, not by being more efficient. Several weeks ago,
the government-run, government-appointed health authority in the Canadian
city where I was born admitted that a dozen patients died in the last three
years while waiting for routine cardiac surgery. None was classified as an
emergency case. In Canada's system, that made them "elective" surgery
patients, triggering wait times that can delay treatment for weeks or even
months. Yet single-payer activists persistently claim that "death by
rationing" is a myth invented by insurance lobbyists.
In the U.S., Medicare hasn't seen much rationing
yet, because it can rely on a privately funded reserve of resources to meet
surges in demand. Whenever Congress flirts with serious cuts to Medicare
fees, doctors push back. Then, Congress flinches—a sign that the program is
more dependent on the private-sector than its champions admit.
Now Vermont is on course to repeat others'
mistakes. For American liberals, there's no better place to test-run a
public option. But if the new plan doesn't work, Vermont is so small that
government-care supporters can pretend it's the state's fault and not a flaw
in the concept. Darcie Johnston of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom fears
the worst: "the largest tax hike in Vermont history" and a dysfunctional
system.
It's a pity, because Vermont is an ideal place to
run a very different experiment. Health-care policy thinkers are shifting
focus to the potential benefits of a true wellness policy. Your health is as
important to health outcomes as your health insurance, after all. Europeans
have better life expectancy than Americans because they take better care of
themselves on average, not because they get better care in their hospitals.
Through their own lifestyle choices, Vermont
residents already have lower than average obesity levels and below-median
smoking rates. With a more patient-centered insurance market, Vermont
residents could receive, for example, cash incentives to prevent diseases
caused by obesity, tobacco, and other lifestyle choices, all at a fraction
of the cost of future treatments.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In this experiment Vermont suffers from a relatively small population over which
to spread health insurance costs for very expensive treatments such as AIDs
medications, organ transplants, premature baby care, and the costs of dying
(especially extended intensive care unit confinements while dying) for patients
not on Medicare. Medical cost In the 2010 census, Vermont only had 630,337
people, many of whom are children and elderly that will not pay medical
insurance premiums in Vermont's public plan ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont
Vermont residents also rely heavily on out--of-state medical providers such
as physicians and hospitals in bordering states of New Hampshire (especially the
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center), Massachusetts (especially in the
metropolitan area of Boston), and Canada. This greatly limits cost containment
initiatives that accompany Vermont's public medical insurance plans.
Freakonomics
"Here’s Why Health Care Costs Are Outpacing Health Care Efficacy," by
Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics.com, April 18, 2011 ---
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/04/18/heres-why-health-care-costs-are-outpacing-health-care-efficacy/
In a new working paper called “Technology Growth
and Expenditure Growth in Health Care” (abstract
here, PDF
here),
Amitabh Chandra and
Jonathan S.
Skinner offer an explanation:
Bob Jensen's threads on health care are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"CEO Pay in 2010 Jumped 11%," by Joann S. Lublin, The Wall Street
Journal, May 9, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703992704576307332105245012.html?mod=djemalertNEWS
Chief executives at the biggest U.S. companies saw
their pay jump sharply in 2010, as boards rewarded them for strong profit
and share-price growth with bigger bonuses and stock grants.
The median value of salaries, bonuses and long-term
incentive awards for CEOs of 350 major companies surged 11% to $9.3 million,
according to a study of proxy statements conducted for The Wall Street
Journal by management consultancy Hay Group.
The rise followed a year in which pay for the top
boss was flat at these companies.
Viacom Inc. CEO Philippe P. Dauman topped the list.
He received compensation valued at $84.3 million, more than double his 2009
pay, thanks largely to equity awards in a renewed contract.
The Journal measured CEO pay by total direct
compensation, which includes salary, bonuses and the granted value of stock,
stock options and other long-term incentives given for service in fiscal
2010. That figure excludes the value of exercised stock options and the
vesting of restricted stock. The survey covered the 350 biggest companies
that filed proxies between May 1, 2010, and April 30, 2011. Graphic: CEO Pay
at Biggest 350 U.S. Public Companies
The Wall Street Journal CEO Compensation Study was
conducted by Hay Group, a management-consulting firm. The study analyzes CEO
pay from the biggest 350 U.S. public companies by revenue that filed their
definitive proxy statements between May 1, 2010, and April 30, 2011.
