Tidbits on June 9, 2011
Bob Jensen? at Trinity University

Once again we're in the midst of Sugar Hill's annual Lupine Festival
Today I made up a special page of my cherished lupine pictures ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Lupine/Set01/LupineSet01.htm   

Professional Photographer Wes Lavin this week sent me the following picture of our cottage
The French lilac bushes in front are in full bloom
They are the most aromatic of all our lilac bushes
I would expect nothing less from a nation known for its fine perfumes

Here are two of my pictures from the other direction
The flowers lining our back walk are alyssum

The picture below shows just part of the stairway to our front deck
Note the red bird feeder and bird houses just beyond the trunk of my crab apple tree in bloom

I rent out a number of small houses beside our cottage and am absolutely thrilled that, for the first time ever,
I have a pair of bluebirds for tenants. They're genuine bluebirds with  bright blue backs and orange breasts.
A huge nasty blue jay keeps trying to poke his head in their door. I don't rent out to the likes of him.

These are my rental houses alongside the slate sidewalk leading to our front deck
This picture was taken in April this year after our church gave us some potted Easter lilies

These rental properties below were vacant in the Summer of 2010
I cannot put bird feed in the red feeder because this will attract black bears
that will simply tear the red restaurant from the post

I did not take the picture below, but it is a great picture of a genuine bluebird
that is exactly like the bluebirds in my rental houses in Summer 2011

Pictures that I did take of rainbows from my front porch (including a double rainbow) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Rainbows/RainbowFavorites.htm  

Dr. Wolff forwarded the Belgian springtime picture of below

Once again we're in the midst of Sugar Hill's annual Lupine Festival
Today I made up a special page of my cherished lupine pictures ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Rainbows/Lupine/Set01/LupineSet01.htm  

More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm

White Mountain News --- http://www.whitemtnews.com/

Tidbits on June 9, 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

3D Map of Universe Captures 43,000 Galaxies ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/1304b223949c4081  

Dramatic New Video of Japan Tsunami ---
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/dramatic-video-japan-tsunami-viral-video-20110417-074110-955.html 

In the  parlor of my Grandmother Jensen's farm home was a fascinating KALEIDOSCOPE. Here's a computerized version ---
http://inoyan.narod.ru/kaleidoskop.swf

DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz Has No Clue That Illegal Immigration Already is A Crime (that's what makes it "illegal") ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asJNCKLoLNA

Tom Hanks Addresses the Yale Class of 2011 ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/13046067d1605100

"Video Shows Windows 8 Seamlessly Integrating Touch, Desktop, and Web: Windows pulls back the veil on its next OS, and it's a doozy," by Christopher Mims, MIT's Technology Review, June 1, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/

European Cultural History in 91 Lectures (Free) --- Click Here
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/13057362ec490892

National Air and Space Museum: Webcast Archive --- http://www.nasm.si.edu/events/lectures/webcast/archive.cfm

Farm Radio International --- http://www.farmradio.org/english/partners/home.asp 

The Greatest Cleanup on Earth: Circus Elephants Help Out in Joplin (after the historic tornado) ---
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/05/31/the-greatest-cleanup-on-earth-circus-elephants-help-out-in-joplin/
I wonder if they're finding peanuts and other goodies in the destroyed kitchens?
Rumor has it that these giants are hoping a tornado hits the Carter peanut farm in Georgia.

Fat Man at a Las Vegas Buffet --- http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1B4AZI

"YouTube & Creative Commons Partnership Will Open Creative Floodgates, Open Culture, June 2, 2011 --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/youtubecreative_commons_partnership.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Starting at 9 pm PDT tonight (June 2, 2011), YouTube will make 10,000 Creative Commons videos available to anyone using YouTube’s video editor. Initially the Creative Commons library will be loaded with videos from C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, andAl Jazeera , and you can bet that more content providers will be added down the line.

This partnership will let video/filmmakers unleash their creativity and produce some extraordinary video remixes – à la Donald Discovers Glenn Beck – without running the risk of legal complications. And because the Creative Commons library will be stocked only with videos released under a less restrictive CC-BY license, the resulting remixes can have commercial ambitions. A boon for some.

Finally, we shouldn’t miss another important component of this partnership: Moving forward, any videomaker can release their own creative work under a CC license on YouTube. Fast forward 6 t0 18 months, and the Creative Commons library will be vast,  and the remix opportunities, endless. A good day for open culture.

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Video:  Aldous Huxley Reads Dramatized Version of Brave New World --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/huxleyreadsbravenewworld.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Free music downloads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

I Wish I Was 18 Again (George Burns Video) --- http://heavens-gates.com/18again/

http://objflicks.com/TakeMeBackToTheSixties.htm  --- https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/1304d02dac4077ff

Geriatric Dirty Dancing --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/eSKCi9ml4ME

Gimme Shelter: The International Edition (Rolling Stones) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/gimme_shelter_the_international_edition.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Most Beautiful Band in the City: A Joyous Prayer from Brazil (nice but not the "most beautiful") --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_most_beautiful_band_in_the_city.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Andrés Segovia, Father of Classical Guitar, at the Alhambra --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/andres_segovia_father_of_classical_guitar_at_the_alhambra.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

Paris, from above the Eiffel Tower, 360 degree view, in 3D ---. http://www.gillesvidal.com/blogpano/paris.htm 

U.S. West: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints --- http://digitalcollections.smu.edu/all/cul/wes/

Pigments Through the Ages --- http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/

West Texas Photographs --- http://www.wymanmeinzer.com/

Francis Alys: A Story of Deception (art history) --- http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/francisalys/

March to the Moon --- http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu 

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) and first lady Michelle Obama react as the car carrying Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh ---
http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//110529/ids_photos_india_wl/ra184216767.jpg/#photoViewer=/110525/ids_photos_wl/r301924988.jpg 

Calder's Portraits: A New Language --- http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/calder/index.html

Five Days of Tornado-Generating Storms as Seen from Space Satellites help give scientists a big-picture look at severe weather ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/26818/?nlid=4542

National Arborists (trees and forests) --- https://natlarb.com/index.html

Arbor Day Foundation (includes tree identification) --- http://www.arborday.org/index.cfm

In Focus: The Tree (Getty Museum) ---  http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/focus_trees/

From the Scout Report on June 3, 2011

Compfight --- http://compfight.com/ 

Compfight describes its purpose as "a search engine tailored for visual inspiration." It is a bit different than other mainstream photo search engines, and visitors can get started by clicking on the "Show me what compfight can do" link. Compfight returns grids of images organized by license type, text tags, and those that are "safe" for all audiences. Visitors can also sign up for their Twitter feed and also send them feedback. Compfight is compatible with all operating systems.

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

"Free for All: National Academies Press Puts All 4,000 Books Online at No Charge," by Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2011 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-for-all-national-academies-press-puts-all-4000-books-online-at-no-charge/31582?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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 June 9, 2011
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/TidbitsQuotations060911.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

"Video Shows Windows 8 Seamlessly Integrating Touch, Desktop, and Web: Windows pulls back the veil on its next OS, and it's a doozy," by Christopher Mims, MIT's Techology Review, June 1, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/

2011 Update
College of 2020 Research Report from the Chronicle of Higher Education

A sweeping review of research and data -- now available for immediate digital download
from The Chronicle of Higher Education -- reveals what college will
look like 10 years out. Indispensable data for planning
and management in academe.

THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS
https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=76319&PK=N5S11XX

Highlights:

* Ethnically diverse "majority-minority" campuses
* Demand for digital coursework and time-shifted instruction
* Savvy, bargain-hunting, retail-oriented "cost/benefit" students
* Reliance on free agent, work-for-hire adjuncts in classrooms

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Summer Reading Suggestions
"What're They Reading on College Campuses?" by Don Troop, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Whatre-They-Reading-on/127698/

What They're Reading at ... Penn State

1.	Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
2.	Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent
3.	Bossypants by Tina Fey
4.	Suits: A Woman on Wall Street by Nina Godiwalla
5.	The Help by Kathryn Stockett
6.	Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin
7.	The Happiness Project by Gretchen Craft Rubin
8.	This Is a Book by Demetri Martin
9.	5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth by Matthew Inman and TheOatmeal.com
10.	The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I hate to admit that the only one of the above that I've read to date is Number 10. I was inspired by the CBS Sixty Minutes interview with the author, although I've also read all of his earlier books.

Note that in Business Week's 2011 Summer Reading List, The Big Short by Michael Lewis is also reviewed. For this and other recommended books for Summer 2011 recommended by Bloomberg Business Week see 
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2011/bs2011061_885909.htm?link_position=link1

Especially note
"The End," by Michael Lewis December 2008 Issue The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#TheEnd 

As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more...Nobody knows which stock is going to go up. Nobody knows what the market as a whole is going to do, not even Warren Buffett. A handful of people with amazing track records isn’t evidence that people can game the market. Nobody knows which company will prove a good long-term investment. Even Buffett’s genius lies more in running businesses than in picking stocks. But in the investing world, that is ignored. Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.
Michael Lewis, "The Evolution of an Investor," Blaine-Lourd Profile, December 2007 ---
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/11/19/Blaine-Lourd-Profile#page3

There are two "Inside the Collapse" CBS Sixty Minute episodes featuring Michael Lewis.

"Michael Lewis: The Economic Crisis -When Irish Eyes Are Crying," Vanity Fair via Simoleon Sense, February 2, 2011 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/michael-lewis-the-economic-crisis-when-irish-eyes-are-crying/

June 6, 2011 reply from Amy Haas

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic [Hardcover] Professor X (Author)

Amy Haas

June 6, 2011 reply from Denny Beresford

It’s already summer in Georgia with temperatures in the mid to high 90’s. My two most recent readings, each of which I would highly recommend, were:

“The Wizard of Lies – Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust” by Diana Henriques

“Reckless Endangerment – How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon” by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner

Denny Beresford

June 7, 2010 reply from Eileen Taylor

The fourth element of fraud was suggested by Wolf and Hermanson (see attached) and is capability, not competence. While capability includes competence (recognizing and crafting the scheme), it also includes ego, social skills, and the belief that one will not get caught, but if one does, he or she will be able to talk his/her way out of it. I bring this up when teaching the Maxwell Case (see Issues in Accounting Education).

Although the AICPA is attached to the fraud triangle, based on Cressey's work developed through interviews of embezzlers (all male, over 50 years ago), there are other fraud theories that may better fit corruption and financial statement fraud types.

