Tidbits on October 27, 2011
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

This week my photographic feature is 
Set 1 of My Favorite Hiking Trails in the White Mountains
Cannon Mountain Rim Trail, Flume Gorge, Bridal Falls, Lost River Gorge and Caves, and the Livermore, NH Ghost Town
www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/HikingTrails/Set01/HikingTrailsSet01.htm

 

I still sit at my desk about 8-10 hours a day and look out at mountains on two sides and my small woods to the south. What's important is the serendipity of opportunity with such things as great lighting, great cloud formations, and other moments that can crop up and pass very quickly if my camera is not at my side at all times.

Unfurling Flowers --- http://player.vimeo.com/video/27920977?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0href=

 

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

WhiteMountainHistory.org --- http://whitemountainhistory.org/
Over 70 Historical Photographs --- http://photos.whitemountainhistory.org/AlbumHomeView.aspx

Blogs of White Mountain Hikers (many great photographs) --- http://www.blogger.com/profile/02242409292439585691

Especially note the archive of John Compton's blogs at the bottom of the page at http://1happyhiker.blogspot.com/

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

 

Tidbits on October 27, 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

Best Interactive Halloween Card Ever (with a surprise ending) --- Click Here

Shucking Corn--Clean Ears Every time (8 minutes in a microwave) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnBF6bv4Oe4

Video:  How to silence Nobel Prize winning economists: Ask them about the economy ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFdnA5UNmVw&feature=feedu
Commentary:  See Below

Smart Idea:  80-Foot Mast Under a 65-Foot Bridge --- http://www.wimp.com/mastbridge/

60 Second Adventures in Thought  (animated sequence that highlights six famous thought experiments) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/60_second_adventures_in_thought.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Some of these are stupid and funny (the first one is a clumsy attempt to illustrate asymptotic epsilon)

Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research --- http://www.growingknowledge.bl.uk/ 
Note the link to "New Ways of doing research"

The Futures Channel (Science and Engineering) --- http://www.thefutureschannel.com/index.php

Witness (Human Rights Causes) ---  http://www.witness.org/

An Owl's Final Approach --- http://www.dogwork.com/owfo8/

Kentucky Critter Files --- http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CritterFiles/casefile/casefile.htm

Humanities on the Road (Videos in Pennsylvania) --- http://www.humanitiesontheroad.org/

Here's a 1932 Cartoon That Explains Everything Happening Right Now --- http://www.jrdeputyaccountant.com/2011/10/heres-1932-cartoon-that-explains.html
(or go to YouTube here)


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

The Futures Channel (Science and Engineering) --- http://www.thefutureschannel.com/index.php

Senior Jitterbug (a groupie) --- http://www.youtube.com/v/uNE3YSr_o2A%26feature%3drelated

Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/thelonious_monk_straight_no_chaser.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Legendary Folklorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’--- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/legendary_folklorist_alan_lomax_the_land_where_the_blues_began.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

‘Jammin’ the Blues,’ by Gjon Mili --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/jammin_the_blues_by_gjon_mili.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Paul Simon, Then and Now: Celebrating His 70th Birthday --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/paul_simon_then_and_now_celebrating_his_70th_birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

First Listen: Joseph Calleja, 'The Maltese Tenor' (full concert) ---
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/16/141353649/first-listen-joseph-calleja-the-maltese-tenor

The Mariinsky Orchestra At Carnegie Hall ---
http://www.npr.org/music/genres/classical/

Just like old times with the nursing home trip
Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie at Occupy Wall Street ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/willie_nelson_pete_seeger_and_arlo_guthrie_at_occupy_wall_street.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Web outfits like Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2

TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.slacker.com/

Gerald Trites likes this international radio site --- http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:  Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
Also try Jango --- http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) --- http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live --- http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note
U.S. Army Band recordings --- http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp

Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials) --- http://www.slacker.com/ 


Photographs and Art

Earth As Art 3: A Landsat Perspective --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/earthasart/Pages/default.aspx

Unfurling Flowers --- http://player.vimeo.com/video/27920977?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0href=

Video:  Iceland in the Midnight Sun --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/iceland_in_the_midnight_sun.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Negro Travelers' Green Book, Spring 1956 (African American History) --- http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/greenbook.html

Digital Horizons (North Dakota and Minnesota History) --- http://digitalhorizonsonline.org

International Museum of Women --- http://imow.org

Pruitt-Igoe Photographs --- http://tjrhino1.umsl.edu/whmc/view.php?description_get=Pruitt+Igoe

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

John Turturro Reads Italo Calvino’s Animated Fairy Tale --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/john_turturro_reads_italo_calvinos_animated_fairy_tale.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 October 27, 2011
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/TidbitsQuotations102711.htm           

"US deficit is 'real and growing' threat: Bernanke," ForexTV, October 4, 2011 ---
http://www.forextv.com/forex-news-story/forex-us-deficit-is-real-and-growing-threat-bernanke

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called for quick and decisive steps to rein in the exploding US budget deficit, warning failure to act could result in a serious crisis. Warning that surging annual deficits presented a "real and growing threat"
Read Full Story

 

"A New Spending Record: Washington had its best year ever in fiscal 2011," The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204479504576637513885592874.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

Maybe it's a sign of the tumultuous times, but the federal government recently wrapped up its biggest spending year, and its second biggest annual budget deficit, and almost nobody noticed. Is it rude to mention this?

The Congressional Budget Office recently finished tallying the revenue and spending figures for fiscal 2011, which ended September 30, and no wonder no one in Washington is crowing. The political class might have its political pretense blown. This is said to be a new age of fiscal austerity, yet the government had its best year ever, spending a cool $3.6 trillion. That beat the $3.52 trillion posted in 2009, when the feds famously began their attempt to spend America back to prosperity.

What happened to all of those horrifying spending cuts? Good question. CBO says that overall outlays rose 4.2% from 2010 (1.8% adjusted for timing shifts), when spending fell slightly from 2009. Defense spending rose only 1.2% on a calendar-adjusted basis, and Medicaid only 0.9%, but Medicare spending rose 3.9% and interest payments by 16.7%.

The bigger point: Government austerity is a myth.

In somewhat better news, federal receipts grew by 6.5% in fiscal 2011, including a 21.6% gain in individual income tax revenues. The overall revenue gain would have been even larger without the cost of the temporary payroll tax cut, which contributed to a 5.3% decline in social insurance revenues but didn't reduce the jobless rate.

The nearby table shows the budget trend over the last five years, and it underscores the dramatic negative turn since the Obama Presidency began. The budget deficit increased slightly in fiscal 2011 from a year earlier, to $1.298 trillion. That was down slightly as a share of GDP to 8.6%, but as CBO deadpans, this was still "greater than in any other year since 1945."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
In fairness, the exploding budget deficits were in the pipeline before President Obama took office. His predecessor, George W. Bush, had no ink in his veto pen when Congressional spending bills crossed his desk. Obama inherited the same inkless pen as far as spending bills are concerned.

Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm




Life Legacy --- Dr. William Breit, age 78 of San Antonio, died Thursday, August 25, 2011 ---
http://porterloring.com/sitemaker/sites/Porter1/obit.cgi?user=1368_WBreit6281 

Years earlier Bob Jensen wrote a tribute to Bill Breit and Ken Elzinga ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/muppets.htm
Scroll down to find the tribute.

Course Management Systems/Learning Management Systems (CMS/LMS) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system

From the 2011 EDUCAUSE Annual Meetings
"Educause Video Archive; Why You Hate Your CMS," by  Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/crosstalk-educause-video-archive-why-you-hate-your-cms/33885?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Educause Archive: Higher ed’s biggest tech conference is over, but Educause has posted a video archive of selected sessions. For those who missed them, be sure to check out Danah Boyd’s presentation on students and online privacy, a Pew presentation on trends in mobile learning, and The Chronicle’s panel on the challenges of the unbundled university.

Mobile Growth: Mary Meeker, a former Morgan Stanley analyst who is one of the most perceptive thinkers on the future of technology, made her annual presentation on how the Internet is changing on Tuesday (slidesvideo). The presentation emphasizes the rapid growth of mobile devices and global Internet usage.

The Hated CMS: Content-management systems, which typically help people organizations their Web sites, are typically among the least liked pieces of software. Among other faults, they age poorly, says Michael Fienen at .eduGuru. Mr. Fienen offers some advice for colleges to choose a CMS more intelligently and for CMS vendors to serve as better members of the higher-ed community.

Question
What was the first computer-based CMS/LMS system?

Hint
It went "hoot."

In the early days of CMS/LMS software there was no Internet available to the general public. The earliest commercial CMS/LMS software came in boxes of floppy disks. The earliest software was developed with funding for the U.S. military training. It later became available to the public in computer stores. Colleges, however, were long delayed in adopting this software in computing centers. Professors like me of course were experimenting on our own. In the early years I used DOS-based HyperGraphics CMS and later Windows-based Toolbook CMS.

The history of CMS/LMS systems can be investigated at the following two links:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245cont.htm

By being an early adopter, I was invited to hundreds of campuses to demonstrate CMS software ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Presentations
Now I'm a has-been with tons of old floppy disks and old CDs!


Learning Management System (LMS) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system

"Freeing the LMS," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, October 13, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/13/pearson_announces_free_learning_management_system

Last year, the media conglomerate Pearson controlled a shade over 1 percent of the market for learning management systems (LMS) among traditional colleges, according to the Campus Computing Project.

This year, Pearson is taking aim at the other 99 percent.

In a move that could shake the e-learning industry, the company today unveiled a new learning management system that colleges will be able to use for free, without having to pay any of the licensing or maintenance costs normally associated with the technology.

Pearson’s new platform, called OpenClass, is only in beta phase; the company does not expect to take over the LMS market overnight. But by moving to turn the learning management platform into a free commodity — like campus e-mail has become for many institutions — Pearson is striking at the foundation of an industry that currently bills colleges for hundreds of millions per year.

“I think that the announcement really marks another, and important, nail in the coffin of the proprietary last-generation learning management system,” says Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve University.

By providing complimentary customer support and cloud-based hosting, OpenClass purports to underprice even the nominally free open-source platforms that recently have been gaining ground in the LMS market. Hundreds of colleges have defected from Blackboard -- whose full-service, proprietary platform has ruled the market for more than a decade -- in favor of open-source alternatives that cost nothing to license. But while the source code for these systems is free, colleges have had to pay developers to modify the code and keep the system stable.

OpenClass can be used “absolutely for free,” says Adrian Sannier, senior vice president of product at Pearson. “No licensing costs, no costs for maintenance, and no costs for hosting. So this is a freehttp://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm r offer than Moodle is. It’s a freer offer than any other in the space.”

Outflanking the Market

Pearson, which sells a variety of higher-education products and services, including textbooks, e-tutoring software and online courseware, has had success selling its own proprietary learning management system, LearningStudio (formerly known as eCollege), to for-profit colleges. But the company has made fewer inroads with the much larger nonprofit sector. With OpenClass, Sannier says Pearson is taking aim at “traditional institutions around the country where professors are the ones making the decisions about what’s happening in their classrooms” — a demographic that has long been Blackboard’s stronghold.

“Our intention is to serve every corner of that instructor-choice marketplace,” says Sannier.

Pearson says it is taking a strategic cue from Google, which offers its cloud-based e-mail and applications suite to colleges for free in an effort to secure “mind share” among the students and professors who use it. Like Google with its Apps for Education — with which Pearson has partnered for its beta launch — the media conglomerate is hoping to use OpenClass as a loss leader that points students and professors toward those products that the company’s higher ed division sees as the future of its bottom line: e-textbooks, e-tutoring software, and other “digital content” products.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the history of Learning Management Systems (also called Course Management Systems) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm


 


And this is why nearly half the U.S. taxpayers receive the benefits of U.S. Federal Government services without paying any Federal income tax
Some even take home taxes paid by the other half of the taxpayers
IRS Releases 2012 Inflation-Adjusted Tax Tables and Other Guidelines ---
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-11-52.pdf

Question
What subject is never raised when the media interviews protesters at Occupy America Protest sites?

"Why do half of Americans pay no federal income tax? A new study shows the top reasons that some Americans don't pay federal income taxes," by Don Marron, The Christian Science Monitor,  July 28, 2011 ---
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2011/0728/Why-do-half-of-Americans-pay-no-federal-income-tax

You may have heard the claim that about half of Americans pay no federal income tax. That’s a true fact. My Tax Policy Center colleagues estimate, for example, that 46% of households either will pay no federal income tax in 2011 or will receive more from the IRS than they pay in.

Today, TPC released a new study that examines why these people end up paying no federal income tax.

The number one reason should come as no surprise. It’s because they have low incomes. As my colleague Bob Williams notes:

A couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax this year because their $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce their taxable income to zero. The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax.

Low incomes (or, if you prefer, the standard deduction and personal exemptions) account for fully half of the people who pay no federal income tax.

The second reason is that for many senior citizens, Social Security benefits are exempt from federal income taxes. That accounts for about 22% of the people who pay no federal income tax.

The third reason is that America uses the tax code to provide benefits to low-income families, particularly those with children. Taken together, the earned income tax credit, the child credit, and the childcare credit account for about 15% of the people who pay no federal income tax.

Taken together, those three factors — incomes that fall below the standard deduction and personal exemptions; the exemption for most Social Security benefits; and tax benefits aimed at low-income families and children — account for almost 90% of the Americans who pay no federal income tax.

For further details and info about the other 10%, please see the study.

P.S.: The true fact — about half of Americans do not pay federal income taxes – often gets transmogrified in public discourse into the decidedly untrue claim that half of Americans pay no taxes. That simply isn’t so. There are many other taxes in our fair land, including payroll taxes, excise taxes, sales taxes, state income taxes, and property taxes. Most people who don’t pay federal income taxes still encounter some of these other taxes, especially at state and local levels. Even those that rent housing pay something toward local taxes in their rent checks.

Jensen Comment
Most of us receiving Social Security benefits do pay Federal income taxes on those benefits. It's a mistake to conclude that most of these benefits are exempt from income taxes.

I personally have benefitted from credits not mentioned above, particularly credits for payments made to add insulation and air tight windows to our 150-year old cottage. Thus I get the reduced cost of heating plus the tax breaks. I have not yet invested in solar or wind energy, but some of my friends up here in the mountains are getting tax credits for those investments as well.

The bottom line for me, however, is that I still pay what seems like a heavy Federal income tax in retirement even though I do get the benefits of a huge mortgage on my home. I do not have to pay a state income tax in New Hampshire except for a relatively small state tax on cash dividends and interest (but not capital gains).

But I'm not really protesting my taxes. Over the years I've received tenfold more benefits from living in America than anything I contributed for those benefits.


In spite of the media hype about 9-9-9, I think it's safe to assume there won't be serious tax reform in the near future.

If tax reform swaggered into a Luckenbach, Texas saloon, it would be "all hat and no horse"
The ladies of the night would die laughing at that "itty-bitty thang" that walked in
And it would need a ladder to peek over the top of the spittoon

My point is that you probably should plan your financial future on the present mess we call the Tax Code. In this regard, you might like to learn about one of the best helper sites around.

Tax Helpers
October 22, 2011 message from Scott Bonacker (himself a professional CPA tax expert)

It is hard to prioritize the things that are important to tax preparers, not the least of which are these: keeping up with current developments and improving understanding of the principles of taxation.  Single sourcing is one way we do it, and for that reason the commercial tax services provide
extensive editorial content and regular newsletters and updates.

There is also a considerable amount of information and thought that is available for free on the internet if you know where to find it. So much, that it is difficult sometimes to filter the choices to the ones that can make a valuable contribution.

Email study groups are one way, and blogs are another. One of those is the 21st Century Taxation blog by Professor Nellen.

Professor Nellen is a tax professor and director of the MS Taxation Program at San Jose State University, and her blog is frequently updated with intelligent commentary and links to resources.

Her experience as a teacher shows as Professor Nellen will often point out an event or an article or a circumstance and then describe how she sees it in relation to current events or professional practice. Her blog posts provide analysis and links to allow the reader to look into things in more
 depth, and many times they close with a question - "What do you think?"

A prolific writer, Professor Nellen maintains a personal website -

http://www.21stcenturytaxation.com/

Professor Nellen's academic page at San Jose State University - http://www.cob.sjsu.edu/nellen_a/  is also a large repository of useful information.

Since most of us are in the business of tax planning and preparation we also become involved in explaining and discussing relative advantages and disadvantages of the options that are available now. Then there is also the potential for future alternatives.  Professor Nellen's collection of articles and analysis of tax reform information can be a very important addition to the resources available to a tax professional.