[CEOPAY11_promo]
Click on image to see CEO Pay at the biggest 350
U.S. public companies
For the surveyed CEOs, the sharpest pay gains came
via bonuses, which soared 19.7% as profits recovered, especially in some
hard-hit industries.
Profits and share prices increased even more than
CEO compensation. Net income rose by a median of 17%; shareholders at those
companies enjoyed a median return, including dividends, of 18%.
CEOs of media companies claimed four of the top 10
spots: Mr. Dauman at Viacom, plus the chiefs of CBS Corp., Walt Disney Co.
and Time Warner Inc.
Another media CEO, News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch,
ranked 52nd, with total compensation valued at $16.5 million. A spokesman
for News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, declined to comment.
Mr. Dauman, Viacom's CEO since 2006, achieved his
$84.3 million largely due to one-time equity awards valued at $54.3 million
as part of a five-year employment contract signed in April 2010. In
extending his contract, directors cited his operational and financial
leadership.
CEO pay rose last year by about 11%, according to
the Wall Street Journal's annual CEO pay survey. Kelsey Hubbard talks with
WSJ's Erin White about the results.
"Viacom shares appreciated 33% during calendar year
2010 as compared with the 13% increase in the S&P 500,'' a Viacom
spokeswoman said. The company benefited last year from a rebound in the
advertising market and improved ratings at its cable networks.
Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle
Corp., took second place. Long ranked among the highest-paid chiefs, he
received compensation valued at $68.6 million for the year ended last May
31. It mostly consisted of options valued at $61.9 million. (The package was
included in a November Wall Street Journal survey of CEO pay that slightly
overlapped the current study.)
Oracle declined to comment.
CBS CEO Leslie Moonves landed the No. 3 spot with
compensation valued at $53.9 million. The total includes a $27.5 million
bonus, which "reflected the company's remarkable year under his
leadership,'' a CBS spokesman recalled. "He led CBS to results that produced
extraordinary growth in shareholder value'' as returns of 37.4% outpaced
media peers, the spokesman said.
View Full Image TOPEARNS TOPEARNS TOPEARNS
Media mogul Sumner Redstone controls Viacom and CBS
through National Amusements, his family holding company, although the CBS
and Viacom boards set executive pay through their independent compensation
committees.
Martin E. Franklin, the longtime head of Jarden
Corp., was fourth highest-paid. His $45.2 million package consisted mostly
of restricted shares tied to higher per-share earnings or stock price at the
maker of consumer goods. (An executive gets such shares free after sticking
around for several years, but they sometimes come with a performance test,
as Mr. Franklin's did.)
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous compensation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation
From the Scout Report on May 6, 2011
ArtSnacks ---
http://web.me.com/khoneycuttessdack/kevinhoneycutt.org/ArtSnacks.html
The ArtSnacks site is designed to be a tool for
teachers who hope to give their students access to a broad range of
artworks. Currently, the site has over 21,000 artworks posted, and along the
way students learn to give feedback in a polite constructive way to other
students, while learning about science, history, and other topics. Visitors
to the site can sign up for an account, and then they will be able to post
materials and also offer comment on other pieces. This version of ArtSnacks
is compatible with all operating systems.
English Companion ---
http://englishcompanion.ning.com/
Where do English teachers go to ask questions and
get help? Well, one online destination is the English Companion site.
Visitors can sign up, and look through online groups that include "Digital
Collaboration", "AP Lit and Language", and "Teaching Shakespeare". They can
also participate in the online forums, which include forum threads like
"Themed Units for Middle School" and "Interactive Notebooks". There are also
a number of instructional applications and even a Twitter feed here. This
site and its applications are compatible with all operating systems.
The recent seizure of the assets of online poker sites raises a number
of questions
Poker players protest government seizure
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/04/27/online.poker.protest/
Poker websites' actions were risky, experts say
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/apr/29/poker-websites-actions-were-
risky-experts-say/
Poker Black Friday: An online poker ponders how he'll make a living
http://www.slate.com/id/2292417/
Time to legalize, tax online gambling
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7545171.html
The official rules of card games: Hoyle up-to-date
http://books.google.com/books?id=C5eIAAAAMAAJ&dq=card%20games&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Frontier Gamblers
http://www.frontiergamblers.com/
Jensen Comment
Of course the U.S government lacks authority for some of the largest and
most abusive gambling sites that are rooted in Canadian Native American
lands (which in turn are suspected fronts for organized crime).