One paper worth reading is Strain, Differential Association, and Coercion, by Donegan and Gannon, Accounting and the Public Interest, 2008 - see attached. Basically, this group of theories deviates from the fraud triangle, in that it allows for collusion and points to a "bad crowd" mentality. Cressey's theory fits a single perp with an unshareable financial need, working alone...coercion theory explains FS fraud as strain placed on individuals to achieve material wealth, combined with DA - getting in with a crowd that accepts fraud (see HealthSouth family and Enron execs), which together coerce people into committing fraud - sometimes without their even being aware of the criminality of their actions.

On another note, NCSU library published a blog listing summer reading from 20 faculty across campus (including yours truly) - see http://news.lib.ncsu.edu/wolfpacksummerreads/  Quite a few not on the best seller list...which is great in my opinion...

Sincerely,
Dr/Professor/Teacher/Honey/and Mom, Eileen

 

January 7, 2011 reply from Francine McKenna

I have been reading a lot of business books in the last year so I can write reviews for my site and for Forbes. Some of them I read as a judge for UCLA's Gerald Loeb business journalism awards.

One of the best books I've read lately is "Drowning in Oil" by Loren Steffy. It's the story of the BP oil spill in the Gulf and the business issues that caused it, in Steffy's opinion. Steffy writes for the Houston Chronicle and knows his stuff. He not only gives you a gripping drama, but a cost accounting case study.

Also in the non-fiction category I recently read Christopher Hitchens' memoir, Catch-22. It makes you laugh, cry, and think really hard all at the same time. I may not agree with all of his politics but he is a genius with words who may not be around much longer.

For fiction, I took out a subscription to Paris Review and Poetry Magazine. Gives me more than enough new material each month, and both are paperback size softcovers that can be carried to the beach or pool.

Francine

 

Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature (overwhelming to say the least) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

"Telling It as It Is (to new first-year students), by Craig Stark, Inside Higher Ed, June 6, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/06/essay_on_how_honest_professors_should_be_to_students_about_the_economy

Jensen Comment
This article, perhaps appropriately, does not go into the ins and outs of choosing a major upon arrival at a college or university. With a few exceptions, this is perhaps a good idea except in certain majors where there prerequisite first-year courses are essential such as in engineering and pre-med. For accounting, the prerequisite first courses can usually be delayed until the sophomore year. But the above article really does not deal with choosing a major early on before students learn a lot about education and careers during their first year on campus. Much of what they learn comes from informal interactions with students who are in their second, third, fourth, and higher levels of study. I think it's a mistake for general curriculum teachers to try to sell students on particular types of majors or particular types of politics. Let students sort these things out for themselves as they advance through the first and even the second years of study.

This article does talk about debt loads. I personally think that students in the first term of college should learn about personal finance, tax issues, and debt risk since many of them will make horrible mistakes in college and after college.

Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

"The Value of a Humanities Degree: Six Students' Views," by Jackie Basu et al., Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Value-of-a-Humanities/127758/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

"Toward a Plausible Rationale for the Humanities," by Frank Donoghue, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/towards-a-plausible-rationale-for-the-humanities/29565?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads on Humanities Versus Business ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#HumanitiesVsBusiness

Question
What is "the" major difference between medical research and accounting research published in top research journals?

Answer
Medical researchers publish a lot of research that is "misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong." The difference is that medical research eventually discovers and corrects most published research errors. Accounting researchers rarely discover their errors and leave these errors set in stone ad infinitum because of a combination of factors that discourage replication and retesting of hypotheses. To compound the problem, accounting researchers commonly purchase their data from outfits like Audit Analytics and Compustat and make no effort to check the validity of the data they have purchased. If some type of rare research finding validation takes place, accounting researchers go on using the same data. More commonly, once research using this data is initially published in accounting research journals, independent accounting researchers do not even replicate the research efforts to discover whether the original researchers made errors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

Nearly always published accounting research, accounting research findings are deemed truth as long they are published in top accounting research journals. Fortunately, this is not the case in medical research even though long delays in discovering medical research truth may be very harmful and costly.

MUCH OF WHAT MEDICAL RESEARCHERS CONCLUDE IN THEIR STUDIES IS MISLEADING, EXAGGERATED, OR FLAT-OUT WRONG. SO WHY ARE DOCTORS—TO A STRIKING EXTENT—STILL DRAWING UPON MISINFORMATION IN THEIR EVERYDAY PRACTICE? DR. JOHN IOANNIDIS HAS SPENT HIS CAREER CHALLENGING HIS PEERS BY EXPOSING THEIR BAD SCIENCE.

""Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science," by David H. Freedman, Atlantic, November 2010 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
Thank you Chris Faye for the heads up.

. . .

But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on what went wrong with "accountics research" can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong

Teaching Tips, Ideas, and Inspiration 

"Teaching Carnival 4.10," by Billie Hara, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 1, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/teaching-carnival-4-10/33718?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Gizmodo runs a weekly page on the week's "Best Apps."
Scroll down to the bottom of the page at
http://gizmodo.com/

Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm

"Managing Tabs More Effectively In Firefox 4," by Brian Croxall, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/managing-tabs-more-effectively-in-firefox-4/33750?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
Note the comments about Google Chrome being faster. But the grouping idea is a great innovation in Firefox. I still don't foor with IE 9 because you have to tinker with your computer's registry to get a fixed menu bar. I don't know if IE 9 can be made (with app minimization) faster than Chrome, but I doubt it. However, I've not really noticed differences in speed between the latest download of Chrome versus IE 8. On occasion I make a race to a site using IE 8 versus Chrome. IE 8 often wins.

Scan Multi-Page Image Documents into PDF Files (especially note the May 31, 2011 reply of Patricia Walters)

Nitro Professional --- http://www.nitropdf.com/

Nitro PDF® Professional, the complete Adobe® Acrobat® replacement, helps you do what you need to with its powerful tools to create, convert, edit, combine, secure, annotate, form-fill, and save 100% industry-standard PDF files.  

Nitro Pro has claimed the top spot in Computerworld's review of PDF editors, beating out Acrobat X (and the rest) with its powerful editing features and superior ease of use.

May 29, 2011 message from Jim Richards

As long as it is a PDF document and not something that has been scanned as images to PDF, then Nitro Professional should do it. It will do more than one page at a time.

Sometimes trial versions will only do a small number of pages but the full version will do the entire document but it might take a while to do it. I have tried it will annual reports but I have never tried to do 244 pages in the one document.

I just tried it with the XBRL Dimensions Specification and it worked fine. I was going to do a research report from Aberdeen that contains graphics but it needed a password to open the document in Nitro.

Tables sometimes cause Nitro problems. On some occasions it does read them as a table but other times it is tabular columns. It may depend on how the original document was created.

I am not sure if I can attach a zip file to list email for you to look at so I will send it directly to your email address.

Jim
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Richards
Phone (Home): (08) 9249 6874
Phone (Mobile): 0419-172-100

May 29, 2011 reply from Bob Jensen

May 30, 2011 reply from Jim Richards

Hi Bob,
Sometimes a PDF ( and a private reply from Barry confirmed this) is a PDF that has been created by scanning pages to create images of each page rather than creating the PDF from a Word document. If the PDF consists of pages that are images it would require OCR and Nitro does offer this as an additional alternative but it is not something I have tested.

What I was trying to explain was the two different ways in which the PDF could have been created. It could be a “native” PDF created by some other application(s) [such as Word and printing to a PDF file or Acrobat itself] or simply pages that have been scanned and collected together in a PDF document. The latter would require OCR capabilities if the text was to be extracted from the document.

Nitro can extract the text from a PDF file if it is a “true” PDF but the more difficult approach is to extract text using OCR if the original document used to create the PDF scanned images of a pages. So if someone had an paper document, scanned all of the pages and then inserted those images into a PDF file, the PDF consists of images rather than text. This would mean that OCR would be needed to try and extract the text from the document.

My understanding from Barry that this latter process was used to create his PDF file.

Jim
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Jim Richards
Phone (Home): (08) 9249 6874
Phone (Mobile): 0419-172-100

May 30, 2011 reply from Scott Bonacker

If you have one of the Acrobat products, you can run OCR on it and then copy the text. But you’ll lose formatting. Accuracy of the OCR depends heavily on the quality of the scan – at least 400dpi black and white is what we use.

Or you can save it as a Word file from within Acrobat, not sure all formatting would survive though.

Not cheap, but if you are going to do this often you could get OmniPage Pro
http://www.nuance.com/for-individuals/by-product/omnipage/index.htm
Might be a good departmental purchase -

Nuance also has a free reader that comes with a conversion service
http://www.nuance.com/products/pdf-reader/index.htm

There is a Yahoo group that might have ideas as well –
paperlessdigitallife@yahoogroups.com


I hope this helps,

Scott Bonacker CPA
Springfield, MO

May 31, 2011 reply from Patricia Walters

I just downloaded and tried the Nuance PDF Converter for Mac that worked like a charm converting a pdf to word.  I haven't yet tried it on a longer annual report, but I was impressed that all formatting was retained (including table formatting).

I was also impressed that I could remove words or sentences entirely from the pdf rather than simply blackline them.  

Thanks again for this recommendation.  

Pat

Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm

Sheryl Sandberg (Chief Operating Officer of Facebook)  --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg

In Support of the Feminist Movement
"Sheryl Sandberg's Graduation Speech for the Ages," by Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review Blog, June 1, 2011 --- Click Here 
 http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2011/06/sheryl-sandbergs-graduation-sp.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

"Barcode Reader app compares prices on the fly," by Rick Broida, cnet, January 7, 2010 ---
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10427233-233.html

How do do your favorite Websites rate in terms of age, popularity, and Google love?

May 31, 2011 message from Emily

Good Morning Dr. Jensen,
Hope you had a nice memorial weekend. I wonder whether you receive my email sent to you on the 23rd? Did you have a chance to review our site reviewandjudge.org? Perhaps it is a valuable resource to your visitors in your page www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudreporting .htm under the section Additional resources?

Please get back to me.
Best Regards,
Emily

Jensen Comment
This is an interesting Website for various things, including consumer frauds:
reviewandjudge --- http://reviewandjudge.org/HOME.htm

I don't know just why, but this site also has a link to having any Website you choose evaluated for age, popularity, and a Google love rating. For example, I keyed in my home page at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
Note that for some reason you have to delete the http:// part of the above URL to get this to work. Thus to make it work I key in only www.trinity.edu/rjensen
I got 5.0/5.0  stars for age of the Webpage (I've been maintaining this page for over 15 years), 3.5/5.0 stars for popularity, and 3.5/5.0 stars for a Google love rating.

