Tidbits on July 6, 2011
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

This week I made a special photograph file of my favorite horse pictures
Click Here
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Horses/Horses.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 July 6, 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

Cheap, Efficient Solar:  The founder of a new startup outlines his plans to make solar affordable ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/26947/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-06-30

Video:  100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books of All Time
"What Are Your Favorite Non-Fiction Books?" --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/what_are_your_favorite_non-fiction_books.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Google App Enhances Museum Visits; Launched at the Getty --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/google_app_getty.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Human Anatomy Video
Man as Industrial Palace: Famous 1926 Lithograph Brought to Life ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/man_as_industrial_palace.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The (Contemplative) Intelligence of Beasts --- http://chronicle.com/article/The-Intelligence-of-Beasts/127969/

Japanese WWII Surrender (old news clip) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vcnH_kF1zXc&feature=player_embedded

"Google's Perspective on Malware's Rise," David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, June 21, 2011 
http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=720

Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Multimedia Guide --- http://www.mfa.org/explore/multimedia-guide

The Elements of Creativity --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_elements_of_creativity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/history_of_english.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

A beautiful religious video --- http://www.andiesisle.com/creation/magnificent.html

'Il Silenzio' - Melissa Venema (13 yo) --- http://www.flixxy.com/trumpet-solo-melissa-venema.htm

Here is Taps played in its entirety. The Original version of Taps was called Last Post, and was written by Daniel Butterfield in 1801. It was rather lengthy and formal, as you will hear in this clip, so in 1862 it was shortened to 24 notes and re-named Taps.

Melissa Venema is playing it on a trumpet whereby the original was played on a bugle. Watch at this site.

"The Education Bubble, Tenure Envy, and Tuition," Harvard Business Review Podcast Featuring Justin Fox, June 23, 2011 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2011/06/the-education-bubble-tenure-en.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Howdy Pardner
First Meeting Between Papua New Guinea Tribesmen & Outside World --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/firstmeeting.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Gone With the Wind Turns 75, and Shows its Age --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/gone_with_the_wind.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Best Culture Links of the Week (beginning June 19, 2011) --- Click Here 
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/open_culture_no_5.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Scout Reports Best New Bookmarks of 2010-2011 (many have video links) ---

Best of 2010-2011
- NOVA Teachers
- Invitation to World Literature
- NOAA Education Resources
- The Mourners
- Museum of Science, Boston: Podcasts [iTunes]
- Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research
- Science360: Chemistry
- National Archives: Teachers' Resources
- Teaching Geoscience Online
-
Dictionary of Art Historians
 

Remember Our Men and Women in Harms Way ---
http://www.youtube.com/v/ervaMPt4Ha0&autoplay=1


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

The Joy of Easy Listening, BBC Documentary Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_joy_of_easy_listening_bbc_documentary_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Clarence Clemons, The Big Man & His Big Sound Will Be Missed --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/clarence_clemons_the_big_man_in_the_e_street_band_dies_at_69.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Shared Madness: Mozart's 'La Finta Giardiniera' (hear introduction to this opera) ---
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/24/137380560/shared-madness-mozarts-la-finta-giardiniera

See the USA in Your Chevrolet (Dinah Shore 1952) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ5tKh0aBDc

Springsteen’s Eulogy for Clarence Clemons‎ --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/springsteens_eulogy_for_clarence_clemons_.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

'Pianomania' Takes Persnickety Pianists To A New Pinnacle ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2011/06/23/137368313/pianomania-takes-persnickety-pianists-to-a-new-pinnacle

Mark Vincent Winner of Australia's Got Talent 2009 --- http://charliephillips.net/videos/theater-9/mark-vincent.html

Amazing Grace With Black Notes Only --- http://pjcockrell.wordpress.com/2007/11/22/amazing-grace-just-the-black-notes/

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

Introductory Astronomy Clearinghouse: Labs ---
http://www.astro.washington.edu/courses/labs/clearinghouse/labs/labs.html

Astronomy Media Player [iTunes] --- http://www.jodcast.net/amp/

Warren H. Manning Collection: Landscape Architecture --- http://www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/LDC/manning/manning.html

William F. Eisner Museum of Advertising & Design --- http://www.eisnermuseum.org/exhibits/online.shtm

Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918 --- http://content.lib.washington.edu/advertweb/index.html

8,000 Chinese Lanterns over Poland --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/8000_chinese_lanterns_over_poland.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Beatles, Friends & Family: Photos by Linda McCartney --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/photos_by_linda_mccartney.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

The Best Magazine Articles Ever, Curated by Kevin Kelly --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_best_magazine_articles_ever_curated_by_kevin_kelly.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Writer's Almanac (radio summary) --- http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) --- Click Here

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) --- Click Here

Darwin’s Personal Library Goes Digital: 330 Books Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/darwins_personal_library_goes_digital_330_books_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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 July 6, 2011
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/TidbitsQuotations070611.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




New:  MS Office 365 for professionals and small businesses (includes a free trial) ---
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx#fbid=DWnPj3vfKSm


"3 Steps Google Plus Must Take to Win Against Facebook," by Zubin Wadia, ReadWriteWeb, June 29, 2011 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/3_steps_google_must_take_to_win_against_facebook.php

Congratulations to the Google Plus team for shipping a superb beta under conditions which could be considered equal parts turmoil and FUD.

I absolutely love it. If it had 750 million users on it right now it would be a superior experience to Facebook.

For starters, it looks more cohesive. This isn't surprising because it is a blank slate product that did not have to deal with the technical debt Facebook has accumulated since 2004. Beyond the interface however, Google Plus will be more engaging emotionally for people because it allows them to be more authentic with one another.

Why? Because Google Plus establishes intuitive clarity for my social graph.

Bob Jensen's threads on social networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm


Video:  100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books of All Time
"What Are Your Favorite Non-Fiction Books?" --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/what_are_your_favorite_non-fiction_books.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


Mapping the U.S. Census by County ---
http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1


It' Snot Nice to Cheat
"Illinois Candidate Caught Cheating on the CPA Exam," by Adrienne Gonzalez, Going Concern, June 28, 2011 ---
http://goingconcern.com/2011/06/illinois-cpa-exam-candidate-caught-cheating-on-the-cpa-exam/

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm


"Dan Ariely: You Are Being Gamed (into sharing personal information with "respected" online vendors," Simoleon Sense, June 2011 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/dan-ariely-you-are-being-gamed/


From Stanford University
In the United States today, two-thirds of African-American college undergrads are women, and they are going on to excel in business, particularly in entrepreneurship, says visiting scholar Katherine Phillips.

"African-American Women Are Moving Ahead Rapidly," by Michelle Chandler,  Stanford GSB News, June 2011 ---
http://gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/2011-african-american-women.html?cmpid=alumni&source=gsbtoday

Some people believe that African American women are doubly oppressed in the workplace, challenged by sexism because they’re female and by racism because they’re black.

However, that bleak assessment does not tell the complete story, says Katherine Phillips, PhD ’99, visiting scholar in organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an expert in workplace diversity.

In fact, black women are excelling in education and entrepreneurship, she said. Two-thirds of African-American college undergrads are female. And, between 2002 and 2008, the number of businesses owned by black women rose by 19% — twice as fast as all other firms and generating $29 billion in sales nationwide.

In reality, Phillips said, black women are viewed as independent, competent, and demanding of respect — all classic leadership traits. So, they may find their dual makeup actually boosts their achievement possibilities, she told a Stanford audience in June during a talk titled, “Black Women and the Backlash Effect — Understanding the Intersection of Race and Gender.”

“African-American women may not be seen as prototypical blacks, and they may not be seen as prototypical women,” Phillips told the audience comprised of people of various genders, ages, and races. “That invisibility might end up being something that’s helpful in allowing [them] to take on behaviors that otherwise would not be allowed. Black women may be in a unique position to, in fact, step into leadership positions, to be embraced in leadership positions.”

Phillips presented a wide variety of academic research about how racial differences affect how individuals are perceived. Black mothers with outside jobs are viewed more positively than those who stay at home with their children, for example, while the opposite was true for white women. Another study, which appeared in 2009 in the journal Psychological Science found that participants assumed that male African American managers sporting “baby faces” earned higher salaries — an assumption that often was true and a pattern that did not extend to white male managers.

She said black women have more ability to be forceful in the workplace without appearing threatening, which is not the case for men of either race.  In fact, one study showed that “Black women do seem to have more latitude to display that dominance,” Phillips said.

And, from heading households to holding down careers, black women can assume broader roles than white women without being criticized. “The evidence here suggests that white women are supposed to stay in this little narrow box more so than black women are,” said Phillips. “The expectations of what black women are supposed to do around these social roles is different than the expectations of what white women are supposed to do.”

Forty percent of African American women between the ages of 25 and 54 have never been married, a development Phillips said was examined in a 2010 Dateline ABC News special titled, “Why Can’t a Successful Black Women Find a Man?” Sometimes strong black women are even stereotyped as angry, she said, referring to a cover story that appeared in Radar Magazine during the 2008 presidential campaign headlined, “What’s So Scary About Michelle Obama? An Insider’s Guide to the Next First Lady.”

“I don’t think I would argue that I’m trying to say that this is two negatives coming together to make a positive,” said Phillips. “But I would say that the complexity of how race and gender interact is not as simple as we typically thought. There may be a malleability that comes with being an African American woman that allows you to identify both as black and as a woman that you might be able to use as a mechanism to make it through the world, to think about things.”