Bob Jensen's Fraud updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
From the Scout Report on May 20, 2011
StudyBlue ---
http://www.studyblue.com/
Online flash cards held in the cloud? A way to
mobilize study notes more effectively? StudyBlue can be used for both tasks
and several more that will be most efficacious for students and others.
First-time visitors will need to sign up for an account and then they can go
ahead and get started. Among the other features is a "Set a Study" reminder,
which will send users a text message to remind them to get back to their
flash cards. This version is compatible with all operating systems,
including Linux.
PenZen ---
http://pen.io/zen/
Sometimes the clutter of a desktop can prevent any
writing from getting done. PenZen offers a bit of a solution to that very
vexing problem. PenZen is a blank slate, and it is just a place for people
to write down their thoughts with no interruptions or unnecessary
distractions. Visitors can write to their heart's content and then just save
the document for later. This version is compatible with all operating
systems, including Linux.
After 58 years, an icon on the Las Vegas Strip closes
Once 'jewel of the desert', Sahara entertains last weekend guests before
closing
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/may/14/sahara/
Las Vegas' Sahara Hotel and Casino closing after more than 58 years
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/16/las-vegas-sahara-hotel-and-casino-
closing-after-more-than-58-years/?hpt=C2
Las Vegas History
http://www.lasvegassun.com/history/
Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years
http://digital.library.unlv.edu/boomtown/
Vegas Tripping: Implosions
http://www.vegastripping.com/implosions/
The Neon Museum
http://neonmuseum.org/
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (education research) ---
http://www.edexcellence.net/
From Georgia State University
Digital Archive @GSU ---
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/
Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston ---
http://www.artsandbusinesscouncil.org/
LibraryCareers.org ---
http://www.ala.org/ala/educationcareers/careers/librarycareerssite/home.cfm
Design : Talkboard (Graphics Design) ---
http://www.designtalkboard.com/
4-H Youth Development Organization [pdf]
http://www.4-h.org/
Farming & Countryside Education ---
http://www.face-online.org.uk/resources-all
"Does all this new technology make a difference? This new report from
The Chronicle looks at the realities behind the hype," Special Report from the
Chronicle of Higher Education, 2011 (not free at under $10 depending on
option chosen) ---
https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=78055&PK=at2511
Educause: Emerging Trends in Education Technology ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/09/qt#250713
Educause and the New Media Consortium have released
the
2011 Horizon Report, an annual study of emerging
issues in technology in higher education. The issues that are seen as likely
to have great impact:
- Over the next year: e-books and mobile
devices.
- From two to three years out: augmented reality
and game-based learning.
- From four to five years out: gesture-based
computing and learning analytics.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Video: Milky Way Panorama (with a Backstory) --- Click
Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/05/milky_way_panorama_with_a_backstory.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
SkyView Virtual Observatory (NASA) ---
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/titlepage.pl
Oklahoma Forestry Services ---
http://www.forestry.ok.gov/
Farming & Countryside Education ---
http://www.face-online.org.uk/resources-all
Penn Museum: Expedition [archaeology]
http://penn.museum/current-expedition.html
Bacteria Museum ---
http://bacteriamuseum.org/cms/
Health on the Net Foundation ---
http://www.hon.ch/home.html
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration ---
http://www.samhsa.gov
MethResources (drug addiction) ---
http://www.methresources.gov/Index.html
Global Drug Reference Online ---
http://www.globaldro.com/
Drug Information --- http://matweb.hcuge.ch/Medical_search/Drugs_pharmacology_pharmacy.html
Drug Information --- http://www.coreynahman.com/medicalinfodatabases.html
Drug Information --- http://library.pbac.edu/drug_information_databases.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on free online science,
engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Social Science and Economics Tutorials
Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Research Working Paper Series ---
http://web.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/Index.aspx
Blair House: The President's Guest House ---
http://www.c-span.org/BlairHouse/
WHO: Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 [traffic, automobiles] ---
http://www.who.int/roadsafety/decade_of_action/en/index.html
Farming & Countryside Education ---
http://www.face-online.org.uk/resources-all
4-H Youth Development Organization ---
http://www.4-h.org/
HUD Archives ---
http://archives.hud.gov/
HUD User [Housing Data] ---