In order to put it to a comparison test, I know that sociology professor Mike Kearl has one of the most popular academic Websites served up by Trinity University. When I keyed in
www.trinity.edu/mkearl
the results were  5.0/5.0  stars for age of Mike's Webpage, 3.5/5.0 stars for popularity, and 3.5/5.0 stars for a Google love rating.

Either Mike and I are running neck and neck or there's something suspicious going on here. So I read in Jim Mahar's popular finance professor blog (after removing http://) at
financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
He is doing much worse than Mike and me, although I think he has, in my viewpoint, one of the best finance blogs on the academic Web.

Next I read in the very popular blog maintained by economics Nobel laureate Gary Becker and famous law professor Richard Posner (after removing http://) at
uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/
Becker and Posner also fared worse than Mike and me except that they did get a 3.5/5.0 Google love rating.

Next I typed in Lady Gaga's home page (after removing http://) at
www.ladygaga.com/bornthisway/
the results were   4.0/5.0 stars for popularity, and 3.5/5.0 stars for a Google love rating.
Yikes! Mike and I are doing almost as well with our dull academic sites as the site that links to many photos and videos of Lady Gaga in her underwear.

Next I read in the ABC News home page (after removing http://) at
http://abcnews.go.com/
the results were  5.0/5.0  stars for age of the ABC News page, 5.0/5.0 stars for popularity, and 4.0/5.0 stars for a Google rating.
Guess Mike and I aren't as popular as ABC News, but we're close, and this makes me slightly suspicious.

Next I read in the Stanford University home page at
www.Stanford.edu
the results were  5.0/5.0  stars for age of Stanford's home page, 4.5/5.0 stars for popularity, and 4.5/5.0 stars for a Google rating.

Next I read in the Harvard University home page at
www.Harvard.edu
the results were  5.0/5.0  stars for age of Harvard's home page, 4.5/5.0 stars for popularity, and 4.0/5.0 stars for a Google rating.
The bottom line is that Google loves Harvard a little less than Stanford, but Google's love for Harvard and Lady Gaga are identical.

June 2, 2011 explanation of Website ratings were sent by Emily:

"Sociology and Other 'Meathead' Majors:  Archie Bunker was right to be skeptical of his son-in-law's opinions," by Harvey Mansfield, The Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576345632061434312.html?_nocache=1306940719500#&mg=com-wsj

Jensen Comment
Although Professor Mansfield has always been one of my hero fighters against the biases of political correctness in higher education, I think he goes overboard in the above editorial.

Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness

"Yale U. Complains That Chinese University Press Plagiarized Free Course Materials," by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2011 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-u-complains-that-chinese-university-press-plagiarized-free-course-materials/31609?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"Yale Professor at Peking U. Assails Widespread Plagiarism in China," Chronicle of Higher Education, December 21, 2007 --- http://chronicle.com/news/article/3678/yale-professor-at-peking-u-assails-widespread-plagiarism-in-china 

Bob Jensen's links to Yale's open sharing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

Richard Vedder --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Vedder

"Time to Make Professors Teach:  My new study suggests a simple way to cut college tuition in half," by Richard Vedder, The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432304576369840105112326.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t

No sooner do parents proudly watch their children graduate high school than they must begin paying for college. As they write checks for upwards of $40,000 a year, they'll no doubt find themselves complaining loudly about rising college costs—even asking: "Is it worth it?"

It's a legitimate question. As college costs have risen wildly, the benefits of the degree seem less and less clear. Larger numbers of college graduates are taking relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.

The good news? There are ways to greatly ease the burden and make college more affordable, according to new data from the University of Texas at Austin.

In a study for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe and I concluded that tuition fees at the flagship campus of the University of Texas could be cut by as much as half simply by asking the 80% of faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach about half as much as the 20% of faculty with the highest loads. The top 20% currently handle 57% of all teaching.

Such a move would require the bulk of the faculty to teach, on average, about 150-160 students a year. For example, a professor might teach one undergraduate survey class for 100 students, two classes for advanced undergraduate students or beginning graduate students with 20-25 students, and an advanced graduate seminar for 10. That would require the professor to be in the classroom for fewer than 200 hours a year—hardly an arduous requirement.

Faculty will likely argue that this would imperil the university's research mission. Nonsense. First of all, at UT Austin, a mere 20% of the faculty garner 99.8% of the external research funding. Second, faculty who follow the work habits of other professional workers—go to work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and work five days a week for 48 or 49 weeks a year—can handle teaching 200 hours a year while publishing considerable amounts of research. I have done just this for decades as a professor.

Third, much research consists of obscure articles published in even more obscure journals on topics of trivial importance. Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, once estimated that 21,000 articles have been written on Shakespeare since 1980. Wouldn't 5,000 have been enough? Canadian scholar Jeffrey Litwin, looking at 70 leading U.S. universities, concluded the typical cost of writing a journal article is about $72,000. If we professors published somewhat fewer journal articles and did more teaching, we could make college more affordable.

Continued in article

Mr. Vedder is a professor of economics at Ohio University and directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

Teaching Excellence Secondary to Research for Promotion, Tenure, and Pay ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TeachingVsResearch

"Accounting Enrollment, Hiring Increase But schools struggle with capacity issues," by Alexadra Defelice, Journal of Accountancy, June 2011 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2011/Jun/20113920.htm 

Continued in article

A full copy of the report is available at
http://www.aicpa.org/InterestAreas/AccountingEducation/NewsAndPublications/DownloadableDocuments/2011TrendsReport.pdf

Bob Jensen's threads on accountancy careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

More needs to be done to prevent the waste of taxpayer dollars and protect students, including veterans, from programs that swindle them rather than prepare them to succeed in the work force,
Pauline Abernathy, the institute’s vice president, said in a statement.

For-Profit University Lobbyists Win a Big One:  Taxpayers Will Still be Footing a Lot of the Bad Debts of Weak For-Profit Admissions Controls
"Concessions or a Cave-In?" by Libby A. Nelson, Inside Higher Ed, June 2, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/02/new_gainful_employment_rules

After 10 months, more than 100 meetings with for-profit colleges and other stakeholders and 90,000 written comments, the Education Department today formally unveiled its second attempt to craft a new system for determining whether vocational programs prepare their graduates for "gainful employment."

Like the highly controversial draft rules that the department proposed last July, the final rules focus on the amount of debt that students in for-profit and certificate programs take on, and on their prospects for paying it off. The final regulations offer colleges significantly more leeway, lowering the required debt-to-income ratios and giving institutions more chances to improve before they lose eligibility for federal financial aid.

Many of the changes address concerns that for-profit institutions (and their allies in Congress) have raised, and over which they have threatened to sue. But Education Department officials (and a leading White House aide) tried to make clear in describing the new rules to reporters on Wednesday that colleges were not "off the hook." Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the new set of regulations “more thoughtful and more sophisticated” than the previous version, but added that the for-profit sector’s success “should not come at the expense of taxpayers and students.”

In refining the measures, the department landed between critics and supporters of for-profit institutions -- and failed to please either group. For-profit colleges wanted nothing more than for the matter to disappear entirely, arguing that the Education Department had overstepped its bounds by issuing the regulations at all and continuing to hold out the prospect of a lawsuit, even as their advocates conceded that the department had moved significantly in their direction.
Supporters of tougher regulations felt disappointed or even betrayed by the new measures, which they said had been watered down to the point where they could no longer protect students. The real test will come in Congress, where a bipartisan group of representatives approved an amendment in February that would block the regulation. The changes the department has made seemed in many ways aimed at winning them over.

Round Two
Compared to the original proposed regulations, the new rules (a PDF of which is available here) will kick in later, give colleges more chances to fix problems and loosen several requirements on measuring debt and repayment. The first year that programs could lose eligibility is now 2015, three years later than previously proposed, and data collection will not begin until 2012, after the new measures take effect.
The rules require programs at for-profit universities and certificate and vocational programs at nonprofit institutions to show that at least 35 percent of their students are repaying their loans or that the annual loan payment does not exceed 30 percent of a typical graduate’s discretionary income or 12 percent of total income. An institution need meet only one of the three requirements to stay eligible for federal aid

. . .

Some of the most vocal advocates for tighter regulation reacted with dismay to the changes. The Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit group that rarely publicly criticizes Duncan, called the new rule a “first step” but said it was ultimately inadequate to protect students.

“More needs to be done to prevent the waste of taxpayer dollars and protect students, including veterans, from programs that swindle them rather than prepare them to succeed in the work force,” Pauline Abernathy, the institute’s vice president, said in a statement.

Continued in article

Also see
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/03/list_looking_at_gainful_employment_changes

Bob Jensen's threads on the for-profit university scandals are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

"The Myths About Legal Gambling," by Steve Chapman, Townhall, June 5, 2011 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/stevechapman/2011/06/05/the_myths_about_legal_gambling

Illinois is on the verge of a major gambling expansion, and citizens are being pelted with competing claims. The advocates envision a gusher of jobs and tax revenues. The opponents brace for an epidemic of bankruptcies, crime, divorce and suicide. Which side to believe? Neither.

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn is now considering whether to sign or amend a measure authorizing five new casinos, including one in Chicago, and slot machines at racetracks as well as Chicago airports. The capacity of gambling establishments in Illinois would more than triple.

The motive for this sudden interest is economic. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel expects up to 10,000 new jobs from opening a casino that will be owned by the city. Legislators eagerly anticipate a windfall of tax payments and licensing fees, which they can use to ease the state's painful budget crunch.

But all that glitters is not gold. More gambling opportunities may not mean more gambling proceeds, since the public appetite is on the wane. Illinois casinos have seen their revenue fall by a third over the past three years. Increasing the number of outlets could mean just dividing the take into smaller piles.

Is Chicago likely to reap big economic gains? Not in this lifetime. A new casino may attract more visitors and create new jobs serving drinks and dealing cards. But money lost at the blackjack table can't be spent on other types of recreation and entertainment. Jobs that spring up in gambling-related businesses may be lost in other sectors.

Casinos have been useful in reviving depressed areas, according to the 1999 National Gambling Impact Study Commission Report. That may have little relevance to Chicago, which is not exactly a declining Rust Belt relic.

The best hope is that the city will draw players who now venture to northwest Indiana, which has made itself a local gambling destination. But any gain here would come at the expense of the people in and around Gary, if that counts for anything.

Continued in article

How to always come out a winner in Las Vegas
Fat Man at a Buffet --- http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1B4AZI
The casinos will pay you $1,000 to leave the premises.