Phillips’ talk was sponsored by Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, along with Stanford’s Feminist Studies program and Department of Sociology.

A professor of organizational Behavior at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Phillips codirects the Interdisciplinary Center on the Science of Diversity. She conceived the creation of the Kellogg School’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion and has led discussions about workplace diversity at organizations including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

In her research she collaborated with Margaret A. Neale, the John G. McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, on a 2009 study showing that newcomers who bring divergent points of view may significantly enhance group performance in the workplace. “Better decisions come from work teams that include a socially distinct newcomer,” she told MBA-focused website Poets & Quants, which included Phillips in their ranking of “The World’s 40 Best B-School Profs Under the Age of 40.”

She has been published in journals including Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.


At Long Last:  Many of Us Have Been Hit With Unwanted Antivirus Criminals Spreading Malware Worldwide as Phony Good Guys
"New Busts in Fake Anti-Virus Epidemic:  Latvian operations are targeted and, in a rare event, two arrests are made," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, June 23, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/26928/?nlid=4639

Jensen Comment
Internet users take enormous risks when visiting porn and gambling sites. Many of us avoid such sites for a number of reasons, one of them being the risk of malware infections. However, phony antivirus sites for me have been more troubling. They can popup on an enormous variety of innocent sites and announce that they are giving you a free virus scan --- when in fact they are really giving you free malware and other virus infections. And sometimes the infections are so deadly that the only possible solution is to clean your entire hard drive of everything and start over (known as rebuilding) your computer software system. All is lost that is not backed up elsewhere. Many of the criminals that spread such infections are very, very high tech.

If you happenstance upon a site, is Windows, that announces that you're getting a free virus scan immediately hit Alt,Ctrl,Del and end the browser program pronto.

 

Video
Vint Cerf, a co-inventor of the Internet's original protocols and now chief internet evangelist for Google, describes what Google is trying to do to defeat the scourge of Web-based malware.

"Google's Perspective on Malware's Rise," David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, June 21, 2011 
http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=720


Gender Issues:  Where blogs are filling in major media gaps

"Refusing to Be Silent," by Mary Churchill, Inside Higher Ed (University of Venus Blog), June 28, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/28/essay_on_tragic_attack_on_university_of_british_columbia_graduate_student

In early June, 33-year-old University of British Columbia graduate student Rumana Manzur was brutally attacked by her husband while visiting family in Bangladesh. He gouged out her eyes, permanently blinding her, and bit off most of her nose. This was done in front of their young daughter.

Stories like this can paralyze us, but they can also mobilize us to speak out. When the mainstream press covers this issue, they are, in effect, starting a public conversation. In responding to this coverage, we tell other parts of the story and create a larger conversation, advocating for unheard voices and voices that are discounted in the "official" discussions at our institutions.

Continued in article (three analysts respond to the incident)

Also see http://www.priyo.com/law-and-order/2011/06/27/sumon-sent-jail-29980.html

Jensen Comment
I'm not certain what Mary means by "mainstream press." As far as I can tell, major newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal did not report this tragedy.  Nor could I find a report at the sites of Time, Newsweek, or The Nation. I'll leave it up to you to imagine why not, but I think it's because the mainstream press does not want to whip up public sentiment for sacrificing more U.S. money and lives in combat wars to solve the societal inequities in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Both liberals and fiscal conservatives want us out of combat wars even if the reasons differ from budget deficit fears to anti-war sentiment.

It's sad, however, that most of the short-lived schools for women in Afghanistan will shut down the instant we surrender completely to the Taliban.

This does illustrate how the blogs are filling in gaps in the news of our "mainstream press."
Maybe the major media sources are silent where the crime only will bring three or less months in prison (I'm just guessing here). But I think there's more to the silence of the mainstream press on violence to women in extremist Muslim countries (although Bangladesh is not considered as extremist as some others). Huffington Post did report the incident, but I do not consider it to be "mainstream press" since Huffington Post is a news and blog aggregator rather than a newspaper or magazine that has an army of reporters digging up new news on the streets around the world.

The Associated Press reported this tragedy to all major newspapers on June 24, 2011. Patricia Walters reminded me that Canada's Globe & Mail reported the news release.


"How Libraries Trump Big Media," by Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed (Library Babel Fish Blog) , June 22, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish


The Best Online College Rankings

Normally, I'm opposed to rankings of colleges since the persons submitting rankings have limited and often biased views of all the colleges they are asked to rank in the data collection process. However, I think some serious ranking efforts are needed to offset the highly biased rankings that for-profit universities generate that ignore the online programs in the non-profit and generally more prestigious universities.

 

For example, see "The Best Online College Rankings" at
http://onlineuniversityrankings.org/
It's as if non-profit universities like the University of Wisconsin and Maryland were not even worth mentioning.
Some of the top-ranked for-profit universities have been operating in the gray zone of fraud, especially with respect to low admissions standards and exploitation of government load programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

 

Watch for US News to publish these rankings in the near future
"Ranking the Online Colleges," Inside Higher Ed,  June 30, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/30/u_s_news_and_world_report_announces_plan_for_best_online_colleges_rankings

U.S. News & World Report, which in the last three decades has become one of the most successful and controversial kingmakers in higher education, is taking preliminary steps to apply its rankings to the increasingly important realm of online colleges.

. . .

he rankings arrive at a time when typing “best online colleges” into an Internet search engine is more likely to bring a potential student to a lead-generation website — a site that collects their contact information and educational interests and sells it to recruiters — than any kind of rigorous, data-driven assessor of various online options.

U.S. News hopes to provide a tool for evaluating online programs based on "old-fashioned" data collection and analysis, said Robert Morse, the director of the rankings.

In interviews on Wednesday, Morse did not want to talk about specific rankings methodologies because they have not yet come up with criteria for assessing the different types of online programs — and also because they do not want respondents to withhold certain information because they think it might result in a bad ranking. The plan is to solicit a wide range of data, and then decide on criteria based on a combination of what makes sense, according to scholarly research into online course effectiveness and interviews with online education authorities, and what comes back, said Morse.

However, the rankings director did give some indications of what data U.S. News is seeking. For example, there are questions about the degree to which faculty members are trained to teach online; whether the same faculty members who teach the online version of a course teach the traditional classroom version; what proportion of faculty are adjuncts; the extent to which a program polices cheating on online tests; how much debt the average student takes on and job placement and salary upon graduation (it will not be asking about program-level loan default rates); and a number of traditional metrics, such as graduation and retention rates.

Both Kelly and Morse acknowledged that one of the biggest challenges of compiling the rankings will be getting cooperation from for-profit colleges, which make up a significant part of the online sector but generally shy away from giving up data they are not required by law to disclose.

But many traditional institutions were no different when U.S. News first began soliciting them for rankings data in 1983, said Kelly. Eventually, many “realized it was in their interest, and it became a national standard,” he said. He said he hopes proprietary online institutions will arrive at the same conclusion. “Our feeling is the good institutions will want to share these data,” Kelly said. “And that we’re going to work with them to make sure we get accurate info in people’s hands.”

Morse emphasized that the initial survey and methodologies will not be perfect. “Any ranking or evaluative list that we do is going to be our first attempt,” he said, “and we know as data get better they’ll evolve over time to become more robust and sophisticated.”

The upside is especially high with online institutions, said Kelly, since they have more data on student outcomes than do traditional colleges and universities. With the amount of data programs are collecting through their online learning environments, U.S. News believes it can not only match the reliability of its current rankings with the online version, but exceed it. Online programs “are about data and measurement,” said Kelly. “And when you have great data and measurement ability you can create great rankings.”

Generation Gap

At the same time that U.S. News was promoting its expansion into online college ranking, a spin-off site it opened two years ago unwittingly wrote a plug for a new program at an online institution, Almeda University, that is not recognized as a legitimate degree-granting university by the U.S. Department of Education or any mainstream accrediting agency, and which has been flagged as a “degree mill” by the Oregon state government.

“Working adults who want to pursue a psychology master’s degree can benefit from the flexibility of online programs, such as the one offered by Almeda University’s School of Psychology,” said a news brief posted Monday on U.S. News University Directory.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on rankings controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings


Question
What goes screaming down the highway with a long tail?

Answer
An ambulance being chased by hundreds of lawyers.

Especially note the chart in the following article
"Tamanaha: The Coming Crunch for Law Schools," by Paul Caron, Tax Prof Blog, June 29, 2011 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/

Following up on yesterday's post, NY Times -- The Lawyer Surplus, State by StateThe Coming Crunch for Law Schools, by Brian Tamanaha (Washington U.):

The New York Times released a chart yesterday showing that law schools are churning out far more lawyers than the number of available legal positions. That is old news, of course. What's worse is that the oversupply promises to continue. ... Law schools now pump out about 45,000 graduates annually at a time when the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 28,000 new lawyer positions per year.

Why are law schools enrolling so many students when employment prospects for graduates are so poor? Because they must. In the past two decades law faculties have gotten bigger. AALS tallied 7,421 full time faculty in 1990, and 10,965 in 2008. Some of this overall increase comes from newly accredited schools, but most of it is faculty expansion: student-faculty ratios have been cut almost by half during this period.

Bigger faculties must be paid for through some combination of more bodies (J.D. and LL.M) and higher tuition. Tuition already goes up every year as it is, so the number of revenue paying students cannot be reduced substantially. It's that basic. ...