http://www.huduser.org/portal/index.html
Penn Museum: Expedition [archaeology]
http://penn.museum/current-expedition.html
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration ---
http://www.samhsa.gov
MethResources (drug addiction) ---
http://www.methresources.gov/Index.html
Global Drug Reference Online ---
http://www.globaldro.com/
Drug Information --- http://matweb.hcuge.ch/Medical_search/Drugs_pharmacology_pharmacy.html
Drug Information --- http://www.coreynahman.com/medicalinfodatabases.html
Drug Information --- http://library.pbac.edu/drug_information_databases.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Knitting Together (yarn, lace, fabrics, cloth) ---
http://www.knittingtogether.org.uk/cat.asp?cat=599
Fenimore Art Museum: The Smith and Telfer Photographic Collection
http://www.fenimoreartmuseum.org/fenimore/collections/photography
Bacteria Museum ---
http://bacteriamuseum.org/cms/
National Jukebox ---
http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/
Also
Click Here
Idaho Yesterdays ---
http://134.50.3.223/idahoyesterdays/index.php/IY
Georgia Archives Home ---
http://cdm.sos.state.ga.us/index.php
WHO: Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 [traffic, automobiles] ---
http://www.who.int/roadsafety/decade_of_action/en/index.html
The Digital Atlas of Idaho ---
http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/
Dallas Museum of Art - Program Recordings ---
http://www.dallasmuseumofart.org/Research/Archives/index.htm
Museum of Art-Rhode Island School of Design ---
http://www.risdmuseum.org/
Farming & Countryside Education ---
http://www.face-online.org.uk/resources-all
Memorial University of Newfoundland Digital Archives Initiative ---
http://collections.mun.ca/
Colorado Plateau Archives (Geology, Art History, Native Americans) ---
http://archive.library.nau.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/cpa
Slavery in America: Image Gallery ---
http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/scripts/sia/gallery.cgi
Blair House: The President's Guest House ---
http://www.c-span.org/BlairHouse/
HUD Archives ---
http://archives.hud.gov/
NOVA: The Spy Factory ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/spy-factory.html
International Spy Museum ---
http://www.spymuseum.org/
Costume History Collection ---
http://www.wmich.edu/library/digi/collections/costume/
All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing, and Costume
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/HumanEcol/subcollections/MillineryBooksAbout.html
From the University of Washington
Fashion Plate Collection (women's fashions in history) ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/costumehistweb/index.html
Textiles and Costumes: Henry Art Gallery [Flash Player]
http://dig.henryart.org/textiles/
All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing, and Costume
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/HumanEcol/subcollections/MillineryBooksAbout.h
Penn Museum: Expedition [archaeology]
http://penn.museum/current-expedition.html
Daphne Dare Collection (theatre costumes) ---
http://drc.ohiolink.edu/handle/2374.OX/30999
Stage Costumes ---
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/Costume/index.html
History of
Costume
Fashion in Color ---
http://ndm.si.edu/EXHIBITIONS/fashion_in_colors/
Jacques Demy’s Lyrical Masterpiece, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/05/jacques_demys_lyrical_masterpiece_ithe_umbrellas_of_cherbourgi.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
National Jukebox ---
http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/
Also
Click Here
The Montreal Symphony's Evolution Of Music
(entire concert) ---
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/15/136284053/the-montreal-symphonys-evolution-of-music
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/
May 9, 2011
May 10, 2011
May 11, 2011
May 12, 2011
May 14, 2011
May 17, 2011
May 18, 2011
May 19, 2011
May 20, 2011
May 21, 2011
May 23, 2011
May 24, 2011
May 25, 2011
Drug and product warnings,
alerts, and recalls
Health on the Net Foundation ---
http://www.hon.ch/home.html
"Type-2 diabetes linked to autoimmune reaction in study," by Krista
Conger, Stanford University School of Medicine, April 17, 2011 ---
http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2011/april/engleman.html
MethResources (drug addiction) ---
http://www.methresources.gov/Index.html
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration ---
http://www.samhsa.gov
Global Drug Reference Online ---
http://www.globaldro.com/
Drug Information --- http://matweb.hcuge.ch/Medical_search/Drugs_pharmacology_pharmacy.html
Drug Information --- http://www.coreynahman.com/medicalinfodatabases.html
Drug Information --- http://library.pbac.edu/drug_information_databases.htm
Advice to Patricia Walters when she joins the TCU accounting faculty
Hi Patricia,
Texas Instruments has a special relationship with TCU. You should explore
various TI resources, including visiting speakers, TI home office tours, and
access to various TI software and databases. For example, you might seek out TI
experts on XBRL, SSARS 19, and Sox Section 404 on internal control auditing.