"Cornell U. Will No Longer Disclose Courses’ Median Grades Online ," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/cornell-u-will-no-longer-disclose-courses-median-grades-online/33496?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Cornell University’s Faculty Senate has voted to abandon a 15-year-old policy of publicly disclosing the median grades for each course, the university announced last week. The system was originally designed as a check against grade inflation, but some scholars at Cornell grew concerned that the policy may have backfired, as students allegedly used the data to shop for easy courses. Although Cornell’s median course grades will no longer be posted on a public Web site, they will continue to appear on students’ transcripts. The new expanded-transcript policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill contains elements that are intended to avoid the problems that Cornell’s system has encountered.

Jensen Comment
I think it is a tremendous innovation to show medial course grades alongside each student's course grade on a transcript. This is some incentive for instructors to have media grades below A or A-, and it is also informative to employers and graduate schools as to grading in each entire course.

Bob Jensen's threads on how Cornell University students used median course grades to track into easier courses are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

Question
If median grades for each course are made publically available on the Internet, will students seek out the high grade average or low grade average courses?
Examples of such postings at Cornell University are at http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Student/mediangradesA.html

Hypothesis 1
Students will seek out the lower grade average courses/sections thinking that they have a better chance to compete for high grades.

Hypothesis 2
Students will seek out the higher grade average courses/sections thinking that particular instructors are easier graders.

However, when Cornell researchers studied about 800,000 course grades issued at Cornell from 1990 to 2004, they found that most students visited the site to shop for classes where the median grade was higher. Plus, professors who tended to give out higher grades were more popular. Students with lower SAT scores were the most likely to seek out courses with higher median grades.
"Easy A's on the Internet:  A surprising Cornell experiment in posting grades; plus a look at recent research into ethical behavior, service charges, and volunteer habits," by Francesca Di Meglio, Business Week, December 11, 2007 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/dec2007/bs20071211_885308.htm?link_position=link2 

Continued at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor 

"Colorado Supreme Court Takes Up Ward Churchill's Case," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Colorado-Supreme-Court-Takes/127728/

The Saga of Ward Churchill --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm

"A New Wave of National Parks:  Our ocean frontiers are disappearing, and it is up to us to conserve the most important wild areas that remain," by Laura Bush, The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303745304576361081626968522.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t

Our first national park was named not after a mountain or forest but for a mighty river: Yellowstone. For centuries the world's waters have connected us. Explorers, traders, scientists and fishermen have traveled our oceans and rivers in search of new resources and a greater understanding of the world. This Wednesday, as we mark World Oceans Day, we must intensify our efforts to better understand, manage and conserve our waters and marine habitats if they are to remain a vibrant source of life for future generations.

Great progress has been made in protecting our environment over the past several decades, but too little of that progress addresses 70% of the world's surface—our oceans. Less than one-half of 1% of the world's oceans are protected in ways that will ensure they stay wild. Too often overharvesting depletes what should be a lasting bounty of fish. In some parts of the oceans today up to 90% of large fish are gone from natural ecosystems.

Our oceans are also where much of our trash and pollution end up. Plastics and other pollutants difficult to break down are killing fish, turtles and birds. Currents in the Pacific have created a plastic garbage dump twice the size of Texas. A few years ago, I visited Midway Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and was shocked to find debris killing birds that could not distinguish between plastic refuse and squid.

We are at risk of permanently losing vital marine resources and harming our quality of life. Overfishing and degrading our ocean waters damages the habitats needed to sustain diverse marine populations. Perhaps the most vital function our oceans serve is that of climate regulator—they produce oxygen, reduce pollution, and remove carbon dioxide. If we don't protect our oceans, we could witness the destruction of some of the world's most beautiful and important natural resources.

Fortunately, Yellowstone offers a blueprint for protecting our oceans. President Ulysses S. Grant created Yellowstone National Park in 1872 at a time when large wild areas on the frontier were at risk. The founding of Yellowstone sparked a 50-year period during which many of the national parks we enjoy today were created. Our country began to see the value of setting aside large territories that would remain wild forever. Our national parks play an outsized role in maintaining healthy and diverse wildlife populations far beyond their boundaries. Many of the elk, deer and wolves seen throughout Western states trace their lineage to populations in Yellowstone.

In the early 1970s, the U.S. established a modest program to conserve some of its most important marine areas, called the National Marine Sanctuary System. In June 2006 and again in January 2009, the U.S. expanded the concept of parkland and wilderness preserves in the sea when President Bush designated four marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean.

The first of these, the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, encompasses a 100-mile wide area of nearly pristine habitat northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii, and was named a Unesco World Heritage site in 2010. A second area, the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, includes the world's deepest canyon and is home to some of the oldest and most resilient forms of life on the planet. The other two monuments are the Pacific Remote Islands dispersed throughout the Pacific Ocean and the Rose Atoll in American Samoa.

These four monuments cover more than 330,000 square miles and add up to the largest fully protected marine area in the world, larger than all of our national parks and wildlife refuges combined. They support vast numbers of fish, breathtakingly beautiful coral habitat, and a remarkable abundance of sharks—often seen as markers of an ecosystem's health.

These monuments will remain open to shipping and other uses that will allow the economies and cultures of nearby American territories to prosper. But they will also remain a wild resource, a place where scientists can make new discoveries and where a variety of species can thrive. The U.S. was able to protect these areas because they fall within the Exclusive Economic Zone that surrounds our territories, and because the U.S. provides the means to manage them.

Continued in article

June 4, 2011 message from Roger Collins

Video of Club Fed in Venezuela
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/06/03/world/americas/100000000849275/venezuelas-prison-paradise.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1 

Roger

Roger Collins
TRU School of Business & Economics

This theory is beyond my comprehension
"Multiverse = Many Worlds, Say Physicists: Two of the most bizarre ideas in modern physics are different sides of the same coin, say string theorists"
MIT's Technology Review, May 23, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26787/?nlid=4512

"Faces of Philosophy A photographer's gallery of minds," by Arthur C. Danto, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, May 29, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Faces-of-Philosophy/127631/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Steve Pyke, master photographer of the soul and character of individuals of diverse classes and callings, encountered his first philosopher in 1988, when he received an editorial commission to portray Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, author of Language, Truth and Logic, a popular classic of analytical thought. Though warned that he had but 10 minutes to capture Ayer's likeness, the session stretched into several hours of talk of a kind and order of openness that nothing in Pyke's experience had prepared him for.

Freddie, as Ayer was affectionately called, professed a philosophy—logical positivism, or logical empiricism—that is often considered tight, dry, closed, cold, narrow, barren, and juiceless. It consigns to the bin of mere nonsense the sublime visions that have inspired multitudes. But based on my own experience, whatever Ayer's official limits on the topic of metaphysics, there must have been so much thought, wit, practical wisdom, wide knowledge, and stunning clarity in his everyday conversation that Pyke, who had seen life, knew the world, and was already an artist of considerable achievement, had never before met its like. He had not read much if any philosophy.

But such, I surmise, was the range, depth, and charm of Ayer's discourse that it sufficed to open Pyke up to philosophers as a species, and to embark on a project of photographing not just philosophers, but philosophers' philosophers—the men and women whose philosophical achievement was respected by other philosophers. The result is the book Philosophers, a unique study of what roughly 100 practitioners, mainly of the analytical school of professional philosophers, actually look like to the Pyke-eye, to use the artist's e-mail designation. It is a thrilling examination of the physiognomy of thought.

Most of what analytical philosophers talked about among themselves was language, but the particular social group to which Ayer belonged was also characterized by a sparkling urbanity that was unique, in my experience at least, and what Pyke was exposed to in his meeting with Ayer was a kind of salon discourse that may have had a counterpart in Paris, but nowhere in America, so far as I know.

Ayer belonged to a subset of British philosophers that was distinguished by a broad cosmopolitanism, and an inbred sophistication that enabled them to move at ease in and out of political, financial, and artistic as well as academic circles. His peers were, among others, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Wollheim, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, David Pears, and Philippa Foot. Theirs was not a world of just language, truth, and logic, but also of theater, art exhibitions, and gossip. Their world was one readers of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell would be familiar with. Their talk would not be typical of the way philosophers talk elsewhere, and for all I know, the social world of Bloomsbury, Chelsea, and South Kensington has now vanished.

But there is a philosophical form of life defined by a certain kind of talk, writing, and thought in which all philosophers must be fluent but in which some philosophers excel. It requires a facility in argument and an ability to invent examples and particularly to produce and know how to neutralize counterexamples. In truth, one can experience philosophy in practice by reading the dialogues of Plato, in which Socrates, who is not known to have written anything, explores with sundry Athenians—soldiers, businessmen, poets, teachers, and others—language, truth, and logic, to be sure, but also beauty, knowledge, virtue, justice, courage, love, appearance, reality, and how to live a meaningful life. Those are still central philosophical topics, and what the Greeks said to one another remains a living presence in philosophy seminars in Frankfurt, Paris, Oxford, both Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wherever else philosophy has a life.

The philosophy of all those pictured here, whether they are living or dead, remains part of what philosophy is, was, and will be. Perusers of these photographs will not hear their voices, but will be able to see, to the degree that it is possible, the way they talked, thought, and wrote, which etched the disposition of their features. For the most part, Pyke shows us only their heads, in characteristic moments of thought, which some of them look as if they are about to express.

Everybody looks fiercely smart, though we have testimony regarding the great thinkers of the past that they didn't always look as clever as they actually were. Most readers of the Scottish seer David Hume would give him the highest marks in acuity and inferential daring, but his looks were another matter altogether. A young lordling, under Hume's charge on the Grand Tour, wrote that "Nature, I believe, never yet formed any man more unlike his real character than David Hume. ... His face was broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility, his eyes, vacant and spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole body was far better fitted to communicate the ideal of a turtle-eating Alderman, than of a refined Philosopher."

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses (many deal with philosophy) and/or course materials from prestigious universities --- 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Jensen Comment
Majoring in philosopy is a classic example of getting an education for the sake of becoming educated. Except for the lucky few who eventually get PhD degrees in philosophy and land jobs in universities, most philophy majors must get further training and education to make a living. But it's hard to think of yourself as being educated without knowing something about the great philosophers and their works.

Philosophy scholars are never embarrassed by their ignorance of accounting and some may even take pride in their ignorance of accounting. Accounting scholars generally become embarrased by their ignorance of philosophy and never take pride in their ignorance of philosophy.

May 31, 2011 message from Roger Collins

Of possible interest...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/books/review/book-review-reckless-endangerment-by-gretchen-morgenson-and-joshua-rosner.html?ref=books

"It’s hardly news that the near meltdown of America’s financial system enriched a few at the expense of the rest of us. Who’s responsible? The recent report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blamed all the usual suspects — Wall Street banks, financial regulators, the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
and subprime lenders — which is tantamount to blaming no one. “Reckless Endangerment” concentrates on particular individuals who played key roles.