Law schools will soon suffer the consequences of this expansion. The chart below tracks the number of applicants against the number of first year students from 1990 to the present. As it shows, law schools exhibit a one-way ratchet: when applications drop, enrollment remains steady; when applications rise, enrollment goes up.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
It seems as though we're hitting times when there's an oversupply of workers in most every profession or trade, at least those that are legal. And one of the worst excess supply professions will now be the legal profession itself. Can the accounting profession be far behind --- having graduated more accountants in North America than at any other time in history?

The oversupply of law school graduates is especially troublesome since this is where humanities undergraduates typically headed after graduating with degrees in philosophy, history, art, music, English, etc. The other track for humanities graduates is in education, as k-12 schools and colleges facing budget crunches reduce tenure-track opportunities, an abundant supply of teachers is also outstripping demand.

And even the medical professions such as nursing are, for the first time in history, hitting oversupply walls to employment.

What should counselors and parents advise children about careers these days? Even the military won't be a great career option when we pull our fighting men and women back from foreign wars.

"Free to Good Homes: U. of Miami Law Grads," by Don Troop, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 12, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Free-to-Good-Homes-U-of/124899/

Jensen Comment
The flies in the face of the U.S. Labor Department's new ruling that bans unpaid internships.. Unpaid internships enable students with lower grade averages to both get on-the-job experience and to prove their employment merits beyond their grade records.


"Law Schools Mull Whether They Are Churning Out Too Many Lawyers," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2009 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/07/21755n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

At a time when law-school graduates are facing greater debt and fewer job opportunities, the University of Miami School of Law has offered to pay accepted students to stay away—at least for a year. The school's unusual offer, which followed an unexpectedly high number of acceptances for this fall's entering class, comes during a period of soul searching in legal education about just how many lawyers the nation needs and whether educators have an obligation to paint a realistic picture of students' prospects for landing jobs that would justify taking out loans of $70,000 or more.

At least 10 new law schools are on the drawing board around the country, in addition to the 200 already accredited by the American Bar Association. At the same time, the demand for legal services has dropped during the economic recession, prompting hundreds of firms to lay off lawyers, cut salaries, and delay the start dates of new associates. As law schools continue to churn out graduates, the resulting bottleneck could make the competition for jobs even more fierce. And some legal experts predict that even when they do resume hiring, many big firms won't be able to continue paying new associates the salaries of $120,000 or more that students had counted on to whittle down their debt.

But that sobering news hasn't stopped students from flocking to law schools, which saw the number of applicants rise 4.3 percent for this fall, according to the ABA. At the University of Miami, a higher-than-expected yield prompted Dean Patricia D. White to send accepted students an e-mail message last month offering $5,000 scholarships if they deferred their admission for a year and completed at least 120 hours of public service by next June. Doing so would also improve their chances of winning the school's three-year, $75,000 public-interest scholarship, she said.

"While I would like to believe that this year’s elevated acceptance rate reflects the great sense of excitement about the law school and its future that led me to become its new dean, I fear that some of it may be related to the shortage of jobs in the current economy,” she wrote. “Perhaps many of you are looking to law school as a safe harbor in which you can wait out the current economic storm. If this describes your motivation for going to law school, I urge you to think hard about your plans and to consider deferring enrollment."

In addition to being difficult and expensive, "in these uncertain and challenging times the nature of the legal profession is in great flux. It is very difficult to predict what the employment landscape for young lawyers will be in May 2012 and thereafter.”

The average debt faced by graduates of public law schools now tops $71,000, while private-school graduates must pay back, on average, more than $92,000, according to the bar association. Over the past year, shrinking endowments and state appropriations have prompted many law schools to enact double-digit tuition increases at a time when the credit crisis has made low-interest student loans harder to come by.

The recession has raised new challenges for law schools now in the pipeline and renewed questions about whether they are needed. Three new schools have been proposed in New York State, which already has 15. Pennsylvania, which has eight law schools, has one more in the works.

Law schools are proliferating, in part, because they add to a college’s prestige. And because they don’t require expensive laboratories and can offer a number of large lecture classes, they can either break even or make money for their institutions.

The State University of New York system, which has a law school at its Buffalo campus, is considering adding two more, at Stony Brook and Binghamton. State lawmakers set aside $2.25-million to explore the possibility of starting a third new law school at St. John Fisher College, in Rochester.

Other colleges with aspirations of opening law schools include Husson College, in Bangor, Me.; Louisiana College, in Pineville; Lincoln Memorial University, in Harrowgate, Tenn.; the University of North Texas, in Denton; and Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. In addition, a new law school will open next month at the University of California at Irvine.

Concordia University, based in Portland, Ore., hopes to open a law school in Boise, Idaho, where it could end up competing with a law school the University of Idaho hopes to open there. The University of New Haven put its plans for a law school on hold because of the economic downturn.

Loren D. Prescott Jr. is in charge of the law-school planning effort at Wilkes University, which hopes to open the school in 2011. The university’s trustees have approved the new school, contingent upon whether the university can raise the necessary money without hurting its other schools or programs.

Mr. Prescott acknowledges that the recession raises questions both about the employment prospects of graduates and the school’s ability to raise money. But he says that when the economy eventually recovers, more jobs will open up, especially for graduates who apply their legal skills to business, philanthropy, and other careers outside law firms.

And, while he says law schools should be honest with students about their career prospects, he disagrees with those who argue that opening new schools will doom more students to lifetimes of underemployment and crushing debt.

“Should we deny someone the opportunity to go to law school, or to go to a school in their region, simply because we feel we know better about their chances of getting a job?” he says. The state’s existing schools are relatively difficult to gain admittance to, he says, and Wilkes’s would focus on students with slightly lower Law School Admission Test scores who would otherwise have to leave the region to attend a law school. It would also emphasize badly needed practical skills, he says.

Not surprisingly, administrators at many existing law schools aren't eager to welcome potential new competitors. James R. Newton, vice dean for administration at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School, says the state’s 15 law schools are plenty.

“The school’s position is that there is no market justification for another law school,” he says. “New York already has more law schools per capita than any other state, and legal employment in New York is saturated, not expanding.”

William D. Henderson, an associate professor at Indiana University at Bloomington's Maurer School of Law who has done extensive research on the legal job market, says he would like to see a Web site in which law schools published accurate details about bar-passage rates and employment statistics. That, he says, would give students a more realistic idea of how readily they would be able to pay off their debts. Instead of just reporting that a certain percentage of graduates went into "business," the site would detail the kinds of jobs and salaries they earned.

“The reality hasn’t filtered down to students that this isn’t like Boston Legal where you get a law degree and walk into a great, high-paying job,” Mr. Henderson says. “We’re taking their money and putting people $100,000 in debt,” he says, while their job prospects are at best uncertain.

Continued in article


The Paradox of Majoring in Physics and Chemistry
Note that there are bipolar sides to the debate when pushing more and more K-12 students, especially females, toward wanting to major in the physical sciences in undergraduate or graduate school. On one side we may be dooming many of them toward majors where the opportunities are lowest in terms of supply of graduates presently outstripping demand, thereby making many of the graduates of chemistry and physics thinking they made a mistake by majoring in the physical sciences.

On the other hand, having more students majoring in things like physics and chemistry because they've increasingly experiencing counseling hype for science might, at least in the short run, save those majors in places like Tennessee State University. But will physics and chemistry students have to start over in a new major after graduation? Will getting into physics or chemistry doctoral programs merely increase their eventual agony? Were there better majors for those wanting to get into medical school, law school, healthcare administration, and MBA programs?

One question is whether women tend to avoid physical science is due more to gender bias in early childhood or more to common sense evaluation of the futures of males and females in those disciplines?

"Low-Hanging Fruit?" by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/27/tennessee_state_cuts_under_producing_programs_to_cope_with_state_laws

When it comes time to cut a university's budget, who stands up for the small department that graduates fewer than 10 majors a year? The answer, it turns out, depends on the department.

To help reconcile budget cuts and new policies aimed at producing more graduates prepared for good jobs, the Tennessee Board of Regents on Friday approved a plan by Tennessee State University to eliminate "low producing" programs, notably undergraduate majors in physics and Africana studies. Both programs, along with a bachelor's program in foreign languages, several master's programs, and two education degrees, graduate only a few students each year. The university will go from offering 67 majors to 61, and will consolidate eight schools into seven.

. . .

Other low-producing programs that survived the current round of cuts, including history, art, chemistry, music, and civil engineering, are currently under review.

Jensen Comment
It's a mistake to think that dropping a major entails dropping all required and popular elective courses in a discipline where the major is dropped. But many upper division specialty courses typically taken only by majors will probably drop out of the curriculum. The main problem with the majors being dropped is that nationwide the supply of graduates with this majors vastly exceeds demand, including PhD graduates in many of these majors.

Compare the above listing with the following:

Disappearing Schools of Journalism and Journalism Students ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/15/qt#257076
Journalism is now ranked as the most useless degree in college ---
 

The most useless 20 college degrees," The Daily Beast, April 27, 2011 ---
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-27/useless-college-majors-from-journalism-to-psychology-to-theater/ 
As college seniors prepare to graduate, The Daily Beast crunches the numbers to determine which majors—from journalism to psychology —didn’t pay.