In answer to your question about auditing research courses, there's a Luleå
University of Technology auditing research syllabus at
http://www.nordicaccounting.org/2010/05/seminar-in-auditing-research/
You might take a look at the various seminars available from the Institute of
Internal Auditors ---
http://www.theiia.org/iia-training/seminars/
A major module in the course should be SSARS 19 ---
http://www.edzollars.com/SSARS19.pdf
If TCU has a student license to PwC's Comperio, I would devote a major
component of an auditing research course to Comperio (which also has the FASB's
Codification) ---
http://www.pwc.com/comperio
Even if your students cannot all access Comperio, I recommend it for yourself
when teaching virtually all accounting and auditing courses. You may find
this the best teaching and research resource you've ever encountered.
Best if luck in your move to the land of the Horned Frogs.
Now comes my serious advice to you:
- Preparing for a new auditing research course is not nearly as difficult
as learning how to do high speed reverses and twirls in the Texas Two-Step.
I suggest that you spend most of the summer learning the Texas honky tonk
dances before you make your big move to Fort Worth ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BYqz4nz6ss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbGMoyqYSsg
Former U.S. Senator Tom Delay from Texas who discovered he can't Two-Step
his way out of prison ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQBbadnGX3I
- CPA's generally need Prozac if they're transferred out of Manhattan and
have to give up Lincoln Center performances, the NYC opera season, and the
live theatres on Broadway. But CPAs transferred from Fort Worth need a daily
double dose of Prozac plus psychotherapy if they have to give up Billy Bob's
--- the "world's largest honky tonk in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards"
---
http://www.billybobstexas.com/
- A typical Texas "good time" line dance at Billy Bob's stretches for
63.49% of a mile, all under one roof.---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs5f8CYyLBo
- At Billy Bob's you can keep one eye on the bull rider and the other eye
on the ambulance alongside the chutes. Another ambulance is available for
aging accounting professors still trying the Boot Scootin' Boogie ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d05tQrhNMkA
- Patricia Walters will have to give up NYC Champaign and pet·it fours for
higher calorie Fort Worth beer and BBQ and Zantac.
- Patricia Walters really has to learn to think football if she's serious
about a move to Fort Worth. TCU stands for Tenure Credit Utility player ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_American_football
- TCU's head football coach, Gary Patterson, only dresses 14 players for
games. The rest of his Horney Frog players have to get into their purple and
white uniforms all by themselves.
- The biggest divorce stumbling block in Texas is who gets custody of the
Cowboy Stadium season tickets.
- Those guys waving sheep toward motorists late at night on Fort Worth
street corners are pimps.
- Muslims worship Allah; Christians have Jesus; and Texas CPAs have Texas
State Board of Public Accountancy's director, Bill Treacy.
I recently had a call from a Bloomberg reporter asking me to comment on Big
Brother Treacy.
- The Texas cosmetologist licensing examination has a section on how to
castrate mean bulls, unruly stallions, and cowboys who never learned the
meaning of the word "no." Cosmetologist stew is a popular in the far reaches
of West Texas cafes.
- George Straight lies when he says he hangs his hat in Tennessee ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMNw_-yUm_0
- Fort Worth interior decorators don't make money innovating. How many
ways can you decorate one big room with long horns over the fire place and
stuffed taxidermy heads on all four walls --- wild boar heads, deer heads,
eagle heads, hawk heads, turkey heads, horned frog heads, and the head of
the feral hog you turned on a spit last Easter?
- My best advice for you, Pat Walters, is to give your students a wide
array of course project options at TCU. A team project for football players
could be having to alphabetize a box of Alpha-Bits cereal. If they can't
handle this, try a package of M&Ms.
- Instead of moving your household goods from New York to Texas, fill the
54-foot moving van with bottles of water. You can get a 1,000% markup on the
water and buy all new household goods. Sadly, you will eventually find
yourself short of water. Think beer --- beer's probably cheaper than water
in Fort Worth supermarkets.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
Why do American workers outsource their own jobs? ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ
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