The authors, Gretchen Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter and columnist at The New York Times, and Joshua Rosner, an expert on housing finance, deftly trace the beginnings of the collapse to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration called for a partnership between the private sector and Fannie and Freddie to encourage home buying. The mortgage agencies’ government backing was, in effect, a valuable subsidy, which was used by Fannie’s C.E.O.,
James A. Johnson, to increase home ownership while enriching himself and other executives. A 1996 study by the Congressional Budget Office found that Fannie pocketed about a third of the subsidy rather than passing it on to homeowners. Over his nine years heading Fannie, Johnson personally took home roughly $100 million. His successor, Franklin D. Raines, was treated no less lavishly...."

continued in article...

Roger

Bob Jensen's threads on earnings management fraud at Fanny Mae ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#Manipulation

Bob Jensen's threads on slease in thesubprime scandals ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze

Question
Is Microsoft's Expression Web a sloth or a lumbering turtle relative to speedy FrontPage?

Big Files Versus Little Files on the Web:  Creating and Maintaining Big Files in Painfully Slow Motion with Microsoft Expression Web

It's very early in the morning, and I can still hear the summer sounds of my hoot owls in the dark before the song birds wake up at dawn.

Did you ever have good reasons for not using some of your new stuff because it doesn't work as effectively or efficiently as your old stuff --- sort of like when Marie Osmond just married her first spouse twice removed? My old Dell XP laptop is in the shop at the moment, and I'm sweating buckets that it can be fixed with all of its old software so that I will not be forced to use my new high-end Dell Windows 7 machine with all its new software. During this long holiday weekend I was forced to use Microsoft Expression on my new computer, and it's been a disaster relative to FrontPage on my old computer. Microsoft folded FrontPage into Expression and no longer upgrades or otherwise sells and services FrontPage.

I lost track of my old FrontPage installation disks when I moved from Texas to New Hampshire. I might have to wait years before Microsoft delivers with its promised speed up of Expression Web for large htm files. Interestingly, the original versions of FrontPage could not load large files like 3 Mb htm files. Then in about Year 2000 Microsoft did deliver with its promised improvements to FrontPage in terms of loading large files quickly. That functionality has been lost in Expression Web. EW will load large files as long as you can tolerate 5-30 minutes of load time for each file. Then if you tab the file, leave it, and come back to the tab you must wait another 5-30 minutes. The same files in FrontPage on my old XP computer will load in less than a minute.

Most readers who use MS Expression (now called Expression Web EW Version 4) successfully think I'm nuts for preferring old FrontPage over new Expression. But if they're happy with MS Expression it's because they work with relatively small Web files. The problem is that most of my htm Web files are hoo mungus after having evolved over two decades with thousands upon thousands of added modules (tidbits). Here are five files that illustrate my problem:

File 1 (6.3 Mb) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm
File 2 (4.8 Mb) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
File 3 (6.3 Mb) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
File 4 (3.0 Mb)--- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133glosf.htm
File 5 (18.9 Mb)--- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

Eliminating the ToolBox speeded things up slightly in Expression, but MS Expression is still painfully slow for large files. Loading and saving these big files in MS Expression is sheer agony. Here's a comparison table of file loading times (even if I keep a big file open as a tab it still takes these times to reload when returning to the tab):

For example, when I want to add a tidbit to File 3 using FrontPage I can load, paste the tidbit, and save the file in less than two minutes. In MS Expression it will take me almost 15 minutes to do the same task. It turns out that this and other slowness problems are known issues with MS Expression, and Microsoft promises that software developers really are trying to work out ways to seriously speed up MS Expression after the enormous and relentless volume of complaints about slowness of EW.

If you have recommendations for more efficient editing of enormous htm files, please let me know.

Experts like Jagdish Gangolly think I'm nuts to use any Microsoft HTML editor since they have such a negative, really visceral, view of Microsoft Corporation in the first place. However, for MS Office users, I prefer to have an HTML editor that is the most compatible with MS Office software, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

When people tell me they use MS Office and ask for my advice on how best to create Web documents I generally advise typing and storing the files as MS Word doc (or docx) files and then also saving them as htm files to send to their Web servers. MS Word is a excellent for both typing original doc files and then saving them as htm files for the Web server.

So why did I not use MS Word for my big htm files in the first place?
The answer is that when I first started creating big files in the 1990s such as those listed above, MS Word could not save files as htm files. We were forced to initially write our own HTML tags (what a pain) and then eventually use some HTML editor. I used both Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Initially Dreamweaver was better, but then as FrontPage got better (especially for very large files), I shifted entirely to FrontPage. I also liked the cut and paste compatibility of FrontPage with the other MS Office software. Also files created originally in FrontPage cannot be easily converted into MS Word files such that abandoning FrontPage in favor of MS Word now is really not a viable option for very large files that you don't want to retype.

File 5 above is my old Technology Glossary that grew to a very large size over two decades of adding modules. About a year ago I added a straw to the file that broke the camel's back. File 5 at 18.9 Mb just became too large to load in FrontPage or MS Expression. I thought about backing down to an older and smaller version of the file and then splitting the File 5 into two or more pieces. But after thinking about it, I decided it was a waste of my time to keep adding to my Technology Glossary. These days it's easier just to look up technology terms on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, etc. I still serve up my outdated Technology Glossary, but now it's mostly of interest to technology history buffs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

On occasion I am forced to split my large files such as became the case for my Accounting Theory file. This huge file is now is served up in two subfiles because it became too large for FrontPage to open:
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm

FrontPage --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontpage
Yesterday I paid $199 to order a complete "new" in-the-box 2003 version of FrontPage that Microsoft has not sold in years. I have a 2003 version on my XP machine but lost the installation disks when I retired from Texas to New Hampshire in 2006. Around 2006, Microsoft replaced FrontPage with Microsoft Expression Web. I assumed EW would be better than FrontPage --- wrong! From the very beginning EW has been ten or more times slower than FrontPage for various tasks, especially when loading and saving large files that are more than 2 Mb in size. FrontPage will load and save such files in seconds whereas EW takes 5-30 minutes to load and save a large htm file.

Hence, even though I have EW Version 4 on my new Windows laptop, I plan to uninstall it and replace it with the much faster and much older FrontPage. Microsoft admits it has been deluged with complaints about the slowness of EW and promises to have some fixes later in the year, but I'll only believe that when I put it to the test after Microsoft upgrades EW for more speed with large htm files. Microsoft might succeed in making EW more effective and efficient. Most readers probably do not recall that the early versions of FrontPage would not even create or load a large htm file. Then as if by magic, FrontPage became the best or one of the best programs for creating, loading, and saving very large htm files.

Both FrontPage 2003 and EW 4 are poorly coded according to computer scientists (who generally think almost everything from Microsoft is badly coded). But I've not yet found a better HTML editor for large htm files than FrontPage. Many of my htm files are in the 3 Mb to 19 Mb range and most of them do not even have pictures and other multimedia since I'm trying to keep size down when possible.

I know I should split my large htm files into fragments, but this makes word searching terribly inefficient for users of my htm files.

If people tell me they are MS Office users and ask my advice about creating htm files for their Web servers, I advise them to first look into creating MS Word doc (or docx) files for storage and editing. Then any file (large or small) to be sent to a Web server can be saved as an htm file. But this was not an option back in the 1990s when I commenced many of my large htm files. In those days it was not possible to also save a doc file as a htm file using MS Word.

Previously, I used a journal-ledger analogy to how I created most of the files on my Web server. When I type of a tidbit (often with quotes from professional journals or news media outlets) I first "journalize" it into one of my three "blog files":
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

There are now hundreds of such blog (journal) files at my main Website such that searching each file is not at all practical. It's possible to cleverly use Google to find tidbits in my hundreds of blog files. For example, search on ["Bob Jensen" AND "Trinity University" AND "KPMG"] using Google. There are hundreds upon hundreds of hits where I have a tidbit about KPMG. However, there are hundreds more KPMG tidbits that Google missed.

To make your search effort more effective and efficient, I "post" my "journal/blog entries" into classified files (ledger/thread files) in given topical areas. The five files listed above are examples of my "ledger/thread" files. You can now search for almost everything I've ever written about KPMG by searching for "KPMG" in Files 1, 2, and 4 above. Now I hope you see why I like hoo mungus Web files that I call "topical ledger/thread files" or "threads." You can find most of my other topical threads listed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Threads.htm

I hope my old Dell XP laptop can be repaired
If this machine is restored with its old software, I can return to my service to the world in journalizing tidbits and posting them to hoo mungus thread files. The reason I can easily carry on is that I can continued to use my FrontPage installation on this XP machine. If I'm forced to use the newer and much slower MS Expression Web EW4 replacement of FrontPage I think I will just retire from updating my Website.

It's hard to teach an old mountain man new tricks or to waste his time with new-fangled inefficient software. I refuse to keep updating my old threads if each update is going to take 15 minutes of what little time I have left in life.

And yes Jagdish. It's pretty easy to love and hate Microsoft at the same time. The trouble is that my love is wearing thin. Firstly, when Microsoft arbitrarily dropped an audio codec that pretty well ends the ability of students and faculty to make use of most of my former Camtasia videos. Secondly, when Microsoft terminated FrontPage that efficiently loaded and saved huge Web files and replaced it with MS Expression loads and saves files at an impossibly slow pace such as raising my uploading time from 2 minutes per tidbit to 15 minutes per tidbit when I have about 100 tidbits to post to my thread files per week.

Dropbox --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_%28service%29 

"Dropbox misrepresented security features, researcher claims," MYCE, May 18, 2011 --- 
http://www.myce.com/news/dropbox-misrepresented-security-features-researcher-claims-45122/ 
Thank you Scott Bonacker for the heads up.

With online data security being at the forefront of consumers’ minds after several recent high-profile breaches, cloud storage service Dropbox is now coming under fire for the way they handle customers’ files.

Christopher Soghoian, PhD and security researcher for the University of Indiana recently sent a letter to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission stating that the company’s security practices do not live up to their advertised claim

. . . 

The company claims to have 25 million users who save up to 200 million files to their servers daily.

After reading through the complaint, Dropbox’s original statements about their security levels seem glaringly inaccurate compared to the reality they’ve admitted. I would be surprised if the FTC didn’t levy a fine on the company in addition to requiring refunds to customers.