Some cities are better than others for college graduates. Some college courses are definitely hotter than others. Even some iPhone apps are better for college students than others. But when it comes down to it, there’s only one question that rings out in dormitories, fraternities, and dining halls across the nation: What’s your major?

Slide Show
01.Journalism
02. Horticulture
03. Agriculture
04. Advertising
05. Fashion Design
06. Child and Family Studies
07. Music
08. Mechanical Engineering Technology
09. Chemistry
10. Nutrition
11. Human Resources
12. Theatre
13. Art History
14. Photography
15. Literature
16. Art
17.Fine Arts
18. Psychology
19. English
20. Animal Science

 

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


On your wireless system
"How to Turn Your iPad into a Touchable Second Monitor ," by Jason B. Jones, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-turn-your-ipad-into-a-touchable-second-monitor/34299?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

. . .

Air Display is only slightly more spendy than DisplayPad, but it also has more flexibility: it works on both OS X and Windows, and you can install it on any iOS device–handy for all those times you want to mirror your 27″ iMac monitor on an iPhone screen! By contrast, DisplayPad is Mac-only and iPad-only. If that is the only combination you want to use, though, in my experience DisplayPad is slightly smoother.

I use the app almost entirely for editing documents, for grading, and for typing in notes from various sources, and so the ability to control the Mac from the iPad is of less interest to me. You can see some of the challenges of using these apps for input by viewing these dueling videos of people running full-blown Photoshop on their iPad: first on DisplayPad, and second from Air Display. (Keep in mind, though, that the strength of the wifi network is the first predictor for how well the apps work.)

 

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


Rigid Tenure Rules Bring Good Things to Life:
If Anthony Weiner Had Tenure His Job Security Would've Been Different

Tenure Prevails for a Campus Flasher
"Arbitrator Rules UNH Professor Can Keep Job," Inside Higher Ed, June 30, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/30/qt#263769

The University of New Hampshire cannot fire Edward Larkin as a German professor, even though he was convicted of indecent exposure for showing his genitals to a woman and her 17-year-old daughter in 2009, an arbitrator has ruled, according to WMUR 9 News. The arbitrator ruled that while Larkin's conduct constituted "moral delinquency," it was not "moral delinquency of a grave order," the standard needed for dismissal.

Jensen Comment
This begs the question of what constitutes "grave order?"


"Virtual Desktops in Education: Reduce Costs and Support Next-Generation Learning" white paper to find out how desktop virtualization can,"
Cisco, June 2011 --- http://www.cisco.com/web/offer/eduk12/index_a1.html?keyCode=207725_1

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


"Chinese Publisher Apologizes to Yale for Plagiarizing Free Course Lectures," by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-u-complains-that-chinese-university-press-plagiarized-free-course-materials/31609

A university press in China appears to be selling transcripts of Yale University’s free online courses in a new volume, sparking complaints from Yale officials. Under the terms of the course  giveaway, called Open Yale Courses, others cannot profit from the material.

Shaanxi Normal University Press recently published the compilation of five Yale open courses, according to a post today on a Yale Alumni Magazine blog. The book reportedly lifted largely from Chinese subtitles translated by a nonprofit group called YYeT, though that group insists it was not involved in the publication, whose author is listed as Wu Han.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing videos and course materials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

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


A severely bipolar intellectual faces the dilemma of balancing medication with creativity!
This six-minute video really raises more questions than it answers.
Can creativity really be turned up by degrees in a manic state?
Would geniuses like Van Gogh or Bobby Fisher have been more creative had they had less mental illness or did mental illness add to their creative accomplishments?
Would Thomas Edison have been a better inventor if he had been severely bipolar?
Is creativity really a tap that can be turned up and down for bipolar patients?
What are the side effects when trying to max out on creativity?
What are some of the other reasons bipolar patients often resist their medications?

Ted Talk:  Joshua Walters: On being just crazy enough ---
http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_walters_on_being_just_crazy_enough.html


Question
How are human beings more than the sum of their parts?
Try applying Industrial Revolution cost accounting discoveries to this factory.

Human Anatomy Video
Man as Industrial Palace: Famous 1926 Lithograph Brought to Life --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/man_as_industrial_palace.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

June 27, 2011 reply from Jagdish Gangolly

Bob,

The model depicted by  Fritz Kahn is a very partial model
(only anatomical aspects and physiological aspects only
at a very high level). In this model, the whole is a
sum of the parts. To be more than that, the model should
also exhibit evolution, learning,...

Work in that area goes by the name "artificial life". Some
interesting sites are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10132762
http://alife.org/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/01.html


Jagdish
--
Jagdish S. Gangolly, (j.gangolly@albany.edu)
Vincent O'Leary Professor Emeritus of Informatics,
Director, PhD Program in Information Science,
Department of Informatics, College of Computing & Information
7A Harriman Campus Road, Suite 220
State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12206.
Phone: (518) 956-8251, Fax: (518) 956-8247
URL: http://www.albany.edu/acc/gangolly


"How to Use Barcodes at Conferences (and Why You Might Want To), by George Williams, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-use-barcodes-at-conferences-and-why-you-might-want-to/34209?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Audiences for oral presentations and poster sessions at academic conferences often want more information about a particular topic. One way to provide this, obviously, is to create printed flyers or brochures and hope that you’ve brought enough copies for everyone who’s interested. But what if your printed handout doesn’t make it all the way back on your audience member’s trip home?

During the 2011 Digital Humanities conference at Stanford University (currently underway) some people are making use of QR codes, a specific kind of two-dimensional bar code (also known as a matrix code).

For example, Peter Organisciak gave a talk entitled “When to Ask For Help: Evaluating Projects For Crowdsourcing,” and on one of his presentation slides–as you can see in the photo at the start of this post–he displayed this QR code:

Continued in article

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


Question
Want to take notes using your Kindle?
It can be done using this custom-built WordPress theme.

"A WordPress Theme for Taking Notes on Your Kindle," by Aram Zucker-Scharff, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-wordpress-theme-for-taking-notes-on-your-kindle/34123?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


Is Apple Turning Its Back on Video Pros in an Effort to Lure Amateurs?
"The Quarrel Over Final Cut Continues," by David Pogue, The New York Times, June 24, 2011 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/the-quarrel-over-final-cut-continues/

This week, the big news in tech was the lovers’ tiff between Apple and professional video editors. And I managed to insert myself right smack in between them.

In Thursday’s paper, I reviewed the new Final Cut Pro X for my audience: laymen. My conclusion was this: “Some bugs need fixing, and the ‘coming soon’ features need to come soon. But despite the footnotes, and if you can get past the shock of the new, Final Cut X is already intuitive, powerful and very sweet.” I stand by that review — for consumers, film students and advanced amateurs like me.

I pointed out, though, that it’s a different story for professionals, who “say the new program is missing high-end features like the ability to edit multiple camera angles, to export to tape, to burn anything more than rudimentary DVDs and to work with EDL, XML and OMF files (used to exchange projects with other programs). You can use a second computer monitor, but you need new TV-output drivers to attach an external video monitor.”

The next day the complaints poured in — on blogs and online, and through e-mail — but with a lot of misinformation. People were reporting missing features that aren’t really missing. Since I’m not a professional editor, I worked with my Twitter followers and e-mail correspondents to produce a list of the top 20 missing features, and confronted Apple with it over the phone. I wrote up Apple’s responses in this blog on Thursday.

I’d hoped to clear up some confusion for the professional crowd, in hopes of letting them make a more informed decision. Instead, based on all the comments, all I managed to do was channel their anger at Apple into anger at me.

Today, I’d like to put this chapter to rest (yeah, right). So here’s exactly where I stand.

If you’re a professional editor, it seems to me, you should not switch to any other program without considering the disruption to your time and workflow. (I’m astonished by the editors who announced that they’re switching, today, to a different program. If you’re happy with the old Final Cut, stay with the old Final Cut. Yes, one day Apple will stop supporting it, but by that time, the new Final Cut will have been brought up to speed. Apple has already said, for example, that it will restore multicam editing and XML export shortly.)

But — and let me be clear on this point — I think Apple blew it.

Apple says that there are workarounds for most of the missing pro features. In the comments for my post on Thursday, it’s clear that many pros disagree. But even if that were true, Apple failed to consider the human element: the psychology of video editors. Yes, there’s been a degree of kneejerk overreaction. But that’s a human reaction, and one that Apple should have anticipated, especially in this industry, when workflow and efficiency are so important. Disruption, in the pro environment, is very, very bad.

Many commenters are saying that the new Final Cut’s friendlier look and feel are evidence that Apple is pursuing a fatter target — amateurs — and turning its back on professionals.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's video helpers for amateurs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm


Given the rather significant security concerns about Dropbox recently, it’s time to start thinking about alternatives like SpiderOak.

"SpiderOak as a Secure Alternative to Dropbox," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/spideroak-as-a-secure-alternative-to-dropbox/34305?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The writers at ProfHacker have often recommended Dropbox as dead simple way to backup and share documents across multiple devices and users.

Recently, however, Dropbox has suffered from some privacy issues, most recently a programming bug that left every user’s Dropbox completely unlocked for a four hour period. Combine this security lapse with Dropbox’s default encryption system, which, as Dave Parry argues, makes it possible for your files to be accessed by a third party via a backdoor, and some of us ProfHackers have begun considering more secure alternatives to Dropbox.

At the head of the list is SpiderOak.

Like Dropbox, SpiderOak automatically backs up files to the cloud, and those files can be accessed from many other devices. Like Dropbox, SpiderOak works on multiple platforms—Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as Android and iOS. Like Dropbox, SpiderOak offers a free 2GB version, from which you can upgrade all the way up to 100GB for $100/year ($100/year only gets you 50GB at Dropbox).

Despite these similarities, there are several significant differences between Dropbox and SpiderOak. Most relevant here, SpiderOak encrypts the files on your computer before uploading them to the server. That means it’s all but impossible for anybody other than yourself to access readable versions of your data by hacking into SpiderOak. Even SpiderOak itself has no access to your unencrypted files, something SpiderOak calls its “zero knowledge” policy.

The other significant difference is that SpiderOak offers a wider range of features, trading Dropbox’s elegant simplicity for greater control. For example, you can opt to forego instant backing up and instead have SpiderOak backup during the night, when it’s less likely to borrow processing power from other applications. Also, rather than having a single “My Dropbox” folder, you can select any existing folder to be backed up by SpiderOak. Another feature is that in addition to backing up your data on the “cloud,” you can also use the desktop version of SpiderOak to sync between hard drives and flash drives.

While I’ve started using SpiderOak, I haven’t entirely given up on Dropbox. The main reason is that other apps I use also rely on Dropbox. For example, I use 1Password to track my passwords, and that data is automatically backed up to Dropbox, where 1Password for iOS and Android can also access it. Appropriately enough, my 1Password data is safer than any other data I have on Dropbox, since 1Password does encrypt my passwords, even if Dropbox doesn’t!

Continued in article

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


Question
How much shareholder power exists in most corporations?

"How Capitalist is America"," by Mark Roe, Project-Syndicate, June 20, 2011 ---
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roe4/English
Thank you Ramesh Fernando for the heads up.

If capitalism’s border is with socialism, we know why the world properly sees the United States as strongly capitalist. State ownership is low, and is viewed as aberrational when it occurs (such as the government takeovers of General Motors and Chrysler in recent years, from which officials are rushing to exit). The government intervenes in the economy less than in most advanced nations, and major social programs like universal health care are not as deeply embedded in the US as elsewhere.

But these are not the only dimensions to consider in judging how capitalist the US really is. Consider the extent to which capital – that is, shareholders – rules in large businesses: if a conflict arises between capital’s goals and those of managers, who wins?

Looked at in this way, America’s capitalism becomes more ambiguous. American law gives more authority to managers and corporate directors than to shareholders. If shareholders want to tell directors what to do – say, borrow more money and expand the business, or close off the money-losing factory – well, they just can’t. The law is clear: the corporation’s board of directors, not its shareholders, runs the business.

Someone naïve in the ways of US corporations might say that these rules are paper-thin, because shareholders can just elect new directors if the incumbents are recalcitrant. As long as they can elect the directors, one might think, shareholders rule the firm. That would be plausible if American corporate ownership were concentrated and powerful, with major shareholders owning, say, 25% of a company’s stock – a structure common in most other advanced countries, where families, foundations, or financial institutions more often have that kind of authority inside large firms.

But that is neither how US firms are owned, nor how US corporate elections work. Ownership in large American firms is diffuse, with block-holding shareholders scarce, even today. Hedge funds with big blocks of stock are news, not the norm.

Corporate elections for the directors who run American firms are expensive. Incumbent directors typically nominate themselves, and the company pays their election expenses (for soliciting votes from distant and dispersed shareholders, producing voting materials, submitting legal filings, and, when an election is contested, paying for high-priced US litigation). If a shareholder dislikes, say, how GM’s directors are running the company (and, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, they were running it into the ground), she is free to nominate new directors, but she must pay their hefty elections costs, and should expect that no one, particularly not GM, will ever reimburse her. If she owns 100 shares, or 1,000, or even 100,000, challenging the incumbents is just not worthwhile.

Hence, contested elections are few, incumbents win the few that occur, and they remain in control. Firms and their managers are subject to competitive markets and other constraints, but not to shareholder authority.

In lieu of an election that could remove recalcitrant directors, an outside company might try to buy the firm and all of its stock. But the rules of the US corporate game – heavily influenced by directors and their lobbying organizations – usually allow directors to spurn outside offers, and even to block shareholders from selling to the outsider. Directors lacked that power in the early 1980’s, when a wave of such hostile takeovers took place; but by the end of the decade, directors had the rules changed in their favor, to allow them to reject offers for nearly any reason. It is now enough to reject the outsider’s price offer (even if no one else would pay more).

American corporate-law reformers have long had their eyes on corporate elections. About a decade ago, after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, America’s stock-market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), considered requiring that companies allow qualified shareholders to put their director nominees on the company-paid election ballot. The actual proposal was anodyne, as it would allow only a few directors – not enough to change a board’s majority – to be nominated, and voted on, at the company’s expense.

Nevertheless, the directors’ lobbying organizations – such as the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce (and their lawyers) – attacked the SEC’s initiative. Lobbying was fierce, and is said to have reached into the White House. Business interests sought to replace SEC commissioners who wanted the rule, and their lawyers threatened to sue the SEC if it moved forward. It worked: America’s corporate insiders repeatedly pushed the proposal off of the SEC agenda in the ensuing decade.

Then, in the summer of 2010, after a relevant election and a financial crisis that weakened incumbents’ credibility, the SEC promulgated election rules that would give qualified shareholders free access to company-paid election ballots. As soon as it did, the US managerial establishment sued the SEC, and government officials felt compelled to suspend the new rules before they ever took effect. The litigation is now in America’s courts.

The lesson is that the US is less capitalist than it is “managerialist.” Managers, not owners, get the final say in corporate decisions.

Perhaps this is good. Even some capital-oriented thinking says that shareholders are better off if managers make all major decisions. And often the interests of shareholders and managers are aligned.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance


Question
How are human beings more than the sum of their parts?
Try applying Industrial Revolution cost accounting discoveries to this factory.

Human Anatomy Video
Man as Industrial Palace: Famous 1926 Lithograph Brought to Life --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/man_as_industrial_palace.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Jensen Comment
At first this seems totally unrelated to accounting, but there is an analogy here in the sense that much of managerial/cost accounting evolved from the industrial revolution and its factories as did the depiction of the human body as a factory. Factories of virtually all types are of interest to researchers in cost accounting and systems analysts.

The timing of this is even more interesting as we are in the dawn of a new era where parts of the human body in human parts factories.

I admit it's a bit far out, but that's one of the joys of being an accountant staring at mountains. I can afford the luxury of empty-headed daydreaming about the future of human beings and cost accounting.

Of course this also relates to the great debate over whether computers like HAL 9000 will one day think like humans and eventually become more creative than humans.

How long will it take to build a "human" factory that simulates the evolved "human" factory?


Hewlett Packard TouchPad a Poor Alternative to iPad at this Point in Time
TouchPad Visual Overview --- http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/tablets/231000659
TouchPad Overview Video--- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_bE8TzgQOc&feature=pyv

"TouchPad Needs More Apps, Reboot to Rival iPad," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304450604576415863218975194.html

A small army of multitouch tablet computers has been launched this year to take on Apple's iPad, which has managed to sell 25 million units and attract 90,000 tablet-specific apps in just about 15 months, and is already in its second generation, the iPad 2. So far, none of these contenders has gained any significant traction with consumers or app developers.

Now, the world's largest PC maker, Hewlett-Packard, is entering the fray. On Friday, it will start selling the TouchPad, a 10-inch tablet with a slick, distinctive software interface. The TouchPad starts at $500, the same entry price as the iPad 2.

Clever Interface

I like the interface a lot. Instead of a screen full of app icons, the main screen of the TouchPad's operating system, called webOS, presents running apps as "cards"—large, live rectangles that you scroll through in a horizontal row.

When you tap a card, it fills the screen and is ready to use. To minimize it, you just swipe up on the bezel surrounding the screen. A second swipe takes you to a screen from which you can launch or download a new app. To get rid of a card, you just flick it upward, and it disappears. Multiple cards can run in the background.

And these cards are clever. For instance, the contacts and photo cards combine both local and online content, from sources like Google and Facebook; and cards with related functions, like an email message and an attachment you've opened, are stacked atop one another.

You can make Skype video and audio calls directly from the messaging apps. And if you buy a forthcoming H-P webOS smartphone, you can link it to the tablet wirelessly, and send and receive voice calls and text messages from the tablet, or transfer a Web page from the phone by tapping the phone on the tablet.

Hardware and Battery

But the tablet's hardware is bulbous and heavy compared with the iPad 2 or the svelte Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, an Android tablet. Worse, it's missing some key features common on the other tablets, like a rear camera or even a camera app for taking videos and still pictures. It has a front camera that can be used only for video chats.

I found the TouchPad's battery life was only 60% that of the iPad 2. In my standard tablet battery test, where I set the screen brightness to 75%, keep the Wi-Fi connection active and play local videos back to back, the TouchPad lasted just 6 hours and 5 minutes, compared with 10 hours and 9 minutes for the iPad 2. H-P claims 9 hours of continuous video playback, but that's with Wi-Fi turned off. In mixed use, battery life was decent. Apps

When H-P bought webOS a year ago this week as part of its purchase of the system's inventor, Palm, one hope was that the giant company's clout would attract lots of apps to the platform. But the TouchPad will launch with just 300 tablet-optimized apps and only 6,200 webOS apps overall, most written for phones and only 70% of which can run on the tablet, in a small, phone-size window that can't be expanded. That compares with 425,000 total apps for the iPad and 200,000 for Android tablets, nearly all of which can run on tablets even if they aren't optimized for the tablet.

This first TouchPad has no app, such as Netflix, for streaming TV shows or movies (though its Web browser, unlike the iPad's, can run Adobe Flash and can stream videos via the Web). Its version of the QuickOffice productivity suite, unlike the same product on the iPad, can't edit documents, but merely displays them. My test unit lacked stores for directly downloading TV shows, movies and music. H-P says a music store will be available at launch and a video download store "shortly" after launch. Glitches

I also ran into plenty of bugs in my tests, even though H-P said I was testing a production unit. For instance, on various occasions, the email app failed to display the contents of messages, the photos app failed to display pictures, and the game "Angry Birds" crashed repeatedly. All of these problems required a reboot of the device to resolve.

. . .

Bottom line

H-P stresses that webOS is a platform and that the TouchPad is just one iteration of it. The company plans to add the operating system to numerous devices, including laptops, and hopes that this scale will attract many more apps. And it pledges continuous updates to fix the current shortcomings.

But, at least for now, I can't recommend the TouchPad over the iPad 2.

Jensen Comment
All the competitors to iPad have the advantage of being able to play Adobe Flash.


Before reading the tidbit below you may want to read some of my threads about sleaze in the initiation of mortgages which then floated down the sewer to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mack, Merrill Lynch, Lehman, and all the others in the having septic tank phony mortgages. In particular, read about welfare mom Marvene's mortgage ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
 

"Fannie Mae Silence on Taylor Bean Opened Way to $3 Billion Fraud," by Tom Schoenbert, Bloomberg, June 30, 2011 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-30/fannie-mae-silence-on-taylor-bean-mortgages-opened-way-to-3-billion-fraud.html

The first sign of what would ultimately become a $3 billion fraud surfaced Jan. 11, 2000, when Fannie Mae executive Samuel Smith discovered Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp. sold him a loan owned by someone else.

Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise which issues almost half of all mortgage-backed securities, determined over the next two years that more than 200 loans acquired from Taylor Bean were bogus, non-performing or lacked critical components such as mortgage insurance.

That might have been the end of Taylor Bean and its chairman and principal owner, Lee Farkas. He is scheduled to be sentenced today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, for orchestrating what prosecutors call one of the “largest bank fraud schemes in this country’s history.”

Instead, it was just the beginning.

Fannie Mae officials never reported the fraud to law enforcement or anyone outside the company. Internal memos, court papers, and public testimony show it sought only to rid itself of liabilities and cut ties with a mortgage firm selling loans “that had no value,” as Smith, the former vice president of Fannie Mae’s single family operations, said in a 2008 deposition.

The trial of Farkas and his co-defendants resulted in the only major criminal conviction stemming from the financial crisis -- a crisis that followed the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the U.S. government takeover of Fannie Mae and its rival Freddie Mac that same month. ‘Most Significant’

Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, described the Farkas case in a Feb. 14 letter to President Barack Obama as “the most significant criminal prosecution to date” that arose from the financial crisis.

“If there had been a criminal referral, Farkas would have gone to jail in 2002,” William Black, who served as deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. during the S&L crisis of the 1980s, said in an interview.

Seven more years passed before federal regulators shut down Ocala, Florida-based Taylor Bean and prosecutors charged Farkas with orchestrating the $3 billion scam. He had duped some of the country’s largest financial institutions, sought federal bank bailout funds and contributed to the failures of Montgomery, Alabama-based Colonial Bank and its parent, Colonial BancGroup, once among the nation’s 25 biggest depository banks. ‘Fraud Scheme’

Taylor Bean would have collapsed in 2002 “but for the fraud scheme,” according to prosecutors. It also survived because Freddie Mac began picking up the company’s business within a week of Fannie Mae’s cutoff, Jason Moore, Taylor Bean’s former chief operating officer, said in an interview.

Freddie Mac soon became Taylor Bean’s biggest customer, and the mortgage company grew to be one of its biggest revenue producers, accounting for about 2 percent of single-family home mortgages by volume in 2009, according to a company filing.

Once the 12th-largest U.S. mortgage lender, Taylor Bean’s business was originating, selling and servicing residential mortgage loans that came from a network of small mortgage brokers and banks.

Continued in article

"What Caused the Bubble? Mission accomplished: Phil Angelides succeeds in not upsetting the politicians," by Holman W, Jenkins, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, January 29. 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704268104576108000415603970.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t

The 2008 financial crisis happened because no one prevented it. Those who might have stopped it didn't. They are to blame.

Greedy bankers, incompetent managers and inattentive regulators created the greatest financial breakdown in nearly a century. Doesn't that make you feel better? After all, how likely is it that some human beings will be greedy at exactly the same time others are incompetent and still others are inattentive?

Oh wait.

You could almost defend the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's (FCIC) new report if the question had been who, in hindsight, might have prevented the crisis. Alas, the answer is always going to be the Fed, which has the power to stop just about any macro trend in the financial markets if it really wants to. But the commission was asked to explain why the bubble happened. In that sense, its report doesn't seem even to know what a proper answer might look like, as if presented with the question "What is 2 + 2?" and responding "Toledo" or "feral cat."

The dissenters at least propose answers that might be answers. Peter Wallison focuses on U.S. housing policy, a diagnosis that has the advantage of being actionable.

The other dissent, by Keith Hennessey, Bill Thomas and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, sees 10 causal factors, but emphasizes the pan-global nature of the housing bubble, which it attributes to ungovernable global capital flows.

That is also true, but less actionable.

Let's try our hand at an answer that, like Mr. Wallison's, attempts to be useful.

The Fed will make errors. International capital flows will sometimes be disruptive. Speculators will be attracted to hot markets. Bubbles will be a feature of financial life: Building a bunch of new houses is not necessarily a bad idea; only when too many others do the same does it become a bad idea. On that point, not the least of the commission's failings was its persistent mistaking of effects for causes, such as when banks finally began treating their mortgage portfolios as hot potatoes to be got rid of.

If all that can't be changed, what can? How about the incentives that invited various parties to shovel capital into housing without worrying about the consequences?

The central banks of China, Russia and various Asian and Arab nations knew nothing about U.S. housing. They poured hundreds of billions into it only because Fannie and Freddie were perceived as federally guaranteed and paid a slightly higher yield than U.S. Treasury bonds. (And one of the first U.S. actions in the crisis was to assure China it wouldn't lose money.)

Borrowers in most states are allowed to walk away from their mortgages, surrendering only their downpayments (if any) while dumping their soured housing bets on a bank. Change that even slightly and mortgage brokers and home builders would find it a lot harder to coax people into more house than they can afford.

Mortgage middlemen who don't have "skin in the game" and feckless rating agencies have also been routine targets of blame. But both are basically ticket punchers for large institutions that should have and would have been assessing their own risk, except that their own creditors, including depositors, judged them "too big to fail," creating a milieu where they could prosper without being either transparent or cautious. We haven't even tried to fix this, say by requiring banks to take on a class of debtholder who would agree to be converted to equity in a bailout. Then there'd be at least one sophisticated marketplace demanding assurance that a bank is being run in a safe and sound manner. (Sadly, the commission's report only reinforces the notion that regulators are responsible for keeping your money safe, not you.)

The FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides is not stupid, but he is a politician. His report contains tidbits that will be useful to historians and economists. But it's also a report that "explains" poorly. His highly calculated sound bite, peddled from one interview to the next, that the crisis was "avoidable" is worthless, a nonrevelation. Everything that happens could be said to happen because somebody didn't prevent it. So what? Saying so is saying nothing.

Mr. Angelides has gone around trying to convince audiences that the commission's finding was hard hitting. It wasn't. It was soft hitting. More than any other goal, it strives mainly to say nothing that would actually be inconvenient to Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Barney Frank or even most Republicans in Congress. In that, it succeeded.

Jensen Comment
And then the subprime crisis was followed by the biggest swindle in the history of the world ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout

At this point time in 2011 there's only marginal benefit in identifying all the groups like credit agencies and CPA audit firms that violated professionalism leading up to the subprime crisis. The credit agencies, auditors, Wall Street investment banks, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mack were all just hogs feeding on the trough of bad and good loans originating on Main Streets of every town in the United States.

If the Folks on Main Street that Approved the Mortgage Loans in the First Stage Had to Bear the Bad Debt Risks There Would've Been No Poison to Feed Upon by the Hogs With Their Noses in the Trough Up to and Including Wall Street and Fannie and Freddie.

If the Folks on Main Street that Approved the Mortgage Loans in the First Stage Had to Bear the Bad Debt Risks All Would've Been Avoided
The most interesting question in my mind is what might've prevented the poison (uncollectability) in the real estate loans from being concocted in the first place. What might've prevented it was for those that approved the loans (Main Street banks and mortgage companies in towns throughout the United States) to have to bear all or a big share of the losses when borrowers they approved defaulted.

Instead those lenders that approved the loans easily passed those loans up the system without any responsibility for their reckless approval of the loans in the first place. It's easy to blame Barney Frank for making it easier for poor people to borrow more than they could ever repay. But the fact of the matter is that the original lenders like Countrywide were approving subprime mortgages to high income people that also could not afford their payments once the higher prime rates kicked in under terms of the subprime contracts. If lenders like Countrywide had to bear a major share of the bad debt losses the lenders themselves would've been more responsible about only approving mortgages that had a high probability of not going into default. Instead Countrywide and the other Main Street lenders got off scott free until the real estate bubble finally burst.

And why would a high income couple refinance a fixed rate mortgage with a risky subprime mortgage that they could not afford when the higher rates kicked in down the road? The answer is that the hot real estate market before the crash made that couple greedy. They believed that if they took out a subprime loan with a very low rate of interest temporarily that they could turn over their home for a relatively huge profit and then upgrade to a much nicer mansion on the hill from the profits earned prior to when the subprime rates kicked into higher rates.

When the real estate bubble burst this couple got left holding the bag and received foreclosure notices on the homes that they had gambled away. And the Wall Street investment banks, Fannie, and Freddie got stuck with all the poison that the Main Street banks and mortgage companies had recklessly approved without any risk of recourse for their recklessness.

If the Folks on Main Street that Approved the Mortgage Loans in the First Stage Had to Bear the Bad Debt Risks There Would've Been No Poison to Feed Upon by the Hogs With Their Noses in the Trough Up to and Including Wall Street and Fannie and Freddie.

Bob Jensen's threads on this entire mess are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


Inside Job: 2010 Oscar-Winning Documentary Now Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/04/inside_job.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

In late February, Charles Ferguson’s film – Inside Job – won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. And now the film documenting the causes of the 2008 global financial meltdown has made its way online (thanks to the Internet Archive). A corrupt financial industry, its corrosive relationship with politicians, academics and regulators, and the trillions of damage done, it all gets documented in this film that runs a little shy of 2 hours.

To watch the film, you will need to do the following. 1.) Look at the bottom of the film. 2.) Click the forward button twice so that it moves beyond the initial trailer and the Academy Awards ceremony. 3.) Wait for the little circle to stop spinning. And 4.) click play to watch film.

Inside Job (now listed in our Free Movie Collection) can be purchased on DVD at Amazon. We all love free, but let’s remember that good projects cost real money to develop, and they could use real financial support. So please consider buying a copy.

Hopefully watching or buying this film won’t be a pointless act, even though it can rightly feel that way. As Charles Ferguson reminded us during his Oscar acceptance speech, we are three years beyond the Wall Street crisis and taxpayers (you) got fleeced for billions. But still not one Wall Street exec is facing criminal charges. Welcome to your plutocracy…

Bob Jensen's threads on the global financial meltdown and its aftershocks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


From the Scout Report on June 24, 2011

Otomata --- http://www.earslap.com/projectslab/otomata 

If you like experimenting with music, you may find that Otomata is just about the best thing ever. Created by Batuhan Bozkurt, Otomata is an online generative sequencer that produces "sound events" through the movement of cells. Visitors can move the cells in different ways to create a range of sounds and textures, and it can be quite addictive. There's also a demonstration video here that will show users how to get started. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


WiFi Photo Transfer 1.4 --- http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-photo-transfer/id380326191?mt=8 

Transferring and accessing photos remotely can be a bit trying, and this helpful application can assist users with such an endeavor. This version of WiFi Photo Transfer will give users the ability to enter a web address into their smartphone's web browser and they will have access to their home computer's photos. Users should note that this version requires an iPhone or iPad running iOS 4.0 and newer.


In preparing for the 2012 Olympics, London tries to bring hope and
prosperity to the residents of east London
London 2012
http://www.slate.com/id/2297346/

Olympics will offer Britain 'transportation legacy'
http://www.rail.co/2011/06/20/olympics-will-offer-britain-transportation-
legacy/


Olympic legacy: game on
http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=16730

1948 London Olympians offered 2012 tickets to mark return of the games to
the capital
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/article-2005899/1948-London-
Olympians-offered-2012-tickets.html?ito=feeds-newsxml


London 2012: Official site
http://www.london2012.com/

London 1948
http://www.london1948.org/index.asp
 


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


Education Tutorials

"The Education Bubble, Tenure Envy, and Tuition," Harvard Business Review Podcast Featuring Justin Fox, June 23, 2011 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2011/06/the-education-bubble-tenure-en.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

The Elements of Creativity --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_elements_of_creativity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Best Magazine Articles Ever, Curated by Kevin Kelly --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_best_magazine_articles_ever_curated_by_kevin_kelly.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Triangle Coalition --- http://www.trianglecoalition.org/

Video:  100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books of All Time
"What Are Your Favorite Non-Fiction Books?" --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/what_are_your_favorite_non-fiction_books.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Best Culture Links of the Week (beginning June 19, 2011) --- Click Here 
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/open_culture_no_5.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Scout Reports Best New Bookmarks of 2010-2011 ---

Best of 2010-2011
- NOVA Teachers
- Invitation to World Literature
- NOAA Education Resources
- The Mourners
- Museum of Science, Boston: Podcasts [iTunes]
- Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research
- Science360: Chemistry
- National Archives: Teachers' Resources
- Teaching Geoscience Online
- Dictionary of Art Historians

 

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Video
Cheap, Efficient Solar:  The founder of a new startup outlines his plans to make solar affordable ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/26947/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-06-30

CDC: Public Health Genomics --- http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/

Introductory Astronomy Clearinghouse: Labs ---
http://www.astro.washington.edu/courses/labs/clearinghouse/labs/labs.html

Astronomy Media Player [iTunes] --- http://www.jodcast.net/amp/

The Astronomy Center --- http://www.astronomycenter.org/

Powerhouse Rules: The Role of Mitochondria in Human Diseases
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-342-powerhouse-rules-the-role-of-mitochondria-in-human-diseases-spring-2011/ 

National Resources Conservation Service: Soils: College Level Teaching Resources ---
http://soils.usda.gov/education/resources/college/index.html

Soil Science Society of America [Real Player, pdf] https://www.soils.org/

Dig It! The Secrets of Soil --- http://forces.si.edu/soils/

Geochemical Instrumentation and Analysis ---
http://www.oercommons.org/courses/teaching-geochemistry/view

Warren H. Manning Collection: Landscape Architecture --- http://www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/LDC/manning/manning.html

Active Transportation Alliance --- http://www.activetrans.org/

Human Anatomy Video
Man as Industrial Palace: Famous 1926 Lithograph Brought to Life --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/man_as_industrial_palace.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

Mapping the U.S. Census by County ---
http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

Beloit College Digital Collections (global affairs, anthropology, geography) ---  http://www.beloit.edu/bcdc/

CDC: Public Health Genomics --- http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/

Renata Salecl: The Paradox of Choice --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/renata_salecl_the_paradox_of_choice.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social


Law and Legal Studies

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


Math Tutorials

Computational Science Education Reference Desk --- http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/

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


History Tutorials

Video:  100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books of All Time
"What Are Your Favorite Non-Fiction Books?" --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/what_are_your_favorite_non-fiction_books.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Best Magazine Articles Ever, Curated by Kevin Kelly --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_best_magazine_articles_ever_curated_by_kevin_kelly.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

William F. Eisner Museum of Advertising & Design --- http://www.eisnermuseum.org/exhibits/online.shtm

Google App Enhances Museum Visits; Launched at the Getty --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/google_app_getty.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918 --- http://content.lib.washington.edu/advertweb/index.html

Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Multimedia Guide --- http://www.mfa.org/explore/multimedia-guide

The Writer's Almanac (radio summary) --- http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

BBC News: A brief history of time zones
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12849630

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  


Language Tutorials

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


Music Tutorials

The Joy of Easy Listening, BBC Documentary Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_joy_of_easy_listening_bbc_documentary_online.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

The Elements of Creativity --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/the_elements_of_creativity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/history_of_english.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries


Updates from WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/

June 20, 2011

June 21, 2011

June 22, 2011

June 23, 2011

June 24, 2011

June 25, 2011

June 27, 2011

June 28, 2011

June 29, 2011

June 30, 2011

July 1, 2011


"Biomedical News: Genome Editing, Lab Grown Blood Vessels, and TB Vaccine for Diabetes," MIT's Technology Review, June 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/26941/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-06-29


Powerhouse Rules: The Role of Mitochondria in Human Diseases
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-342-powerhouse-rules-the-role-of-mitochondria-in-human-diseases-spring-2011/ 


"New clues to the cause of Alzheimer's disease," PhysOrg, June 30, 2011 ---
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-clues-alzheimer-disease.html


"The Accountable Care Fiasco Even the models for health reform hate the new HHS rule," The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576343410729769144.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

The Obama Administration is handing out waivers far and wide for its health-care bill, but behind the scenes the bureaucracy is grinding ahead writing new regulations. The latest example is the rule for Accountable Care Organizations that are supposed to be the crown jewel of cost-saving reform. One problem: The draft rule is so awful that even the models for it say they won't participate. ***

The theory for ACOs, as they're known, is that hospitals, primary-care doctors and specialists will work more efficiently in teams, like at the Mayo Clinic and other top U.S. hospitals. ACOs are meant to fix health care's too-many-cooks predicament. The average senior on Medicare sees two physicians and five specialists, 13 on average for those with chronic illnesses. Most likely, those doctors aren't coordinating patient care.

This fragmentation is largely an artifact of Medicare's price control regime: The classic case study is Duke University Hospital, which cut the costs of treating congestive heart failure by 40% but then dumped the integration program because it lost money under Medicare's fee schedule.

Intelligent liberals now concede this reality but claim that the government merely needs to devise better price controls. By changing the way it pays, Medicare under the ACO rule is effectively mandating a new business model for practicing medicine. The vague cost-control hope is that ACOs will run pilot programs like Duke's and the successful ones will become best practices. While the program is voluntary for now, the government's intention is to make it mandatory in the coming years.

But what if they had an ACO revolution and no one showed up? The American Medical Group Association, a trade association of multispeciality practice groups and other integrated providers, calls the rule recently drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services "overly prescriptive, operationally burdensome, and the incentives are too difficult to achieve." In a survey of its members, 93% said they won't enroll.

The Administration wrote its rule based on an ACO pilot program that started in 2005 among 10 high-performing physician groups, including Geisinger Health System and Dartmouth-Hitchcock. All 10 say they have "serious reservations" about the new rule and that without major revisions "we will be unable to participate." In other words, the providers that are already closest to being an ACO have rejected the Administration's handiwork.

And no wonder, since the 429-page rule is a classic of top-down micromanagement. ACOs will need to comply with a kitchen sink of 65 clinical measures that are meant to produce efficiencies, like reducing infections or ensuring that patients take their medications after hospital discharge. If care at an ACO costs less than Medicare predicts it will cost under the status quo, then the ACO will receive a share of the savings as a bonus payment. The rule also includes financial penalties if an ACO misses its targets.

Incredibly, the ACO teams won't know in advance which patients they're supposed to manage. Seniors will be "retrospectively assigned" to an ACO at the end of every year, based on an arbitrary algorithm, for the purposes of calculating costs.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on health care are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm


"As Sacramento Turns California Governor Jerry Brown's latest budget soap opera," The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303635604576391674030931658.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t

All My Children" may be off the air, but the soap opera is still running in Sacramento. In the latest installment, Governor Jerry Brown divorced his fellow Democrats by vetoing their budget. Democrats and unions are furious and plotting revenge, while both sides blame the evil Republicans for refusing to sanction a referendum that would give voters a chance to endorse a tax increase.

Where's Susan Lucci when you need her?

Mr. Brown deserves credit for vetoing the Democratic budget that reverted to Sacramento form to close a $9.6 billion deficit, deferring several billion dollars of bills into the future, borrowing from special funds, and raising the state's sales tax and vehicle registration fee without the constitutionally required supermajority vote. Even the Democratic treasurer warned that the state couldn't finance its short-term debt with such a risky plan, and Mr. Brown cashiered it.

Democrats are now blasting him for suggesting that an "all cuts" budget is the only alternative if Republicans won't agree to allow a vote on a five-year extension of what was supposed to be a temporary income tax surcharge, among other tax hikes. Democrats are frustrated because they expected Republicans to cave months ago. But Republicans have shown laudable discipline, and they know that their relevance in state politics hinges on extracting concessions from employee unions that will reduce the future cost of government.

Mr. Brown needs at least two GOP votes in each chamber to put the tax increases on the ballot. And Republican lawmakers have said for months that they're willing to do so in return for modest pension and regulatory reforms and a hard spending cap.

For instance, they want to cap annual pension benefits at $106,000 per employee. Yup, state workers could still earn a six-figure annual pension from retirement to death. Republicans also want new state workers—not current employees—to have the option of a hybrid pension that includes a less generous defined benefit portion as well as an employer-matched defined contribution plan. That proposal is scaled back from the recommendation of the state independent oversight commission to freeze benefits for current workers and to move everyone into hybrid plans.

Republican lawmakers tell us that Democrats won't agree to a deal unless the government-worker unions give their blessing. But the unions now don't want a special election since recent polls show public support for the tax extensions waning, particularly in light of the state's recent discovery of $6.6 billion in additional revenue as the economy recovers. The unions would rather conserve their resources for the 2012 legislative races in which they hope to elect a Democratic supermajority. Their plan is to postpone dealing with California's budget problems until Democrats can raise taxes without making concessions.

Continued in article




Forwarded by Maureen

From the diary of a Pre-School Teacher

My five-year old students are learning to read. Yesterday one of them pointed at a picture in a zoo book and said, "Look at this! It's a frickin' elephant!"

I took a deep breath, then asked..."What did you call it?"

"It's a frickin' elephant! It says so on the picture!"

And so it does...

[Display picture of an African elephant!]

Hooked on phonics! Ain't it wonderful?

Jensen Comment
Trinity University retired chemist Ben Plummer gives us a picture of a frickn' elephant ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/tidbits042811.htm

 


Forwarded by Paula

Pork Chops and the Tiger

In a zoo in California , a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs.. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size, they died shortly after birth..

The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health, although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate another mother's cub's, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the mourning mother. The veterinarians decided to try something that had never been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of one species, will take on the care of a different species. The only 'orphans' that could be found quickly, were a litter of weanling pigs. The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger.

Would they become cubs or pork chops??

Take a look....

Now, please tell me one more time .........? Why can't the rest of the world get along?

 




From Maureen (who lives on the outskirts of Boston)

The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End.

Harvard Bridge The bridge connecting Boston and Cambridge via Massachusetts Avenue is commonly known as the Harvard Bridge. When it was built, the state offered to name the bridge for the Cambridge school that could present the best claim for the honor. Harvard submitted an essay detailing its contributions to education in America, concluding that it deserved the honor of having a bridge leading into Cambridge named for the institution. MIT did a structural analysis of the bridge and found it so full of defects that they agreed that it should be named for Harvard.

This is all true

Information on Boston and the Surrounding Areas:

There is no school on School Street, no court on Court Street, no dock on Dock Square, and no water on Water Street. Back Bay Boston streets are in alphabetical awddah: Arlington , Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, etc. So are South Boston streets: A, B, C, D, etc. If the streets are named after trees (e.g. Walnut, Chestnut, Cedar), you are on Beacon Hill. If they are named after poets, you are in Wellesley.

Massachusetts Avenue is Mass Ave. Commonwealth Avenue is Comm Ave. South Boston is Southie. The South End is the South End. East Boston is Eastie. The North End is east of the former West End. The West End and Scully Square are no more; a guy named Rappaport got rid of them one night. Roxbury is The Burree, Jamaica Plain is J.P.

How to say these Massachusetts city names correctly (Say it wrong and be shunned).

Worcester : Wuhsta (or Wistah) Gloucester : Glawsta Leicester: Lesta Woburn: Woobun Dedham : Dead-um Revere: Re -vee-ah Quincy: Quinzee Tewksbury : Tooks ber ry Leominster : Le-min-sta Peabody: Pee-ba-dee Waltham : Walth-ham Chatham: Chaddum Samoset: Sam-oh-set or Sum-aw-set, but nevah Summerset!

Definitions:

Frappes are made with ice cream; milkshakes are not. If it is carbonated and flavored, it is tonic. Soda means CLUB SODA. Pop refers to DAD. When we want Tonic WATER, we will ask for TONIC WATER. The smallest beer is a pint.< BR>Scrod is whatever they tell you it is, usually fish. If you paid more than $7/pound, you got scrod. It is not a water fountain; it is a bubblah. It is not a trashcan; it is a barrel. It is not a spucky, a hero, or a grinder; it is a sub. It is not a shopping caht; it is a carriage. It is not a purse; it is a pockabook.

They are not franks; they are haht dahgs; franks are money used Switzahland.

Police do not drive patrol units or black and whites; they drive a crewza. If you take the bus, your on the looza crooza. It is not a rubber band; it is an elastic. It is not a traffic circle, it is a rotary. "Going to the islands" means going to Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket.

The Sox = The Red Sox
The Cs = The Celtics
The Bs = The Bruins
The Pats =The Patriots

Things not to do:

Do not pahk your cah in Hahvid Yahd. They will tow it to Meffa (Medford ) or Summahville (Somerville) .
Do not sleep on the Common. (Boston Common)
Do not wear orange in Southie on St. Patrick's Day.

Things you should know:

There are two State Houses, two City Halls, two courthouses, and two Hancock buildings (one is very old; one is relatively new). The colored lights on top the old Hancock tell the weatha: "Solid blue, clear view." "Flashing blue, clouds due." "Solid red, rain ahead." "Flashing red, snow instead." (except in summer, flashing red means the Red Sox game was rained out! Most people live here all their life and still do not know what the hell is going on with this one. Route 128 South is I-95 south. It is also I-93 north. The underground train is not a subway. It is the T, and it does not run all night (fah chrysakes, this ain't Noo Yawk). Order the cold tea in China Town after 2:00 am; you will get a kettle full of beer.

Bostonians: think that it is their God-given right to cut off someone in traffic. Bostonians: think that there are only 25 letters in the alphabet (no Rs, except in id). Bostonians: think that three straight days of 90+ temperatures is a heat wave. Bostonians: refer to 6 inches of snow as a dusting. Bostonians: always bang a left as soon as the light turns green, and oncoming traffic always expects it.. Bostonians: believe that using your turn signal is a sign of weakness. Bostonians: think that 63 degree ocean water is warm. Bostonians: think Rhode Island accents are annoying.

 




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

World Clock --- http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

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

Accountancy Discussion ListServs:

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

Roles of a ListServ --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
 

CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ 
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.
Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.
AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1 
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.
Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com 
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM

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

 

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

Some Accounting History Sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All my online pictures --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/

 

 

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