Tidbits on December 8, 2011
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

In 1977, after the Sunset Hill Hotel and Resort was nearly all demolished, our cottage (before it was ours)
was moved from the golf course across a tennis court and up to where the former hotel site.
This week I show pictures of the move to the new site
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/CottageHistory/NewSite/Set01/Set01.htm

Echo Lake is at the base of Cannon Mountain about 10 miles from our cottage
"A Short Gallop to White Horse Ledge," by John Compton, Happy Hiker in the White Mountains, November 1, 2011 ---
http://1happyhiker.blogspot.com/2011/11/short-gallop-to-white-horse-ledge.html

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

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/

Question
Are their trails in our White Mountains of New Hampshire that have ice in summer as well as winter?
See "The Ice Gulch, Would I do it Again" by John Compton, August 5, 2011 ---
http://1happyhiker.blogspot.com/2011_08_05_archive.html

Okay, you might ask, is there really ice in the Ice Gulch, even in August? Yes, there is! The next photo shows one small patch of ice. There were many larger patches, but they were at the bottom of some of those deep gaps that I mentioned above. I took some photos, but none of them really turned out, even with using a flash to illuminate these dark, dank, deep spots.

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

Tidbits on December 8, 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

Cultural & Academic Films --- http://www.archive.org/details/culturalandacademicfilms

Stephen Colbert Talks Science with Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/stephen_colbert_talks_science_with_astrophysicist_neil_degrasse_tyson.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Goshawk Flies Through Tiny Spaces in Slo-Mo! ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2CFckjfP-1E

To Infinity and Beyond: A Mind-Bending Documentary from the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/ito_infinity_and_beyondi_a_mind-bending_documentary_from_the_bbc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Why dogs are easier to herd than cats
Walking 16 Dogs --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=qFP28ANXLLA&vq=medium

Fifth grade Yup'ik school kids in Quinhagak and the
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=LyviyF-N23A

The World’s First Mobile Phone (1922) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/worlds_first_mobile_phone_1922.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
One Ringy Dingy --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o

Holiday Greeting from Ernst & Young --- http://www.ey.com/GL/en/Home/Holiday_Connection

Change for a Dollar --- http://www.flickspire.com/m/Share_This/changeforadollar?lsid=161f9da9b7692b6854ca64548e80ab61

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

John Coltrane Plays Only Live Performance of A Love Supreme --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/coltrane_only_live_performance_a_love_supreme.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Amazing Grace and the Black Keys on the Piano --- http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=1312

A Tune to Make You Smile (with great jitterbug dancing) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=oXvJ8UquYoo&vq=large%3E
It takes a while to get to the tune!

Let’s Get Lost: Bruce Weber’s Sad Film of Jazz Legend Chet Baker --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/ilets_get_losti_bruce_webers_sad_film_of_jazz_legend_chet_baker.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

2011 National Geographic Photo Contest --- http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/photo-contest/

The First Actresses
http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/the-first-actresses/first_actresses_exhibition.php

Cultural & Academic Films --- http://www.archive.org/details/culturalandacademicfilms

A Day in Venezia --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/a_day_in_venezia.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

National Building Museum --- http://www.nbm.org/

Great Buildings Collection (architecture) --- http://www.greatbuildings.com/gbc.html Moving Image Source (history of film) --- http://www.movingimagesource.us/

Buildings in Cities --- http://www.emporis.com/en/

National Gallery of Great Buildings --- http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/New_National_Gallery.html

Life on a Train --- http://www.openmyeyeslord.net/LifeOnTheTrain.htm

The World’s First Mobile Phone (1922) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/worlds_first_mobile_phone_1922.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Illustrations to Dickens --- http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fdickens2

Pacific Standard Time at the Getty (art history) --- http://www.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/

NIST: A Walk Through Time (watches, clocks, timepieces) --- http://www.nist.gov/pml/general/time

Welcome Home Howard, Or Whatever Became of the Daring Aviator?
Howard Hughes Aviation Photograph Collection --- http://digital.library.unlv.edu/hughes/

TIME Photos: Stalin’s daughter Lana Peters
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2100515,00.html

Stanley Kubrick’s Photographs: Browse Them or Buy Them --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/stanley_kubricks_photographs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History

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

"Poetry: Dos-à-dos With Dickinson," by Lisa Russ Spaar, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, December 5, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/spaar-on-poetry-dos-a-dos-with-dickinson/41777?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on December 8, 2011
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/TidbitsQuotations120811.htm           

The booked National Debt on August 21, 2011 was slightly over $14 trillion ---
U.S. National Debt Clock --- http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

The January 2010 Booked National Debt Plus Unbooked Entitlements Debt
The GAO estimated $76 trillion Present Value in January 2010  unless something drastic is done.
Click Here |
 http://www.pgpf.org/~/media/PGPF/Media/PDF/2010/03/fiscalsustainabilityGAONationsLongTermFiscalOutlook03032010.ashx?pid={97E10657-8193-4455-871C-4E7A6A9EE084}
 

There are many ways to describe the federal government’s long-term fiscal challenge. One method for capturing the challenge in a single number is to measure the “fiscal gap.” The fiscal gap represents the difference, or gap, between revenue and spending in present value terms over a certain period, such as 75 years, that would need to be closed in order to achieve a specified debt level (e.g., today’s debt to GDP ratio) at the end of the period.2 From the fiscal gap, one can calculate the size of action needed—in terms of tax increases, spending reductions, or, more likely, some combination of the two—to close the gap; that is, for debt as a share of GDP to equal today’s ratio at the end of the period. For example, under our Alternative simulation, the fiscal gap is 9.0 percent of GDP (or a little over $76 trillion in present value dollars) (see table 2). This means that revenue would have to increase by about 50 percent or noninterest spending would have to be reduced by 34 percent on average over the next 75 years (or some combination of the two) to keep debt at the end of the period from exceeding its level at the beginning of 2010 (53 percent of GDP).

Peter G. Peterson Website on Deficit/Debt Solutions ---
http://www.pgpf.org/

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

The World’s First Mobile Phone (1922) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/worlds_first_mobile_phone_1922.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
One Ringy Dingy --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o

Compare High Speed Internet Providers in Your Zip Code Area ---
http://www.broadbandexpert.com/

Drought's impact beyond Texas and Oklahoma
"Worst drought in 200 years paralyses Danube river shipping," by Bruno Waterfield, The Telegraph, December 5, 2011 ---
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/hungary/8936080/Worst-drought-in-200-years-paralyses-Danube-river-shipping.html

"Progress but Also Insecurity: An Insider's View of Life in Today's Russia," Knowledge@Wharton, November 22, 2011 ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2885

Russia experienced one of the largest mass privatization efforts ever undertaken in the history of the world, says Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Philip M. Nichols. "Virtually everything was at one time controlled by the state. Now that is no longer true. Virtually all assets in Russia have been privatized. However, some of the largest and most valuable assets have been renationalized, or they are privatized in a way that allows the state to continue to control them."

A prime example is the energy conglomerate, Gazprom, Russia's biggest company and one in which the Russian government now holds a controlling stake. Another, very highly publicized example is the state's seizure of the petroleum company Yukos, whose former head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was convicted of acquiring the company illegally and is currently in prison.

It is against this backdrop that Nichols recently interviewed Vitali Naishul, president of the Institute for the Study of the Russian Economy and the Center for the Study of Russian Socio-Political Language, and widely acknowledged as one of the creators of the market economy in Russia. During the Soviet era, Naishul worked in the inner circles of Gosplan, the Soviet Union's central planning agency. In addition, he was one of the founding members of the Snakehill Group, a gathering of economists who met regularly to study and develop strategies to manage the future of the Soviet Union. A paper Naishul wrote for that group, later published as the book Another Life, became the blueprint for the Yeltsin-era economic reforms. "Essentially, he is the architect of the modern Russian state," says Nichols.

In the interview with Nichols, Naishul talks about privatization in Russia as well as life in Russia today -- improvements in material well-being, but also a renewed awareness of insecurity about individual and property rights. As Nichols explains it, "there is no sense that the state cannot take back what it gave you, no sense that property is inviolate. As long as people still see the state as a powerful actor that can take property, there is a feeling of unease. Will your house be your house tomorrow? Will your car be your car tomorrow? That is the kind of uncertainty that Vitali speaks about." In Russia today, Nichols adds, "it's not that people worry on a daily basis that some physical harm will come to them; it's more the sense that physical harm could come to them."

Naishul remains a well-known figure today in Russia, adds Nichols, who works with him on projects involving business ethics and Russian values. He says he has seen strangers come up to Naishul on the streets of Moscow and ask to shake his hand. "Then they giggle," Nichols says, "because in Russia, an intellectual is a rock star. That's how Vitali continues to be seen in Russia today."

Continued in article
Watch the video

Bob Jensen's neglected threads on acquisitions ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#Pooling

"Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army: An undercover team of computer scientists reveals the practices of people who are paid to post on websites," Technology Review, November 22, 2011 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27357/
Thank you Glen Gray for the heads up

In China, paid posters are known as the Internet Water Army because they are ready and willing to 'flood' the internet for whoever is willing to pay. The flood can consist of comments, gossip and information (or disinformation) and there seems to be plenty of demand for this army's services.

This is an insidious tide. Positive recommendations can make a huge difference to a product's sales but can equally drive a competitor out of the market. When companies spend millions launching new goods and services, it's easy to understand why they might want to use every tool at their disposal to achieve success.

The loser in all this is the consumer who is conned into making a purchase decision based on false premises. And for the moment, consumers have little legal redress or even ways to spot the practice.

Today, Cheng Chen at the University of Victoria in Canada and a few pals describe how Cheng worked undercover as a paid poster on Chinese websites to understand how the Internet Water Army works. He and his friends then used what he learnt to create software that can spot paid posters automatically.

Paid posting is a well-managed activity involving thousands of individuals and tens of thousands of different online IDs. The posters are usually given a task to register on a website and then to start generating content in the form of posts, articles, links to websites and videos, even carrying out Q&A sessions.

Often, this content is pre-prepared or the posters receive detailed instructions on the type of things they can say. And there is even a quality control team who check that the posts meet a certain 'quality' threshold. A post would not be validated if it is deleted by the host or was composed of garbled words, for example.

Having worked undercover to find out how the system worked, Cheng and co then studied the pattern of posts that appeared on a couple of big Chinese websites: Sina.com and Sohu.com. In particular, they studied the comments on several news stories about two companies that they suspected of paying posters and who were involved in a public spat over each other's services.

The Sina dataset consisted of over 500 users making more than 20,000 comments; the Sohu dataset involved over 200 users and more than 1000 comments.

Cheng and co went through all the posts manually identifying those they believed were from paid posters and then set about looking for patterns in their behaviour that can differentiate them from legitimate users. (Just how accurate were there initial impressions is a potential problem, they admit, but the same one that spam filters also have to deal with.)

They discovered that paid posters tend to post more new comments than replies to other comments. They also post more often with 50 per cent of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average. They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again.

What's more, the content they post is measurably different. These workers are paid by the volume and so often take shortcuts, cutting and pasting the same content many times. This would normally invalidate their posts but only if it is spotted by the quality control team.

So Cheng and co built some software to look for repetitions and similarities in messages as well as the other behaviours they'd identified. They then tested it on the dataset they'd downloaded from Sina and Sohu and found it to be remarkably good, with an accuracy of 88 per cent in spotting paid posters. "Our test results with real-world datasets show a very promising performance," they say.

That's an impressive piece of work and a good first step towards combating this problem, although they'll need to test it on a much wider range of datasets. Nevertheless, these guys have the basis of a software package that will weed out a significant fraction of paid posters, provided these people conform to the stereotype that Cheng and co have measured.

And therein lies the rub. As soon as the first version of the software hits the market, paid posters will learn to modify their behaviour in a way that games the system. What Cheng and co have started is a cat and mouse game just like those that plague the antivirus and spam filtering industries.