Bob Jensen's threads on computer and network security are at 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection 

Unrelated Jensen Comments
Dah --- On Rebooting My Wireless Router
Even though I recently purchased a high-end Windows 7 Dell laptop, I've very disappointed in the speed of the machine relative to my old reliable Dell XP machine. For example, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and IE are all much slower on the new machine even though I took pains to delete apps that were slowing the browsers down.

Last week my old and reliable XP laptop kept losing its wireless Internet connection. I thought it was the computer since my same home wireless router was still serving the Windows 7 computer reliably. I took the XP laptop to the local company (Ammonoosuc) that installed my wireless system, and their technician could find nothing wrong with my XP computer in his office. But when I brought it back home it was still being flaky about holding its Internet connection. Then I performed the dah task of rebooting my wireless system by simply pulling the power plug for 30 seconds. That solved my Internet connection problem on the XP computer.

I should've known better since I sometimes had to reboot my old hard-wired router to restore Internet connections. I guess I was misled since my new wireless router was working fine with my newer Windows 7 laptop. At least that's my excuse for today.

"With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter, it's obviously impractical to imprison them all," Hemming said.
"Soccer Scandal Tests Twitter's Boundaries: Twitter sees a huge spike after users reveal the name of a player who obtained a "super-injunction," by Erica Naone, May 23, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/26791/?nlid=4512

"Spain, Scary Statistics, and Why the U.S. Dollar Remains the World's Reserve Currency," by David Champion, Harvard Business Review Blog, May 23, 2011 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2011/05/spain_scary_statistics_and_why.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

The Spanish held some local elections yesterday and the ruling Socialist party took an expected drubbing. The item in the news commentaries that really jumped out at me, though, was the level of Spain's unemployment. This country, a large European economy, has an unemployment rate of 21.3% and, more disturbingly, a youth unemployment rate above 40%. Two out of every five young workers do not have a job. It's hardly surprising that the election was marked by large daily protests in Spain's biggest cities that might mark the beginnings of a movement.

On its own, this would be scary. But consider the unemployment rates of the three European economies that the EU and IMF have been bailing out this past year. Ireland's unemployment is around 14.6% and its youth rate about 29%. Portugal's rates are 11.1% and 23% respectively, and for Greece, 14.2% and 35.6%. I can't vouch completely for the comparability of the rates but it is hard not to conclude that that Spain is much worse off in employment terms than the three supposedly most vulnerable European states.

With a GDP of around $1.4 trillion, Spain's economy is larger than Portugal's ($236 billion), Ireland's ($186 billion), and Greece's ($342 billion) combined. The bailout packages, which may not yet be complete (the EU and IMF are looking into another one for Greece) amount to around $375 billion. With Spain's economy looking as sick as it does, it's not outside the realms of possibility that Spain will need a bailout as well. But how much longer can the EU and IMF keep on providing that kind of money?

Continued in article

"Professors to Koch Brothers: Take Your Green (Money) Back No one ever questions George Soros money, but apparently this $1.5 million gift violates academic freedom," by Donald D. Luskin, The Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576341343051176086.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t

Times are tough for state-funded colleges like Florida State University. After four years of budget trimming, FSU now faces an additional $19 million in cuts and a $40 million deficit. So it's an inopportune moment to raise a stink over private donations of $1.5 million made three years ago.

But that's just what two FSU professors—Ray Bellamy of the College of Medicine and Kent Miller, professor emeritus of psychology—did earlier this month in an op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat, arguing that the donations are "seriously damaging to academic freedom." The piece set off a firestorm of warring newspaper editorials, blog posts and online petitions.

What's the beef? Like many large private gifts, the $1.5 million to FSU was given to endow programs in a designated subject specified by the donors. The professors' problem in this case is the subject, the strings attached, and, most important, who the donors are.

The subject being endowed, as described by the two protesting professors, is the "political ideology of free markets and diminished government regulation." That's an inflammatory way to describe a program which, according to its founding documents, is to study "the foundations of prosperity, social progress, and human well-being." Such a program would seem to fit right into its home at FSU's Stavros Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education, which was founded in 1988.

Then there's the donors. One of the donors, according to the two professors, is known for his "efforts to influence public policy, elections, taxes, environmental issues, unions, regulations, etc."

Whom might they be referring to? Certainly not George Soros—there's never an objection to that billionaire's donations, which always tend toward the political left. No, it's Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries. With revenue estimated at about $100 billion, the energy and chemicals conglomerate is America's second-largest privately held company. The Koch brothers tend to give to right-leaning and libertarian causes. Koch money was instrumental, for example, in founding the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party.

As for the strings attached, there's really only one of any substance. An advisory board, selected by the Koch brothers' charitable foundation in consultation with the FSU economics department, reviews and approves professors chosen for the program before funding is released.

A story two weeks ago in the St. Petersburg Times claimed that "Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions" in the first round of hiring in 2009. But according to FSU President Eric Barron in a subsequent op-ed for the same newspaper, what really happened was that the board—two of whose three members are themselves FSU faculty—approved for further interviews 16 out of 50 faculty suggestions, which had been culled by faculty from 500 applicants. Neither of the two professors ultimately hired was from among the 16, and the board was fine with that.

But the left won't be satisfied as long as the Kochs are involved. An editorial in last weeks' St. Petersburg Times called FSU "For Sale University." Progress Florida, a leftist online organizing group opposing the Koch-funded program, is pushing a petition claiming that FSU has agreed to "sell off the hiring decisions of the university's economics department to a radical ideologue." The ultimate aim, according to Progress Florida? To turn it into an "incubator for extremist propaganda."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
George Soros has given a lot of money to liberal causes, including those in universities. However, I don't know that he's ever attached strings to the extent that the Koch Brothers wrapped up this proposed gift to the Economics Department of Florida State University. Soros really doesn't have to since he can be assured that a liberal faculty will carry out his bidding without being asked to do so with ribbons and bows.

FSU will do the right thing if it turns down this Koch gift. But principles have their limits. This gift just is not big enough for a sell out.

"The Costs of Bad Security:  Mounting threats to the security of information are forcing companies to make more sophisticated cost-benefit analyses when they craft their security strategies," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, June 1, 2011 ----
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/37675/?nlid=4542

Jensen Comment
Accounting instructors who teach cost-benefit analysis may want to pass this article along to students.

Leo Strauss --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss

May 26, 2011  reply from Steve Sutton

I’ve mentioned this paper before on this list, so sorry for bringing it up again. But, it’s a ‘short course’ on the influence of Strauss on our political process, tax policy and federal budgeting focus. Unfortunately, way too much of our paper seems to be unfolding into reality in today’s political environment.

 

Starving the Beast: Using Tax Policy and Governmental Budgeting to Drive Social Policy
Amy M. Hageman, Vicky Arnold, and Steve G. Sutton
Accounting and the Public Interest 9(1), 10 (2009) (29 pages)
Abstract    Full Text: [ PDF (218 kB)  ]   

 

STARVING THE BEAST: USING TAX POLICY AND GOVERNMENTAL BUDGETING TO DRIVE SOCIAL POLICY

            This study explores the philosophical and theoretical bases underlying U.S. tax and social policy for over 25 years in order to develop a comprehensive framework from which to evaluate the intended and actual effects on wealth distribution and social policy overall. The framework provides a basis for understanding the overarching social agenda of neoconservative leadership as it advocates what has become known as Starve the Beast (STB). The STB strategy focuses on altering taxation structures in order to facilitate desired reallocations in government budgets to effect change in social policy. This study explores the roots of STB beginning with the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, followed by the adaptation of Strauss’s philosophy by Irving Kristol (the godfather of neoconservatism) in establishing the basic tenets of neoconservative political theory, and the marriage of neoconservatism with supply-side economics to increase popular support. Through this anthropological study, 11 propositions evolve during the development of a comprehensive view of a complex social policy underlying STB strategies designed to promote wealth retention, less progressive tax rate structures, less spending on social programs, and greater national focus on defense, security, and patriotism. The resulting framework has implications for future tax policy research, as well as enhancing our understanding of the influence of the neoconservative movement on the greater accounting environment.

Steve G. Sutton
KPMG Professor & Ph.D. Program Coordinator   
Dixon School of Accounting, University of Central Florida       

"Number of Accounting Grads Hits New High," AICPA, CPA Trendlines, May 27, 2011 ---
http://cpatrendlines.com/2011/05/17/record-high-accounting-grads/

Newly minted accountants have some of the brightest job prospects in the nation, with nearly 90 percent of accounting firms forecasting the same or increased hiring of graduates this year compared with 2010, and nearly three quarters, 71 percent, of the largest firms anticipating more hiring – an indicator of a rebounding economy.

That’s according to survey results in the 2011 “Trends in the Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits” report by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. The report shows record numbers of accounting students and graduates, but also hints at a potential challenge for the profession: demand for new talent eventually could outpace supply.

“Opportunities in the accounting profession continue to expand as the needs of firms and businesses grow ever more complex and global,” said Jeannie Patton, AICPA vice president for students, academics and membership. “As the U.S. and global economies recover, and as seasoned professionals begin to retire in unprecedented numbers, it’s even more important to guard against a talent shortage. Employers increasingly want graduates with advanced degrees at the same time colleges, facing budget and other constraints, are restricted in their capacity to train all the students who want to join our profession.”

The AICPA report echoes findings from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which expects accountants to experience “much faster than average” employment growth in the coming years. The bureau’s 2010-2011 “Occupational Outlook Handbook” estimates 22 percent growth in accounting and auditing jobs in the decade between 2008 and 2018, adding that job candidates with professional designations, particularly CPAs, and graduates with masters degrees have the brightest outlook.

All told, 226,108 students were enrolled in undergraduate or graduate accounting programs during the 2009-2010 academic year, 6 percent more than in 2007-2008, the last time the AICPA conducted its survey. A record 68,639 students graduated with accounting degrees in 2010. Nearly 4 in 10 accounting graduates hired last year by CPA firms had master’s degrees, compared with 26 percent in 2008. By contrast, 43 percent of graduates hired had bachelor’s degrees, down from 56 percent in 2008.

The shift reflects growing complexity and globalization of the accounting industry. And against that backdrop, colleges and universities are struggling to keep up. According to the AICPA report, a growing number of accounting programs are rejecting qualified applicants because they don’t have capacity to accept them. The increase likely is due to budget constraints at universities brought on by the economic downturn and a shortage of academically qualified professors as many longtime teachers reach retirement.

Jensen Comment
I have trouble reading the graph that seems to show greater numbers of graduates in some years before and after 1990,
Why is 2011 called a "new high" year in terms of the number of accounting graduates?