I saw an email tagline that said something about experts knowing where to find answers. First you have to recognize that there may be an issue. What
are your sources of information?

Scott Bonacker CPA
Springfield, MO

Bob Jensen's tax helpers (which are virtually nothing compared to those of Professor Nellen) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation

 


Screencasting
ScreenCast from TechSmith is a leading storage/server alternative for your Jing and Camtasia videos ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechSmith

However, there are quite a few other screeencast video capturing alternatives and hosts ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_software
This is a pretty impressive Wikipedia comparison site!

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


Dropbox (Cloud Storage) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_%28service%29

"Dropbox Will Simplify Your Life," by David Pogue, The New York Times, October 20, 2011 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/dropbox-will-simplify-your-life/

Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of the world.

So here goes: I love Dropbox.

Continued in article

October 22, 2011 reply from Amy Dunbar

I use dropbox for my excel-based students projects.  I create a dropbox folder for each group, and then share the folder with the students.  Each student is expected to complete all three projects, but they can help each other.  Every student submits the first project but for the next two, each group selects one project for final grading.  When someone is stuck, I can quickly open the project and see what is going on.  To demonstrate how to use dropbox, I ask a student in class to save a file to the dropbox and then the class can see on the overhead the file showing up in my dropbox folder for that group.  I love it! 

Heads up: If two people are working on a file at the same time the file saves as a conflicted file.  So students have to be careful to save files with unique names.

Amy Dunbar

UConn

 

October 22, 2011 reply from Rick Lillie

I read David Pogue's post about Dropbox.  I agree it is easy to use and is a great tool for file sharing.

There are many software programs and hosted collaboration services available (both free and for fee) that focus on file sharing as a way to collaborate.  But, file sharing is just one aspect of collaborating with others on a project.

Dropbox is great for what it does.  There are alternatives that do much more than what Dropbox does. 

For example, for the past few years, I have used Collanos Workplace as a way to collaborate with students on independent study and group projects.  Collanos is similar to Groove Networks (now part of enterprise edition of Microsoft Office).  Collanos emphasizes organizing the project and workflow and includes many options for communicating and incorporating other technology tools as needed to meet project needs.

I've also used Collanos Workplace to collaborate with colleagues on research projects.  Recently, I've been using a great online hosted collaboration service called Glasscubes It's more intuitive than Collanos and shifts the process to "the Cloud."

There are lots of tech tools to use for research and classroom activities.  The key is to find the tool that "best fits" the needs of the project and the technology skills of both students and instructor.

Best wishes,

Rick Lillie, MAS, Ed.D., CPA
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Coordinator, Master of Science in Accountancy
CSUSB, CBPA, Department of Accounting & Finance
5500 University Parkway, JB-547
San Bernardino, CA.  92407-2397

Bob Jensen's threads on archiving and long-term storage ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#archiving


Bad News for the World
Germany will not bail out French banks or Rhode Island's Public Pensions

Question
What happens when you get more retirees on a pension plan than there are workers contributing to that plan?

"The Little State With a Big Mess," by Mary Williams Walsh, The New York Times, October 21, 2011 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/business/for-rhode-island-the-pension-crisis-is-now.html?hp

ON the night of Sept. 8, Gina M. Raimondo, a financier by trade, rolled up here with news no one wanted to hear: Rhode Island, she declared, was going broke.

Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But if current trends held, Ms. Raimondo warned, the Ocean State would soon look like Athens on the Narragansett: undersized and overextended. Its economy would wither. Jobs would vanish. The state would be hollowed out.

It is not the sort of message you might expect from Ms. Raimondo, a proud daughter of Providence, a successful venture capitalist and, not least, the current general treasurer of Rhode Island. But it is a message worth hearing. The smallest state in the union, it turns out, has a very big debt problem.

After decades of drift, denial and inaction, Rhode Island’s $14.8 billion pension system is in crisis. Ten cents of every state tax dollar now goes to retired public workers. Before long, Ms. Raimondo has been cautioning in whistle-stops here and across the state, that figure will climb perilously toward 20 cents. But the scary thing is that no one really knows. The Providence Journal recently tried to count all the municipal pension plans outside the state system and stopped at 155, conceding that it might have missed some. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is asking questions, including the big one: Are these numbers for real?

“We’re in the fight of our lives for the future of this state,” Ms. Raimondo said in a recent interview. And if the fight is lost? “Either the pension fund runs out of money or cities go bankrupt.”

All of this might seem small in the scheme of national affairs. After all, this is Little Rhody (population: 1,052,567). But the nightmare scenario is that Ms. Raimondo has seen the future of America, and it is Rhode Island. As Wall Street fixates on the financial disaster in Greece, a fiscal wreck is playing out right here. And the odds are that it won’t be the last. Before this is over, many Americans may be forced to rethink what government means at the state and local level.

Economists have talked endlessly about a financial reckoning for the United States, of a moment in the not-so-far-away when the nation’s profligate ways catch up with it. But for Rhode Island, that moment is now. The state has moved to safeguard its bond investors, to avoid being locked out of the credit markets. Last week, the General Assembly went into special session and proposed rolling back benefits for public employees, including those who have already retired. Whether the plan will succeed is anyone’s guess.

Central Falls, a small city north of Providence, didn’t wait for news from the Statehouse. In August, the city filed for bankruptcy rather than keep its pension promises to its retired firefighters and police officers.

Illinois, California, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Michigan — the list of stretched states runs on. In Pennsylvania, the capital city, Harrisburg, filed for bankruptcy earlier this month to avoid having to use prized assets to pay off Wall Street creditors. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie wants to roll back benefits, too.

In most places, as in Rhode Island, the big issue is pensions. By conventional measures, state and local pensions nationwide now face a combined shortfall of about $3 trillion. Officials argue that, by their accounting, the total is far less. But with pensions, hope often triumphs over experience. Until this year, Rhode Island calculated its pension numbers by assuming that its various funds would post an average annual return on their investments of 8.25 percent; the real number for the last decade is about 2.4 percent. A phrase that gets thrown around here, à la Rick Perry describing Social Security, is “Ponzi scheme.”

That evening in September, Ms. Raimondo walked into the Cranston Portuguese Club to face yet another angry audience. People like Paul L. Valletta Jr., the head of Local 1363 of the firefighters union.

“I want to get the biggest travesty out of the way here,” Mr. Valletta boomed from the back of the hall. “You’re going after the retirees! In this economic time, how could you possibly take a pension away?”

Someone else in the audience said Rhode Island was reneging on a moral obligation.

Ms. Raimondo, 40, stood her ground. Rhode Island, she said, had a choice: it could pay for schoolbooks, roadwork, care for the elderly and so on, or it could keep every promise to its retirees.

“I would ask you, is it morally right to do nothing, and not provide services to the state’s most vulnerable citizens?” she asked the crowd. “Yes, sir, I think this is moral.”

FOR many Americans, the Ocean State conjures images of Newport mansions and Narragansett chic. The overall reality is more prosaic. Rhode Island today is a place where the roads and bridges rank among the worst in the nation and where jobs are particularly hard to find. Unemployment rose faster during the 2008-9 recession than in any other state. The official jobless rate is now 10.6 percent, versus the national average of 9.1 percent.

The textile mills and jewelry manufacturers that once employed thousands here have dwindled away. The big employers today are in health care and education, both of which rely heavily on government spending that has been drying up.

Many states and cities can credibly say their pension plans are viable, even when those plans are not fully funded. That is because state retirement funds, like Social Security, pay out benefits bit by bit, over many years.

But unlike, say, California, with its large, diverse economy, Rhode Island is so small that there is little margin for error. Leaving the state, to escape its taxes, is almost as easy as moving to the other side of town. Efforts to balance the state budget by shrinking the public work force have left Rhode Island with a problem like the one that plagues General Motors: the state has more public-sector retirees than public-sector workers.

Continued in article

The Sad State of Governmental Accounting and Accountability ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting


Madoff Book's 9 Juiciest Bits --- Click Here
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/21/bernie-madoffs-daughter-in-law-on-husbands-suicide-and-bernies-crime.html

The End of Normal, by Stephanie Madoff Mack. Blue Rider Press. 253 p. $17.43 (prices may vary)

Bob Jensen's threads on Bernie Madoff and Ponzi frauds ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Ponzi


"The Student Loan Racket" - The Complete Infographic --- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/student-loan-racket-complete-infographic

"Washington's Quietest Disaster Student loan defaults are growing, and the worst is still to come," The Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903703604576587103028334580.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t

When critics warned about rising defaults on government-backed student loans two years ago, the question was how quickly taxpayers would feel the pain. The U.S. Department of Education provided part of the answer this month when it reported that the default rate for fiscal 2009 surged to 8.8%, up from 7% in 2008.

This rising default rate doesn't even tell the whole story. The government allows various "income contingent" and "income-based" repayment options, so the statistics don't count kids who were given permission to pay less than they owed. Taxpayers shouldn't expect relief any time soon. Thanks to policy changes in recent years and fraudulent government accounting, the pain could be excruciating.

Readers who followed the Congressional birth of ObamaCare in 2010 may recall that student lending was the other industry takeover that came along for the legislative ride. Private lenders used to originate federally guaranteed loans, but the new law required all such loans to come directly from the feds. Combined with earlier changes that discouraged private loans sold without a federal guarantee, the result is a market dominated by Washington.

The 2010 changes did not happen simply because President Obama and legislators like Rep. George Miller and Sen. Tom Harkin distrust profit-making enterprises. The student-loan takeover also advanced the mirage that ObamaCare would save money.

Thanks to only-in-Washington accounting, making the Department of Education the principal banker to America's college students created a "savings" of $68 billion over 11 years, certified by the Congressional Budget Office. Even CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf admitted that this estimate was bogus because CBO was forced to use federal rules that ignored the true cost of defaults. But Mr. Miller had earlier laid the groundwork for this fraud by killing amendments in the House that would have required honest accounting and an audit.

Armed in 2010 with their CBO-certified "savings," Democrats decided they could finance a portion of ObamaCare, as well as an expansion of Pell grants. But as Bernie Madoff could have told them, frauds break down when enough people show up asking for their money. That's happening already, judging by recent action in the Senate Appropriations Committee, where lawmakers apparently realize that the federal takeover isn't going to deliver the promised riches.

To preserve Team Obama's priority of maintaining a maximum Pell grant of $5,550 per year and doubling the total annual funding to $36 billion since President Obama took office, Democrats recently decided to make student-loan borrowers pay interest on their loans for their first six months out of college. Washington used to give the youngsters an interest-free grace period. Taxpayers might cheer this change if the money wasn't simply being transferred to another form of education subsidy. But it seems almost certain to raise default rates as it puts recent grads under increased financial pressure.

None of these programs has anything to do with making it easier to afford college. Universities have been efficient in pocketing the subsidies by increasing tuition after every expansion of federal support. That's why education is a rare industry where prices have risen even faster than health-care costs.

This is also the rare market where the recent trend of de-leveraging doesn't apply. An August report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that Americans cut their household debt from a peak of $12.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008 to a recent $11.4 trillion. Consumers have reduced their debt on houses, cars, credit cards and nearly everything except student loans, where debt has increased 25% in the three years.

Perhaps this is because most federal student loans are made without regard to income, assets or credit history. Much like the federal obsession to finance a home for every American regardless of ability to pay, the obsession to finance higher education for every high school student ignores inconvenient facts. These include the certainty that some of these kids will take jobs that don't require college degrees and may not support timely repayment.

For this school year, even the loans that pay on time aren't necessarily winners for the taxpayer. That's because of a 2007 law that Mr. Miller and Nancy Pelosi pushed through Congress—and George W. Bush signed—that cut interest rates on many federally backed student loans. Stafford loans, the most common type, have been available since July at a fixed rate of 3.4%, barely above the historically low rates at which the Treasury is currently borrowing for the long term. The student loan rates are scheduled to rise back to 6.8% next year. But if our spendthrift government ends up borrowing money above 7% and lending it to kids at 6.8%, taxpayers will suffer even before the youngsters go delinquent.

Efforts to clean up this debacle are stirring on Capitol Hill, with House Republicans moving to limit Pell grants to students who have a high school diploma or GED. Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn would go further and have government leave the business of subsidizing the education industry via student loans and let private lenders finance college. That may be too radical at the moment, but it won't be if taxpayers ever figure out how much subsidized loans will cost them

 


Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012 --- http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1826214
Note especially the "Internet of Things"

Note especially how technology forecasts have changed since the turn of the 21st Century. Back in 2002 Gartner foresaw the explosion of grid and cluster computing but die not seem to foresee the explosion in mobile computing. Now all that has changed somewhat at least.

"What Is Grid Computing, Anyway?" by Tim McDonald, NewsFactor Network July 24, 2002 --- http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18722.html 

One good way to gauge a new technology's degree of acceptance is to observe whether it has moved out of the laboratory and onto store shelves -- from science to commerce. According to that measure, grid computing is just coming of age.

Often called the next big thing in global Internet technology, grid computing employs clusters of locally or remotely networked machines to work on specific computational projects.

One well-known example of grid computing -- sometimes called distributed or clustered computing -- is the ongoing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in which thousands of users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help search for signs of "rational" signals from outer space.

From Science to Commerce

Grid computing traditionally has been useful to researchers working on scientific or technical problems -- much like the SETI project -- that require a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.

But while this technology was once exclusively the province of academics in fields like biomedicine and weather forecasting, it has recently been making a strong foray into potentially lucrative e-commerce sectors. Although clustering has been used for several years as a load-balancing technique by server Latest News about server hardware manufacturers, grid computing now seems to be coming of age for other applications as well.

"Grid computing has advanced to the point now that there are products out there like Sun's Grid Engine Enterprise Edition," Aberdeen Group analyst Bill Claybrook told NewsFactor.

Much like a load-balancing server cluster, Sun's Grid Engine software lets organizations create networked grids to share resources on a wider scale and to allocate processing resources according to department priorities.

Grid Computing Components

Essentially, grids are built from clusters of computer servers joined together over a local area network (LAN) or over the Internet.

While several grids that run over the Internet -- like the SETI project -- have been built with proprietary software, there are several development tools that can facilitate the growth and adoption of grid computing.

One of those tools is Globus, a research and development project focused on helping software developers apply the grid concept.

The Globus toolkit, the group's primary offering, is a set of components that can be used to develop grid applications. For each component in the toolkit, Globus provides an API (application programmer interface) for use by software developers.

Power to the People

Research scientists historically have been attracted to grid computing because it uses the power of idle computers to work on difficult computational problems.

Proponents of grid computing say the technology will enable universities and research institutions to share their supercomputers, servers and storage capacity, allowing them to perform massive calculations quickly and relatively cheaply.

In line with those expectations, HP recently announced that a 9.2-teraflop supercomputer Latest News about supercomputer soon will be connected to the Department of Energy's Science Grid. When installed, it will be the largest supercomputer attached to a grid anywhere in the world, according to the company.

Sharing Data

Until now, the problem with grid computing has been a lack of common software for developers to work with, largely because grids rely on Internet-based software.

In an effort to spur broader adoption of grids, the National Science Foundation established the US$12.1 million Middleware Initiative last year, and the agency has recently released software and other tools designed to make working on grids easier for scientists and engineers.

"Scientists are now sharing data and instrumentation on an unprecedented scale, and other geographically distributed groups are beginning to work together in ways that were previously impossible," according to the Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support Center.

First Gaming Grid

In a real-world example of grid computing, IBM (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM and Butterfly.net announced in May that they would soon release a computing grid for the video game industry. Butterfly.net spent two years building the grid, which distributes games across a network of server farms using IBM e-business infrastructure technology.

Massively multiplayer games (MMGs) historically have been run on mirrored servers that essentially duplicate copies of the MMG universe to balance user loads.

While this technique is designed to reduce latency for all users -- so that each set of servers behaves responsively to user actions -- the mirroring technique limits the number of players who can participate at one time in the same game universe.

When load balances increase, the typical MMG response has been to add more servers, copy the game universe and spill the extra load into that new copy.

Now, however, Butterfly.net's grid technology provides "cross-server sentinels" that supports the interaction of millions of players in one world, with server boundaries invisible to players. According to the company, the extension of grid computing to the gaming world lets game developers support a limitless number of users in their MMGs.

'Taking Hold of an Industry'

Companies are lining up to jump on the Butterfly bandwagon. This week, for example, software development site CollabNet announced it will work with Butterfly.net to develop an online environment that lets game developers test their games.