And that means, the battle ahead with the Internet Water Army will be long and hard.

Continued in article

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

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

Bad Habits of Misleading Prospective Students are Hard to Break
"Law Schools Pump Up Classes and Tuition, Though Jobs Remain Scarce," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 16, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/law-schools-pump-up-classes-tuition-though-jobs-remain-scarce/34657

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

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

ABA Approves New Law School Placement Data Reporting Rules
From Paul Caron's TaxProf Blog on December 6, 2011 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/

National Law Journal, ABA Gives Ground on Law Schools' Graduate Jobs Data Reporting:

The ABA is changing the way it collects graduate employment information from law schools.

The council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar on Dec. 3 approved a new annual questionnaire intended to gather more detailed information about where recent law grads find work. The change came as law students, graduates and three U.S. senators heaped criticism on the ABA and law schools for not providing prospective law students with an accurate picture of graduate employment and salary levels. ...

The updated questionnaire contains several new elements:

• Law schools will report their graduate employment and salary data directly to the ABA, rather than through the NALP.
• Graduate employment information will be made available to the public faster. Instead of being published two years after a particular class graduates, the data will be collected earlier in the year and will be made public approximately one year after graduation.
• Law schools will have to report whether graduates are in jobs funded by the schools, themselves. They will have to stipulate whether graduates are in jobs requiring bar passage; positions for which J.D.s are an advantage; professional positions that do not require a J.D., non-professional positions; and whether jobs are long-term or short-term.
• Employment and salary information must be reported for each individual graduate rather than in the aggregate, giving the ABA the ability to audit the figures.

The new questionnaire does not include all the changes that transparency advocates have been pushing for. Law School Transparency — a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve consumer data for law students — has called upon the ABA to publish school-specific salary data. That would allow prospective law students to see how much graduates of each school earn. ...

The new questionnaire is an improvement, said Law School Transparency co-founder Kyle McEntee. But the ABA made a mistake by temporarily eliminating some key questions from the 2011 survey, which went out to law schools this fall, he said. That questionnaire did not ask schools to report the number of graduates in the class of 2010 in full- and part-time jobs or in jobs that require a J.D., meaning that less information will be available about the class of 2010 than for previous classes. ... "There are still questions about [the changes] took so long and why it still falls short of providing the best consumer information," McEntee said.

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

Another CBS Sixty Minutes Blockbuster (December 4, 2011)
"Prosecuting Wall Street"
Free download for a short while
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57336042/prosecuting-wall-street/?tag=pop;stories
Note that this episode features my hero Frank Partnoy

Sarbanes–Oxley Act (Sarbox, SOX) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act

 Key provisions of Sarbox with respect to the Sixty Minutes revelations:

The act also covers issues such as auditor independence, corporate governance, internal control assessment, and enhanced financial disclosure.

Sarbanes–Oxley Section 404: Assessment of internal control ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act#Sarbanes.E2.80.93Oxley_Section_404:_Assessment_of_internal_control

Both the corporate CEO and the external auditing firm are to explicitly sign off on the following and are subject (turns out to be a ha, ha joke)  to huge fines and jail time for egregious failure to do so:

• Assess both the design and operating effectiveness of selected internal controls related to significant accounts and relevant assertions, in the context of material misstatement risks;
• Understand the flow of transactions, including IT aspects, in sufficient detail to identify points at which a misstatement could arise;
• Evaluate company-level (entity-level) controls, which correspond to the components of the COSO framework;
• Perform a fraud risk assessment;
• Evaluate controls designed to prevent or detect fraud, including management override of controls;
• Evaluate controls over the period-end financial reporting process;
• Scale the assessment based on the size and complexity of the company;
• Rely on management's work based on factors such as competency, objectivity, and risk;
• Conclude on the adequacy of internal control over financial reporting.

Most importantly as far as the CPA auditing firms are concerned is that Sarbox gave those firms both a responsibility to verify that internal controls were effective and the authority to charge more (possibly twice as much) for each audit. Whereas in the 1990s auditing was becoming less and less profitable, Sarbox made the auditing industry quite prosperous after 2002.

There's a great gap between the theory of Sarbox and its enforcement

In theory, the U.S. Justice Department (including the FBI) is to enforce the provisions of Section 404 and subject top corporate executives and audit firm partners to huge fines (personal fines beyond corporate fines) and jail time for signing off on Section 404 provisions that they know to be false. But to date, there has not been one indictment in enormous frauds where the Justice Department knows that executives signed off on Section 404 with intentional lies.

In theory the SEC is to also enforce Section 404, but the SEC in Frank Partnoy's words is toothless. The SEC cannot send anybody to jail. And the SEC has established what seems to be a policy of fining white collar criminals less than 20% of the haul, thereby making white collar crime profitable even if you get caught. Thus, white collar criminals willingly pay their SEC fines and ride off into the sunset with a life of luxury awaiting.

And thus we come to the December 4 Sixty Minutes module that features two of the most egregious failures to enforce Section 404:
The astonishing case of CitiBank
The astonishing case of Countrywide (now part of Bank of America)

The Astonishing Case of CitiBank
What makes the Sixty Minutes show most interesting are the whistle blowing  revelations by a former Citi Vice President in Charge of Fraud Investigations

• What has to make the CitiBank revelations the most embarrassing revelations on the Sixty Minutes blockbuster emphasis that top CItiBank executives were not only informed by a Vice President in Charge of Fraud Investigation of huge internal control inadequacies, the outside U.S. government top accountant, the U.S. Comptroller General, sent an official letter to CitiBank executives notifying them of their Section 404 internal control failures.
   
• Eight days after receiving the official warning from the government, the CEO of CitiBank flipped his middle finger at the U.S. Comptroller General and signed off on Section 404 provisions that he'd also been informed by his Vice President of Fraud and his Internal Auditing Department were being violated.
  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-24/what-vikram-pandit-knew-and-when-he-knew-it-commentary-by-jonathan-weil.html
   
• What the Sixty Minutes show failed to mention is that the external auditing firm of KPMG also flipped a bird at the U.S. Comptroller General and signed off on the adequacy of its client's internal controls.
   
• A few months thereafter CitiBank begged for and got hundreds of billions in bailout money from the U.S. Government to say afloat.
   
• The implication is that CitiBank and the other Wall Street corporations are just to0 big to prosecute by the Justice Department. The Justice Department official interviewed on the Sixty Minutes show sounded like hollow brass wimpy taking hands off orders from higher authorities in the Justice Department.
   
• The SEC worked out a settlement with CitiBank, but the fine is such a joke that the judge in the case has to date refused to accept the settlement. This is so typical of SEC hand slapping settlements --- and the hand slaps are with a feather.

The astonishing case of Countrywide (now part of Bank of America)

• Countrywide Financial before 2007 was the largest issuer of mortgages on Main Streets throughout the nation and by estimates of one of its own whistle blowing executives in charge of internal fraud investigations over 60% of those mortgages were fraudulent.
   
• After Bank of America purchased the bankrupt Countrywide, BofA top executives tried to buy off the Countrywide executive in charge of fraud investigations to keep him from testifying. When he refused BofA fired him.
   
• Whereas the Justice Department has not even attempted to indict Countrywide executives and the Countrywide auditing firm of Grant Thornton  (later replaced by KPMG) to bring indictments for Section 404 violations, the FTC did work out an absurdly low settlement of $108 million for 450,000 borrowers paying "excessive fees" and the attorneys for those borrowers ---
  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/business/countrywide-to-pay-borrowers-108-million-in-settlement.html
  This had nothing to do with the massive mortgage frauds committed by Countrywide.
   
• Former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo settled the SEC’s Largest-Ever Financial Penalty ($22.5 million) Against a Public Company's Senior Executive
  http://sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-197.htm
  The CBS Sixty Minutes show estimated that this is less than 20% of what he stole and leaves us with the impression that Mozilo deserves jail time but will probably never be charged by the Justice Department.

I was disappointed in the CBS Sixty Minutes show in that it completely ignored the complicity of the auditing firms to sign off on the Section 404 violations of the big Wall Street banks and other huge banks that failed. Washington Mutual was the largest bank in the world to ever go bankrupt. Its auditor, Deloitte, settled with the SEC for Washington Mutual for $18.5 million. This isn't even a hand slap relative to the billions lost by WaMu's investors and creditors.

No jail time is expected for any partners of the negligent auditing firms. .KPMG settled for peanuts with Countrywide for $24 million of negligence and New Century for $45 million of negligence costing investors billions.

Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on how white collar crime pays even if you get caught ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#CrimePays

"A Degree of Practical Wisdom:: The Ratio of Educational Debt to Income as a Basic Measurement of Law School Graduates’ Economic Viability," by Jim Chen, SSRN, December 3, 2011 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1967266

Abstract:     
This article evaluates the economic viability of a student’s decision to borrow money in order to attend law school. For individuals, firms, and entire nations, the ratio of debt to income serves as a measure of economic stability. The ease with which a student can carry and retire educational debt after graduation may be the simplest measure of educational return on investment.

Mortgage lenders evaluate prospective borrowers' debt-to-income ratios. The spread between the front-end and back-end ratios in mortgage lending provides a basis for extrapolating the maximum amount of educational debt that a student should incur. Any student whose debt service exceeds the maximum permissible spread between mortgage lenders' front-end and back-end ratios will not be able to buy a house on credit.

These measures of affordability suggest that the maximum educational back-end ratio (EBER) should fall in a range between 8 and 12 percent of monthly gross income. Four percent would be even better. Other metrics of economic viability in servicing educational debt suggest that the ratio of total educational debt to annual income (EDAI) should range from an ideal 0.5 to a marginal 1.5.

EBER and EDAI are mathematically related ways of measuring the same thing: a student's ability to discharge educational debt through enhanced earnings. This article offers guidance on the use of these debt-to-income ratios to assess the economic viability of students who borrow money in order to attend law school.

. . .

To offer good financial viability, defined as a ratio of education debt to annual income no greater than 0.5, post-law school salary must exceed annual tuition by a factor of 6 to 1. Adequate financial viability is realized when annual salary matches or exceeds three years of law school tuition. A marginal, arguably minimally acceptable level of financial viability requires a salary that is equal to two years’ tuition. The following table compares some tuition benchmarks with the salary needed to ensure the good, adequate, and marginal levels of financial viability identified in this article:

 

Jensen Comment
This type of study, in my viewpoint, has some relevancy for professional schools beyond the bachelors degree. However, I would not recommend this type of analysis for students contemplating where to go after high school. In the first four years, students get much more out of college than career opportunities. There are liberal education quality considerations, greatness of faculty considerations, socialization experiences, dating, dorm living, and intimacy often leading to marriage. Often more expensive schools have more to offer beyond the classroom experience. By the time students are more mature after graduation from college, the importance of some of these "extracurricular" experiences often diminishes.

And if we look at post-graduate law, medicine, engineering, and business schools, the job opportunities and salary expectations are not independent of the halo effect of where the candidate graduated. Diplomas from Harvard and Yale Law Schools add a great deal to salary expectations. And there are huge advantages of being able to network with alumni who often pave the way for job opportunities. What I'm saying is going to a law school having a tuition of $60,000 may well be worth it to graduates who take full advantage of the "extracurricular" opportunities such as networking with alumni. And for all practical purposes you can never be a U.S. Supreme Court justice unless you either graduated from Harvard or Yale law schools or were on the faculty at one of those law schools.

In other words, if you can swing it go to Yale Law school rather than UCON (sorry Amy).

EGADS. I'm a snob.

The top hundredth of one percent of compensation in higher education
From the Chronicle of Higher Education on December 5, 2011

Executive Compensation: a Special Report

What Private-College Presidents Make The economic divide is not confined to Wall Street and Main Street. A special Chronicle report tracks executive pay—and lets you use interactive tools to find your own stories.