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#careers

NCAA hits the championship men's basketball team with one of 103 wet towels
"NCAA Penalizes 103 Teams for Missing Academic-Progress Mark," by Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 24, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/NCAA-Penalizes-103-Teams-for/127617/

The University of Connecticut men's basketball team is the reigning NCAA champion, but it is also one of a handful of marquee basketball and football programs to receive penalties from the association this week for poor academic performance.

The Huskies' score of 893 out of 1,000 points on the NCAA's annual academic-progress report, released on Tuesday, was well below the cutoff point drawing a penalty of reduced scholarships for the team. Five other basketball and football programs in major athletic conferences scored below the NCAA's benchmark of 925 out of a possible 1,000, down from a dozen big-time teams last year.

In basketball the penalized teams included Arkansas (892), Georgia Tech (915), and Louisiana State (905). Both Arkansas and Georgia Tech's men's basketball programs received penalties two years ago. The elite football teams receiving penalties this year for their low academic-progress rates were Louisville (908) and Maryland (922).

NCAA officials on Tuesday credited the reduced number of teams receiving penalties to a willingness among most athletic departments to make athletes’ academic performance a priority. Over all, 350 of the NCAA's roughly 6,400 Division I teams did not meet the academic mark, but just 103 were penalized. The scores represent a four-year average of teams' academic-progress rates from the 2006-7 to 2009-10 academic years.

The NCAA dealt the harshest punishment, a one-year restriction on postseason competition, to eight teams at seven institutions this year. (Last year only one program, the men's basketball team at Portland State University, received that penalty.) All were men's basketball and football programs. In basketball the penalty went to California State University at Northridge (871), Chicago State (823), Grambling State (873), and the University of Louisiana at Monroe (852).

In football the teams suffering a championship ban were Idaho State (888) and Jackson State (879). Southern University at Baton Rouge received such a ban in both football (899) and men's basketball (852).

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The Division 1 NCAA universities need more academic flexibility. For example if basket weaving is just too tough in some sports management programs or arranging the pieces in alphabetical order from an Alpha Bits Cereal box, I mentioned last week that a greater variety of academic team projects can be introduced in courses --- things like arranging M&Ms in alphabetical order and choral singing of "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."

Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics

GirlGeeks --- http://www.girlgeeks.org/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on careers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

From the Scout Report on June 3, 2011

Compfight --- http://compfight.com/ 

Compfight describes its purpose as "a search engine tailored for visual inspiration." It is a bit different than other mainstream photo search engines, and visitors can get started by clicking on the "Show me what compfight can do" link. Compfight returns grids of images organized by license type, text tags, and those that are "safe" for all audiences. Visitors can also sign up for their Twitter feed and also send them feedback. Compfight is compatible with all operating systems.

---

After a series of negotiations with political party leaders, Germany decides to phase out the use of nuclear power Germany pulls plug on nuclear power http://www.smh.com.au/world/germany-pulls-plug-on-nuclear-power-20110530-1fcrx.html  

Nuclear power in Germany: The reasons behind Chancellor Merkel's U-turn http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13595171 

France Criticizes German Nuclear Retreat
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-30/areva-s-lauvergeon-says-germany-will-import-nuclear-power.html  

German nuclear energy history: a timeline http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15117199,00.html 

Nuclear Power Global Status [pdf] http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull492/49204734548.html

HowStuffWorks: "How Nuclear Power Works" http://www.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power.htm

 

From the Scout Report on May 27, 2011

Express Planner --- http://www.planningforce-express.com/

Those persons with a yen for project management will want to take a look at Planning Force's Express Planner. The program is designed for those doing work in project management and business, and it gives users the ability to apply calendars to projects and tasks, prioritize items, and create reports. The site includes several tutorials, and it is compatible with computers
running Linux and Windows 2000 and newer.

2Plan Desktop --- http://2-plan.com/2-plan-desktop.html
2Plan Desktop is offered as an alternative to Microsoft Project for those parties who might be interested in finding a free program for desktop scheduling. The program features a fine user interface that allows individuals to manipulate their screen layout, create project scheduling, and monitor a project budget. The website for 2Plan includes a manual and several training videos. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer, along with Linux

 In an announcement this week, the Indian Prime Minister pledges $5 billion in support to Africa Counter the Dragon: With $5 billion pledge, India takes big step into Africa
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Counter-the-Dragon-With-5-billion-pledge-India-takes-big-step-into-Africa/articleshow/8561741.cms

India prime minister pledges billions to Africa --- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13515993

Africa Can…End Poverty --- http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/

United States African Development Foundation --- http://www.adf.gov/

Africa Region: Working Paper Series --- http://www.worldbank.org/afr/wps/

Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance, economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Education Tutorials

"Free for All: National Academies Press Puts All 4,000 Books Online at No Charge," by Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-for-all-national-academies-press-puts-all-4000-books-online-at-no-charge/31582?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
This includes such things as books on education assessment and incentives, dietary assessments, health books, and Medicare geography.

Nanotechnology Center for Teaching and Learning --- http://community.nsee.us/ 

 Penn State University Center for Nanotechnology Education and Utilization ---  http://www.cneu.psu.edu/

Teaching Resources: Biotechnology Institute --- http://www.biotechinstitute.org/teaching-resources 

GirlGeeks --- http://www.girlgeeks.org/ 

Teaching With Documents: Lesson Plans (for teaching American history) --- http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/ 

Teaching the Ocean System: Resources for Educators --- http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/ocean/ 

"YouTube & Creative Commons Partnership Will Open Creative Floodgates, Open Culture, June 2, 2011 --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/youtubecreative_commons_partnership.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Starting at 9 pm PDT tonight (June 2, 2011), YouTube will make 10,000 Creative Commons videos available to anyone using YouTube’s video editor. Initially the Creative Commons library will be loaded with videos from C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, andAl Jazeera , and you can bet that more content providers will be added down the line.

This partnership will let video/filmmakers unleash their creativity and produce some extraordinary video remixes – à la Donald Discovers Glenn Beck – without running the risk of legal complications. And because the Creative Commons library will be stocked only with videos released under a less restrictive CC-BY license, the resulting remixes can have commercial ambitions. A boon for some.

Finally, we shouldn’t miss another important component of this partnership: Moving forward, any videomaker can release their own creative work under a CC license on YouTube. Fast forward 6 t0 18 months, and the Creative Commons library will be vast,  and the remix opportunities, endless. A good day for open culture.

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Physics Education --- http://mazur.harvard.edu/education/educationmenu.php

HowStuffWorks: "How Nuclear Power Works" http://www.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power.htm

Award Winning Periodic Table Videos --- https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/13046078ec5cd7c0

Teaching the Ocean System: Resources for Educators --- http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/ocean/ 

Genes, Health and Society --- http://www.bioedonline.org/courses/ 

Pigments Through the Ages --- http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/

Teaching Resources: Biotechnology Institute --- http://www.biotechinstitute.org/teaching-resources 

Cells Alive --- http://www.cellsalive.com/

National Association of Biology Teachers: Instructional Materials --- http://www.nabt.org/sites/S1/index.php?p=25 

Nanotechnology Center for Teaching and Learning --- http://community.nsee.us/ 

March to the Moon --- http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu 

Penn State University Center for Nanotechnology Education and Utilization ---  http://www.cneu.psu.edu/

STEM Education Coalition (education lobbying) --- http://www.stemedcoalition.org/ 

Illinois State Geological Survey: Teacher Resources for Geology http://www.isgs.illinois.edu/education/teach-res.shtml 

Farm Radio International --- http://www.farmradio.org/english/partners/home.asp 

Pigments Through the Ages --- http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/

National Arborists (trees and forests) --- https://natlarb.com/index.html

Arbor Day Foundation (includes tree identification) --- http://www.arborday.org/index.cfm

In Focus: The Tree (Getty Museum) ---  http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/focus_trees/

National Air and Space Museum: Webcast Archive --- http://www.nasm.si.edu/events/lectures/webcast/archive.cfm

Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Research (particular focus is given to emerging technology ethics) ---
http://www.onlineethics.org/Topics/EmergingTech.aspx

The Wikipedia page on ethics --- http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics 

TeachEngineering --- http://www.teachengineering.org/ 

MIT OpenCourseWare: Principles of Engineering Practice ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/materials-science-and-engineering/3-003-principles-of-engineering-practice-spring-2010/ 

Course Description

This class introduces students to the interdisciplinary nature of 21st-century engineering projects with three threads of learning: a technical toolkit, a social science toolkit, and a methodology for problem-based learning. Students encounter the social, political, economic, and technological challenges of engineering practice by participating in real engineering projects with faculty and industry; this semester's major project focuses on the engineering and economics of solar cells. Student teams will create prototypes and mixed media reports with exercises in project planning, analysis, design, optimization, demonstration, reporting and team building.

Technical Requirements

Special software is required to use some of the files in this section: .xls.
http://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-technical-requirements/#xls

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses (and videos) available for MIT courses and courses in other prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

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

Southern Changes Digital Archive --- http://beck.library.emory.edu/southernchanges/ 

RTI International (human condition research, poverty) --- http://www.rti.org/

Stop Child Poverty --- http://www.stopchildpoverty.org/

Monopoly Redesigned --- http://www.studio360.org/2011/may/20/monopoly-redesigned/
Bob Jensen's threads on  Edutainment --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment 

NewsOnline: Digital Library and Archives, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University --- http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/NewsOnline/ 

Lessons Learned: A Planning Toolsite (for the arts) http://www.nea.gov/resources/Lessons/index.html

Ration Coupons on the Home Front, 1942-1945 --- http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hfc/

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

RTI International (human condition research, poverty) --- http://www.rti.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law

Math Tutorials

MAA Math Alert --- http://www.maa.org/mathalert/mathalert.html

MAA Online: Classroom Capsules and Notes --- http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/20/

Iowa Mathematics and Science Education Partnership: For Parents --- http://www.iowamathscience.org/parents

Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

History Tutorials

Video:  Aldous Huxley Reads Dramatized Version of Brave New World --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/huxleyreadsbravenewworld.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

European Cultural History in 91 Lectures (Free Video) ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/13057362ec490892

NewsOnline: Digital Library and Archives, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University --- http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/NewsOnline/

Francis Alys: A Story of Deception (art history) --- http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/francisalys/ 

Ration Coupons on the Home Front, 1942-1945 --- http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hfc/

Andover-Harvard Library: Holocaust Rescue and Relief: Digitized Records of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee ---  http://www.hds.harvard.edu/library/collections/digital/service_committee.html

National Air and Space Museum: Webcast Archive --- http://www.nasm.si.edu/events/lectures/webcast/archive.cfm

Lessons Learned: A Planning Toolsite (for the arts) http://www.nea.gov/resources/Lessons/index.html