"IBM's been extremely busy on a number of fronts in grid, in terms of investing resources and winning new partners and customers," IBM spokesperson Jim Larkin told NewsFactor.

"Butterfly is one of the key examples thus far of how IBM has worked with another company to help develop a computing grid that is in the commercial arena," Larkin said. "It's a clear example of how grid is taking hold of an industry."

"Digipede to Showcase .NET Grid Computing Solutions at Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference," PR Web, June 19, 2006 --- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb400497.htm

"Grids Unleash the Power of Many," by John Gartner, MIT's Technology Review,  January 14, 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/wo_gartner011405.asp?trk=nl 

Computer scientists in three states -- West Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado -- are each combining their technology resources into separate computer grids that will give researchers, universities, private companies and citizens access to powerful supercomputers.

The project designers say these information aqueducts will encourage business development, accelerate scientific research, and improve the efficiency of government.

"Grid computing will provide 1,000 times more business opportunities than what we see over the Internet today," says Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of grid computing and networking services at MCNC in Research Triangle Park, NC.

MCNC is spearheading North Carolina's statewide grid development that currently includes seven universities including North Carolina State, Duke, and the University of North Carolina.

The North Carolina project -- which has a goal to link 180 institutions -- is encouraging business development through its Start Up Grid Initiative, which allows fledgling companies to plug into the grid for up to nine months free of charge and afterwards at discounted rates, Gentzsch says.

Because raising capital and acquiring technology takes up most of a new company's time, "Startups usually only get to spend 10 percent of their time executing their idea," says Gentzch, who has launched seven companies.

According to a 2003 report by Robert Cohen, a Fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, North Carolina's grid could create 24,000 jobs and boost the state's output by $10.1 billion by 2010 if effectively implemented.

Before statewide grids can become a realit, the software used to share and manage resources needs to be improved to include more standard communication protocols. Gentzsch says the expected release of version 4.0 of the open source Globus Toolkit, which he estimates is used by 90 percent of grid projects, will greatly simplify connecting computers to the grid.

Securing a location's computing resources so that only specified resources are made available for sharing is a significant challenge, Gentzsch says. To protect data files, institutions must "encrypt everything," and configure the grid network so that "the CPU cycles are separated from the disk resources."

Gentzsch estimates that advanced computing resource utilization is just 25 percent, and grid computing could increase the efficiency to 75 percent.

"Back to Basics and the Next Big Thing," by Phillip D. Long, Syllabus, August 2002, pp.10-11 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590 

Grid Computing: The Next Big Thing

The next big thing to transform the Internet is likely to come from work going on with the grid. The grid is an infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of people, institutions, and resources.

It may be useful to recall that the birth of the Web came from a desire to share research papers among large numbers of particle physicists doing “big science” at CERN, the Swiss research center. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision has changed all our lives. In the world of international science, its impact has been staggering. Recognizing this, the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC), the UK analog of the National Science Foundation, has embarked on a £98 million project called the Core e-Science Programme, managed by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of the UK Research Councils. The e-Science project proposes to connect scientists with expensive remote facilities, teraflop computers, and information resources stored in dedicated databases. Add to these resources higher level services such as workflow, transactions, data mining, and knowledge discovery, and you begin to glimpse what’s envisioned. The grid is the architecture proposed to make this a reality.

What kinds of research are we talking about? Everything from particle physics (what goes around comes around) to basic medical investigation. For example, our understanding of even basic human physiology remains terribly limited. We don’t know how multiple parameters interact over time in fundamental processes like heart rate, blood pressure, and other cardiovascular indicators. Imagine if 100,000 people volunteered to wear real-time monitoring devices so that their daily metabolic functions were recorded and analyzed in real time. The volume of data is enormous but that’s just the beginning. We would want to compare how the data relate to the activities of the people as they went about their daily lives. In the end, predicting the likelihood of an impending physical problem becomes a potential reality. Just like the work underway to provide predictive intervention for the replacement of computing hardware, you can imagine high risk heart patients wearing proactive monitors that page them to head for a cardiac care unit because the data indicate a potential problem in the next 24 hours. Today it may seem like science fiction, but with research using the grid, it’s emerging into possible science fact.

This may seem far a field from the classroom. How far it is remains to be seen of course, but there are people working today on applying the potential of the grid to learning management or virtual learning environments. Better descriptions about teaching processes and the learning objects needed, along with work on metadata for educational objects, are underway. So stay tuned for more about the “next big thing” in future columns.

References

Laurillard, D. The Changing University. 1996.
http://itech1.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper13/paper13.html

Metadata for Education Group
www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj

The full article is at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6590

CLUSTER AND GRID COMPUTING REFERENCES --- http://www.ic.uff.br/~vefr/research/clcomp/clustrefs.html 

Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


With a bit of sarcasm
"Yes, You Need More Gadgets," by Michael Schrage, The Harvard Business Review Blog, October 20, 2011 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2011/10/yes-you-need-more-gadgets.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Everyone heard the rising panic in her voice. The irritating chatterbox nattering away on her cell phone while in line to board our flight suddenly realized that her boarding pass was — surprise! — in the Smartphone she was talking on. She'd have to disconnect the call in order to wave her device before the optical reader. The impatient queue behind her burst into laughter, smirks and chortles as her call abruptly ended. I'm not ashamed to say I was among them.

The (brief) era of single and serial mobile devices is over. The age of multiple and parallel devices has begun. An impromptu survey of CIOs revealed that the typical executive already has roughly three devices connected to the enterprise network. Our traveling companion should have known better. She could have continued irritating everyone as she boarded if only she'd remembered to put her boarding pass on her other iPhone, Android, Kindle, iPad or latest tablet. As Smartphones become significantly smarter — Siri? Watson? Is that you? — the combined cognitive and coordinative challenge of juggling three or four devices becomes more like supervising a small team than managing a personal assistant.

Treating phones, tablets, BlackBerries and laptops as distinct technical entities is pragmatically anachronistic. In the twinkling of fewer than two Moore's Law generations, the central personal productivity question has shifted from, "How do I get more value from my mobile device?" to "How should I get more value from my device ensemble?"

The notion that you might need a Smartphone to manage your Smartphones may seem mildly funny and ironic. The simpler reality is that smart ensembles of smarter devices require smarter networking. Syncing — simply making sure your devices have the same up-to-date data — is the sterile path to convergence. What you need to do is both more demanding and more rewarding. Pay attention. Pay attention to those moments when you wish you had another phone. Observe seatmates who aren't merely multitasking but multi-device multitasking. Who is chatting on their phone while retrieving email on an iPad while highlighting an HBR article on their Kindle? Then ask yourself: are they doing this because they're inefficient? Or because this improvised arrangement makes them more efficient?

Utilizing two or three devices doesn't inherently make you two or three times more effective. Diminishing returns exist. But there are frequently times when having two or three devices working with, and for, you concurrently can make you an order of magnitude more productive. For example, the ability to have your phone conduct searches on your tablet and allow you to compare competing results sent by a colleague as you virtually chat with and text each other could turn a task that takes a typical day into one requiring less than an hour. It's not the total bandwidth that matters; it's how that bandwidth is split up and shared.

Productivity/creativity/effectiveness breakthroughs will increasingly come not from greater data sharing between devices but enabling devices to collectively offer integrated user experiences. A single tablet or phone is — Microsoft should excuse the expression — a window or a lens. But three or four devices becomes a productivity "cockpit" that allows you to have multiple views. In other words, your phone will "know" to put the boarding pass on your tablet if you're on the phone at boarding time. Your two tablets will "know" to display the synchronized "bird's eye" and "walkthrough" views of a site you're planning to visit. Siri will "know" to send the Facebook and Flickr imagery to your tablet — and the reference materials to your Kindle — of the two couples you and your spouse are supposed to meet at a party in an hour. Every mobile device will have a "stick shaker" capability to alert their user that "must see/must respond" information must be accessed.

Continued in article

Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price
You might want to examine the NYT feature while it is still free --- http://nyti.ms/9EegB2

"Hooked on Gadgets and Happy About It," by Alexandra Samuel, Harvard Business Review Blog, June 8, 2010 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/06/hooked_on_gadgets_and_happy_ab.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology


From the EDUCAUSE Annual Meetings in Philadelphia on October 20, 2011

EDUCAUSE 2011 Annual Meeting Highlights as They Unfold This Week --- http://www.educause.edu/E2011

Updates for October 20 --- http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/category/educause-2011

"Myths of Online Education," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, October 21, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/21/educational-technologists-defend-online-education 

One of higher education’s biggest exports is skepticism. So it is perhaps unsurprising that, whereas many educators have questioned the virtue of online education, others would question the way in which the questioners have questioned online education.

A panel of academic technologists ganged up on a straw-man version of the online education skeptic here at the annual Educause conference here on Thursday.

The panel took aim at a number of questions that often come up when online education is put under the microscope, including: Does online education take more time? And does it enable cheating?

Using these questions to prod the worthiness of online education is likely to lead to “causal fallacies” than useful insights, said George Otte, director of academic technology at the City University of New York System. “Just as you can lie with statistics, you can mislead with questions,” he said.

For his part, Otte took aim at the question of online education being a time-suck for professors — a question that has prompted fears of faculty burnout. But the CUNY technologist suggested that this question does not adequately account for the cost, in time, of finding one’s footing on a new teaching platform.

“We may be confounding the time it takes to do something with the time it takes to learn to do something,” Otte said. The first time instructors teach online, they tend to overcompensate for their ignorance by over-investing their time in the virtual classroom. But that does not mean they will not adjust and adapt — just as most instructors did to the circumstance and demands of classroom teaching when they began their careers.

“A linguist once told me that if we were adults when we began language acquisition, and knew how hard it was and all it entailed, who would ever bother?” he continued. “But, of course, that all happens before we think we have a choice and when we’re really good at it.”

In other words, developing fluency in a new medium might be more labor-intensive than sticking to grunts and gestures; but once everybody gets going, it opens up the process of exchanging information to new levels of complexity and understanding.

The new opportunities inherent to online education come with new challenges, particularly when it comes to enforcing integrity rules. Hence the next question: Does online education enable cheating?

Philip D. Long, a professor of innovation in educational technology at the University of Queensland, in Australia, suggested many issues that endanger the integrity of online learning, such as assessing individual contributions to group projects, are not unique to online education.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology (including distance education) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads about asynchronous learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Bob Jensen's threads about the dark side of education technology and distance education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm


Smile! You're on Candid Class Camera!
"Nudity, Pets, Babies, and Other Adventures in Synchronous Online Learning," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 20, 2011 ---
Click Here
 http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/nudity-pets-babies-and-other-adventures-in-synchronous-online-learning/33846?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The University of Southern California places a premium on synchronous online education. Students fire up their Webcams and participate in live virtual classes.

But those live video feeds are opening a debate about classroom decorum, pushing the university to create new guidelines for “Netiquette.”

Barking dogs, wailing babies, a naked spouse—all have made cameo appearances in USC online classes, said Jade Winn, head of library services for USC’s education and social work schools, during a talk about online education at the Educause conference here.

Ms. Winn recalled one pajama-clad student who rolled over in bed, turned on a Webcam, and tried to attend class lying on a pillow. Another distraction: students crunching bowls of cereal.

“It’s just a whole level of being in someone’s home, that you don’t take into consideration,” Ms. Winn said in an interview after her talk.

The university plans to start taking it into consideration with a new Netiquette guide. The goal is to spell out up front what USC won’t tolerate. A spouse parading naked behind a student clearly isn’t kosher—but where else do you draw the line?

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads about the dark side of education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm


Death of an Artificial Intelligence Pioneer from Stanford University Who Spoke With a LISP
John McCarthy, a Pioneer in the Study of Artificial Intelligence, Dies," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/john-mccarthy-a-pioneer-in-the-study-of-artificial-intelligence-dies/37454?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

John McCarthy, a computer scientist long associated with Stanford University and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, died on Sunday, according to news reports and Tweets from the Stanford School of Engineering. He was 84.

Mr. McCarthy invented the programming language Lisp and was responsible for coining the term “artificial intelligence,” in a proposal for a conference on the topic at Dartmouth College in 1956. He received the A.M. Turing Award, given by the Association for Computing Machinery, in 1971 for his contributions to the field.

Mr. McCarthy earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1951 and became a full professor at Stanford in 1962. He retired in 2000 and had held emeritus status since then. He also held appointments at Princeton, Dartmouth, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

 


Have we overvalued science (STEM) degrees?

"High Demand for Science Graduates Enables Them to Pick Their Jobs, Report Says," by Paul Basken, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 20. 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/High-Demand-for-Science/129472/

A couple of years ago, a pair of researchers at Georgetown University and Rutgers University concluded that, contrary to widespread perception, the United States produces plenty of scientists and engineers.

The problem, wrote Harold Salzman of Rutgers and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown, is that fewer than half of all college graduates in science and engineering actually take jobs in those fields. So instead of pressing colleges to produce more science graduates, they wrote, the country needed only to persuade new graduates to take the right jobs.

A study released on Wednesday by another Georgetown research team suggests, however, that lot of persuasion may be necessary.

Among its findings, the study, from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, shows that science and engineering graduates enjoy high demand in a variety of fields, with a bachelor's degree in a science major commanding a greater salary than a master's degree in a nonscience major.

And, the new report says, English-speaking science graduates are much less likely than foreign-born science graduates to take a job in a traditional science career, which American graduates often view as too socially isolating.

"It sort of fits the stereotype, frankly," said the report's lead author, Anthony P. Carnevale, a research professor at Georgetown who serves as director of the Center on Education and the Workforce.

In recent months, the center has also issued reports that analyzed students' future earnings based on their undergraduate majors, and that tied lifetime earnings as much to students' choice of occupation as to their degrees.

The 2009 study by Mr. Salzman, a professor of public policy on Rutgers's New Brunswick campus, and Mr. Lowell, director of policy studies at Georgetown's Institute for the Study of International Migration, used 30 years of federal job data to show that American colleges produce far more talented graduates in the sciences than is required by the industry for which they've been specifically trained. But there is a labor shortfall, the professors said, because so many science graduates take jobs in areas such as sales, marketing, and health care.

The training and expertise of science graduates give them that flexibility, Mr. Carnevale found in his study. Sixty-five percent of students earning bachelor's degrees in science or engineering fields earn more than master's-degree holders in nonscience fields do, the report says. And 47 percent of bachelor's-degree holders in science fields earn more than do those holding doctorates in other fields.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This article begs some questions.

  1. If "science" is such a hot undergraduate degree, why do other studies conclude that for students not going on to graduate or professional schools, most science undergraduate degrees are "useless?" And why would some major universities be contemplating dropping physics as an undergraduate major due to lack of students electing to major in physics?

    Answer
    I think Salzman and Lowell confound engineering with science, thereby making science degrees more attractive than undergraduates perceive them to be as majors.

    "Texas May Cut Almost Half of Undergrad Physics Programs," Inside Higher Ed, September 27, 2011 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/27/qt#271341


    Note that "useless" in context means an oversupply of graduates relative to job opportunities in a discipline. The jobs themselves may be high paying, but 300 may apply for a single opening such that the 299 that got turned away wish they'd majored in some other discipline.
    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

  2. There are more opportunities for those that go on to earn their PhD degrees in science, but even here opportunities are limited. When a college gets a tenure track opening in science it will probably get hundreds of highly qualified PhD applicants, including those who earned their doctorates at very prestigious universities like Cal Tech or MIT. More scientists will go into industry, but even here there is not a shortage of supply like there is in some engineering specialties and medicine. This is why some undergraduates choose to go on to professional programs like medical, law, business and education graduate programs.
     
  3. Even though there are opportunities in industry for both science and engineering graduates, some choose professional undergraduate degrees like premed, prelaw, accounting, finance, marketing, and management because they view these degrees as having faster tracks to high paying medical doctor careers or managerial jobs and partnerships in corporations, accounting firms, and law firms.
     
  4. To compete in the global economy where science and engineering specialists are prized, the U.S. job market does not place a high enough premium on opportunities in those disciplines to attract many of the brightest and best who opt for alternatives like those mentioned above. The Salzman and Lowell study outcomes suggests this by noting that science and engineering undergraduates often track into nonscientific careers.

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

 


Library of Online Technology Articles --- http://www.techcast.org/Library.aspx

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on tools and tricks of the trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

"With New Google Docs Presentations, Why Use PowerPoint?" by Jon Mitchell, ReadWriteWeb, October 18, 2011 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/with_new_google_docs_presentations_why_use_powerpo.php

Google Docs takes another bite out of expensive Microsoft Office software today with a complete do-over of Presentations. Google Docs slideshows can now be edited live and simultaneously with a team. It enables viewing of revision history, so any team member can go back and see changes made by others. The update also features live chat alongside the editing tools.

In addition to the collaboration features, Docs has added new transitions, animations and themes, with which PowerPoint users have been fluffing up their posts for years. The new features are only supported on modern browsers.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
One of the strongest statements in favor of using Google Docs for interactive accounting distance education came from Amy Dunbar ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#GoogleApps

Jensen Question
What presentation software preceded PowerPoint?
My guess is that you don't remember the various presentation software that is now defunct for one reason or another because of Microsoft.

Answers go way back to the Jensen and Sandlin book of 1994 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/215ach04.pdf

 

"Business Degrees Skyrocket in Popularity in Asia," FINS Asia-Pacific, October 7, 2011 --- Click Here
http://asia-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SBB0001424053111903285704576560832111849732/Business-Degrees-Skyrocket-in-Popularity-in-Asia

 


Hi Barry, Dave, and others interested in blogging history,
(I hope Roger Debreceny reads this posting)


There's a country song lyric that goes something like this:
"I was country when country wasn't cool"


The term "blog" emerged by dropping the first two letters from what started as the term "Weblog" or "We blog"
I can honestly say:
"I was 'We blog' when 'We blog' wasn't cool"


The longest serving Weblog/Blog in accounting is my New Bookmarks "blog" that dates back to before 1998 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookurl.htm


To be honest I cannot recall when New Bookmarks commenced as an email service, and I no longer have any record of my New Bookmarks "Blog Postings" before 1998. Those early 1994 or 1995 "Blog Postings" on the AECM were mostly about education technology, especially my work and the work of Barry Rice in HyperGraphics and later ToolBooks. Barry Rice also posted emails about his use of HyperGraphics Response Pads in his enormous lecture halls.


The term "Weblog" commenced in 1997, although I don't think I heard the term used until around 1999.
Weblog History --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog 

 

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.


In the very early days of the AECM I sometimes strayed a bit too far off the accounting-topic path. I recall being chewed out royally by Barry because I posted a link to the early history of commodes. "What does that have to do with accounting?" Barry asked. In reality I think commodes are where a lot of accounting theory and research should be flushed!


An early international accounting education "blog" was called AccountingEducation.com.. I think this was commenced by Roger Debreceny when he was still living in either New Zealand or Australia. AE still is a great international accounting blogging service. It's a commercial site with many free services ---
http://accountingeducation.com/


Perhaps Roger can fill us in more about the history of AccountingEducation.com which in email form might have even preceded my New Bookmarks in 1996. I cannot find a database of the AE archive of postings from AE's early years.


Is there an archive Roger?


Petrea Sandlin and I wrote an early history of education technology in 1995 that was updated in 1997 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245cont.htm
This included a survey of accounting education programs back when there were almost no applications of education technology in accounting education programs.


Respectfully,
Bob Jensen

Financial Education:  Publisher of The Business School Daily and Financial Education Daily --- http://paper.li/~/publisher/229148
About Financial Education --- http://paper.li/introduction.html

The Financial Education Daily published by Financial Education (131 news spotters today, October 19, 2011) ---
http://paper.li/businessschools
This has a new free subscription service (I subscribed this morning)

Here's a good pickup line at Carnegie-Mellon University
"Are you aware that your PowerPoint is showing?"

Jensen Comment
Even the Presbyterians might approve of mini-skirts used for OmniTouch purposes!

"OmniTouch: a Wearable Projection System," Financial Education Daily, October 19, 2011 linked to the following site at Carnegie-Mellon University ---
http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/computing/2011/fall/omnitouch.shtml
 

OmniTouch, a wearable projection system developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research, enables users to turn pads of paper, walls or even their own hands, arms and legs into graphical, interactive surfaces.

In other words, there will be no need to find that pen you keep misplacing — or even to dig your smartphone out of your pocket to record a note.

The system employs a depth-sensing camera, similar to the Microsoft Kinect, to track the user's fingers on everyday surfaces.

This allows users to control interactive applications by tapping or dragging their fingers, much as they would with touchscreens found on smartphones or tablet computers.

The projector can superimpose keyboards, keypads and other controls onto any surface, automatically adjusting for the surface's shape and orientation to minimize distortion of the projected images.

"It's conceivable that anything you can do on today's mobile devices, you will be able to do on your hand using OmniTouch," said Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mello
n's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

The palm of the hand could be used as a phone keypad, or as a tablet for jotting down brief notes. Maps projected onto a wall could be panned and zoomed with the same finger motions that work with a conventional multitouch screen.

Harrison was an intern at Microsoft Research when he developed OmniTouch in collaboration with Microsoft Research's Hrvoje Benko and Andrew D. Wilson. Harrison is describing the technology on Wed., Oct. 19, at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in Santa Barbara, Calif.

A video demonstrating OmniTouch and additional downloadable media are available at: http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/OmniTouch

The OmniTouch device includes a short-range depth camera and laser pico-projector and is mounted on a user's shoulder. But Harrison said the device ultimately could be the size of a deck of cards, or even a matchbox, so that it could fit in a pocket, be easily wearable, or be integrated into future handheld devices.

"With OmniTouch, we wanted to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides," said Benko, a researcher in Microsoft Research's Adaptive Systems and Interaction group.

"We see this work as an evolutionary step in a larger effort at Microsoft Research to investigate the unconventional use of touch and gesture in devices to extend our vision of ubiquitous computing even further. Being able to collaborate openly with academics and researchers like Chris on such work is critical to our organization's ability to do great research — and to advancing the state of the art of computer user interfaces in general."

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on Invisible Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Nanotechnology, and Microsoft.Net ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ubiquit.htm


"New Digital Tools Let Professors Tailor Their Own Textbooks for Under $20 And that's just one option, along with mix-and-match Web sites from big publishers and libraries of open-source content," by Alex Campbell, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 8, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/New-Digital-Tools-Let/129309/

Bob Jensen's threads on free lectures, courses, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Jensen Comment

I'm in sympathy with the protests of outrageous executive compensation that rewards failure as well as success. But I'm not in sympathy with protesters who blame the real estate crash on the private sector. In reality, the real estate bubble and subsequent crash lies at the feet of bad government policy dating back to Bill Clinton's presidency that created opportunities for mortgage fraudsters on Main Street rather than Wall Street:

Fannies' butt was being screwed on Main Street rather than Wall Street because of government policies forced on Fannie Mae and the smaller Freddie Mack.

Bob Jensen

 

"CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About... ," by Henry Blodget, Business Insider, October 12, 2011 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10

The "Occupy Wall Street" protests are gaining momentum, having spread from a small park in New York to marches to other cities across the country.

So far, the protests seem fueled by a collective sense that things in our economy are not fair or right.  But the protesters have not done a good job of focusing their complaints—and thus have been skewered as malcontents who don't know what they stand for or want.

(An early list of "grievances" included some legitimate beefs, but was otherwise just a vague attack on "corporations." Given that these are the same corporations that employ more than 100 million Americans and make the products we all use every day, this broadside did not resonate with most Americans).

So, what are the protesters so upset about, really?

Do they have legitimate gripes?

To answer the latter question first, yes, they have very legitimate gripes.

And if America cannot figure out a way to address these gripes, the country will likely become increasingly "de-stabilized," as sociologists might say. And in that scenario, the current protests will likely be only the beginning.

The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation's history, and unemployment has reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression. And, at the same time, corporate profits are at a record high.

In other words, in the never-ending tug-of-war between "labor" and "capital," there has rarely—if ever—been a time when "capital" was so clearly winning.

The CHARTS (slide show) are at ---- Click Here
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10#lets-start-with-the-obvious-unemployment-three-years-after-the-financial-crisis-the-unemployment-rate-is-still-at-the-highest-level-since-the-great-depression-except-for-a-brief-blip-in-the-early-1980s-1

Jensen Comment
It would not be so bad if corporate executives and bankers really earned their substantial incomes.

But in reality, these outrageous executive pay packages reward failure almost as much as success.

Quotations from http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
John Kenneth Galbraith --- Click Here

If you aren’t (cynical) now, you will by the time you finish the new Bebchuk and Fried paper on executive compensation.  They paint a fairly gloomy picture of managers exerting their power to “extract rents and to camouflage the extent of their rent extraction.”  Rather than designed to solve agency cost problems, the paper makes the case that executive pay can by an agency cost in and of itself.  Let’s hope things aren’t this bad. 
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=364220

They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings.
Steal a little and they throw you in jail,
Steal a lot and they make you king.
There's only one step down from here, baby,
It's called the land of permanent bliss.
What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?

Lyrics of a Bob Dylan song forwarded by Damian Gadal [DGADAL@CI.SANTA-BARBARA.CA.US

Bankers bet with their bank's capital, not their own. If the bet goes right, they get a huge bonus; if it misfires, that's the shareholders' problem.
Sebastian Mallaby. Council on Foreign Relations, as quoted by Avital Louria Hahn, "Missing:  How Poor Risk-Management Techniques Contributed to the Subprime Mess," CFO Magazine, March 2008, Page 53 --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10755469/c_10788146?f=magazine_featured
Now that the Fed is going to bail out these crooks with taxpayer funds makes it all the worse.
Bob Jensen's "Rotten to the Core" threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

That some bankers have ended up in prison is not a matter of scandal, but what is outrageous is the fact that all the others are free.
Honoré de Balzac

I’d been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk. One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard. Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel’s shoe-polishing machine and carried it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained. . . . By the time I arrived on Wall Street in 1999, the link between derivatives and the real world had broken down. Instead of being used to reduce risk, 95 per cent of their use was speculation - a polite term for gambling. And leveraging - which means taking a large amount of risk for a small amount of money. So while derivatives, and the financial industry more broadly, had started out serving industry, by the late 1990s the situation had reversed. The Market had become a near-religious force in our culture; industry, society, and politicians all bowed down to it. It was pretty clear what The Market didn’t like. It didn’t like being closely watched. It didn’t like rules that governed its behaviour. It didn’t like goods produced in First-World countries or workers who made high wages, with the notable exception of financial sector employees. This last point bothered me especially.
Philipp Meyer, American Rust (Simon & Schuster, 2009) --- http://search.barnesandnoble.com/American-Rust/Philipp-Meyer/e/9780385527514/?itm=1
American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all - Americas, World - The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-excess--a-wall-street-trader-tells-all-1674614.html 
Jensen Comment
This book reads pretty much like an update on the derivatives scandals featured by Frank Partnoy covering the Roaring 1990s before the dot.com scandals broke. There were of course other insiders writing about these scandals as well --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
It would seem that bankers and investment bankers do not learn from their own mistake. The main cause of the scandals is always pay for performance schemes run amuck.
The End of Investment Banking --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#InvestmentBanking

 


The total return of the S&P 500 index fell by nearly 40% last year, the second-worst performance by America’s stockmarket since 1825 --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/us-stockmarket-returns-since-1825/

But Wall Street's pay packages in 2009 are shooting for all time highs --- Click Here


Bonuses for What?
The only guy to make almost a $100 Million dollars at GE is the CEO who destroyed shareholder value by nearly 50% in slightly less than a decade

"GE has been an investor disaster under Jeff Immelt," MarketWatch, March 8, 2010 ---
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ge-has-been-an-investor-disaster-under-jeff-immelt-2010-03-08

When things go well, chief executives of major companies rack up hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions, on their stock allotments and options.

It's always justified on the grounds that they've created lots of shareholder value. But what happens when things go badly?

For one example, take a look at General Electric Co. /quotes/comstock/13*!ge/quotes/nls/ge (GE 16.27, +0.04, +0.22%) , one of America's biggest and most important companies. It just revealed its latest annual glimpse inside the executive swag bag.

By any measure of shareholder value, GE has been a disaster under Jeffrey Immelt. Investors haven't made a nickel since he took the helm as chairman and chief executive nine years ago. In fact, they've lost tens of billions of dollars.

The stock, which was $40 and change when Immelt took over, has collapsed to around $16. Even if you include dividends, investors are still down about 40%. In real post-inflation terms, stockholders have lost about half their money.

So it may come as a shock to discover that during that same period, the 54-year old chief executive has racked up around $90 million in salary, cash and pension benefits.

GE is quick to point out that Immelt skipped his $5.8 million cash bonus in 2009 for the second year in a row, because business did so badly. And so he did.

Yet this apparent sacrifice has to viewed in context. Immelt still took home a "base salary" of $3.3 million and a total compensation of $9.9 million.

His compensation in the previous two years was $14.3 million and $9.3 million. That included everything from salary to stock awards, pension benefits and other perks.

Too often, the media just look at each year's pay in isolation. I decided to go back and take the longer view.

Since succeeding Jack Welch in 2001, Immelt has been paid a total of $28.2 million in salary and another $28.6 million in cash bonuses, for total payments of $56.8 million. That's over nine years, and in addition to all his stock- and option-grant entitlements.

It doesn't end there. Along with all his cash payments, Immelt also has accumulated a remarkable pension fund worth $32 million. That would be enough to provide, say, a 60-year-old retiree with a lifetime income of $192,000 a month.

Yes, Jeff Immelt has been at the company for 27 years, and some of this pension was accumulated in his early years rising up the ladder. But this isn't just his regular company pension. Nearly all of this is in the high-hat plan that's only available to senior GE executives.

Immelt's personal use of company jets -- I repeat, his personal use for vacations, weekend getaways and so on -- cost GE stockholders another $201,335 last year. (It's something shareholders can think about when they stand in line to take off their shoes at JFK -- if they're not lining up at the Port Authority for a bus.)


"A Dangerous Pattern: Rewarding Failure," by Ron Kensas, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 9, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/ashkenas/2010/03/a-dangerous-pattern-rewarding.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Over the past few months there has been growing anger and frustration about outsized Wall Street bonuses awarded by institutions that were rescued by taxpayer funds. At the core of this anger is the feeling that the pursuit of big payoffs caused bankers to develop complex products and take big risks which ultimately caused the financial system to crash — and if this dynamic is not curbed, it will happen again. At the same time, there is also a feeling, reinforced by President Obama, that Wall Street bankers have not really been held accountable for their risky actions and, in fact, are being unduly rewarded while everyone else continues to suffer.

Unfortunately, the focus on Wall Street masks a more dangerous pattern of rewarding failure that is deeply embedded in the highest levels of corporate and governmental culture. For example, President Obama's point person for reforming Wall Street is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. But somehow Geithner himself has not been held accountable for the financial crisis. This is despite the fact that as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Geithner was responsible for the supervision of Wall Street banks. His reward for allowing these banks to create unsustainable balance sheets: He was made Treasury Secretary.

Similarly Geithner's boss in the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, was not held accountable for the interest rate and regulatory policies that some say caused the crisis. Instead, he was confirmed for a second term by a wide margin in the Senate. And to complete the failure trifecta, Lawrence Summers, who supported many of the policies that caused the financial crisis and resigned from his position as President of Harvard after making unfortunate statements about the capabilities of women, was given a senior role as a White House economic policy advisor.

But this culture of rewarding failure is not limited to the highest levels of government. Virtually every senior corporate leader of a failed institution walks away with millions of dollars. Many move on to other senior corporate jobs or board positions. Take Robert Nardelli as an example. After not getting the top job at GE in 2001, Nardelli became the CEO of Home Depot where he made a series of strategic missteps and displayed an arrogance that alienated employees and customers. After being ousted from that job (with millions of dollars) he was hired by Cerberus to turn around Chrysler — another failure which ultimately resulted in its acquisition by Fiat. And while thousands of Chrysler employees and dealers lost their jobs and their incomes, again Nardelli walked away with his fortune intact and enhanced.

None of this is to blame Geithner, Bernanke, Summers or Nardelli. The point of this argument is that at the highest levels of government and corporations, we have accepted a culture of rewarding failure. That is why perhaps the best job in America is to be a failed CEO. You receive millions in severance and are once more given opportunities to either try it again, or serve on a board of directors where you can again escape accountability for failure. In fact, while President Obama calls for "clawbacks" of banker's bonuses, nobody seems to be calling for directors to return the compensation that they received for poorly "supervising" financial institutions and other corporations that struggle or fail.

Steve Kerr, former chief learning officer of GE and Goldman Sachs, notes that the biggest problem with compensation is what he calls "asking for A while rewarding B." If we are serious about asking for excellent performance, then we have to stop rewarding failure. It's a simple equation — and until we get it right, the President's calls for greater accountability will have a hollow ring.

What do you think?

"Five Ways to Heal American Capitalism," by Roger Marti, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 3, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/healing_american_capitalism_to.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous executive compensation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation


Question
Do big bonuses lead to worse performance?

"Does Bigger Bonus Equal Worse Performance? Around the turn of every year, bankers can think of only one thing: the size of their bonuses," by Dan Ariely, Wall Street Technology, June 18, 2010 ---
http://wallstreetandtech.com/career-management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225700612&cid=nl_wallstreettech_daily
Thanks Jagdish!

Around the turn of every year, bankers can think of only one thing: the size of their bonuses.

Even beyond bonus season, they run different scenarios and assumptions, trying to calculate their number.

This distracts them so much that the bigger the bonus at stake, the worse the performance, according to behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who lays out his theory in his new book "The Upside of Irrationality" (HarperCollins, $27.99).

"For a long time we trained bankers to think they are the masters of the universe, have unique skills and deserve to be paid these amounts," said Ariely, who also wrote the New York Times bestseller "Predictably Irrational."

"It is going to be hard to convince them that they don't really have unique skills and that the amount they've been paid for the past years is too much."

Ariely's findings come as regulators try to rein in Wall Street's bonus culture after the 2008 financial collapse. The financial industry argues it needs to pay large bonuses to attract and motivate its top employees.

In an experiment in India, Ariely measured the impact of different bonuses on how participants did in a number of tasks that required creativity, concentration and problem-solving.

One of the tasks was Labyrinth, where the participants had to move a small steel ball through a maze avoiding holes. Ariely describes a man he identified as Anoopum, who stood to win the biggest bonus, staring at the steel ball as if it were prey.

"This is very, very important," Anoopum mumbled to himself. "I must succeed." But under the gun, Anoopum's hands trembled uncontrollably, and he failed time after time.

A large bonus was equal to five months of their regular pay, a medium-sized bonus was equivalent to about two weeks pay and a small bonus was a day's pay.

There was little difference in the performance of those receiving the small and medium-sized bonuses, while recipients of large bonuses performed worst.

SHOCK TREATMENT

More than a century ago, an experiment with rats in a maze rigged with electric shocks came to a similar conclusion. Every day, the rats had to learn how to navigate a new maze safely.

When the electric shocks were low, the rats had little incentive to avoid them. At medium intensity they learned their environment more quickly.

But when the shock intensity was very high, it seemed the rats could not focus on anything other than the fear of the shock.

This may provide lessons for regulators who want to change Wall Street's bonus culture, Ariely said. Paying no bonus or smaller bonuses could help fix skewed incentives without loss of talent.

"The reality is, a lot of places are able to attract great quality people without paying them what bankers are paid," Ariely said. "Do you think bankers are inherently smarter than other people? I don't." (Reporting by Kristina Cooke; Editing by Daniel Trotta)

Continued at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation

Rotten to the Core ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Jensen Comment
I'm in sympathy with the protests of outrageous executive compensation that rewards failure as well as success. But I'm not in sympathy with protesters who blame the real estate crash on the private sector. In reality, the real estate bubble and subsequent crash lies at the feet of bad government policy dating back to Bill Clinton's presidency that created opportunities for mortgage fraudsters on Main Street rather than Wall Street:

Fannies' butt was being screwed on Main Street rather than Wall Street because of government policies forced on Fannie Mae and the smaller Freddie Mack.

"Wall Street's Gullible Occupiers The protesters have been sold a bill of goods. Reckless government policies, not private greed, brought about the housing bubble and resulting financial crisis," by Peter J. Wallison, The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203633104576623083437396142.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

There is no mystery where the Occupy Wall Street movement came from: It is an offspring of the same false narrative about the causes of the financial crisis that exculpated the government and brought us the Dodd-Frank Act. According to this story, the financial crisis and ensuing deep recession was caused by a reckless private sector driven by greed and insufficiently regulated. It is no wonder that people who hear this tale repeated endlessly in the media turn on Wall Street to express their frustration with the current conditions in the economy.

Their anger should be directed at those who developed and supported the federal government's housing policies that were responsible for the financial crisis.

Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007.

It is certainly possible to find prime borrowers among people with incomes below the median. But when more than half of the mortgages Fannie and Freddie were required to buy were required to have that characteristic, these two government-sponsored enterprises had to significantly reduce their underwriting standards.

Fannie and Freddie were not the only government-backed or government-controlled organizations that were enlisted in this process. The Federal Housing Administration was competing with Fannie and Freddie for the same mortgages. And thanks to rules adopted in 1995 under the Community Reinvestment Act, regulated banks as well as savings and loan associations had to make a certain number of loans to borrowers who were at or below 80% of the median income in the areas they served.

Research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae (now a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute) has shown that 27 million loans—half of all mortgages in the U.S.—were subprime or otherwise weak by 2008. That is, the loans were made to borrowers with blemished credit, or were loans with no or low down payments, no documentation, or required only interest payments.

Of these, over 70% were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie or some other government agency or government-regulated institution. Thus it is clear where the demand for these deficient mortgages came from.

The huge government investment in subprime mortgages achieved its purpose. Home ownership in the U.S. increased to 69% from 65% (where it had been for 30 years). But it also led to the biggest housing bubble in American history. This bubble, which lasted from 1997 to 2007, also created a huge private market for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) based on pools of subprime loans.

As housing bubbles grow, rising prices suppress delinquencies and defaults. People who could not meet their mortgage obligations could refinance or sell, because their houses were now worth more.

Accordingly, by the mid-2000s, investors had begun to notice that securities based on subprime mortgages were producing the high yields, but not showing the large number of defaults, that are usually associated with subprime loans. This triggered strong investor demand for these securities, causing the growth of the first significant private market for MBS based on subprime and other risky mortgages.

By 2008, Mr. Pinto has shown, this market consisted of about 7.8 million subprime loans, somewhat less than one-third of the 27 million that were then outstanding. The private financial sector must certainly share some blame for the financial crisis, but it cannot fairly be accused of causing that crisis when only a small minority of subprime and other risky mortgages outstanding in 2008 were the result of that private activity.

When the bubble deflated in 2007, an unprecedented number of weak mortgages went into default, driving down housing prices throughout the U.S. and throwing Fannie and Freddie into insolvency. Seeing these sudden losses, investors fled from the market for privately issued MBS, and mark-to-market accounting required banks and others to write down the value of their mortgage-backed assets to the distress levels in a market that now had few buyers. This raised questions about the solvency and liquidity of the largest financial institutions and began a period of great investor anxiety.

The government's rescue of Bear Stearns in March 2008 temporarily calmed the market. But it created significant moral hazard: Market participants were led to believe that the government would rescue all large financial institutions. When Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail in September, investors panicked. They withdrew their funds from the institutions that held large amounts of privately issued MBS, causing banks and others—such as investment banks, finance companies and insurers—to hoard cash against the risk of further withdrawals. Their refusal to lend to one another in these conditions froze credit markets, bringing on what we now call the financial crisis.

Continued in article

Causes of the Bubble ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Causes


The Pathetic Nobel Prize in Economics
You must watch this video to the end because Peter Schiff's commentaries are way too long
The video really speaks for itself without Peter's sarcasm
Peter Schiff by the way called the 2007-2008 economic meltdown before it really happened
Video:  How to silence Nobel Prize winning economists: Ask them about the economy
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFdnA5UNmVw&feature=feedu

October 17, 2011 reply from Jagdish Gangolly

Bob,

This is pathetic. The Nobel committee ought to be red-faced. In my humble opinion, this was inevitable. Perhaps starting such a prestigious prize in an immature discipline was a bad idea. It would have made sense to have a prize for social sciences in general so that they did not have to reach bottom of the barrel to grant prizes.

Feynman once called economics a "cargo-cult science" in that, filled with complicated mathematical mumbo-jumbo that, to the uninitiated, it looked like Physics but had nothing to do with the real world.

The great geneticist JBS Haldane once said that in science, an ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument. Feynman, on the other hand, said that one clear concept is worth more than a thousand pages of mathematics. Economists would do well to pay heed to both. They also need to pay heed to what some one described as the Feynman Principle: Use no more math than necessary.

Jagdish --
Jagdish S. Gangolly
Department of Informatics College of Computing & Information
State University of New York at Albany Harriman Campus,
Building 7A, Suite 220 Albany, NY 12222
Phone: 518-956-8251, Fax: 518-956-8247

 

"Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics," by Ira Basen, Globe and Mail, October 15, 2011 ---
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/economics-has-met-the-enemy-and-it-is-economics/article2202027/page1/ 
Thank you Jerry Trites for the heads up.

After Thomas Sargent learned on Monday morning that he and colleague Christopher Sims had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2011, the 68-year-old New York University professor struck an aw-shucks tone with an interviewer from the official Nobel website: “We're just bookish types that look at numbers and try to figure out what's going on.”

But no one who'd followed Prof. Sargent's long, distinguished career would have been fooled by his attempt at modesty. He'd won for his part in developing one of economists' main models of cause and effect: How can we expect people to respond to changes in prices, for example, or interest rates? According to the laureates' theories, they'll do whatever's most beneficial to them, and they'll do it every time. They don't need governments to instruct them; they figure it out for themselves. Economists call this the “rational expectations” model. And it's not just an abstraction: Bankers and policy-makers apply these formulae in the real world, so bad models lead to bad policy.

Which is perhaps why, by the end of that interview on Monday, Prof. Sargent was adopting a more realistic tone: “We experiment with our models,” he explained, “before we wreck the world.”

Rational-expectations theory and its corollary, the efficient-market hypothesis, have been central to mainstream economics for more than 40 years. And while they may not have “wrecked the world,” some critics argue these models have blinded economists to reality: Certain the universe was unfolding as it should, they failed both to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008 and to chart an effective path to recovery.

The economic crisis has produced a crisis in the study of economics – a growing realization that if the field is going to offer meaningful solutions, greater attention must be paid to what is happening in university lecture halls and seminar rooms.

While the protesters occupying Wall Street are not carrying signs denouncing rational-expectations and efficient-market modelling, perhaps they should be.

They wouldn't be the first young dissenters to call economics to account. In June of 2000, a small group of elite graduate students at some of France's most prestigious universities declared war on the economic establishment. This was an unlikely group of student radicals, whose degrees could be expected to lead them to lucrative careers in finance, business or government if they didn't rock the boat. Instead, they protested – not about tuition or workloads, but that too much of what they studied bore no relation to what was happening outside the classroom walls.

They launched an online petition demanding greater realism in economics teaching, less reliance on mathematics “as an end in itself” and more space for approaches beyond the dominant neoclassical model, including input from other disciplines, such as psychology, history and sociology. Their conclusion was that economics had become an “autistic science,” lost in “imaginary worlds.” They called their movement Autisme-economie.

The students' timing is notable: It was the spring of 2000, when the world was still basking in the glow of “the Great Moderation,” when for most of a decade Western economies had been enjoying a prolonged period of moderate but fairly steady growth.

Some economists were daring to think the unthinkable – that their understanding of how advanced capitalist economies worked had become so sophisticated that they might finally have succeeded in smoothing out the destructive gyrations of capitalism's boom-and-bust cycle. (“The central problem of depression prevention has been solved,” declared another Nobel laureate, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, in 2003 – five years before the greatest economic collapse in more than half a century.)

The students' petition sparked a lively debate. The French minister of education established a committee on economic education. Economics students across Europe and North America began meeting and circulating petitions of their own, even as defenders of the status quo denounced the movement as a Trotskyite conspiracy. By September, the first issue of the Post-Autistic Economic Newsletter was published in Britain.

As The Independent summarized the students' message: “If there is a daily prayer for the global economy, it should be, ‘Deliver us from abstraction.'”

It seems that entreaty went unheard through most of the discipline before the economic crisis, not to mention in the offices of hedge funds and the Stockholm Nobel selection committee. But is it ringing louder now? And how did economics become so abstract in the first place?

The great classical economists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries had no problem connecting to the real world – the Industrial Revolution had unleashed profound social and economic changes, and they were trying to make sense of what they were seeing. Yet Adam Smith, who is considered the founding father of modern economics, would have had trouble understanding the meaning of the word “economist.”

What is today known as economics arose out of two larger intellectual traditions that have since been largely abandoned. One is political economy, which is based on the simple idea that economic outcomes are often determined largely by political factors (as well as vice versa). But when political-economy courses first started appearing in Canadian universities in the 1870s, it was still viewed as a small offshoot of a far more important topic: moral philosophy.

In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith famously argued that the pursuit of enlightened self-interest by individuals and companies could benefit society as a whole. His notion of the market's “invisible hand” laid the groundwork for much of modern neoclassical and neo-liberal, laissez-faire economics. But unlike today's free marketers, Smith didn't believe that the morality of the market was appropriate for society at large. Honesty, discipline, thrift and co-operation, not consumption and unbridled self-interest, were the keys to happiness and social cohesion. Smith's vision was a capitalist economy in a society governed by non-capitalist morality.

But by the end of the 19th century, the new field of economics no longer concerned itself with moral philosophy, and less and less with political economy. What was coming to dominate was a conviction that markets could be trusted to produce the most efficient allocation of scarce resources, that individuals would always seek to maximize their utility in an economically rational way, and that all of this would ultimately lead to some kind of overall equilibrium of prices, wages, supply and demand.

Political economy was less vital because government intervention disrupted the path to equilibrium and should therefore be avoided except in exceptional circumstances. And as for morality, economics would concern itself with the behaviour of rational, self-interested, utility-maximizing Homo economicus. What he did outside the confines of the marketplace would be someone else's field of study.

As those notions took hold, a new idea emerged that would have surprised and probably horrified Adam Smith – that economics, divorced from the study of morality and politics, could be considered a science. By the beginning of the 20th century, economists were looking for theorems and models that could help to explain the universe. One historian described them as suffering from “physics envy.” Although they were dealing with the behaviour of humans, not atoms and particles, they came to believe they could accurately predict the trajectory of human decision-making in the marketplace.

In their desire to have their field be recognized as a science, economists increasingly decided to speak the language of science. From Smith's innovations through John Maynard Keynes's work in the 1930s, economics was argued in words. Now, it would go by the numbers.

Continued in a long article

October 17, 2011 message from Paul Williams

It isn't all economists who are to blame, but a particular species (the one that has infected accounting) that is the problem. A growing number of economists are expressing increasingly brazen disaffection with the "conventional wisdom." A recent book by Ha-Joon Chang, an economist at Cambridge University, titled 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, debunks 23 significant myths, all of which US accounting scholars, for the most part, believe with all of their hearts and souls. Notable for an economist he is honest enough to proclaim the unthinkable among that crowd:

"Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise. Free-market economists may want you to believe that the correct boundaries of the market can be scientifically determined, but this is incorrect. If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science."

What Chang means by this is illustrated with his example of labor markets. At one time child labor was ubiquitous so the boundary of the labor market included children (in some parts of the world, it still does). But those boundaries can be changed; they are, all of the time, by value judgments enacted via the political process. Much of the US scholarly enterprise in the US is erected on such value judgments. Harken back to Anthony Hopwood's Presidential address: Accounting is not a science, but a practice. As a practice we are free to speak about it anyway we want, including (especially including) critical examination of the myths and value judgments that it enacts in the world. (Speaking of ironies neither John Locke nor Adam Smith thought limited liability corporations were a good idea; Smith was adamantly opposed to them because they absolved people of their moral responsibilities. But Karl Marx saw in them their great potential to unleash productive possibilities. The free marketers who regard accounting as the handmaiden of corporate values are more Marxian than Smithian in their thinking about the institution of limited liability corporations.).

Paul

Mathematical Analytics in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#Analytics

October 21, Message from Bob Jensen to the AECM

Hi Jagdish,

Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics
by Tom Karier ---
 http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Capital-Forty-Years-Economics/dp/0521763266/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319104060&sr=1-1 

Years ago Paul Williams carefully explained to AECMers that the Nobel Prize in Economics was funded by the Swedish central bank rather than the Nobel Trust. However, that's probably not nearly as important as the use of prestigious term "Nobel Prize" in Sweden.

Trinity University funded travel to campus and generous stipends for presentations by all former Nobel Prize in Economics winners. Their presentations, however, were to be biographical about their lives rather than technical presentations about their discoveries. The late economist Bill Breit conceived this idea and Trinity Funded the project over the years ---
http://porterloring.com/sitemaker/sites/Porter1/obit.cgi?user=1368_WBreit6281

I think all living winners made presentations on campus except for two that are severely mentally ill --- John Nash and John Hicks. Bill actually traveled to England to search out the mysterious John Nash. Bill told this story to me one day over lunch. I doubt that it will ever be put on paper, but if it were ever written down it would read like a mystery novel about searching out a hermit.

The most memorable campus presentation to me was the presentation of Franco Modigliani.


Professor Modigliani is one of my all time heroes, and what stood out in his presentation about his life is that when doing research in the 1960s and before how much we did not pamper our research professors like we do today.

In modern times our research professors, especially in accountancy, bargain for something like having to teach two or three courses in a year (across two semesters), although one of my former students bargained for one a year some time back at UC Berkeley. When producing his best early research, Professor Modigliani was teaching nine or ten courses per year (some with repeat preps in the second semester).

What we don't properly appreciate is that sometimes teaching stimulates creative ideas, and sometimes hard sweat stimulates our Adrenalin beyond normal levels.

Respectfully,
Bob Jensen


"The Problem is Beyond Psychology: The Real World is More Random than Regression Analyses," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel G. Goldstein, SSRN, October 10, 2011 --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1941792

Abstract:     
Where the problem is not expert underestimation of randomness, but more: the tools themselves used in regression analyses and similar methods underestimate fat tails, hence the randomness in the data. We should avoid imparting psychological explanations to errors in the use of statistical methods.

Bob Jensen's discussion of black swans and fat tails is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#EMH


Question
What do the 2011 Wall Street protests have in common with the assassination of President William McKinley, Jr. in 1901?

 

October 172 2011 message from Robert Bruce Walker in New Zealand

Here are a couple of articles that relate, directly or indirectly, to the current protests against Wall Street.  I think they are vaguely related to accounting.

The first article is a straight forward account of the intellectual origins of the protest.  It is reasonably interesting but the second is far more interesting because the subject matter is identical albeit located in time about 110 years ago.  It is a discussion of the assassination of President McKinley.  I did not know this, but perhaps I should have, that the assassination was carried out by an anarchist.  The article describes McKinley’s association to big business (principally a man named Hanna).  It is the time that the Republicans became strongly associated with business and Wall Street.  The parallels are uncanny.

The article also briefly touches upon the consequence of the assassination which led to the presidency of Roosevelt (version 1).  It is Roosevelt of course that was one of the principal authors of the idea that the government should intervene to curb the excesses of capitalism.

I have been re-reading R A Bryer’s article on the origins of fair value accounting which I found on Bob’s website.  His thesis is, if can do him an injustice, that fair value accounting has its origins in the acrimonious relations between labour and business in the US at the turn of the last century.

http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Roots-of-Wall/129428/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/13/anarchists-capitalists/

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory


Perhaps Klein's overlapping roles of scholar and writer contributed to the novel's themes as well as its plot. The lesson of Something for Nothing is one of reason and restraint. The book's villains are its ideological extremists: Bill Crocker, an ex-tobacco-industry smooth talker who believes that moral principles should trump economic ones, and Randolph Carlson, a professor of sociology who teaches a course called "Threats to Liberty" and likes to accuse everyone and anyone of supporting capitalist greed. It's the diligent, truth-seeking economists we root for, even when they blunder.
"Something for Nothing'," by kacie Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, October 23, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Something-for-Nothing/129468/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

David Fox's life is not working out as planned. During his college years, the path ahead seemed clear: graduate with honors, obtain Ph.D. at a prestigious institution, accept tenure-track position in large metropolitan area.

But with his doctorate in hand, David finds himself stuck in Knittersville, N.Y., with a one-year appointment at undistinguished Kester College. He's deflated by the dismal job market, intimidated by his colleagues in the economics department, overwhelmed by his teaching duties, desperate to morph his dissertation into something publishable, and tempted by a voluptuous thesis advisee—all as he suffers the indignity of living in a town that is "not Manhattan" in every possible way.

A duller-sounding place than Knittersville never was—because it's fictional. So is Kester College, and so is David Fox, which considerably raises his chances of landing flyover interviews and getting embroiled in academic intrigue. David is the protagonist of Something for Nothing (MIT Press), a novel by Michael W. Klein, who is a professor of international economic affairs at Tufts University.

David's prospects improve when he receives an e-mail from the Center to Research Opportunities for a Spiritual Society (Cross), a right-wing organization seeking to promote scholarship that supports an evangelical-Christian agenda. Its director, Bill Crocker, is interested in publishing and publicizing a long-forgotten graduate paper of David's called "Something for Nothing." The paper shows the success of a high-school abstinence program in lowering teen-pregnancy rates and raising academic achievement.

David—who is liberal, Jewish, and no fan of abstinence—worries about the social ramifications, but not so much that he insists on a toned-down interpretation of the paper's results. After all, the benefits are sweet: With the news coverage come respect and clout, along with better chances at a tenure-track job. So, against his better judgment, he keeps his head down and mouth shut, at least until things start to unravel.

Economics and academe permeate the novel. Klein's prose reflects a scholarly attention to detail; for example, he includes e-mail correspondence from job committees and a transcript of David's ill-fated interview on a conservative radio show. Like any good economist, David weighs the costs and benefits of every choice, whether it involves his paper for Cross, his dealings with the attractive advisee, or his shirt/tie combination on the first day of class.

So how much of Klein's book is autobiographical? "I never had any of my work promoted by a think tank (right-wing or other), I was never interviewed on a right-wing talk show, and I never came close to having an affair with a student," responds the author in an e-mail. "That said, I found it easy and fun to draw on my quarter-century in academia to inform the novel—things like the anxiety facing professors before the first class of the semester, the seating patterns of students, the way professors have to self-organize their days, and the challenges of the job market."

The author is on leave from Tufts, serving as chief economist in the Office of International Affairs at the Treasury Department. Although none of his characters work in government, all are to some extent driven by politics. Their heated conflicts reflect the country's changing climate, Klein notes.

Continued in article

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


The newest Almanac of Higher Education gathers an assortment of key data about the most important trends in higher education.
The Chronicle's annual Almanac brings readers an in-depth analysis of colleges and universities with data on students, professors, administrators, institutions, and their resources. Also featured are data spotlights on all 50 states, and special reports on technology, access and equity, and the changing face of international higher education.
Item: ALM1112 .

 
Print Price :     $15.00       Print Quantity :        
Digital Price :     $7.95       Digital Quantity :        
https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=78223&cid=alm11nb
This is probably available to students and faculty in the campus library.

RFID --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID

Note in Advance
Many people who watch this video will not know what RFID stands for and how it can be used in the future to charge shoplifters for products they hide.
Actually the guy in this video is simply shopping without a cart.

Watch the video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eob532iEpqk

"A Gem from CLTA at Midwest: YouTube Videos for Class," by Julie Smith David on the AAA Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/e712dae7dc#12234

I had the pleasure of attending the Conference on Teaching and Learning (CTLA) at the Midwest Region meeting this past weekend, and one of the gems that I took away was the power of using YouTube videos in class.  Mike Meyer, from Notre Dame, encouraged us to find and share videos that would give our students a "common understanding" of business environments that they are unfamiliar with - especially if they're traditional students.

The video he shared (click on the image to see) provides a glimpse into what grocery stores might be like in the future.  And he has used it when he teaches inventory to illustrate how emerging technologies (RFID, in this case) can enhance a firm's control environment.

The session participants had a range of experiences with video, and promised to share their favorites with the rest of us.  So, for everyone who uses video in class, please click on the title above to open this post, and then enter your recommendations as comments.  I'll have them transferred over to the teaching area so everyone can find them here - and there.  And thanks in advance!

Julie

Jensen Comment
The AAA Commons is becoming a great resource for accounting researchers and teachers. If you've not already done so, consider joining the American Accounting Association and make use of the AAA Commons at least once per week!


"In Victory for Open-Education Movement, Blackboard Embraces Sharing," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19, 2011 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/in-victory-for-open-education-movement-blackboard-embraces-sharing/33776?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Professors who use Blackboard’s software have long been forced to lock their course materials in an area effectively marked, “For Registered Students Only,” while using the system. Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online.

The move may be the biggest sign yet that the idea of “open educational materials” is going mainstream, nearly 10 years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first began giving away lecture notes online. Blackboard made the change after college officials complained that the company’s software, which more than half the colleges in the country use for their online-course materials, was holding them back from trying open-education projects.

The president of Blackboard’s learning division, Ray Henderson, plans to send an e-mail to customers today that effectively modifies the company’s contract with colleges. In the old contract, colleges could have been charged extra for every additional person who viewed course materials placed on the Blackboard software platform (because license fees were set based on the number of potential users). Now that has been “liberalized” so that any outsiders who are invited to look in will not bring extra charges to a college, says Mr. Henderson. “If it’s non-revenue for you, we understand it’s going to be non-revenue for us,” he says.

Mr. Henderson said that in the past 18 to 24 months he has heard increasing requests from colleges officials to allow sharing. He said that he wanted to make the change sooner, but that it is easier for him to win the argument now that the company, which was publicly held, has been sold to a private-equity firm, Providence Equity Partners.

“This is something that is easier to do as a private company more easily than as a public company because the risk of being misunderstood by investors is less,” says Mr. Henderson. “The investor community was skeptical about that and worried” about an open policy, he says, adding that in the new ownership model, “we had to tell three people about that at Providence, who immediately got it.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Of course instructors will have to use caution when not owning some of their Bb file copyrights. For example, instructors cannot share textbook solutions openly with the world even though publishers allow sharing with students. The American Accounting Association allows free sharing of its journal articles for classroom purposes, but the AAA does not allow open sharing of its journals with the entire world.

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

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


New System-wide ideas for a student-centered university
"Building Something Different," by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, October 17, 2011 --- Click Here
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/17/bain_initiative_at_university_of_north_texas_dallas_aims_for_new_educational_model

Given the task of building a new university from the ground up, most traditional higher education leaders might enlist the help of faculty members, presidents of other universities, and members of the community.

John Ellis Price has a different team. The president of the University of North Texas System and CEO of the campus at Dallas, a 10-year-old campus that gained its independence from the system's flagship in nearby Denton in 2009, has turned to a prominent management consulting firm, Bain & Company, primarily known for working with Fortune 500 companies.

The unconventional partnership is a reflection of Price's unconventional goal. He's not trying to emulate Ivy League institutions, the University of Texas at Austin, or even his university's own flagship campus, which, like so many universities, has pursued a research-intensive path.

Instead, he wants to create a model of higher education that, he says, is more accessible, more flexible, and more student-focused. "The one thing at the forefront of everything we do is what can we do to drive down the cost of instruction and the time that it takes to complete a four-year degree while maintaining quality," Price says.

Over the next year, Price and Bain will convene a group of 10 community, business and education leaders, known as the "21st Century Commission," to help the university draft a strategic plan to grow from about 2,000 student to 16,000 by 2030. Judging by statements from Price, Bain consultants, and members of the commission, the plan is likely to include several ideas that have been discussed with increasing frequency by higher education reformers, such as an emphasis on online technology in education delivery, a restructuring of the traditional 15-week semester, and consideration of new ways of financing education.

The ideas thrown out by Price and the consultants at Bain have troubled faculty members when they were proposed at other universities, with professors arguing that such changes water down the educational experience, strip faculty of traditional rights, and place too much emphasis on what students want rather than giving them a well-rounded education.

But because UNT-Dallas is so young, and because the majority of the faculty are either assistant professors or lecturers, positions that do not come with tenure protection, public criticism of the commission has been minimal. Some faculty members have expressed concern about the direction of the institution, but they feel they have no latitude to stop the changes.

If UNT-Dallas ends up adopting these ideas, and if they prove successful, the university could influence how other institutions adapt to a changing higher education landscape. The initiative could also have ramifications for Bain, which has already shown interest in consulting with universities on administrative issues. Success in creating a new kind of university could drive other institutions to seek the firm’s assistance (or those of other firms) to delve further into university structure, including previously untouched areas such as academics, research and student life.

"We really are trying to figure out a model that can bend the curve on education costs pretty dramatically," says Mark Gottfredson, a partner in Bain's Dallas office, which will be working with the university.

Test Case

Price and Gottfredson say UNT-Dallas makes a good testing ground for new approaches. It is the first undergraduate public university situated within the city limits of Dallas. (Despite its name, the University of Texas at Dallas is located in a suburb, Richardson, Tex.) UNT-Dallas sits on a 264-acre campus in the south of the city, an area that has historically been underserved by higher education, local officials say. They believe demand exists in the area for a low-cost bachelor's degree that can be flexible with nontraditional students' schedules.

Since it began in 2000, the university has been growing at a rate of about 14 percent a year. When it reached 1,000 students in 2009, it became a full-fledged institution independent from UNT's main campus. It now runs undergraduate and graduate programs in business, education, criminal justice and applied arts and sciences.

Continued in article

Our Compassless Colleges:  What are students really not learning? ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz

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

 


The Real Rosie the Riveter Project (labor, women, feminist, gender) --- http://dlib.nyu.edu/rosie/


"Executive Overconfidence and the Slippery Slope to Financial Misreporting," Catherine Schrand, Professor of Accounting at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sarah Zechman of the accounting group at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, October 14, 2011 ---
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2011/10/14/executive-overconfidence-and-the-slippery-slope-to-financial-misreporting/

In the paper, Executive Overconfidence and the Slippery Slope to Financial Misreporting, forthcoming in the Journal of Accounting and Economics as published by Elsevier, our detailed analysis of a sample of 49 firms subject to SEC Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs) suggests two distinct explanations for the misstatements. Just over one quarter of the cases represent many of the well-publicized examples of corporate fraud including Adelphia, Enron, Healthsouth, and Tyco. The nature of the misstatements, their timing, and an analysis of the executives suggest that the activities are consistent with a strong inference of intent on the part of the respondent and consistent with the legal standards necessary to establish fraud.

However, perhaps more surprising, we find that the actions by the executives in the remaining three quarters of the cases are not consistent with the pleading standards required to establish an intent to defraud. Rather, our analysis of the 49 AAER firms suggests that optimistic bias on the part of executives can explain these AAERs. We show that the misstatement amount in the initial period of alleged misreporting is relatively small, and possibly unintentional. Subsequent period earnings realizations are poor, however, and the misstatements escalate. Using a matched sample of non-AAER firms, we show that the misreporting firms did not simply get a bad draw on earnings. Nor does it appear that weaker monitoring relative to the matched sample explains why the misreporting manager’s optimistic bias affects the financial statements.

We further examine whether the optimistic bias for the misreporting firms is associated with the character trait of overconfidence. The evidence from the analysis of the 49 AAER sample is mixed on this question. However, we find evidence of a positive association between proxies for overconfidence and the propensity for AAERs in two larger samples that use alternative measures of overconfidence. The association between overconfidence and AAERs is consistent with the slippery slope explanation in which greater optimistic bias makes it more likely that a manager is in the position that significant misreporting is an optimal choice.

An interesting question raised by the analysis is the importance of monitoring the optimistic bias of executives. Various models predict that overconfidence has desirable effects on the executive’s performance (Goel and Thakor, 2000; Gervais and Goldstein, 2007; Gervais et al., 2010). Our analysis indicates overconfidence can be associated with financial reporting concerns and prior work has documented an association between overconfidence and distorted investment and financing decisions (e.g., Malmendier and Tate, 2005 and 2008 among others). For firms who value the positive aspects of overconfidence, a plausible response is to put mechanisms in place to monitor the executive’s decision-making biases associated with this trait. This response is feasible only if the Board recognizes executive overconfidence. Our evidence indicating that the misreporting firms and matched sample of non-AAER firms have different compensation arrangements suggests that the Board is able to do so at some level. However, our corresponding analysis of monitoring does not indicate that the overconfident managers were better monitored, which explains why they were more likely to end up misreporting. The potential for monitoring to moderate the optimistic bias that characterizes executives remains an interesting open question. Is it that our analysis does not adequately capture the specific mechanisms that would control optimistic bias? Or, is the cost of better monitoring higher than the expected benefits from mitigating the risk of misreporting, which is a significant but unusual event?

The full paper is available for download at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1919729
Download it while it's free.

Bob Jensen's threads on creative accounting and earnings management are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#Manipulation

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

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm

Jensen Comment
Once again this illustrates how the IASB and FASB are overly focused on assets and liabilities without even being able to define net income on anything other than a residual leftover basis. As a result, things like unrealized fair value changes get blended in with realized operational earnings in eps and P/E ratio calculations that are the major focal points of company management and investors. This supports my previous appeal for multi-column financial statements that vary according to degree of realization and attestation by CPA auditors.


You can read about media rankings of accounting and business programs (undergraduate and graduate) at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

Rankings different somewhat as to criteria and who performs the rankings. The best-known ranking comes from US News where the rankings are based upon multiple criteria (especially research and faculty reputations) where the rankings are done by deans and other administrators. The Wall Street Journal rankings of MBA programs rely heavily upon recruiters of graduates. The Business Week rankings of undergraduate and graduate business programs rely heavily upon alumni. An the newer rankings of MBA programs in The Economist are based upon what students enrolled in programs want from those programs.

"The Top Thirty (Global MBA) Programs," The Economist, October 15, 2011, Page 73 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21532270

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE’S Tuck School of Business takes first place in The Economist’s ninth annual ranking of full-time MBA programmes. The New Hampshire school has moved up from second position last year. Virtually all of its students—who went into a wide range of industries—found work within three months of graduating. Its MBAs could expect a basic salary of $107,000, a 65% increase on their pre-degree earnings. Tuck students also graded the quality of their alumni the best in the world—an important consideration given the often-repeated claim that who you meet on an MBA programme is just as important as what you learn.

Chicago drops to second, having come top last year, while the world’s most famous school, Harvard, also drops a place to fifth. Europe’s top programme is IMD, a Swiss school, which ranks third. Though INSEAD has campuses in both France and Singapore, no purely Asian school makes our top 30. Hong Kong University, at 36th, is the highest-placed. The China Europe International Business School is the only school from the mainland to make our top 100. The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India’s sole representative, and the toughest business school in the world to get into (see article), is 78th.

Continued in article

MBA Programs at the (Expensive and Cheap) Extremes are Doing Well Whereas Those in the Middle are Struggling for Students and Placements of Graduates
"Trouble in the Middle: Is time running out for business schools that aren't quite elite," The Economist, October 15, 2011, pp. 71-72 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21532269

IN 2009, when the American economy was beset by recession, interest in MBA programmes hit a record high. No one was much surprised: applications to business schools often rise during the first years of a recession as people seek shelter from the storm. So perhaps no one should be surprised that in both succeeding years applications have fallen. That’s what prolonged doldrums do.

Yet, privately at least, some business schools are worried that a two-year decline, along with a level of applications from American students lower than it has been this century, is more than just a response to the economy. They fear that the established model of business education may be in trouble, if not for all schools, then definitely for mid-ranking American institutions offering a traditional two-year MBA. Two-thirds of schools which offer long, residential programmes saw applications drop in 2011.

Data taken from The Economist’s latest ranking of full-time MBA programmes (see article) show that an MBA from a mid-ranking school is no longer the investment it once was. In 2010 the average tuition fee charged by American institutions ranked within our top 100, but outside of the top 15, was $81,911 for the full two years. The average basic salary of those schools’ freshly-minted MBAs was $81,178 a year. Five years ago tuition at the same cohort of schools was nearly $22,000 cheaper—$60,247—while the average salary, $78,442, was barely less than today’s. This price rise comes at a time when enrolment is falling; for American mid-level schools it is down 20% over the decade.

In comparison, the schools at the ends of the spectrum look more appealing. Lower-level programmes, which harbour no ambitions to be international players and are not covered in our ranking, are seeing applications rise. They are much cheaper to attend and often offer a discount for local students. For those taking the increasingly popular part-time or online programmes, there is no reason even to leave their jobs. (Disclosure: The Economist has an online business-education business, but not one that offers an MBA.)

Elite business schools still look like a fair deal. MBA students attending a top-15 institution may be charged an average of $92,262 for their tuition, but they can expect a basic salary of $110,879 once they graduate. Payscale, a company that collects pay data, claims that graduates from Harvard’s MBA programme will earn $3.6m over a 20-year career (although it is not able to compare this with the rewards that go to equally smart cookies who haven’t bothered with an MBA).

. . .

High Costs of New and Pampered Faculty

Schools with names that send a less sexy signal, though, may be in trouble. For one thing, wages have become a huge drain on their resources. An AACSB survey of 503 American business schools found that a newly-hired academic can expect a salary of $169,000. At a mid-ranking school, salaries of $250,000 and above are common. That’s just for nine months: plenty of time for books, consulting and visiting professorships during the long summer vacation.

Another strain is that pampered faculty and high-paying students expect to be housed in posh buildings with nice gardens. Few schools enjoy the resources of Stanford, which recently opened a $345m campus. But many feel the need to splurge millions on new facilities in the hope of poaching applicants from their peers.

Continued in article

Lake Wobegone (Illusory superiority) Rankings of European Universities --- All of Them are Above Average
It's like a kids' fair where everybody earns a blue ribbon

"A New European Ranking: Prizes for All!" by Ben Wildavsky, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/a-new-european-ranking-prizes-for-all/28377

 

Bob Jensen's threads on Higher Education Controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

 


Global Executive MBA Program Rankings
"EMBA Rankings 2011," as ranked by the Financial Times, 2011 ---
http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/emba-rankings-2011

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


Videos Illustrating How to Make Videos Using Camtasia Version 7.1

October 13, 2011 message from Rick Newmark

Here are three videos that I made to show my colleagues how to use Camtasia to make a class video for when you go out of town, or to create a tutorial for your class. I figured that some of you might be interested, so here they are. Please note that these are not Richard Campbell-quality videos. I shot these quickly and without any script. I made only a couple of minor edits.

Also, please note I used Screencast-O-Matic to make the first part of Part 1 so that I could capture setting up Camtasia Recorder. Pay attention to before and after I press the Record button to see the differences between the two applications.

How to record a class using Camtasia 7

http://youtu.be/PdSsVcLBsMM Part 1 - Setting up Camtasia Recorder and recording a class video.

http://youtu.be/aqUd8kD4VM8 Part 2  - Producing your Camtasia recording for posting in BlackBoard.

http://youtu.be/4KLNlxZOleE Part 3 - Posting your video in BlackBoard.

 

FYI, In Part 1, I used the following to demonstrate different ways to use Camtasia

1.       Running virtual machines on your PC using Virtual Box

·         Apple Snow Leopard 10.6

·         Linux Ubuntu 11.04

2.       Creating a two-table query in Access 2010

3.       Demonstrating how to use Windows Journal with a Tablet PC—also applies to using the Sympodium on a classroom computer.

·         I showed how to use the REA Enterprise Ontology, t-accounts, and journal entries to explain the following

                                                               i.       The nature of accounts receivable and unearned revenue, including the duality imbalance that creates them

                                                             ii.      How to use t-accounts to design database queries to compute accounts receivable and unearned revenue.

 

Rick

----------------------------------------

Richard Newmark
Professor, School of Accounting and Computer Information Systems
Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business

2004 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Winner
University of Northern Colorado
Campus Box 128, Kepner Hall 2095D
Greeley, CO 80639
(970) 351-1213 (office)
(970) 351-1068 (fax)
http://PhDuh.com/unc

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

Note that I find the F9 toggle key very useful for pausing for periods of rest and preparation during the recording of a relatively long video.

Many of my old videos will not run in Windows 7 because Microsoft dropped an an audio codec.


"Far From Honorable," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, October 25, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/25/online-students-might-feel-less-accountable-honor-codes

Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of social belonging among online students might help universities fight another problem: cheating.

In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place primarily in a classroom.

“The more distant students are, the more disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.

While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus, said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social connections.”

Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs has given rise to a cottage industry of remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of online students as a rule.)

But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so, then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in the online environment.

They experimented with the effectiveness of honor codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students, mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14 multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of them.

The second trial involved another fully online introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code -- posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported cheating between the two groups.

In a third trial, the professors repeated the experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20 percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in which they were not.

This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference: Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.

LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest to police.

“The bottom line is that if there are opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be contained.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think universities like Trinity University that expanded their honor codes to include student courts are generally happy with the operations of those honor codes. However, Trinity has only full time students and no distance education courses.

One thing that I hated giving up was grading control. For most of my teaching career I gave F grades to students who seriously cheated in my courses. Under the revised Trinity Honor Code, instructors can no longer control the granting of F grades for cheating.

When I was a student at Stanford the Honor Code included a pledge to report cheating of other students. I think most universities have watered down this aspect of their honor codes because, in this greatly increased era of litigation, student whistle blowers can be sued big time. Universities may continue to encourage such whistle blowing, but they no longer make students sign pledges that on their honor they will be whistleblowers if they do not want to bear the risk of litigation by students they report.

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

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


"Why Do Accounting Academics Blog Less Than Other Academics?" by Tom Selling, The Accounting Onion, October 11, 2011 ---
http://accountingonion.typepad.com/theaccountingonion/2011/10/why-do-accounting-academics-blog-less-than-other-academics.html

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The phrase "blog less" has two meanings. One is that there are fewer accounting professor/student bloggers than in other disciplines. This is largely due to the fact that accounting is a smaller academic discipline than many of our brethren in humanities, mathematics, and science.

Second is that there might be comparable number of academic accounting bloggers who post less frequently than their brethren in humanities and science. At first blush this is a bit surprising to me since accounting is a dynamic discipline with many things taking place globally every day in media fraud articles, news from international and national accounting standard setting bodies, etc. It could be that we, as academic accountants, tend to rely on a small number of commercial blogs such as those of the Big Four, the AICPA, SmartPros, AccountingWeb, GoingConcern, re:TheAuditors, etc. These popular commercial blogs may reduce the need for more accounting professors to blog or to post multiple messages daily.

Many academic accountants have come to rely on blog aggregators and filters. For example, I suspect that the AECM listserv has a larger daily audience reading a larger number of AECM postings than readings of any accounting professor who blogs. Also intense debates on the AECM reveal more intense and enduring debates on issues than the commentaries at accounting professor blogging sites.

The AAA Commons is also becoming increasingly popular among accounting academics. For example, it could be that more people frequent the postings of Rick Lillie via the AAA Commons than frequent his blog. I do not, however, know this for a fact.

We also must consider the fact that social networkings (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) reduce the blogging traffic.

Be that as it may, I think there are quite a few blogging professors who have relatively small audiences. The small audiences tend to discourage new entrants into the blogging arena. For a listing of some of the academic accounting bloggers go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
There are too many for me to monitor even on a weekly basis.


We've come to expect that lawyers lie --- it's part of their job responsibilities in some instances
But it's a bit of a shock how much law schools themselves lie (until we make the connection that law schools are run by lawyers)

"Coburn, Boxer Call for Department of Education to Examine Questions of Law School Transparency," New Release from the Official Site of Senator Barbara Boxer, October 14, 2011 ---
http://boxer.senate.gov/en/press/releases/101411.cfm

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) yesterday asked the Department of Education’s Inspector General to provide information about key law school job placement, bar passage and loan debt metrics in light of serious concerns that have been raised about the accuracy and transparency of information being provided to prospective law school students.  

This letter follows repeated calls from Senator Boxer to the American Bar Association to provide stronger oversight of reporting by law schools and better access to information for students. 

In their letter, the Senators pointed to media reports that raise questions about whether the claims law schools use to lure prospective students are, in fact, accurate. They also cited reporting that questions whether law school tuition and fees are used for legal education or for unrelated purposes.  

The full text of the Senators’ letter appears below. 

October 13, 2011 

Ms. Kathleen Tighe
Inspector General
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Ave., S.W.
Washington, DC 20202-1500

To help better inform Congress as it prepares to reform the Higher Education Act, we write to request an examination of American law schools that focuses on the confluence of growing enrollments, steadily increasing tuition rates and allegedly sluggish job placement.  

Recent media stories reveal concerning challenges for students and graduates of such schools. For example, The New York Times reported on a law school that “increased the size of the class arriving in the fall of 2009 by an astounding 30 percent, even as hiring in the legal profession imploded.” The New York Times found the same school is ranked in the bottom third of all law schools in the country and has tuition and fees set at $47,800 a year but reported to prospective students median starting salaries rivaling graduates of the best schools in the nation “even though most of its graduates, in fact, find work at less than half that amount.” 

Other reports question whether or not law schools are properly disclosing their graduation rates to prospective students. Inside Higher Ed recently highlighted several pending lawsuits which “argue that students were essentially robbed of the ability to make good decisions about whether to pay tuition (and to take out student loans) by being forced to rely on incomplete and inaccurate job placement information. Specifically, the suits charge the law schools in question (and many of their peers) mix together different kinds of employment (including jobs for which a J.D. is not needed) to inflate employment rates.”  

Media exposes also reveal possible concerns about whether tuition and fees charged by law schools are used directly for legal education, or for purposes unrelated to legal education. For example, The New York Times reports “law schools toss off so much cash they are sometimes required to hand over as much as 30 percent of their revenue to universities, to subsidize less profitable fields.” The Baltimore Sun recently reported on the resignation of the Dean of the University of Baltimore (UB) Law School, who said he resigned, in part, over his frustration that the law school’s revenue was not being retained to serve students at the school. In his resignation letter, UB’s Dean noted: “The financial data [of the school] demonstrates that the amount and percentage of the law school revenue retained by the university has increased, particularly over the last two years. For the most recent academic year (AY 10-11), our tuition increase generated $1,455,650 in additional revenue. Of that amount, the School of Law budget increased by only $80,744.”  

To better understand trends related to law schools over the most recent ten-year window, we request your office provide the following information: 

1. The current enrollments, as well as the historical growth of enrollments, at American law schools – in the aggregate, and also by sector (i.e., private, public, for-profit).  

2. Current tuition and fee rates, as well as the historical growth of tuition and fees, at American law schools – in the aggregate, and also by sector (i.e., private, public, for-profit).  

3. The percentage of law school revenue generated that is retained to administer legal education, operate law school facilities, and the percentage and dollar amount used for other, non-legal educational purposes by the broader university system. If possible, please provide specific examples of what activities and expenses law school revenues are being used to support if such revenue does not support legal education directly. 

4. The amount of federal and private educational loan debt legal students carried upon graduation, again in the aggregate and across sectors. 

5. The current bar passage rates and graduation rates of students at American law schools, again in the aggregate and across sectors.  

6. The job placement rates of American law school graduates; indicating whether such jobs are full- or part-time positions, whether they require a law degree, and whether they were maintained a year after employment. 

In your final analysis, please include a description of the methodology the IG employed to acquire and analyze information for the report. Please also note any obstacles to acquiring pertinent information the agency may encounter.  

We thank you in advance for your time and attention to this matter. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions concerning this request.  

Sincerely,  

Tom A. Coburn,
M.D. United States Senator 

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

Jensen Comment
Faculty urged not to be “too choosy” in admitting new cash-cow graduate students
"Not So Fast," by Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Ed, August 29, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/08/29/essay_suggesting_faculty_members_should_be_dubious_of_drive_for_new_graduate_programs

 

Bob Jensen's threads on Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools

 


From the Scout Report on October 14, 2011

Kibin --- https://kibin.com/

Kibin is a rather interesting peer-editing review service, and it is worth a
look. Essentially, users can submit papers for review and they receive
assistance from someone in the Kibin community. Visitors can sign up to try
the service for free and they can also purchase points that can be used to
have someone edit their document. The site contains a FAQ area and more
information about the service. This service is compatible with all operating
systems.


QuickScreenShare --- http://quickscreenshare.com/

Want to share your computer screen with someone? It can be done quite simply
with QuickScreenShare. Visitors can just use the start up screen to begin,
and there's no installation required. Users can remotely control the mouse
and keyboard of the other computer, and there's even a demonstration video
here. This application is compatible with all operating systems, including
Linux

From the Scout Report on October 21, 2011

Liferea 1.7 --- http://liferea.sourceforge.net/ 

Many operating systems have news aggregators, but persons who use Linux may find fewer options. Fortunately there is Liferea, which stands for "Linux Feed Reader". The program gives users the ability to bring together their various news sources and updates into one convenient location. The Liferea website also contains an FAQ area and several screenshots. This version is compatible with all computers running Linux.


Stardock Fences 1.01.143 --- http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/index.asp

If you're looking for a way to clean up your desktop clutter, Stardock Fences is an application worth checking out. It gives users the opportunity to create shaded areas on their desktop which become movable and sizable containers for their icons. Visitors can then double click on these "fence" areas and they will fade into the background. Also, visitors can customize the color and opacity of their "fences". This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and newer

 

 


Free eBooks
"How to Download Free Ebooks With just a little searching, you can find and download free, legal ebooks for your e-reader, smartphone, or tablet," by Michael King, PC World,  Oct 15, 2011 ---
http://www.pcworld.com/article/241717/how_to_download_free_ebooks.html#tk.nl_wbx_t_crawl2

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


Education Tutorials

Library of Online Technology Articles --- http://www.techcast.org/Library.aspx

Office of Science Education: Life Works [careers, education, health] --- http://science.education.nih.gov/LifeWorks.nsf/feature/index.htm

Teaching College-Level Science and Engineering --- http://mit.edu/5.95/

Science Mentoring Research --- http://ehrweb.aaas.org/sciMentoring/index.php

Boston Science Partnership [middle school] http://www.bostonscience.org/

John Turturro Reads Italo Calvino’s Animated Fairy Tale --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/john_turturro_reads_italo_calvinos_animated_fairy_tale.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

Science Mentoring Research --- http://ehrweb.aaas.org/sciMentoring/index.php

Office of Science Education: Life Works [careers, education, health] --- http://science.education.nih.gov/LifeWorks.nsf/feature/index.htm

Science Museum: Brought to Life --- http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife.aspx

Boston Science Partnership [middle school] http://www.bostonscience.org/

Teaching Resources: Botany and Plant Pathology --- http://www.ag.purdue.edu/btny/pages/teachingresources.aspx

APSnet: Advanced Plant Pathology Resources --- http://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/advanced/Pages/default.aspx

Teaching College-Level Science and Engineering --- http://mit.edu/5.95/

The Futures Channel (Science and Engineering) --- http://www.thefutureschannel.com/index.php

Kentucky Critter Files --- http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CritterFiles/casefile/casefile.htm

Environmental Sciences & Sustainability: The NY Academy of Sciences ---
http://www.nyas.org/Topic.aspx?tid=a43f6ad6-0e70-49ce-9f03-afb7b87de3e5

Library of Online Technology Articles --- http://www.techcast.org/Library.aspx

Earth As Art 3: A Landsat Perspective --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/earthasart/Pages/default.aspx

CENtral Science (chemical and engineering news) --- http://cenblog.org/

Case Studies in Primary Health Care --- http://ocw.jhsph.edu/courses/casestudiesinphc/index.cfm

Daguerreotypes at Harvard (photography history) --- http://preserve.harvard.edu/daguerreotypes/

An Introduction to Cosmology by Sean Carroll (five lectures) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/an_introduction_to_cosmology_by_sean_carroll.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Solar Cookers International --- http://solarcooking.org/

From the Scout Report on October 21, 2011

New film takes a look at the legacy of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project
Why the Pruitt-Igoe housing project failed
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/10/american-public-housing

Pruitt-Igoe Photographs
http://tjrhino1.umsl.edu/whmc/view.php?description_get=Pruitt+Igoe

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: Journal of Architectural Education [pdf]
http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/temp/1991-bristol-pruitt-igoemyth.pdf

Living St. Louis: Wendell Pruitt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abT8jDrbQpU

William Leo Igoe
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=I000005
 


Social Science and Economics Tutorials

60 Second Adventures in Thought  (animated sequence that highlights six famous thought experiments) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/60_second_adventures_in_thought.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Some of these are stupid and funny.

Immigrants in 2010 Metropolitan America --- http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2011/1013_immigration_wilson_singer.aspx

Office of Science Education: Life Works [careers, education, health] --- http://science.education.nih.gov/LifeWorks.nsf/feature/index.htm

Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas http://www.philosophynow.org/

Marshall McLuhan on the Stupidest Debate in the History of Debating (Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/marshall_mcluhan_on_the_stupidest_debate_in_the_history_of_debating.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online --- http://www.ncecho.org/

The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925 --- http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/bookshopdoor/#1

The Real Rosie the Riveter Project (labor, women, feminist, gender) --- http://dlib.nyu.edu/rosie/

Human Rights --- http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/humanrights/

Witness (Human Rights Causes) ---  http://www.witness.org/

International Museum of Women --- http://imow.org

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

Witness (Human Rights Causes) ---  http://www.witness.org/

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


Math Tutorials

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


History Tutorials

International Museum of Women --- http://imow.org

Science Museum: Brought to Life --- http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife.aspx

Massachusetts Historical Society: Object of the Month --- http://www.masshist.org/objects/

Massachusetts Historical Society: Object of the Month --- http://www.masshist.org/objects/

Nantucket Historical Association --- http://www.nha.org/

Humanities on the Road (Videos in Pennsylvania) --- http://www.humanitiesontheroad.org/

The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925 --- http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/bookshopdoor/#1

John Turturro Reads Italo Calvino’s Animated Fairy Tale --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/john_turturro_reads_italo_calvinos_animated_fairy_tale.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Real Rosie the Riveter Project (labor, women, feminist, gender) --- http://dlib.nyu.edu/rosie/

Earth As Art 3: A Landsat Perspective --- http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/earthasart/Pages/default.aspx

The Daily Princetonian Larry DuPraz Digital Archives (media, newspapers) ---  http://theprince.princeton.edu/

Unknown No Longer: Virginia Historical Society (African American History) --- http://unknownnolonger.vahistorical.org/

The Negro Travelers' Green Book, Spring 1956 (African American History) --- http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/greenbook.html

Digital Horizons (North Dakota and Minnesota History) --- http://digitalhorizonsonline.org

Daguerreotypes at Harvard (photography history) --- http://preserve.harvard.edu/daguerreotypes/

"A History of Photography from its beginnings till the 1920s," by Robert Leggat --- http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/

History of Photography www.kbnet.co.uk/rleggat/photo  

From the Scout Report on October 14, 2011

Big Ben’s tilt now visible to the naked eye
Leaning tower of London? Big Ben is tilting
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44846729/ns/travel-news/t/leaning-tower-london-big-ben-tilting/

Big Ben leaning over: Time's up for tilting clock tower of London
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2047021/Big-Ben-leaning-Times-tilting-clock-tower-London.html

Big Ben: UK Parliament
http://www.parliament.uk/bigben

Big Ben Webcam
http://www.camvista.com/england/london/bigben.php3

Big Ben Strikes 12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9wWBjnaEck&feature=related

Big Ben Dashboard Widget
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/bigben_thedashboardwidgetandgadgetdevelopment.html

London’s Historic Buildings Hit: Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Parliament
Houses Struck
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lFNQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HA4EAAAAIBAJ&dq=big%20ben&pg=6773%2C2000920

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

Legendary Folklorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’--- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/legendary_folklorist_alan_lomax_the_land_where_the_blues_began.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

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


Writing Tutorials

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


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

October 13, 2011

October 14, 2011

October 15, 2011

October 17, 2011

October 18, 2011

October 19, 2011

October 20, 2011

October 21, 2011

October 22, 2011

October 24, 2011

October 25, 2011

October 26, 2011

 


I hope you watched CBS 60 Minutes on October23, 2011
Following an informative segment on the life of Steve Jobs (he was much more of an unbathing mystic hippie than I realized), there was an even better segment on the impact of the iPad on many autistic people (not just children, but it's best to try them on iPads as early as possible). Note that the iPad is not a magic bullet for all people afflicted with autism. But for some the touch screen using some amazing autism apps became a miracle that allows them to communicate what has heretofore been locked inside their heads. The iPad for some is an amazing way for them to reveal their talents and their emotions. Also note the recent discoveries using brain scans of autism victims.

I still have no incentive myself to invest the time and money in an iPad, although I should perhaps begin testing some apps that might be relevant for my life and work. But for autistic victims and their families, it's grossly negligent not to try out iPads. Note that it may be best to also have teachers specially trained in both iPad apps and autism rather than just starting an autistic person out cold with an iPad.

The video segment entitled "Studying autism and iPads" is for a short time available free at
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7385702n&tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.1
This is a fantastic module as long as you realize they might've cherry picked the success cases.

The earlier segment "Steve Jobs: Revelations from a tech giant" us fir a short time available free at
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-20124391/steve-jobs-revelations-from-a-tech-giant/?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
Note that he was not a particularly good manager of people and did some mean things in his life. This segment illustrates how even our heroes have their imperfections.

The 60 Minutes Interview with Walter Isaacson, Author of New Steve Jobs Biography (29 minute video) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/steve_jobs_biography.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


Solar Cookers International --- http://solarcooking.org/


Case Studies in Primary Health Care --- http://ocw.jhsph.edu/courses/casestudiesinphc/index.cfm


"Psychiatric Meds: Perils, Promises, and Profits," Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, October 23, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Psychiatric-Meds-Perils/129466/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

John Horgan's piece "Are Psychiatric Medications Making Us Sicker?" (The Chronicle Review, September 23) should raise our consciousness on this profound scientific, societal, and health issue. There are the medication issues, and there are also the diagnostic issues, and these are of course related. An increasing number of diagnostic categories, discrete disorders, and so on, are allegedly being identified, so we can expect new psychiatric medications to be developed presumably to treat them.

The diagnostic growth industry represented by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association increasingly pathologizes human behavior, expanding by more than 200 percent the number of disorders from the original DSM of 1952 to the current fourth edition—a process we can reasonably call "the sickening of society." Heading into the fifth edition of this influential document, due in 2013, with yet more disorders expected to make their debut, a chorus of criticisms about it has arisen, including from the chair of the fourth edition!

So many scientific and societal questions have arisen over the DSM in recent years that, in my view, serious consideration should be given to scrapping this failing manifesto of mental illness and starting over. But at the very least, a full-scale debate about the issues raised by Horgan and many others should be joined by scientists, practitioners, and the public, whose health is on the line.

Frank Farley
Professor of Educational Psychology
Temple University
Philadelphia
Former President (1993)
American Psychological Association

 


"Peter Wehrwein Astounding increase in antidepressant use by Americans," by Peter Wehrwein, Editor, Harvard Health Letter, October 20. 2011 ---
http://paper.li/businessschools?utm_source=subscription&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=paper_sub

Jensen Comment
Purportedly women are twice as likely to be clinically depressed (on Celexa, Effexor, Paxil, Zoloft, etc.) as men, although there may be bias in the detection system. Men might be more likely to keep their disease hidden from doctors as part of the macho-male syndrome that also keeps many males from crying in front of other people.


"Memoir About Schizophrenia Spurs Others to Come Forward," by Benedict Carey, The New York Times, October 22, 2011 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/health/23livesside.html?hpw

Researchers have long wondered how some people with schizophrenia can manage their symptoms well enough to build full, successful lives. But such people do not exactly line up to enroll in studies. 

Researchers have long wondered how some people with schizophrenia can manage their symptoms well enough to build full, successful lives. But such people do not exactly line up to enroll in studies. Enlarge This Image Mikel Healey/USC School of Law

For one thing, they are almost always secretive about their diagnosis. For another, volunteering for a study would add yet another burden to their stressful lives.

But that is beginning to change, partly because of the unlikely celebrity of a fellow sufferer. In 2007, after years of weighing the possible risks, Elyn R. Saks, a professor of law at the University of Southern California, published a memoir of her struggle with schizophrenia, “The Center Cannot Hold.” It became an overnight sensation in mental health circles and a best seller, and it won Dr. Saks a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.

For psychiatric science, the real payoff was her speaking tour. At mental health conferences here and abroad, Dr. Saks, 56, attracted not only doctors and therapists, but also high-functioning people with the same diagnosis as herself — a fellowship of fans, some of whom have volunteered to participate in studies.

“People in the audience would stand up and self-disclose, or sometimes I would be on a panel with someone” who had a similar experience, Dr. Saks said. She also received scores of e-mails from people who had read the book and wanted to meet for lunch. She told many of them about the possibility of participating in a research project.

She now has two studies going, one in Los Angeles and another in San Diego, tracking the routines and treatment decisions of these extraordinary people. The movie producer Jerry Weintraub has optioned the book.

It has been a remarkable response, considering that the book was almost abandoned. Dr. Saks surveyed friends and colleagues for years before publishing it and got very mixed advice. Her husband was against it; the risks were too high. Academic colleagues warned her that coming out with a disorder as serious as schizophrenia could only harm her. “You want to be known as the schizophrenic with a job?” one said.

Her friend Stephen Behnke, director of ethics at the American Psychological Association, was supportive of her decision. “I remember talking about it just on the cusp of when she was going to send off the manuscript,” Dr. Behnke said. “I said that we needed to sit down and make sure she was ready for this. It was like she was about to jump off of a cliff.”

Jump she did. With the MacArthur money, she founded the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics to study mental health and society. She is now working on another book, “Mad Women: A Most Uncommon Friendship,” with the author Terri Cheney, who has written about her struggles with bipolar disorder.

“I was very lucky, being in academia, where people have been very accepting of this,” Dr. Saks said. “Most people struggling to manage a severe mental illness do not have the luxury to do what I did.”

 




Forwarded by Russell

I've learned....That the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.

I've learned....That when you're in love, it shows.

I've learned....That just one person saying to me, 'You've made my day!' makes my day.

I've learned....That having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the most peaceful feelings in the world.

I've learned....That being kind is more important than being right.

I've learned....That you should never say no to a gift from a child.

I've learned....That I can always pray for someone when I don't have the strength to help him in some other way.

I've learned....That no matter how serious your life requires you to be, everyone needs a friend to joke and laugh with.

I've learned....That sometimes all a person needs is a hand to hold and a heart to understand.

I've learned....That simple walks with my father around the block on summer nights when I was a child did wonders for me as an adult.


I've learned....That money doesn't buy class.

I've learned....That it's those small daily happenings that make life so spectacular.


I've learned....That love, not time, heals all wounds.

I've learned....That the easiest way for me to grow as a person is to surround myself with people wiser than I am.

I've learned....That everyone you meet deserves to be greeted with a smile.

I've learned....That no one is perfect until you fall in love with them.


I've learned....That I wish I could have told my Mom that I love her one more time before she passed away.


I've learned....That a smile is an inexpensive way to improve your looks.

I've learned....That when your newly born grandchild holds your little finger in his little fist, you're hooked for life.
 

 


If you are fully tenured and your supervisor is becoming increasingly troublesome or seems to no longer see any humor in the Department, forward this to him or her  (it's up to you whether you forward it anonymously) ---
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/81939659/


Sir Ian McKellen Reads Manual for Changing Tires in Dramatic Voice --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/sir_ian_mckellen_reads_manual_for_changing_tires_in_dramatic_voice.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


JEWISH ZODIAC --- http://www.jewzo.com/Jewish-Zodiac-Placemat-p/jz-1001.htm


Forwarded by Eric Cohen

You call THAT a test message? Now THIS is a test message.

 

1)  Why did the Sabbath, observed by Jews beginning on Friday nights, change to be celebrated by Christians on Sundays?
 

2) Why was the Western Roman Empire more easily and quickly conquered than the Eastern Roman Empire?
 

3) If a urinalysis test comes back with results showing a large amount of blood and also showing few to no red blood cells seen (per high power field), what is the likely cause of this otherwise seeming disparity?
 

4) You're in Miami, Florida. There is great chaos going on around you, caused by a hurricane and severe floods. There are huge masses of water all around you. You are a CNN photographer and you are in the middle of this great disaster. The situation is very dire -- nearly hopeless.

There are houses and people floating by you, disappearing into the swirling waters. Nature is showing all its destructive power and is ripping everything away with it. Suddenly you see a man in the water. He is gasping for air, fighting for his life, trying not to be taken away by the torrents of water and mud.

You move closer.

Somehow the man looks familiar.

Suddenly it strikes you. You know who the struggling man is! It's the President!!! At that very same moment, you notice that the raging waters are about to take him away, forever.

You have two options. You can save him or you can take the best photo of your life. Again, you can save the life of the President, or you can shoot a Pulitzer Prize winning photo -- a unique photographic record displaying the death of one of the world's most powerful men.

Would you (a) select color film, or (b) go with the simplicity of classic black and white?

5) To which composer and song is it a custom to have the orchestra members stop playing one by one, get up one by one, blow out a candle, and leave the stage as the song continues until there is only one person performing...and why?


Humor Between October 1 and October 31, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q4.htm#Humor103111 

Humor Between September 1 and September 30, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q3.htm#Humor093011

Humor Between August 1 and August 31, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q3.htm#Humor083111 

Humor Between July 1 and July 31, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q3.htm#Humor073111

Humor Between May 1 and June 30, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q2.htm#Humor063011   

Humor Between April 1 and April 30, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q2.htm#Humor043011  

Humor Between February 1 and March 31, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q1.htm#Humor033111 

Humor Between January 1 and January 31, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q1.htm#Humor013111 

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

 




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