On Campuses, the Income Gap Widens at the Top A handful of college presidents earn considerably more than professors on their campuses, or gobble up a notable share of their institutions’ budgetary pie.

Graphic: How Presidents' Pay Compares With Professors' Salaries

Sortable Table: Salaries of Private-College Presidents, 2009

Executive Profiles: Meet the Presidents

 

Jensen Comment
The Chronicle ignored the salaries and benefits packages offered to newly minted accountics science professors

The Presidents fire back by pointing out their successes in fund raising. But they fail to note that much of the credit goes to the title on the door. For example, the President of Harvard University is going to be a successful fund raiser even if the job goes to Donald Duck.

Inside Innovative Law Schools Financial Times, December 2011

Learning the law business http://click.email.ft.com/?qs=e67a8c6ab4516400b87045ef919f2c7565147ba7026f059ebb06675c03f94403a30576566bd9eb6a Legal education increasingly takes in other disciplines. Good law means good business http://click.email.ft.com/?qs=e67a8c6ab4516400872b1ff5b4b6ea6e7adec72f6ea36598937c4be32bafdd5813f76106fab7a4c9 Schools reject silo mentality of the past.

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

Accountancy Doctoral Programs

December 2, 2011 reply from Bob Jensen to Dan Stone

Hi Dan,

You may want to take a look at the terrific BYU database of of information about accounting doctoral programs ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=University_Information

Your question is really not clear, because there are core courses in statistics, econometrics, and probability theory in virtually all accounting doctoral programs in AACSB accredited universities. In other words, it is not usually possible to avoid studying econometrics by choosing a behavioral track or non-quantitative beyond the core requirements. Michigan State many years ago had no required core courses, but I'd bet my shirt that MSU now has some core courses that require econometrics, statistics, and probability theory.

Various programs have archival versus behavioral tracks versus other tracts (e.g., accounting history at Ole Miss. and Case Western)  beyond the core requirements. For example, look at Question 14 about Cornell University that is made public on a BYU site ---
http://aaahq.org/temp/phd/StudyMaterials/Questions/CornellUniv.pdf

BYU has a unique masters program (called a PhD Prep Track) to prepare accounting students for admission into accounting doctoral programs (this Prep Track program won an AAA Innovation in Accounting Education Award) ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=So_you_want_to_get_a_Ph.D.?

You may want to take a look at the terrific BYU database of of information about accounting doctoral programs ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=University_Information

Respectfully,
Bob Jensen

Bob Jensen's threads on accountancy doctoral programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

"The Myth of Work-Life Balance," by John Beeson, Harvard Business Review Blog, December 2, 2011 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/the_myth_of_work-life_balance.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Jensen Comment
This begs the question of "Work-Life Balance" of faculty in research universities.

The good news is that there is an enormous amount of discretionary time for university faculty at all ranks given the frequent long breaks for some holidays, breaks between semesters, and breaks for the summer months for professors who choose not to teach in summers. There are also sabbatical leaves and in some universities' like Michigan State, there is a term without teaching every other year. Also teaching schedules during a term are often worked out so that the professor only teaches two or three days in a week or in some cases only one night class each week. Also on a teaching day, the instructor may only be in class 2-6 hours that day.

The bad news is that many professors work harder on those discretionary time "breaks" than when they are in the classroom teaching. Firstly, there are duties connected with teaching such as grading examinations, grading homework, grading term papers, advising students, preparing for class, preparing online materials such as technical Camtasia videos, email messaging with students, chat rooms with students, etc.

The bad news is that a great deal of time is required for keeping scholarship up to date. Accounting professors have to allow five hours a day reading Bob Jensen's messages on the AECM and the AAA Commons. An increasing amount of time is spent in professional and social networks. Also there is a lot of incoming scholarship messaging from the Big Four firms, from bloggers, and news services such as the NYT, WSJ. Bloomberg, etc.

Over the course of a decade, a vast amount of time is lost on technical glitches and problems with software and hardware. Some professors actually time to locate the campus library while some techie from the computer center is trying to remove malware from their office computers.

And then there's research which is supposed to require at least half of a researcher's time in a research university, but often ends up taking more than 20 hours of time in a teaching week and 50 hours of time in week in which the professor does not have to teach. One huge time taker is the time it takes to learn new/updated  software that becomes a necessary condition for work life. By the time you've mastered the software it's obsolete.

Is there work-life balance for professors in research universities? Probably not for younger faculty focused on reputation building and annual performance reports. Probably not for senior faculty who are committed to research and consulting that ends up taking an enormous amount of discretionary time.

There probably is more of a life balance for some senior tenured professors who are pretty much on automatic pilot and tending to their hobbies and searching for a trophy spouse after their second divorces.

Have a good day!

"End-of-Term Conundrums, Part 1: Plagiarism," by Frank Donoghue, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/end-of-term-conundrums-part-1-plagiarism/31005?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

As professors and students approach the end of the academic term, I thought it appropriate to post about two items that never fail to factor in the early winter and late spring. The first is plagiarism. I can’t help feeling that, in recent years, academia has not kept pace with what I see as a rapidly changing and increasingly hard-to-define concept. Two important factors to consider: 1) plagiarism has gotten much easier to commit in the age of the Internet; and 2) students currently in the undergraduate pipeline either understand intellectual property imperfectly or they simply don’t care about it.

1) Google and Wikipedia simultaneously constitute a gold mine and a potential minefield for wannabe plagiarists. As a random illustration, I looked up “Scarlet Letter essays” and “Scarlet Letter term papers” on Google, and looked up The Scarlet Letter on Wikipedia. The Google searches yielded page after page of complete essays, “study guides” which could easily be transformed into papers with little effort, and advertisements for paper-writing services. These last were, I must admit, refreshing and funny. When I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s, I knew students who bought term papers, but, to hear them talk about it, the process sounded much like a drug deal, with everything on the QT. Now paper-writing services are out in the open, and have clearly adopted the advertising model used by online dating services: that is, they bill themselves as “free,” and there is a (very) minimal amount of free material on their sites, but if you want something you can actually turn in for a grade (the equivalent of “show profile” and “chat” options I guess), you have to pay. You can even order a customized essay, so that specific, assigned paper topics pose no problem. But with so many free papers available—and with so much thematic overlap among them that cut and paste opportunities are everywhere—why pay money?

The Wikipedia article on The Scarlet Letter also demonstrated that a paper on the novel was one mouse click away. After a very detailed plot summary, the author of the article offered an analysis of what he or she considered its two major themes: sin and the clash between past and present.

It’s hard to imagine weak students, students working 50 hours a week, or desperate students getting to their assignments at the eleventh hour, not availing themselves of these resources, particularly since they’re universal in all our daily lives. Smartphones have made bar bets a thing of the past; my students regularly use “Google” and “Wikipedia” as verbs; and even the new Kindle Touch has a feature that links key terms in the books one downloads to Wikipedia.

2) Plagiarism aside, these are not bad developments. Wikipedia in particular is a unique phenomenon, in the sense that it is slowly but surely transforming itself from a catch-all bin of information into a legitimate scholarly reference. It can do so in part because the Internet allows it to be infinitely more agile than, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica (and when, by the way, was the last time you saw a citation in a student paper to that once august reference work?). Wikipedia also adopts a collaborative conception of writing, blurring the notion of writing as personal, intellectual property. Chris Anderson’s popular and provocative recent book Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing (2010), simultaneously released as a traditional book and as a free downloadable text, blurs that notion even farther, giving the reader the choice either to acknowledge the book as Anderson’s intellectual property or to decide that it doesn’t belong to anyone.

Traditionalists would argue that we need to do a better job of policing student work and punishing plagiarists. I counted myself among them and have often pointed out that, unlike my university, Ohio State, many colleges and universities require students to submit their papers to the plagiarism-detection service Turnitin.com. I thought that was a good idea until I began researching this post, only to discover that (intellectual property concerns aside—Turnitin claims ownership of the papers fed into it, as those papers make up part of its database), Turnitin just doesn’t work. I found several articles and even, amazingly, a YouTube video on the topic of “how to beat Turnitin.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Accounting students have a harder time plagiarizing from Wikipedia vis-à-vis finance and economics students. This is because accountants have been hugely negligent contributing to Wikipedia relative to their other professional and academic brethren.

But Google searches by accounting students are alive and well, and hits to my own Website become more popular late in every semester. Of course most of these students do not plagiarize my work. But I'll bet the shirt I'm wearing that I end up having written huge portions of term papers every semester for which I get no credit ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

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

"Rethinking the Digital Future:  In 1991 a Yale professor David Gelernter envisioned a lot of what we now do on the Internet. Future computing, he thinks, may be organized around a concept called 'lifestreams," by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203833104577072162782422558.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is already destined to be remembered as the man nearly murdered by the Unabomber. After a painful recovery, he blossomed as a conservative social critic and continued to pursue his personal vocation of painting. He's also written books on subjects as diverse as the future of technology, the meaning of Judaism, and the 1939 World's Fair. Today, the still-revolutionary opportunities of computing are again taking a central place among his varied interests.

To him, Facebook and Twitter are partial fulfillment of something he's been writing about and thinking about since the early 1990s, an evolution of the Internet into a form far less chaotic and more useful than today's. His preferred term is "lifestream." Whatever you call it, the cybersphere as it now exists is due for an overhaul.

Prophecy comes naturally to Mr. Gelernter. He is credited in some circles for having coined the term "the cloud." But what preoccupies him is the inadequacy of our conventions and practices for organizing the wildly expanding array of digital objects that populate the cybersphere.

On the desktop, he says, "The file system was already broken in the early '90s, the hierarchical system. Namespaces were saturated. I was sick of making up names like nsfproposal319. The file system got too crowded and people started crowding their desktops with icons."

On top of this complexity soon arrived the complexity of the Web, the mass of digital objects we know today, connected by hyperlinks but organized in a way satisfying to no one, except possibly Google. "The current shape of the Web is the same shape as the Internet hardware," says Mr. Gelernter. "The Internet hardware is lots of computers wired together into a nothing-shaped cobweb. The Web itself is a lot of websites hyperlinked together into a nothing-shaped cobweb."

The failure of the Internet to organize itself into a more useful metaphor is precisely what needs fixing. "It is impossible to picture the Web. It's a big fuzzy nothing. I sort of tiptoe around tiny areas of it shining a flashlight."

We sit in his family's modest, woodsy home a few miles north of New Haven. Because the Unabomber experience has so colored the press's interest in him, Mr. Gelernter, in profiles, tends to come across as grim. He's anything but grim. He's a bit of a comedian, in a deadpan sort of way. He cites the "most talked about" part of one of his books, but quickly adds, "not that any part was greatly talked about."

In that book, 1991's "Mirror Worlds," Mr. Gelernter described a future in which all our activities would be mirrored on the Web. Almost as soon as it was published he began thinking about a radical new way to organize our digital mirror world. He started a company to pursue his vision, but it was not well conceived and went out of business after a few years. Today its patents, now owned by an investor group, are at the center of a major lawsuit with Apple.

The idea, though, of lifestreams has been catching on. A lifestream is a way of organizing digital objects—photos, emails, documents, Web links, music—in a time-ordered series. A timeline, in essence, that extends into the past but also the future (with appointments, to-do lists, etc.). Facebook, with its "wall" constantly updated with postings by you and your friends, is a lifestream. Twitter's feed is a lifestream. "Chatter," developed by Salesforce.com for internal use by client companies, is a lifestream.

Mr. Gelernter believes streams are a more intuitive, useful way to organize our digital lives, not least because, as the past and future run off either side of our screen, at the center is now—and now is what the Internet really is about.

Eventually business models based on streaming will dominate the Internet, he predicts. All the world's data will be presented as a "worldstream," some of it public, most of it proprietary, available only to authorized users. Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system. The stream will become a mirror of the unfolding story of their lives.

"I can visualize the worldstream," says Mr. Gelernter, explaining its advantages. "I know what it looks like. I know what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream that is a subset of the worldstream. So when I focus the stream, by doing a search on Sam Schwartz"—a hypothetical student—"I do stream subtraction. Everything that isn't related to Schwartz that I'm allowed to see vanishes. And then the stream moves much more slowly. Because Sam Schwartz documents are being added at a much slower rate than all the documents in the world. So now I have a manageable trickle of stuff."

A stream is any stream you care to describe. "These very simple operations, which correspond to physical intuitions, are going to give people a much more transparent feeling about the Net. People will understand it better, and the Net itself will support what is clearly emerging as its most important function, which is to present relevant information in time."

His son Daniel, a recent Yale graduate, sits in on our interview. His apparent dual mission is to tout the inevitable triumph of a new company the two are working on while making sure Mr. Gelernter doesn't say anything to queer his former company's pending lawsuit against Apple.

Mr. Gelernter himself grew up in the suburbs of New York, visiting Brooklyn regularly where both sets of grandparents lived. He believes America, and especially its educational system, has gone downhill in some ways since then. He recalls a time, in the 1960s, when poets like Robert Frost and painters like Jackson Pollock were as closely followed by the "educated middle class" as TV celebrities are today.

Mr. Gelernter's father studied physics and became a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence at IBM, so growing up Mr. Gelernter was "familiar with software and found it a comfortable topic." His ambition, from a very early age, was to be an important painter, but at Yale he pursued computing "as a path to supporting a family, which is a very important obligation in Judaism. Computing in the 70s and early 80s," he adds, "was not a path to absurd wealth. It was a path to well-paying jobs, compared to people in the English department."

There followed happy days and nights in the computing lab, which might have come straight from the memoirs of Bill Gates or other computing superstars. His early work on parallel computing—in which many computers cooperate on tasks—made him a superstar too.

His targeting by Theodore Kaczynski, living in a shack in Montana and waging his deranged war against modernity, has been told often enough. Mr. Gelernter was lucky to survive a mail bomb that tore open his chest and abdomen, mangled his right hand and eye. His blood pressure is said to have been undetectable by the time he stumbled from his office to a Yale clinic nearby. Today the glove on his right hand, mentioned in every media account, I learn is not a concession to those around him, but a prosthesis. "It allows me to get some use out of the hand. It's all ripped up and stuff, patched together."

He takes medicine for pain and visits a pain specialist regularly, but he has come to see himself as lucky compared to other chronic pain sufferers—able to "operate in the world, and do the things you want to do. It could have been a lot worse," he says.

The question posed at the top was meant whimsically. Mr. Gelernter, by any measure, is living a rich life. He has been making paintings since childhood. Lately he has allowed his work to be sold and next year will bring what he calls "an important event for me," his first museum show at Yeshiva University Art Gallery. He sees his work building on the "discoveries" of the New York abstract expressionists as well as the flat panels of Medieval devotional art. Interestingly, he also sees a similar new-old artistic potential in the high-definition video display: "Since the richness of stained glass emerged in the late 12th century, for the first time there is a new luminous art medium—a medium for creating glowing art."

Mr. Gelernter sold his first company, Mirror Worlds Technologies, and its intellectual property to an investor group years ago. The buyer insisted on giving him a small stake in the outcome of its patent lawsuits, and last year a jury handed down an eye-popping $625 million verdict against Apple for infringing lifestream-related patents in its Macintosh and iPhone operating systems. In April, the judge in the case overruled the jury and tossed out the award. The matter is now under appeal.

Mr. Gelernter says the former company has no relation to a new venture he and Daniel are working on—though Daniel is quick to note that they will be obtaining a license for the Mirror Worlds technology, as Apple supposedly should have done.

The new venture, for which Mr. Gelernter is just beginning to seek funding, will focus on developing a lifestream product for the Apple iPad. "We like the pad," he says. "A particular goal is to create a lifestream which aggregates the most popular social network streams, and includes email and stuff like that. It will generate revenues the way Twitter and Facebook do—by getting huge numbers of users, beginning at the place we know, Yale University undergraduates, who love glitzy new software. They tell their parents, who are big shots because their kids are students at Yale." The new product will spread virally, forming a vast audience that can be sold to advertisers.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Facebook started at Harvard and branched out to other universities before conquering the world. Facebook, which has evolved into a stream by which users tell their own stories and read each other's stories, is "plugging a very important gap in the cybersphere, but I don't think it's plugging it in an elegant way," says Mr. Gelernter. "I don't think Facebook will be around forever."

Continued in article

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

"Teaching Carnival 5.04," by Mikhail Gershovich, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/teaching-carnival-5-04-2/37515?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Know of a blog post (perhaps your own) that should be included in the next Teaching Carnival…?

1. Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of your blog post, and/or
2. Tag your post in Delicious (or Diigo or other bookmarking service) with teaching-carnival.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Hurry, hurry, hurry. Step right up. See the most amazing, most provocative, most edumacational teaching links on the Interwebz. Don’t miss your chance to be wowed, amazed, professionally developed and procrastinated! Step right this way!

This month at the Teaching Carnival:

Edudemic showcases 100 best web 2.0 tools for teachers as chosen by teachers while Peter Dewitt offers an in-depth discussion of why educators should join Twitter. Mrs. Ripp suggests 14 steps to meaningful student blogging, George Siemens shares a few simple tools he’s like ed-tech startups to build. and Audrey Watters tells us about Code Now, a DC area program dedicated to teaching underserved high school students how to program.

Tom Woodward offers us some things to consider regarding the instructional use of digital content, and Jane Hart argues that while we can manage the use of media that can facilitate informal learning, we can’t manage informal learning itself.

Stephen Lazar, of Education Week, suggests how to teach high-school history by facilitating critical inquiry. Liz Losh discusses the use of digital role-playing games for a critical engagement with racial history. Mike Cosgrove explains how to Game Reality History. The Christian Cynic considers analysis of song lyrics as a means of encouraging critical thought. Andrew Miller argues for integrating visual art into curricula as a form of critical thinking.

Ryan Cordell discusses “speed-dating” peer-review writing workshops, and Dean Shareski proclaims lectures good. At cac.ophony.org, Meechal Hoffman and Erica Kaufman offer a few thoughts on teaching with technology, and Sarah Ruth Jacobs traces the genealogy of communication across the the curriculum courses (part 1 and part 2.)

At Blogging Pedagogy, we learn how the Voyeur data visualization tool and the automated text analysis it offers might be useful for revision and consider a rumination on the form of the blog post.

Mark Sample and Shannon Mattern each present on the digital humanities in the classroom (videos). Roger Whitson calls on DH teachers and scholars to engage in digital activism to undercut a “cultural obsession with individualism” foster an environment where collaborative digital projects are valued.

You’ve heard of the MOOC, now learn all about it: The 7 things you should know about MOOCs. Alan Levine considers the “course-iness” of MOOCs. David Kernohan discusses the mythical #economooc. Michael Feldstein offers some thoughts on scaling MOOCs.

Ok, you get the MOOC but what is this rhizomatic learning? Dave Cormier explains. If that wasn’t clear, here’s how he explains it to his 5 year old.

In the spirit of the Occupy Movement, Jose Vilson offers James Baldwin’s take on the purpose education: “The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” Along those lines: Cheryl Smith on teaching and protest, Jay Cross on occupying education, and Cathy Davidson on why this is a “Gettysburg address moment in higher education.”

Clayton R. Wright gives us a seemingly comprehensive list of education technology conferences, January-June 2012. (.doc, courtesy of Stephen Downes)

Audrey Watters speculates on whether the Kindle Fire will be popular among educators and then later discusses why she sent hers back to Amazon.

At the Chatty Professor, Ellen Bremen reflects on how college students manage changing relationships and discusses what students should know about faculty office hours. Quinn Warnick shares the list of articles he asks undergraduates to read before offering advice on grad school. Delaney Kirk suggests what students can expect from their profs and what profs should expect from their students.

Alice Cassidy shares a wealth of resources on sustainability education and leadership.

Trouble with your IT Department? Here’s how to work successfully with them.

And, finally, Wired UK explains the science of why the sound of fingernails on a blackboard makes us cringe.

Earlier Editions

Search Over 400,000 Teacher-Reviewed Lesson Plans & Worksheets from LessonPlanet ---
http://www.lessonplanet.com/

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

Converting Analog to Digital Video (ADC Analog Digital Conversion)  --- http://www.synchrotech.com/support/analog2dv-conversions.html
Note that some devices will only input analog video camera cartridges.
If you want to convert VCR/VHS tape cartridges you need to make sure that your converter can read VCR cartridges

You might want to search for "Zone 72-4769 Video Converter"
I don't think this has an analog VCR/VHS tape and camcorder tape reader.

Free Conversion Software --- http://digital-video-converter.software.informer.com/
You must have a hardware device on your computer that will read camcorder and VCR tapes.

There are also various service providers that will convert VCR/VHS tapes and camcorder tapes for a fee. This entails sending the tapes to the vendor.

To Infinity and Beyond: A Mind-Bending Documentary from the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/ito_infinity_and_beyondi_a_mind-bending_documentary_from_the_bbc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

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

"The Man Who Busted the ‘Banksters’," Smithsonian, November 29, 2011 ---
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/the-man-who-busted-the-%E2%80%98banksters%E2%80%99/

Three years removed from the stock market crash of 1929, America was in the throes of the Great Depression, with no recovery on the horizon. As President Herbert Hoover reluctantly campaigned for a second term, his motorcades and trains were pelted with rotten vegetables and eggs as he toured a hostile land where shanty towns erected by the homeless had sprung up. They were called “Hoovervilles,” creating the shameful images that would define his presidency. Millions of Americans had lost their jobs, and one in four Americans lost their life savings. Farmers were in ruin, 40 percent of the country’s banks had failed, and industrial stocks had lost 80 percent of their value.

With unemployment hovering at nearly 25 percent in 1932, Hoover was swept out of office in a landslide, and the newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised Americans relief. Roosevelt had decried “the ruthless manipulation of professional gamblers and the corporate system” that allowed “a few powerful interests to make industrial cannon fodder of the lives of half the population.” He made it plain that he would go after the “economic nobles,” and a bank panic on the day of his inauguration, in March 1933, gave him just the mandate he sought to attack the economic crisis in his “First 100 Days” campaign. “There must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and wrongdoing,” he said.

Ferdinand Pecora was an an unlikely answer to what ailed America at the time. He was a slight, soft-spoken son of Italian immigrants, and he wore a wide-brimmed fedora and often had a cigar dangling from his lips. Forced to drop out of school in his teens because his father was injured in a work-related accident, Pecora ultimately landed a job as a law clerk and attended New York Law School, passed the New York bar and became one of just a handful of first-generation Italian lawyers in the city. In 1918, he became an assistant district attorney. Over the next decade, he built a reputation as an honest and tenacious prosecutor, shutting down more than 100 “bucket shops”—illegal brokerage houses where bets were made on the rise and fall prices of stocks and commodity futures outside of the regulated market. His introduction to the world of fraudulent financial dealings would serve him well.

Just months before Hoover left office, Pecora was appointed chief counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency. Assigned to probe the causes of the 1929 crash, he led what became known as the “Pecora commission,” making front-page news when he called Charles Mitchell, the head of the largest bank in America, National City Bank (now Citibank), as his first witness. “Sunshine Charley” strode into the hearings with a good deal of contempt for both Pecora and his commission. Though shareholders had taken staggering losses on bank stocks, Mitchell admitted that he and his top officers had set aside millions of dollars from the bank in interest-free loans to themselves. Mitchell also revealed that despite making more than $1 million in bonuses in 1929, he had paid no taxes due to losses incurred from the sale of diminished National City stock—to his wife. Pecora revealed that National City had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and pawning them off to unwitting investors. By the time Mitchell’s testimony made the newspapers, he had been disgraced, his career had been ruined, and he would soon be forced into a million-dollar settlement of civil charges of tax evasion. “Mitchell,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash.”

The public was just beginning to get a taste for the retribution that Pecora was dishing out. In June 1933, his image appeared on the cover of Time magazine, seated at a Senate table, a cigar in his mouth. Pecora’s hearings had coined a new phrase, “banksters” for the finance “gangsters” who had imperiled the nation’s economy, and while the bankers and financiers complained that the theatrics of the Pecora commission would destroy confidence in the U.S. banking system, Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana said, “The best way to restore confidence in our banks is to take these crooked presidents out of the banks and treat them the same as [we] treated Al Capone.”

President Roosevelt urged Pecora to keep the heat on. If banks were worried about the hearings destroying confidence, Roosevelt said, they “should have thought of that when they did the things that are being exposed now.” Roosevelt even suggested that Pecora call none other than the financier J.P. Morgan Jr. to testify. When Morgan arrived at the Senate Caucus Room, surrounded by hot lights, microphones and dozens of reporters, Senator Glass described the atmosphere as a “circus, and the only things lacking now are peanuts and colored lemonade.”

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's American History of Fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
 

"Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate"
Daniel Martin Katz --- Michigan State University - College of Law
Joshua R. Gubler  --- Brigham Young University - Department of Political Science
Jon Zelner --- University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Center for Study of Complex Systems
Michael James Bommarito II --- University of Michigan, Department of Financial Engineering; University of Michigan, Department of Political Science; University of Michigan, Center for the Study of Complex Systems
Eric A. Provins  --- University of Michigan - Department of Political Science
Eitan M. Ingall  --- affiliation not provided to SSRN

SSRN, August 2011 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1352656

Abstract:
As its structure offers one causal mechanism for the emergence of and convergence upon a collective conception of what constitutes a sound legal rule, we believe the social structure of the American law professoriate is an important piece of a broader model of American common law development. Leveraging advances in network science and drawing from available information on the more 7,200 tenure-track professor employed by an ABA accredited institution, we explore the topology of the legal academy including the relative distribution of authority among its institutions. Drawing from social epidemiology literature, we provide a computational model for diffusion on our network. The model provides a parsimonious display of the trade off between "idea infectiousness" and structural position. While our model is undoubtedly simple, our initial foray into computational legal studies should, at a minimum, motivate future scholarship.

The authors constructed this network chart, showing the core law schools feeding the most law school faculty as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, NYU, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley :

What is WordNet?
http://www.certifiedchinesetranslation.com/WordNet/

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus, in that it groups words together based on their meanings. However, there are some important distinctions. First, WordNet interlinks not just word forms—strings of letters—but specific senses of words. As a result, words that are found in close proximity to one another in the network are semantically disambiguated. Second, WordNet labels the semantic relations among words, whereas the groupings of words in a thesaurus does not follow any explicit pattern other than meaning similarity.

Structure

The main relation among words in WordNet is synonymy, as between the words shut and close or car and automobile. Synonyms--words that denote the same concept and are interchangeable in many contexts--are grouped into unordered sets (synsets). Each of WordNet’s 117 000 synsets is linked to other synsets by means of a small number of “conceptual relations.” Additionally, a synset contains a brief definition (“gloss”) and, in most cases, one or more short sentences illustrating the use of the synset members. Word forms with several distinct meanings are represented in as many distinct synsets. Thus, each form-meaning pair in WordNet is unique.

Relations

The most frequently encoded relation among synsets is the super-subordinate relation (also called hyperonymy, hyponymy or ISA relation). It links more general synsets like {furniture, piece_of_furniture} to increasingly specific ones like {bed} and {bunkbed}. Thus, WordNet states that the category furniture includes bed, which in turn includes bunkbed; conversely, concepts like bed and bunkbed make up the category furniture. All noun hierarchies ultimately go up the root node {entity}. Hyponymy relation is transitive: if an armchair is a kind of chair, and if a chair is a kind of furniture, then an armchair is a kind of furniture. WordNet distinguishes among Types (common nouns) and Instances (specific persons, countries and geographic entities). Thus, armchair is a type of chair, Barack Obama is an instance of a president. Instances are always leaf (terminal) nodes in their hierarchies.

Meronymy, the part-whole relation holds between synsets like {chair} and {back, backrest}, {seat} and {leg}. Parts are inherited from their superordinates: if a chair has legs, then an armchair has legs as well. Parts are not inherited “upward” as they may be characteristic only of specific kinds of things rather than the class as a whole: chairs and kinds of chairs have legs, but not all kinds of furniture have legs.

Continued in article

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

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

Why do minority students "opt out" of many professions?

"'Opting Out'," by Allie Grasgreen, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/02/new-book-says-elite-black-students-dont-try-high-paying-jobs

The economic and educational disadvantages of low-income black students who struggle to complete college are well-documented. While black students at elite universities don’t necessarily fit into that category, a new book says they face social and institutional obstacles of their own – obstacles that ultimately drive them away from the high-status, high-paying jobs that they’re qualified for in fields such as engineering, science, finance and information technology. And while the reasons are complex, universities are partly at fault, the book argues.

Black students who graduate from elite colleges consistently gravitate toward less prestigious – though by no means less important – jobs in fields perceived as directly addressing social and racial inequities, such as education, social work and community and nonprofit organizing, the author found.

In an interview about her controversial new book, Opting Out: Losing the Potential of America’s Young Black Elite (University of Chicago Press), Maya A. Beasley explained the findings of her research and what she believes they mean for students and the colleges that educate them.

“Not everybody is going to make a great social worker…. Some are going to be fantastic brain surgeons, and we’re really missing the potential of these students because they’re not getting the information they need,” says Beasley, who is also an assistant professor of sociology and a member of the advisory board of the Institute for African Studies at the University of Connecticut. “It’s something that hasn’t been studied, and I think it’s a very important topic, particularly because I believe in people making choices that are informed and are going to fit well for them. But that’s not what’s happening, and I think there’s a systematic problem for African Americans, if a huge proportion of the population has certain types of careers that – while incredibly valuable – are also relatively lower paying, lower status, and have lower positions of power. And it’s shocking to me that students coming out of Harvard and Stanford are following that pattern.”

The Research

Beasley was inspired to look into the issue while in graduate school at Stanford University, after the dot-com boom hit. She was puzzled that none of her black peers from undergrad at Harvard University seemed to be taking part in the boom. Through a statistical analysis for her master's thesis, Beasley realized black students were largely absent from science, technology, engineering and mathematics, as well as other corporate fields.

Despite civil rights legislation enacted in the 1960s and ’70s, a lack of federal enforcement of and funding for black employment initiatives kept the parents of today’s college students from making significant strides, Beasley writes – and their children have modeled their career preferences accordingly. There is more occupational diversity among black employees today, but the differences as compared to whites are still significant.

For example, according to the 2000 Census, the top 20 white-collar careers among both black and white employees include elementary and secondary education as well as registered nursing. But break it down further and you’ll find that white people hold proportionately more high-status positions: lawyers, physicians, surgeons, chief executives and financial, general and operations managers. Black employees, in contrast, trend toward “service-oriented, racialized jobs” including counselors, education administrators, preschool and kindergarten teachers and community and social service specialists. Taken together, the differences in employment result in: chief executives being the fifth most common white-collar occupation among whites, but 35th among blacks; lawyers being 10th among whites but 27th among blacks; and physicians being 19th among whites but 31st among blacks.

Thus, Beasley concludes that a persistent lack of black employees within certain fields is the source of “significant economic and status disparities” between black and white populations in America.

Aiming to figure out why young black people apparently aren’t pursuing these jobs, Beasley conducted in-depth interviews with 60 elite students total -- 30 black, 30 white – between Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. What she found made sense in light of previous research and statistics regarding who works what jobs: the aspirations of most of these students, Beasley writes, “corresponded to what is effectively the status quo.”

“Black students aspired to careers in which they have greater numbers and/or to racialized occupations,” she writes, “whereas white students showed a more diverse range of occupational interests, free of racialized substance.”

The University Role

Despite the significant role of history and culture in this trend, colleges are partly responsible as well, Beasley says. And she says one big thing they should do to remedy that is revisit the idea of black-themed student residence halls.

“The issue of housing is relatively controversial because the decision to build black-themed dorms and Hispanic-themed dorms all over in the ’80s and ’90s – in general, they were very well-intentioned,” Beasley says. “But the result of having students be so highly segregated is that they’re missing a lot.”

Some black students in Beasley’s study reported self-segregating their social interactions in part to avoid racism or stigmas they encounter on campus, a habit that has been documented in previous research on predominantly white campuses. (While black students make up 10 to 12 percent of Stanford’s undergraduates, they account for only 4 percent at Berkeley. That number has declined significantly since the system’s Board of Regents eliminated affirmative action in hiring and admissions in 1995.) Students take ample advantage of various race-based groups when they are available.

But limiting interaction between students of different ethnicities is not only harmful in the widely accepted sense that it hinders development of tolerance and empathy, Beasley argues, it also puts groups at an informational disadvantage. While she says she’s not insisting that these dorms should be eliminated, she says administrators should “acknowledge the consequences of their support for student requests to segregate themselves.”

Or, to use another word, to see that they may “ghettoize” the students.

“College offers black students chances to do the same kinds of networking and to be exposed to the same information that most white students have had their entire lives,” Beasley writes. Yet, many of the students she interviewed socialized primarily with other black peers. “While black students may derive substantial value from these networks, there is also a considerable downside to their separation from the wider campus community. Racially integrated networks provide access to information otherwise unavailable to these students, including the existence of occupations they had never considered, the awareness of how to obtain training for them, and connections to professionals (white and nonwhite) who possess them.”

Other things universities should be doing::

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think many minority students opt out of some majors that have certification/licensing examinations because of what professors, older students, alumni, and even parents are saying about certification examinations in those professions. In accounting, for example, many white and minority students avoid accounting majors because of what they hear about the difficulty and low passage rates on the nationwide uniform CPA examination. Others fear the CFA, engineering licensing examinations, teaching certification examinations, etc. Others fear such admission examinations such as the MCAT (for medical school), the LSAT (for law school) and the GRE for various other professions like architecture. Graduate school costs are also considerations, especially for medical school and law school. Even accounting requires five years (150 credits) with some particular tough course requirements to sit for the CPA examination.

"Whatever Happened to All Those Plans to Hire More Minority Professors?" by Ben Gose, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2008
 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i05/05b00101.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Certification Examinations
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#CertificationExams

For similar reasons, I think many blacks and Latinos are avoiding other professions with difficult and color-blind licensing examinations. Nursing may be an exception, but many of the blacks and Latinos in nursing schools are top female students in the university. Also nursing school curricula are very focused on the licensing examinations.

What it takes most is special effort and funding to achieve a higher proportion of minorities in a profession. Bless Bernie Milano at KPMG for years and years of determination to raise accounting PhD fellowships and special programs for minority doctoral students ---
 

To its credit, the Big Four accounting firm KPMG, inspired heavily by Bernie Milano at KPMG, years ago created a foundation  (with multiple outside contributors) for virtually five years of funding to minorities to selected for particular accounting doctoral programs --- http://www.kpmgfoundation.org/foundinit.asp

December 2, 2011 reply from Amelia A. Baldwin on the AAA Commons
: http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/198bee6d80  

Bob,

Thans for sharing that! It's directly relevant to one of my current research projects which looks at the placement of accounting doctoral graduates. Our results show that when the initial placement of those from under-represented minority populations is compared to the initial placement of all others (controlling for the rank of the accounting doctoral program) the only significant differences in placements are found in the top quartile of programs. That is, there's no difference in placement for those in the middle or bottom ranked programs, regardless of minority status, but graduates of color from top ranks accounting doctoral programs do not place as well as other graduates from those same programs.

So, the problem isn't just that few persons of color elect to pursue accounting degrees in general (which is sadly true), or that even fewer persons of color elect to pursue accounting doctoral studies (a big enough problem already) but also that even when they do pursue accounting doctoral degrees and even if they attend top schools, they do not initially place as well as their non-minority counterparts.

Shocking!

"British Library Group Sticks With Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell," by Jenifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/british-library-group-doesnt-ditch-elsevier-and-wiley-blackwell/34517?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

A major British library group announced today that it has struck new deals with Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell, two of the largest publishers of academic journals. The group, Research Libraries U.K., had threatened to discontinue so-called Big Deal subscription arrangements with the two publishers because of what it called unsustainable price increases. U.S. libraries have also been re-examining whether Big Deals are really worth what they cost.

The new deals with Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell “serve as new benchmarks for our relations with other publishers, as RLUK’s members will no longer accept massive unjustified price rises,” Phil Sykes, chair of the group, said in a statement. “We will continue to scrutinize all offers carefully in the future to make sure we get best value for money and to ensure that we do not pay for new, untested journal titles as part of ‘all-or-nothing’ packages.” The new deal was negotiated on behalf of the group’s 30 member libraries by JISC Collections, an organization that helps provide digital resources for British education and research.

Continued in article

About those nondisclosure agreements in journal subscription contracts
"Cornell U. Library Takes a Stand With Journal Vendors: Prices Will Be Made Public," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, March  24, 2011 --- http://chronicle.com/article/Cornell-U-Library-Takes-a/126852/

Librarians have long complained about the nondisclosure agreements, or NDA's, that some publishers and vendors require them to sign, making it difficult to share information about how much they pay to subscribe to journal databases and other scholarly material. Some state universities' libraries have been able to reveal licensing terms anyway because their institutions are subject to sunshine laws. Now one major private institution, Cornell University, has publicly declared it's had enough of confidentiality agreements, too.

"To promote openness and fairness among libraries licensing scholarly resources, Cornell University Library will not enter into vendor contracts that require nondisclosure of pricing information or other information that does not constitute a trade secret," the library said in a statement posted on its Web site. "The more that libraries are able to communicate with one another about vendor offers, the better they are able to weigh the costs and benefits of any individual offer. An open market will result in better licensing terms."

Anne R. Kenney, Cornell's university librarian, said that with purchasing decisions under close scrutiny, it felt like the right moment to take a stand. Enough major publishers have agreed to drop nondisclosure clauses "that it was time to bite the bullet and make that a principle moving forward," she said. "Publishers are beginning to get it."

At the end of its statement, the Cornell library listed some of the publishers that do not request confidentiality clauses when they negotiate licenses. They include the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press, EBSCO, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, ProQuest, Sage, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. (If a publisher does not appear on the list, that doesn't necessarily mean it requires NDA's, just that it hasn't been in recent contract negotiations with Cornell's library.)

Ms. Kenney said that Cornell is joining "a groundswell among academic libraries to start to routinely ask for the removal of NDA's." In June 2009, the Association of Research Libraries urged its members to steer clear of nondisclosure or confidentiality clauses.

"Part of our rationale in going public with this is to make evident that private institutions are also starting to feel that this is not a good way of doing business," Ms. Kenney said.

Support for the Move

Several librarians at other universities said their institutions had taken positions similar to Cornell's, even if they haven't publicly posted their policy on NDA's. "Yes, we have taken a similar approach for the past year," said Winston Tabb, the dean of university libraries and museums at the Johns Hopkins University. He wrote in an e-mail that "we believe that transparency is appropriate for libraries generally; and in particular that we should not agree to withhold information about how we are spending an increasingly huge—and ever-growing—percentage of our stretched library budgets."

Continued in article

Commercial Scholarly Journals and Oligopoly Publishers Are Ripping Off Libraries, and Scholars, Authors, and Students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals

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

"New Course-Management Software Promises Facebook-Like Experience," by Alexandra Rice, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 29, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-course-management-software-promises-facebook-like-experience/34488?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Three University of Pennsylvania students who recently dropped out to start an upstart course-management system today unveiled their software, called Coursekit, after having raised more than $1-million in venture capital.

The trio, frustrated with the systems offered by universities, such as Blackboard, decided to team up and design their own online course platform, which emphasizes social networking and an easy-to-use interface. By May, the founders, Joesph Cohen, Dan Getelman, and Jim Grandpre, had raised so much start-up cash, from sources including the Founder Collective and IA Ventures, that they decided to quit school to focus on developing Coursekit.

Thirty universities tested Coursekit this fall, including Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.

Coursekit offers a platform for hosting discussions, posting grades and syllabi, sharing calendars and links, and creating student profiles. The company has hired 80 student ambassadors to introduce the new course-management system to students at colleges across the country.

The software is one of several new challengers to Blackboard, which is used by a majority of U.S. colleges. In October, Pearson announced OpenClass, a free course-management system, and last year a Utah company called Instructure unveiled Canvas, which is available under an open-source license.

"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

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

Bob Jensen's threads on the history of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Course Management Systems (CMS) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm

Professors Who Cheat (in this case fabricate data and research outcomes)
Dutch begin documenting and trying to explain top social psychologist's massive fraud.

"A Star's Collapse." Inside Higher Ed, November 28, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/28/scholars-analyze-case-massive-research-fraud

Bob Jensen's threads on Professors Who Cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoFabricate

Bob Jensen's threads on the how top accounting research journals don't do enough to deter accounting professors who (might) cheat
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

December 1, 2011 message from David Albrecht

I'm attaching a link to a pretty interesting interview of Helen Brown. She is talking about how the search engines are affecting your search results.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxQShnkhGFg&feature=youtu.be

One of the selling points of for-profit universities is that they are more open to non-traditional students vis-à-vis nonprofit traditional colleges and universities. This is thus a "diversity" selling point for for-profit universities.

However, one of the drawbacks is that when traditional colleges and universities attempt to be more open to diversity and admission of non-traditional students, there are huge problems of enforcing academic standards and serious possibilities that most of the non-traditional students will not graduate.

Here's how some for-profit universities deal unethically with assessment issues. It's a small wonder that for-profit universities are very popular with non-traditional students.

"Undercover Probe Finds Lax Academic Standards at Some For-Profit Colleges," by Kelly Field, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 22, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Undercover-Probe-Finds-Lax/129881/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

An undercover investigation by the Government Accountability Office has found evidence of lax academic standards in some online for-profit programs.

The probe, which is described in a report made public Tuesday, found that staff at six of the 12 colleges that enrolled the investigators tolerated plagiarism or awarded credit for incomplete or shoddy work.

The release of the report, "For-Profit Schools: Experiences of Undercover Students Enrolled in Online Classes at Selected Colleges," comes roughly a year after the accountability office revised an earlier report on recruiting abuses at for-profit colleges, acknowledging errors and omissions in its findings. A coalition of for-profit colleges has sued the office over that report, accusing its investigators of professional malpractice.

In that earlier investigation, the office sent undercover investigators to 15 for-profit colleges to pose as prospective students. It found widespread deception in recruiting by the colleges, with many employees providing students with false or misleading information about graduation rates, job prospects, or earning potential.

This time, the agents attempted to enroll in online programs at 15 for-profit colleges using a home-school diploma or a diploma from a closed high school. Twelve of the colleges accepted them.

The "students" then proceeded to skip class, plagiarize, and submit "substandard" work. Though several ultimately failed their classes, some got credit for shoddy or plagiarized work along the way.

At one college, a student received credit for six plagiarized assignments; at another, a student submitted photos of political figures and celebrities in lieu of an essay, but still earned a passing grade. A third student got full credit on a final project, despite completing only two of the three required components. That same student received full credit for an assignment that had clearly been prepared for another class.

In two cases, instructors confronted students about their repeated plagiarism but took no disciplinary action against them. One student received credit for a response that was copied verbatim from other students' discussion posts.

Instructors at the other six colleges followed their institutions' policies on grading and plagiarism, and in some cases offered to help students who appeared to be struggling.

All of the students ultimately withdrew or were expelled from the programs. Three of the colleges failed to provide the departing students with federally required exit counseling about their repayment options and the consequences of default.

Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, who requested the report, said its findings "underscore the need for stronger oversight of the for-profit education industry."

"It is obvious that Congress must step in to hold this heavily federally subsidized industry more accountable," he said.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This makes me wish that similar investigations (audits?) be expanded to huge samples of nonprofit colleges and universities where grade inflation is also rampant.

Most universities now have financial internal auditors and are subjected to governmental or independent CPA audits. But few have independent audits of the  variability in academic standards between departments and between individual faculty members.

Bob Jensen's threads on For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone of Fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

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

November 28, 2011 reply from David Albrecht

Bob, I agree with your comment that the study could have been expanded. As it is, the study is hardly scientific. The sample size is small, and we have no idea whether lax standards, instructor negligence, or instructor mercy are responsible for the actions. In traditional schools, whether they be state funded or private, I wonder if more abuses would be found among tenure-track or non-tenure-track profs.

Dave Albrecht

November 28, 2011 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

In my opinion, grade inflation and lax academic standards may be more of a problem for tenured professors than probationary (non-tenured) professors on tenure track and maybe even for adjunct professors (but adjuncts are so variable it's hard to draw generalizations).

I will provide an example of non-tenured faculty who are on tenure tracks at Trinity University. Such probationary faculty are under severe scrutiny by their immediate departmental faculty and upper-level university committees. There's heavy pressure on all faculty involved to warn probationary faculty about inadequate versus adequate progress toward tenure. The hope is that all nontenured faculty not making adequate progress by year six will have been terminated such that all faculty going up for tenure have highly probable chances of not being rejected.

Included in what Trinity calls "probationary reviews" as well as final "tenure applications" are teaching evaluations, grading distributions for each course, copies of examinations in each course, copies of course syllabi, and self-review statements of candidates. There are also external (off-campus) reviews in tenure applications, but these are mostly focused on research and publication.

Tenured faculty are not subjected to such rigorous reviews, and hence a few tenured faculty in my viewpoint become more lax about academic standards. Hopefully these are just outliers. There is a rigorous review of associate professors at times when they apply for full professorships. These are much like tenure applications and require a truckload of teaching evaluations, grading distributions for each course, copies of examinations in each course, copies of course syllabi, and self-review statements of candidates. There are also external (off-campus) reviews in full-professorship applications, but these are mostly focused on research and publication.

In my 24 years at Trinity University I was completely surprised by proportion of hired tenure track faculty that were terminated before even reaching the tenure application stage. I was also even more surprised by some of the tenure applicants and full-professor applicants who were rejected by the P&T Committee and/or the President of the University.

I was also surprised in some years by the some of the long-term tenured faculty (some of whom were lifetime associate professors) who had their tenure contracts bought out by deals made with the President of the University. In some cases those buyouts were either for lackluster teaching and/or lackluster academic standards.

Of course there were also a few faculty members who had some other dysfunctional behavior leading to buyouts. One of my friends had an early onset of dementia and was somewhat of a problem even after termination (on a generous early retirement package), because he continued to hang around computer labs and the campus library and showed  off his vanity press "research" book that was garbage to the point of embarrassment. He claimed that proper exercise could prevent all forms of cancer.


Some campus officials and faculty, including me, breathed a sigh of relief when he eventually died and stopped giving his vanity press book away for free around Texas.

Of course there are also those who will breathe a sigh of relief when one of their retired faculty members stops sending so many messages to the AECM.

Respectfully,
Bob Jensen

"Historically Black University Looks Online to Raise Enrollment," by Alexandra Rice, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 30, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/historically-black-university-looks-online-to-raise-enrollment/34498?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The Southern University system is increasing its online course offerings through a partnership with a for-profit provider of online degree programs for historically black colleges and universities.

Education Online Services Corporation, or EOServe, which specializes in marketing and recruitment, will work with the university to package its existing degree programs for the Internet and to develop its online presence, said Southern’s president, Ronald F. Mason Jr.

The financially ailing system, comprising five campuses in Louisiana, is betting on the effort to attract new students and additional revenue. “Southern has historically been one of the larger HBCU’s,” Mr. Mason said, “and that means a lot of noncompleters or graduates of the university are out there to be tapped.”

Southern is looking to attract those students—whether finishing an undergraduate degree or returning for an advanced degree—by offering online classes traditionally provided in a brick-and-mortar setting.

“We want to help expand the school’s brand,” said Barry Singer, CEO of EOServe, “and give students the opportunity to go to Southern who normally wouldn’t be able to do so.”

EOServe is paying to help develop the online programs, and it will split any profits with the university system. The company will also recruit and enroll students; Southern will provide the course material and instruction, Mr. Singer said.

Continued in article

Southern University and A&M College Graduate School
http://web.subr.edu/fileadmin/files/Gradschool/2010_2012_GraduateSchoolBulletin.pdf

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

"Working Into the Sunset," by Elizabeth Murphy, Inside Higher Ed, November 29. 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/29/survey-documents-retirement-worries-higher-ed-employees 

More than 6 in 10 higher education employees fear their retirement savings will not be enough for a comfortable retirement, according to a survey released Monday by Fidelity Investments.

The survey found that most employees in academe — regardless of age — feel like novices when it comes to investing their money. More than half of those surveyed reported they feel “overwhelmed” by the investing process and wish they had more guidance from their employers, according to the survey.

Fidelity officials said this trend seems to be indicative of the economy as a whole. As the economy dipped, employees were being asked to take on more responsibility for their own retirement savings, and many fear for the long-term viability of Social Security.

"It's not all that surprising when you look at the rollercoaster people have been on in the last 18 to 24 months in the market," said Lauren Brouhard, senior vice president of marketing of the tax exempt market at Fidelity Investments, said. "It's not uncommon for people to be investing more conservatively, especially younger investors who are skittish based on the markets that they see."

Fidelity surveyed about 600 higher education employees, including faculty members, administrators, general staff and executive staff members from private and public institutions, and analyzed the responses by employee age.  (Those surveyed were among all higher education employees, randomly selected, regardless of whether they are Fidelity clients.)  Most respondents said they do not have a formal retirement plan, even though they say that is the most important savings area for them.

And even though the younger groups should be more aggressive with their investments, the survey found their asset allocations are on par with those in the baby boomer group.  It also found that half of the employees surveyed considered themselves “conservative” retirement investors, no matter the age.

Select Fidelity Survey Findings

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
What the article does not stress is that the freedom of time allocation for most working professors makes their jobs more like retirement than is possible in most other working careers. Some older professors really abuse their privileges by teaching on automatic pilot, spending less than 20 hours per week in their offices, and living like retirees the rest of the time. What's the incentive to retire?

Of course other older professors live much more stressful lives teaching and conducting research and maintaining Websites 70 or more hours per week. But many of these often like their working lives so much that they prefer this working life to a "boring" retirement.

What professors needed was more parenting time when their children were very young. Unfortunately, this is often that stage of their careers that was the most stressful when they were still seeking tenure and/or promotions to full professorships. After Age 60 their children are grown, and their work on campus is often less stressful than it was when they were younger.

The article does not mention another thing that keeps older professors on the job long after retirement age --- newer and younger trophy spouses who lose their medical insurance their professor spouses retire. This may change when and if Obamacare kicks in and many universities drop medical insurance plans for employees. I'm not just being facetious here. I know at least two professors at Trinity working long beyond retirement age primarily to continue their medical insurance benefits for younger trophy spouses. Fortunately for me my wife was on early  Medicare when I retired --- no younger trophy spouse. Sigh!

"Journal Editors' Reactions to Word of Plagiarism? Largely Silence," by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 20, 2011 ---  http://chronicle.com/article/Journal-Editors-Reactions-to/129829/

Lior Shamir was surprised to learn that one of his papers had been plagiarized. He was even more surprised to learn that it had been plagiarized, by his count, 21 times.

But what really astonished him is that no one seemed to care.

In July, Mr. Shamir, an assistant professor of computer science at Lawrence Technological University, near Detroit, received an anonymous e-mail signed "Prof. Against Plagiarism." That's how he found out that multiple paragraphs from a paper he had presented at a 2006 conference, titled "Human Perception-Based Color Segmentation Using Fuzzy Logic," also appeared in a 2010 paper by two professors in Iran. There was no question of coincidence—the wording was identical—and his paper wasn't even cited.

Curious, he started to poke around some more. One of the Iranian professors, Ali Moghani, a professor at the Institute for Color Science and Technology, in Tehran, appeared to have copied parts of the paper in eight different publications. (Mr. Moghani did not respond to a request for comment.) But he wasn't the only one. The more Mr. Shamir looked, the more he found. Those 21 papers had 26 authors, all of whom had published Mr. Shamir's work under their names, without credit.

It's not as if the paper was a central part of his academic work. In fact, he had forgotten about it until he got the anonymous e-mail. Now, though, he was intrigued, and more than a little annoyed.

So he started contacting journals, indexing services, conference organizers. He sent, by his estimate, about 30 e-mails. He expected that the papers, once it was shown that they had been plagiarized, would be retracted. Maybe he would get an explanation, or an apology, or a response of some kind.

In fact, he received only a couple of replies.

Among those he did receive was a reply from Mohammad Reza Darafsheh, the other Iranian academic. Mr. Darafsheh, a professor of mathematics at the University of Tehran, wrote that "[a]bout the overlap of some sentences in chapter 4 of our paper with yours we feel sorry." But he added that it was "only about one page." The e-mail ended with an offer to collaborate with Mr. Shamir in the future.

When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Darafsheh wrote in an e-mail that only one paragraph was identical to the original, and that it had "no scientific value." After it was pointed out to Mr. Darafsheh that, in truth, about 400 words of the eight-page paper appeared to have been copied directly from Mr. Shamir's paper, he insisted that there had been no copying, and that it was merely a "co-accident."

Mr. Darafsheh and Mr. Moghani's paper was published in the Italian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. The Chronicle contacted the editor, Piergiulio Corsini, who in turn asked Violeta Leoreanu Fotea, a professor of mathematics at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, in Romania, to investigate. After reviewing both papers, she wrote that she could "not say that Darafsheh and Moghani have plagiarized the work of Shamir."

After The Chronicle e-mailed her multiple examples of just such copying from the paper, Ms. Leoreanu Fotea acknowledged that it was "a lot of identical text," and said Mr. Corsini would decide how to handle the matter. But he wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle that he was not sure what decision he was supposed to make. "The paper has been already published, and I cannot cancel it," he wrote. "I'm sorry for what happened."

Later, Ms. Leoreanu Fotea wrote to say that "two lines on this unpleasant episode of plagiarism" would appear in a future edition of the journal. 'Deny the Undeniable'

In 2009, another paper that borrowed heavily from Mr. Shamir's without credit was published in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering & Technology. One of the co-authors was Preeti Bajaj, president of the G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, in India, who was also chair of the conference where the plagiarized paper was presented.

That plagiarism was first reported this past September by the journal Nature India, in which Ms. Bajaj acknowledged that portions were copied but blamed a graduate assistant who was a co-author of the paper. She told Nature India that the assistant had been fired. What she did not mention was that the paper was published again this year in the Journal of Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing. In an e-mail to The Chronicle, she wrote in uncertain English that as a co-author, "I'm guilty but I didn't knew my student will do so." In a follow-up message, she asserted that the "research truth can be known to only those who understands and work on the technology." Ms. Bajaj did not respond to a request for further explanation.

Continued in article

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

Question
Have there been any recent plagiarism incidents detected for American Accounting Association research journals?
Plagiarism arises when these journal authors plagiarized or when these journal authors had their own writings plagiarized.


I know of one back in the 1960s where TAR published a paper in its entirety that was previously published in Management Science. TAR issued an apology and the author, from Scandinavia, was not punished in any way to my knowledge other than to face the embarrassment of being caught. By the way, it was Les Livingstone who first notified the AAA that this TAR paper was plagiarized.

From the Scout Report on December 2, 2011

Muuter --- http://muuter.com/ 

If you are on Twitter for work or pleasure, you may find that some users are a bit too "noisy". Muuter can help with this problem, as it gives interested parties the ability to scan their timeline and mute everyone who uses certain keywords habitually. Visitors can set up Muuter to mute certain users and their tweets for a set amount of time as well. This version is compatible with all operating systems.  

---

ArchivedBook --- http://archivedbook.com/ 

Looking for a way to locate past information on your Facebook profile? ArchivedBook is a simple and easy way to do just that. Visitors just need to sign-in to their own Facebook profile, and after giving ArchivedBook permission, they can look at all of their Facebook messages, check-in locations, status updates, and posted links. Visitors wishing to use the site should note that the program is compatible with all operating systems.

 

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

Education Tutorials

Life Sciences Education (Journal) ---  http://www.lifescied.org/

Pathways to Science --- http://www.pathwaystoscience.org/index.asp

Great Science For Girls --- http://www.greatscienceforgirls.org/

STEM Resources for Teachers and Students --- http://www.thinkfinity.org/stem

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

Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Stephen Colbert Talks Science with Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/stephen_colbert_talks_science_with_astrophysicist_neil_degrasse_tyson.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Goshawk Flies Through Tiny Spaces in Slo-Mo! ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2CFckjfP-1E

To Infinity and Beyond: A Mind-Bending Documentary from the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/ito_infinity_and_beyondi_a_mind-bending_documentary_from_the_bbc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Life Sciences Education (Journal) ---  http://www.lifescied.org/

Great Science For Girls --- http://www.greatscienceforgirls.org/

STEM Resources for Teachers and Students --- http://www.thinkfinity.org/stem

Pathways to Science --- http://www.pathwaystoscience.org/index.asp

The Science of HIV/AIDS --- http://bioedonline.org/resources/hivaidsindex.cfm

Welcome Home Howard, Or Whatever Became of the Daring Aviator?
Howard Hughes Aviation Photograph Collection --- http://digital.library.unlv.edu/hughes/

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

Social Science and Economics Tutorials

Practical Action (using technology to solve poverty problems) --- http://practicalaction.org/home

Chronic Poverty Research Centre --- http://www.chronicpoverty.org/page/index

ReliefWeb (poverty) --- http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc100?OpenForm

Detroit Public Television's American Black Journal --- http://abj.matrix.msu.edu/

Great Science For Girls --- http://www.greatscienceforgirls.org/

United Nations Development Programme: Open Data --- http://data.undp.org/

National Blood Clot Alliance --- http://www.stoptheclot.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

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

Math Tutorials

To Infinity and Beyond: A Mind-Bending Documentary from the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/ito_infinity_and_beyondi_a_mind-bending_documentary_from_the_bbc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Great Science For Girls --- http://www.greatscienceforgirls.org/

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

History Tutorials

To Infinity and Beyond: A Mind-Bending Documentary from the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/ito_infinity_and_beyondi_a_mind-bending_documentary_from_the_bbc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Cultural & Academic Films --- http://www.archive.org/details/culturalandacademicfilms

The First Actresses
http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/the-first-actresses/first_actresses_exhibition.php

A Day in Venezia --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/a_day_in_venezia.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

National Building Museum --- http://www.nbm.org/

Great Buildings Collection (architecture) --- http://www.greatbuildings.com/gbc.html Moving Image Source (history of film) --- http://www.movingimagesource.us/

Buildings in Cities --- http://www.emporis.com/en/

National Gallery of Great Buildings --- http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/New_National_Gallery.html

Illustrations to Dickens --- http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fdickens2

Pacific Standard Time at the Getty (art history) --- http://www.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/

The World’s First Mobile Phone (1922) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/worlds_first_mobile_phone_1922.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
One Ringy Dingy --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o

Stanley Kubrick’s Photographs: Browse Them or Buy Them --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/stanley_kubricks_photographs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

NIST: A Walk Through Time (watches, clocks, timepieces) --- http://www.nist.gov/pml/general/time

"Poetry: Dos-à-dos With Dickinson," by Lisa Russ Spaar, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, December 5, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/spaar-on-poetry-dos-a-dos-with-dickinson/41777?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Welcome Home Howard, Or Whatever Became of the Daring Aviator?
Howard Hughes Aviation Photograph Collection --- http://digital.library.unlv.edu/hughes/

From the Scout Report on December 2, 2011

In a small town in Wisconsin, Josef Stalin’s daughter dies
Lana Peters, Stalin’s Daughter, Dies at 85
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/world/europe/stalins-daughter-dies-at-
85.html

Stalin’s daughter dies
http://themoscownews.com/russia/20111129/189244085.html

Portland granddaughter of Josef Stalin remembers her mother as a talented
writer and lecturer in her own right
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/11/portland_granddaughter_of_jose.html

Tea with Stalin’s Daughter
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/12/01/inigo-thomas/tea-with-stalin%E2%80%99s-
daughter/

Lana about Svetlana: Stalin's daughter on her life in Wisconsin
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/doug_moe/article_85ebc5d0-4978-11df-
b181-001cc4c002e0.html

Twenty Letters to a Father
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1967/11/twenty-letters-to-a-
father/3396/

TIME Photos: Stalin’s daughter Lana Peters
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2100515,00.html

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

Language Tutorials

What is WordNet?
http://www.certifiedchinesetranslation.com/WordNet/

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus, in that it groups words together based on their meanings. However, there are some important distinctions. First, WordNet interlinks not just word forms—strings of letters—but specific senses of words. As a result, words that are found in close proximity to one another in the network are semantically disambiguated. Second, WordNet labels the semantic relations among words, whereas the groupings of words in a thesaurus does not follow any explicit pattern other than meaning similarity.

Structure

The main relation among words in WordNet is synonymy, as between the words shut and close or car and automobile. Synonyms--words that denote the same concept and are interchangeable in many contexts--are grouped into unordered sets (synsets). Each of WordNet’s 117 000 synsets is linked to other synsets by means of a small number of “conceptual relations.” Additionally, a synset contains a brief definition (“gloss”) and, in most cases, one or more short sentences illustrating the use of the synset members. Word forms with several distinct meanings are represented in as many distinct synsets. Thus, each form-meaning pair in WordNet is unique.

Relations

The most frequently encoded relation among synsets is the super-subordinate relation (also called hyperonymy, hyponymy or ISA relation). It links more general synsets like {furniture, piece_of_furniture} to increasingly specific ones like {bed} and {bunkbed}. Thus, WordNet states that the category furniture includes bed, which in turn includes bunkbed; conversely, concepts like bed and bunkbed make up the category furniture. All noun hierarchies ultimately go up the root node {entity}. Hyponymy relation is transitive: if an armchair is a kind of chair, and if a chair is a kind of furniture, then an armchair is a kind of furniture. WordNet distinguishes among Types (common nouns) and Instances (specific persons, countries and geographic entities). Thus, armchair is a type of chair, Barack Obama is an instance of a president. Instances are always leaf (terminal) nodes in their hierarchies.

Meronymy, the part-whole relation holds between synsets like {chair} and {back, backrest}, {seat} and {leg}. Parts are inherited from their superordinates: if a chair has legs, then an armchair has legs as well. Parts are not inherited “upward” as they may be characteristic only of specific kinds of things rather than the class as a whole: chairs and kinds of chairs have legs, but not all kinds of furniture have legs.

Continued in article

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

Music Tutorials

Let’s Get Lost: Bruce Weber’s Sad Film of Jazz Legend Chet Baker --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/ilets_get_losti_bruce_webers_sad_film_of_jazz_legend_chet_baker.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/

November 28, 2011

• Middle-of-Night Sleeping Pill Intermezzo Approved
• All Beans Aren't the Same in Gassy Side Effects
• Bacteria Flourish in Public Restrooms
• CDC: Teens Don't Eat Enough Fruits and Veggies
• Most Drug-Related Hospitalizations Due to Handful of Drugs
• Acne Patients Who Take Antibiotics May Get More Sore Throats
• Higher Cancer Risk in People With HIV
• Consumer Group: Dangerous Toys Are on Store Shelves
• Study: Sex Puts a Shine on Golden Years
• Coffee May Cut Endometrial Cancer Risk

November 29, 2011

• Childbirth May Cut Women's Heart Disease Risk
• Microwave Technique Fights Lung Tumors
• Kids With ADHD Have Distinct Brain Patterns
• Chickenpox Vaccination of Children Helps Protect Infants, Too
• Most Drug-Related Hospitalizations Due to Handful of Drugs
• Middle-of-Night Sleeping Pill Intermezzo Approved
• CDC: Teens Don't Eat Enough Fruits and Veggies
• Bacteria Flourish in Public Restrooms
• All Beans Aren't the Same in Gassy Side Effects
• Consumer Group: Dangerous Toys Are on Store Shelves

November 30, 2011

• Violent Video Games Linked to Brain Changes
• Snacking Before Lunch May Sabotage Your Diet
• FAQ: Generic Lipitor
• Men Don't Always Think About Sex
• Artificial Hips: Newer Might Not Be Better
• Concussions Might Affect Kids and Adults Differently
• Heading Soccer Ball Linked to Brain Injury
• Childbirth May Cut Women's Heart Disease Risk
• Most Americans With HIV Don’t Have Infection Under Control
• Microwave Technique Fights Lung Tumors

December 1, 2011

• Violent Video Games Linked to Brain Changes
• Eating Fish May Be Good for Brain Health
• Report: Arsenic in Apple, Grape Juice
• Long-Term Treatment May Be Best Way to Help Smokers Quit
• Concussions Might Affect Kids and Adults Differently
• Snacking Before Lunch May Sabotage Your Diet
• Men Don't Always Think About Sex
• Artificial Hips: Newer Might Not Be Better
• FAQ: Generic Lipitor
• Heading Soccer Ball Linked to Brain Injury

December 2, 2011

• Weight Gain, Need to Be Nice Are Holiday Season Gripes
• Experimental Treatment May Help Relieve Back Pain
• Diet Loaded With Veggies, Fruits, Whole Grains May Cut Stroke Risk
• New FDA Guidelines for Testing Artificial Pancreas
• Prozac May Lessen Autism Symptom in Adults
• Report: Arsenic in Apple, Grape Juice
• Eating Fish May Be Good for Brain Health
• Long-Term Treatment May Be Best Way to Help Smokers Quit
• Violent Video Games Linked to Brain Changes
• Heading Soccer Ball Linked to Brain Injury

December 3, 2011

• Experts Call Male Menopause a Myth
• Treatment Shows Promise for Premature Ejaculation
• Weight Gain, Need to Be Nice Are Holiday Season Gripes
• Study: BPA Is in Wide Variety of Paper Products
• Chewing Gum Before a Test May Boost Performance
• Prozac May Lessen Autism Symptom in Adults
• Experimental Treatment May Help Relieve Back Pain
• New FDA Guidelines for Testing Artificial Pancreas
• Diet Loaded With Veggies, Fruits, Whole Grains May Cut Stroke Risk
• Eating Fish May Be Good for Brain Health

December 5, 2011

• Weight Gain, Need to Be Nice Are Holiday Season Gripes
• Experts Call Male Menopause a Myth
• Chewing Gum Before a Test May Boost Performance
• Treatment Shows Promise for Premature Ejaculation
• Study: BPA Is in Wide Variety of Paper Products
• Experimental Treatment May Help Relieve Back Pain
• New FDA Guidelines for Testing Artificial Pancreas
• Prozac May Lessen Autism Symptom in Adults
• Diet Loaded With Veggies, Fruits, Whole Grains May Cut Stroke Risk
• Long-Term Treatment May Be Best Way to Help Smokers Quit

December 6, 2011

• Newer Antidepressants Work Equally Well, Study Finds
• Eating Fatty Fish Benefits Younger Women, Study Shows
• Low Vitamin D May Raise Diabetes Risk in Kids
• More People Getting Flu Shots This Year
• Want to Live Longer? Fit Outweighs Fat
• Eating Rice May Raise Arsenic Levels
• Study: Fears of Teen 'Sexting' May Be Exaggerated
• Weight Gain, Need to Be Nice Are Holiday Season Gripes
• Treatment Shows Promise for Premature Ejaculation
• Chewing Gum Before a Test May Boost Performance

Hi XXXXX

This one is not only false, but it's false about "checking with Snopes."
http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/radiation.asp

But if you get the corn to pop beside your cell phone, then please let me know. I've been waiting for years to prove Snopes wrong about something that's easy to verify.

That does not mean there aren't some risks of holding a cell phone to your ear for hours each day. The medical dangers, however, are still unknown --
http://www.webmd.com/cancer/brain-cancer/news/20110727/study-cell-phones-dont-raise-brain-cancer-risk-in-kids 

I think kids who spend hours each day on a cell phone are at risk of becoming morons.

Bob Jensen

Quotations forwarded by Auntie Bev
The are bar room or bathroom signs that are often not politically correct

If life is a waste of time, And time is a waste of life, Then let's all get wasted together And have the time of our lives.
Armand's Pizza, Washington , DC

No matter how good she looks, Some other guy is sick and tired Of putting up with her shit.
Men's Room Linda's Bar and Grill, Chapel Hill, NC

You're too good for him.
Sign over mirror in Women's restroom Ed Debevic's, Beverly Hills, CA

It's hard to make a comeback When you haven't been anywhere.
Written in the dust on the back of a bus, Wickenburg , AZ

Make love, not war. Hell, do both GET MARRIED!
Women's restroom The Filling Station, Bozeman, MT

If voting could really change things, It would be illegal.
Revolution Books New York, New York.

If pro is opposite of con, then what is the opposite of progress? Congress!
Men's restroom House of Representatives, Washington, DC

Express Lane: Five beers or less.
Sign over one of the urinals Ed Debevic's, Phoenix, AZ

No wonder you always go home alone.
Sign over mirror in Men's restroom, Ed Debevic's, Beverly Hills, CA

A Woman's Rule of Thumb: If it has tires or testicles, You're going to have trouble with it.
Women's restroom Dick's Last Resort, Dallas

HAPPINESS
To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little.
To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.

LONGEVITY
Married men live longer than single men do, but married men are a lot more willing to die.

Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Who put the dick on the snowman? ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaSXa5KmYQw&feature=youtu.be

Forwarded by Paula

The following was printed in Heloise's column on November 27, 2011:

 

Want to make Christmas morning special for your little ones?  Make "Santa's Footprints."

 

Cut two large foot-shaped stencils from paper or cardboard.  (Or use a large pair of shoes to draw the outline on the cardboard.)
 

Lay them on the floor and sift baking soda around the edge.

 

Carefully lift and repeat the process from the fireplace or window to the tree and then toward the table with the milk and cookies (and carrots for the reindeer).

 

In the morning, your child will wake up to a nice surprise -- "evidence" that Santa visited in the middle of the night.  The baking soda is easily vacuumed up and will deodorize the carpet.

 

Alternately, string out empty beer bottles
but the kids might suspect that Dad rather than Santa drank the beer). 

The World’s First Mobile Phone (1922) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/worlds_first_mobile_phone_1922.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

One Ringy Dingy --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o

Beer Advertisement from Europe ---
http://www.theinspiration.com/2011/09/carlsberg-stunt-in-cinema/

Humor Between December 1-31, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q4.htm#Humor123111 

Humor Between November 1 and November 30, 2011 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book11q4.htm#Humor113011 

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 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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