U.S. West: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints --- http://digitalcollections.smu.edu/all/cul/wes/

Calder's Portraits: A New Language --- http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/calder/index.html

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

Teaching With Documents: Lesson Plans (for teaching American history) --- http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/ 

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages

Music Tutorials

Andrés Segovia, Father of Classical Guitar, at the Alhambra --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/andres_segovia_father_of_classical_guitar_at_the_alhambra.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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 27, 2011

• Prostate Cancer Drug Zytiga May Extend Life
• Stroke Rehab: Home Exercise as Good as Rehab Facility
• Many Young Adults May Have High Blood Pressure
• Kids May Get Pain From Playing Handheld Games
• USDA Revises Cooking Temperatures for Pork
• Meningitis Rate Is Dropping in U.S.
• Autism Brains Alike; Very Different From Normal Brains
• Atrial Fibrillation Raises Death Risk for Middle-Aged Women
• Minneapolis-St. Paul Nabs 'Fittest City' Title
• Brisk Walking May Help Keep Prostate Cancer in Check

May 28, 2011

• Does Your Medication’s Label Lead to Information Overload?
• Do Tinted Glasses Provide Migraine Relief?
• Racial, Ethnic Gap in Stroke Care
• Omega-3s May Reduce Heart Risks for People With Stents
• Babies Think, Therefore ...
• Preschoolers Who Sleep Less Weigh More by Age 7
• Job-Related Exercise Helps People Stay Healthy
• USDA Revises Cooking Temperatures for Pork
• Many Young Adults May Have High Blood Pressure
• Prostate Cancer Drug Zytiga May Extend Life

May 31, 2011

Flu Vaccine May Reduce Premature Birth Risk
Pediatrics Group: Energy Drinks No Good for Kids
Brain Scans May Help Detect Autism
Stress May Not Raise MS Risk
Food Pyramid Replacement: The Plate Coming June 2
Does Your Medication’s Label Lead to Information Overload?
Do Tinted Glasses Provide Migraine Relief?
Racial, Ethnic Gap in Stroke Care
Omega-3s May Reduce Heart Risks for People With Stents
Babies Think, Therefore ...

June 1, 2011

FDA Approves New Drug to Treat C. diff
Food Pyramid Replacement: The Plate Coming June 2
Diabetes Patients May Have Higher Fracture Risk
Expert Panel: Cell Phones Might Cause Brain Cancer
Flu Vaccine May Reduce Premature Birth Risk
Brain Scans May Help Detect Autism
Stress May Not Raise MS Risk
Study: Developmental Delay for Late Preterm Babies
Pediatrics Group: Energy Drinks No Good for Kids
Racial, Ethnic Gap in Stroke Care

June 2, 2011

Prenatal Vitamins May Lower Autism Risk
Weight Loss May Improve Sleep Apnea
Childhood ADHD Linked to Later Risk of Drug Abuse
New Doubts on XMRV as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Cause
FDA Approves New Drug to Treat C. diff
Vaccine May Help Treat Advanced Melanoma
Food Pyramid Replacement: The Plate Coming June 2
Diabetes Patients May Have Higher Fracture Risk
Stress May Not Raise MS Risk
Study: Developmental Delay for Late Preterm Babies

June 3, 2011

• Stress-Reduction Technique May Ease Hot Flashes
• Sleep Loss May Lower Testosterone
• Lawn Mower Injuries Are on the Rise
• Vaccination Rate for Kindergartners Is Over 90%
• New Strain of MRSA Found in Milk
• People Living Longer With HIV
• Use of Key Clot-Busting Stroke Drug Is Rising
• Divorce Affects Kids' Academic, Social Skills
• E. coli Outbreak May Be New Strain
• FDA Investigates Newer Birth Control Pills

June 4, 2011

• Lawn Mower Injuries Are on the Rise
• Bone Drug May Prevent Return of Breast Cancer
• Sleep Loss May Lower Testosterone
• Stress-Reduction Technique May Ease Hot Flashes
• 6 Americans Sickened by Deadly E. coli in Germany
• FDA Investigates Newer Birth Control Pills
• New Strain of MRSA Found in Milk
• Vaccination Rate for Kindergartners Is Over 90%
• E. coli Outbreak May Be New Strain
• Use of Key Clot-Busting Stroke Drug Is Rising

June 6, 2011

• 2 New Drugs May Treat Advanced Melanoma
• Yoga May Improve Balance of Stroke Patients
• Ovarian Cancer Screen: Risks May Outweigh Benefits
• Smoking Raises Risk of Peripheral Artery Disease
• Skin Cancer Protection Starts in Infancy
• Drug May Be New Option to Cut Breast Cancer Risk
• Parkinson's Disease May Raise Risk of Melanoma
• New Guidelines Suggest Higher Doses of Vitamin D
• Study: Mental Health Is Top Concern for Youth
• Asthma Drug May Be Fat-Burner Pill

June 7, 2011

• Survey: Increased Health Risks for Gay Teens
• Flaxseed May Be No Help for Hot Flashes
• Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Victoza Helps Type 1, Too
• Facial Wrinkles Linked to Lower Bone Density
• Too Much Pregnancy Weight Linked to Baby's Obesity Risk
• Testosterone Decline: Not Inevitable With Age?
• Infection Risk Lurks in Hospital ICUs
• E. coli Down, Salmonella Up in U.S.
• Skin Cancer Protection Starts in Infancy
• Parkinson's Disease May Raise Risk of Melanoma

Genes, Health and Society --- http://www.bioedonline.org/courses/ 

For Those With Diabetes, Older Drugs are Often the Best ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/health/28consumer.html

"The Cellphone Panic The U.N. promotes a needless cancer scare," The Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303745304576361600394911720.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t

Fluoridated water. Artificial sweeteners. Genetically modified foods. Power lines. Vaccines. Now cellphones have officially been served with their own baseless indictment, by no less than the World Health Organization.

This week the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a respected WHO panel, touched off a media bonfire with its declaration that the radio-frequency electromagnetic fields that cellphones emit are "possibly carcinogenic to humans." Maybe this cancer menace will be validated one day, but the WHO seems to be using its public health platform to exaggerate minuscule risks and send a crowd into a burning theater.

The agency promoted the sensationalistic coverage with a news conference, even though it has yet to release either its scientific monograph or the forthcoming summary in the Lancet Oncology. Below the headlines, the panel concluded that the existing evidence is concerning but inconclusive—so cellphones enter a WHO danger zone that already includes coconut oil, oral contraceptives, dry cleaners and coffee. Even with that nuance, the panel did hype the 40% increased risk that a small number of heavy cell phone users supposedly invite for glioma, the brain tumor that killed Ted Kennedy.

Some facts might help here. While cell phone use has surged since the 1980s, both the incidence and mortality rate for brain and other central nervous system cancers in the U.S. have fallen slightly. About 22,000 Americans were diagnosed with brain tumors in 2010, in a country of 270 million mobile phone users.

As for glioma, the 40% finding was merely suggestive, i.e., not proven. It comes from the largest study of cellphones and cancer to date, conducted in 13 countries and published last year. But this was a "case-control study," a not very rigorous method. Researchers compared patients with cancer (case) with healthy subjects (control) and asked about their past cellphone use. Understandably, their memories yield imprecise results. The case and control groups largely reported the same amount of cellphone use, and for most brain cancers the study failed to establish a "dose-response" link between increased cellphone use and increased risk.

The dozens of other studies of cancer and cellphones are no more frightening. The larger problem for the alarmists is that medicine lacks a theory of how mobile signals might lead to the cellular mutations that cause cancer. A cellphone's radiation levels are far too low to damage body tissue.

Continued in article

"A Blood Test for Depression A commercial test could let doctors easily screen for major depressive disorder," by Erika Jonietz, MIT's Technology Review, MaY 27, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/37630/?nlid=4531 

United Cerebral Palsy --- http://www.ucp.org/ 

Geriatric Dirty Dancing --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/eSKCi9ml4ME

How to always come out a winner in Las Vegas
Fat Man at a Buffet --- http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1B4AZI
The casinos will pay you $1,000 to leave the premises.

Forwarded by Paula

A while ago a new supermarket opened in Topeka, KS. It has an automatic water mister to keep the produce fresh.

Just before it goes on, you hear the sound of distant thunder and the smell of fresh rain.

When you pass the milk cases, you hear cows mooing and you experience the scent of fresh mowed hay.

In the meat department there is the aroma of charcoal grilled steaks with onions.

When you approach the egg case, you hear hens cluck and cackle, and the air is filled with the pleasing aroma of bacon and eggs frying.

The bread department features the tantalizing smell of fresh baked bread and cookies.

I don't buy toilet paper there any more.

Forwarded by Paula

Dear God:  Here is a list of
just some of the things I must remember
to be a good dog:
1. I will not eat the cat's food before he eats
it or after he throws it up..
2. I will not roll on dead seagulls, fish,
crabs, etc., just because I like the way they smell.
3. The Litter Box is not a cookie jar.
4. The sofa is not a 'face towel'.
5. The garbage collector is not stealing our stuff.
6. I will not play tug-of-war with Dad's
underwear when he's on the toilet.
7.  Sticking my nose into someone's
crotch is an unacceptable way of saying 'hello'.
8. I don't need to suddenly stand
straight up when I'm under the coffee table.
9. I must shake the rainwater out of my fur before
entering the house - not after.
10. I will not come in from outside,
and immediately drag my butt across the carpet.
11. I will not sit in the middle of the living
room, and lick my crotch.
12. The cat is not a 'squeaky toy',
so when I play with him and he makes that noise,
it's usually not a good thing.

Tidbits Archives --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/

Find a College
College Atlas --- http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone of Fraud  (College, Inc.) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

• With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
• With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
• With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of Accountancy Ignores TAR
• With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research into Undergraduate Accounting Courses

What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?  ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong

The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm

Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So

Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews

World Clock --- http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock and Calendar --- http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones --- http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) --- http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
         Also see http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
         Facts about population growth (video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth --- http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq --- http://www.costofwar.com/ 
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons --- http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.

Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle --- http://cpareviewforfree.com/

Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at http://iaed.wordpress.com/

Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
Any college may post a news item.

Accountancy Discussion ListServs:

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

AECM (Educators)  http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/  AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc Roles of a ListServ --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/  CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.

AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1  This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.

Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com  This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM]

Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) --- http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm

Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Some Accounting History Sites

Bob Jensen's Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
 

Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

Sage Accounting History --- http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269

A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm 

A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

From Texas A&M University
Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

History of Fraud in America --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone:  603-823-8482 
Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu