Tidbits on February 28, 2012
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Bob
Jensen's Second Set of Favorite Mountain Pictures
Including Some of John Compton's Pictures Taken on White Mountain Hiking Trails
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Mountains/Set02/MountainsSet02.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
A Beautiful
Day of Trekking in Easton, NH (Cooley Hill and Mud Pond) ---
http://1happyhiker.blogspot.com/2012/02/beautiful-day-of-trekking-in-easton-nh.html
Blogs of White
Mountain Hikers (many great photographs) ---
http://www.blogger.com/profile/02242409292439585691
Especially note
the archive of John Compton's blogs at the bottom of the page at
http://1happyhiker.blogspot.com/
White
Mountain News ---
http://www.whitemtnews.com/
Tidbits on February 28, 2012
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
African American Oral History Collection ---
http://digital.library.louisville.edu/collections/afamoh/
Annabel Carberry in "A Glass of Red" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-R-0pvQqKg
Population Action International (Video) ---
http://www.populationaction.org/Video
NEW CENTER FOR AUDIT QUALITY VIDEO DESCRIBES THE FINANCIAL
STATEMENT AUDIT ---
February 13, 2012 ---
http://www.accountingeducation.com/index.cfm?page=newsdetails&id=151875
Scale of the Universe ---
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/332213/589217_scale_of_universe_enhanced.swf
Remembering John Glenn’s Historic Space Flight, 50 Years Ago
Today ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/remembering_john_glenns_historic_space_flight_50_years_ago_today.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Norwegian Police on Ice ---
http://sorisomail.com/email/16993/exibicao-de-banda-militar--um-espectaculo-imperdivel.html
RFID Chip Fraud Risk Video
WTHR_The Risk inside your credit card ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLAFhTjsQHw&sns=em
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Stan Kenton At 100: Artistry In Rhythm ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2012/02/17/147040413/stan-kenton-at-100-artistry-in-rhythm
Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes At Carnegie Hall ---
http://www.npr.org/event/music/146886360/leif-ove-andsnes-at-carnegie-hall
From Hyperpianos To Harmonious Handel: New
Classical Albums ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/02/12/146698600/from-hyperpianos-to-harmonious-handel-new-classical-albums
Silver Medals and Sweet Memories (Statler Bros.) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUUrJYA2HXY
André Rieu - Romance (Trailer) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42fvhhDI_a8
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
From SUNY Albany: How to Improve Your Digital Photography
Interactive Media Center: Digital Image Information ---
http://library.albany.edu/imc/tutimages.htm
Aesthetics + Computation Group: MIT Media Laboratory
---
http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/
Masters of Photography (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Xu4PNWkV4
Masters of Photography (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqmco1C6L_E
"A History of Photography from its beginnings till the 1920s," by
Robert Leggat ---
http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/
Daguerreotypes at Harvard (photography history) ---
http://preserve.harvard.edu/daguerreotypes/
Metropolis: New York City Water and Transit
Infrastructure in Photographs ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=industry&col_id=186
Draw a Stickman
---
http://www.drawastickman.com/
Science Oxford Live [iTunes] ---
http://www.scienceoxfordlive.com/
Famous People Painting (pass the cursor over any
face) ---
http://cliptank.com/PeopleofInfluencePainting.htm
Battat Contemporary (art) ---
http://battatcontemporary.com/english/exhibitions-archive
Society of Antiquaries of London: Making History: 300 Years of
Antiquaries in Britain ---
http://makinghistory.sal.org.uk/
Illinois Wesleyan University: Historic Images ---
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_iwu_histph.php?CISOROOT=/iwu_histph
Illinois State Museum: Audio-Video Barn ---
http://avbarn.museum.state.il.us/
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society ---
http://dig.lib.niu.edu/ISHS/index.html
Ward Morgan Photography, Southwest Michigan 1939-1980 ---
http://cdm16259.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p124301coll2
University of Michigan Collections (Images, Photographs) ---
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?page=groups#um-
MoMA: Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence
(feminist modern art) ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/sanjaivekovic/
Aerial Photography: Florida ---
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/aerials
Burgert Brothers Collection of Tampa Photographs ---
http://guides.lib.usf.edu/content.php?pid=86148&sid=640824#
Robertson & Fresh Photograph Collection of Tampa Photographs
---
http://guides.lib.usf.edu/content.php?pid=86148&sid=640895#
Clara Barton National Historic Site (nursing) ---
http://www.nps.gov/features/clba/feat0001/flash.html
Pygmies.org ---
http://www.pygmies.org/
Map of ‘terrorism hot spots’ in US ---
http://ihrrblog.org/2012/02/13/map-of-terrorism-hot-spots-in-us/
Mathematics Meets Photography ---
http://www.maa.org/mathhorizons/MH-Sept2011_MathPhotography.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various
types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
The Lotus Eater , a
short story written by
W. Somerset Maugham written in 1935.
http://maugham.classicauthors.net/lotuseater/
Booker T. Washington Papers ---
http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/volumes.html
Booker T. Washington's West Virginia Boyhood
http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh32-1.html
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 February 28, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations022812.htm
From Paul Caron, Tax Prof Blog, February 13, 2012 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/
The Treasury Department
released its 208-page Green Book,
General Explanations of the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2013 Revenue
Proposals. For each of the more than 100 tax
policy changes in the President's budget, the Green Book explains the
current tax law, the change in tax policy proposed, the reasons for the
change and a 10-year revenue estimate for the policy change.
The booked National
Debt on January 1, 2012 was over $15 trillion ---
U.S. National Debt Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Also see
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Teaching Case on Political Insanity: Charging Up Social Security and
Medicare Monthly Entitlements on Our Chinese Credit Card
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on February 17,
2012
Deal Reached on Payroll Tax
by:
Naftali Bendavid and Kristina Peterson
Feb 15, 2012
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
Click here to view the video on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Tax Laws, Tax Policy, Taxation
SUMMARY: Congressional lawmakers negotiated across party lines to
extend the FICA payroll tax rate cut which was due to expire on February 29.
The original provision to enact the rate cut had been set to expire in
December 2011 but a two month extension was then agreed upon as described in
the related article from that time. The political parties were in an unusual
situation in which Republicans were arguing against the extension--without
corresponding spending cuts to pay for the cost-and Democrats were arguing
for the tax cut. The bill to be submitted also will "...provide that
Medicare would continue to pay physicians at current rates, avoiding a 27.4%
cut in fees [when caring for patients on this plan] which would have kicked
in March 1....[and] an extension of enhanced unemployment benefits...."
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is useful to introduce the
political viewpoints on taxes in a tax class or when discussing payroll
taxes in a financial accounting class.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Advanced) What are payroll taxes? Describe all payroll taxes
paid by a company employer and by an employee.
2. (Introductory) What tax rate reduction was given for U.S.
payroll taxes? Who pays the tax that was cut? When was this tax cut first
scheduled to expire? Hint: You may refer to the related article to find a
description of the original expiration of this payroll tax cut.
3. (Advanced) Arguments discussed in the related video identify
that temporary tax cuts don't stimulate the economy. In general, how are
taxes related to the economy?
4. (Advanced) Further comments in the video indicate that the
agreement reached among lawmakers to extend this tax cut has more to do with
politics in this presidential election year than with the impact of the
payroll taxes on the economy. What are the political viewpoints of the
lawmakers on the two sides of the debate over extending this tax cut?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
RELATED ARTICLES:
Lawmakers Deadlock Over Tax Cut
by Janet Hook
Dec 20, 2011
Online Exclusive
"Deal Reached on Payroll Tax," by: Naftali Bendavid and Kristina Peterson,
The Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204883304577223581091709596.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
Congressional negotiators reached a tentative a
deal Tuesday night on extending the current payroll-tax cut through the end
of the year, as well as continuing longer unemployment benefits and avoiding
a steep cut in Medicare doctors' fees.
The agreement, culminating a long and angry debate,
followed a major concession earlier in the week from House Republicans, who
agreed to extend the payroll-tax holiday without offsetting spending cuts.
Without an agreement, payroll-tax rates would rise on March 1 for 160
million American workers.
Rep. Steve LaTourette (R., Ohio) said that it's "a
done deal subject to the i's being dotted and t's crossed."
Rep. David Camp (R., Mich.), who along with Sen.
Max Baucus (D., Mont.) was one of the chief negotiators, added, "We have a
structure and a framework."
The deal represents a victory for President Barack
Obama and fellow Democrats, who have argued the payroll-tax break is an
emergency measure to support the weak recovery and doesn't have to be paid
for. The deal also plays into Democrats' attempts to position themselves as
champions of the middle class.
Republicans also have reason to welcome the deal,
since it gets a politically troubling issue off the table. Republicans had
found themselves on the defensive over the payroll-tax cut. Some worried
about whether it would be effective or wise, and Democrats had hammered them
for opposing a middle-class tax cut.
The agreement showed the reluctance of both sides,
but especially Republicans, to re-engage in the sort of brinksmanship that
has caused congressional approval to plummet. The payroll-tax cut,
unemployment benefits and Medicare payment system would have expired on Feb.
29, and an agreement two weeks ahead of time is a major change from last
year's 11th-hour deals.
Leaders of both parties had been waiting to gauge
the reaction of House GOP conservatives, who have been an unpredictable
faction in the past year. But conservatives emerging from a closed-door
meeting of House Republicans Tuesday night suggested the deal was likely to
pass.
"I think you'll see a fair number of dissenters on
it," said Rep. Dennis Ross (R., Fla.), a freshman, who worried that the tax
cut could hurt Social Security, which is funded by the payroll tax. But he
added, "I think they'll have the votes to pass it."
The deal, which could be formalized as early as
Wednesday, would extend the tax cut for the rest of the year. After months
of insisting that the tax break, which will cost the government $93 billion
in revenue, must be paid for, GOP leaders dropped that demand on Monday.
The agreement would also provide that Medicare
would continue to pay physicians at current rates, avoiding a 27.4% cut in
fees that would have kicked in March 1. That fee adjustment, expected to
cost about $30 billion, would be funded by cuts in payments to Medicare
providers, as well as a cut to the wellness and prevention fund in Mr.
Obama's health-care law.
Among the thorniest issues was continuing longer
unemployment benefits, which currently provide jobless benefits for up to 99
weeks, depending on a state's jobless rate.
The two sides were making conflicting claims on the
duration of benefits under the new deal. Some Democrats said the maximum
length would be 75 weeks. Republicans said that for most states, the maximum
number of weeks would be capped at 63 weeks. About 1.3 million unemployed
people would lose their benefits by the end of March in case of no deal.
This extension would be funded with an array of
measures, including a sale of the broadband spectrum and a cut in the
government's contribution to employee pensions.
Earlier Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D., Nev.) had pushed hard for a deal on jobless benefits, noting that
Congress is on recess next week.
"We still have about 40 million people who are
unemployed," Sen. Reid said. "We cannot leave here without the conference
committee having resolved a way of dealing with unemployment compensation."
Many Republicans worry that the payroll-tax cut
will hurt Social Security, and others say it should at least be paid for at
a time of soaring federal budget deficits. Democrats say the Social Security
funds will be replenished with money from the general treasury.
The payroll-tax issue has flummoxed Republicans
since late last year, when Democrats began pushing for a one-year extension
of the cut, which initially was set to expire in December.
Some Republicans countered the tax code needed a
thorough overhaul rather than temporary tinkering, and that the tax break
would do little to create jobs. Republicans also demanded offsetting
spending cuts to pay for the tax cut. In response, Democrats proposed an
upper-income tax increase to pay for the break, but Republicans opposed
that.
Continued in article
Nations who collect their payroll taxes with more fiscal responsibility
than the U.S. ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
Why the Canadians never built an $80 trillion Titanic that lies deep in the
ocean.
"Expect higher payroll taxes in 2012, taxpayers group says," by Joanna
Smith, The Star, December 28, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1107876--expect-higher-payroll-taxes-in-2012-taxpayers-group-says?bn=1
Canadians will see the biggest increase in payroll
taxes in a decade next year, according to a Canadian Taxpayers Federation
analysis of how many of your dollars will go to federal government coffers.
Employment insurance premiums will increase 5 cents
per $100 of insurable earnings as of Jan. 1. That’s half of what the
Conservative government originally planned but the analysis shows employees
will still see a $53 jump to $840 in EI premiums in 2012
Combine that with the federal pension plan
contributions and it means employees will have to give up a total of $3,147
in payroll taxes next year — an increase of about $142 over this year.
Employers will have to shell out about $164 more in
payroll taxes next year, for a total of $3,483.
The combined net increase of 4.84 per cent is the
highest since 2002.
“Finance Canada tells us that we should be thanking
the government because they are not going to be raising payroll taxes as
much as they promised,” said Derek Fildebrandt, national research director
for the advocacy group.
A spokeswoman for the federal finance department
suggested exactly that.
“The Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board is
responsible for setting premium rates to ensure that the program just breaks
even over time and managing a cash reserve — including adjustments in
rates,” Suzanne Prebinski wrote in an email.
“However, to protect the economy and jobs, we cut
any potential increases in half for 2012 — keeping EI premiums near their
lowest level since 1982. This change is expected to save employers and
employees $600 million in 2012.”
Prebinski noted there is no change to the Canada
Pension Plan contribution rate, which has been at 9.9 per cent of
pensionable earnings since 2003, but there will be an increase in the
maximum contribution to account for inflation.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on entitlements ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
"Important Developments in Federal Income Tax (2010-11)," by Edward A.
Morse, SSRN, December 9, 2011 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1984124
Effective Tax Rates Are Lower Than Most People Believe
"Measuring Effective Tax Rates," by Rachel Johnson Joseph Rosenberg Roberton
Williams, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, February 7, 2012 ---
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/412497-ETR.pdf
"How to Raise $1 Trillion Without a VAT or a Rate Hike," by Calvin H.
Johnson, University of Texas Law School, 2010 ---
http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/calvinjohnson/How_to_Raise 1_Trillion.pdf
Details are provided in the lengthy Table 1 of the article.
The most controversial item in my opinion is the repeal of the tax exemption for
tax-free bonds used by towns, counties, states, and school districts. At the
moment investors are willing to put their money in tax-exempt bonds having lower
returns than corporate bonds and in most instances higher default risks. Of
course comparisons are highly dependent upon what bond issues are being
compared.
See
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2016792850_guest18mcintire.html
What makes repeal of tax-free bonds is the enormous rise in interest rates
that must be paid by towns, counties, states, and school districts if
investors do not get a tax break. Of course, the Federal Government could
subsidize those jurisdictions, but this seems to be self-defeating in terms
raising revenues to reduce the Federal deficit.
And unless we elect Hugo Chavez as President of the United States, the
Federal Government probably cannot make present municipal bondholders eat the
tremendous loss in bond values. Calvin Johnson suggests that the Federal
government would have to make up these losses to present bondholders. The cost
of doing this would be tremendous.
President Obama has proposed capping the exemptions ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/13/us-usa-budget-municipals-idUSTRE81C1AZ20120213
But he does not want to discuss the impact of this proposal on financing of
owns, counties, states, and school districts. His proposal is also inconsistent
with his desire to increase the quality and quantity of public schools.
Personally, I think he proposed this as a bargaining chip with no real intent to
pull the rug out from under towns, counties, states, and school districts.
And he must consider what his proposal will do to property taxes now used
primarily to fund education, county hospitals, etc. In my opinion it would send
property taxes (and according rents) through the roof. And the middle class and
poor bear a huge portion of these property taxes. Huge property tax increases in turn would hit the
already-sick real estate market like a pandemic.
Video
"Debt: The First 5,000 Years," by Paul Kedrosky , Kedrosky.com,
September 10, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/09/debt-the-first-5000-years.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InfectiousGreed+%28Paul+Kedrosky%27s+Infectious+Greed%29
Jensen Questions
How did the accounting system account for debt 5,000 years ago?
Does care and nurturing human children create debt to parents?
"When Debt Gets in the Way of Growth," Harvard Business Review Blog,
September 13, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2011/09/when_debt_gets_in_the_way_of_g.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Population Action International (Video) ---
http://www.populationaction.org/Video
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
Keep in mind that nearly half of all U.S. "taxpayers" pay zero or negative
income taxes!
"Working All Day For the I.R.S.," by James B. Steward, The New York
Times, February 17, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/business/working-all-day-for-the-irs-common-sense.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1329653387-Qk2jd7VEcw0/dRTE1VBETw
Mitt Romney is not alone. I thought Mr. Romney’s
13.9 percent federal tax rate would be hard to beat. But among the 400
Americans with the highest adjusted gross incomes in 2008, 30 of them paid
less than 10 percent and another 101 paid less than 15 percent. And these
people earned, on average, more than 10 times Mr. Romney’s $21.7 million —
an average of $270.5 million each.
¶ After I disclosed a few weeks ago that I pay 37
percent of my adjusted gross income and 74 percent of my taxable income in
combined federal, state and local income and payroll taxes, I asked the
Internal Revenue Service how that compares with other taxpayers. I never got
a simple answer (and an I.R.S. spokesman said the agency could not discuss
individual returns).
¶ But this week, the I.R.S. sent me reams of data,
including analyses of returns from taxpayers reporting adjusted gross income
of more than $200,000 and returns from the top 400 taxpayers. Some data were
from 2009, but most went back to 2008. (The agency offered no explanation as
to why it takes so many years to compile.) But the data helps explain why
many people are so angry about the tax code.
¶ Relatively few taxpayers pay an enormous
percentage of the total federal income tax, and most of them are people who
work for a living and have adjusted gross incomes of $100,000 to $500,000,
which is the sweet spot for tax revenue. They account for 20.2 percent of
total returns but pay a whopping 44.9 percent of total tax. The average tax
rate for this group ranges from 11.9 percent for those with less than
$200,000 in adjusted gross income to 19.6 percent for those with $200,000 to
$500,000. Above those income levels, the rate rises to close to 25 percent
and then declines to 22.6 percent for taxpayers earning more than $10
million.
¶ The I.R.S. doesn’t break down the data for
incomes above $10 million, but the results for the top 400 returns suggest
that the rate continues to decline as incomes rise. The top 400 paid an
average of $49 million, or 18.1 percent of their adjusted gross income, in
federal tax — lower than taxpayers in the $200,000 to $500,000 bracket. They
reported an average $14.1 million in state and local taxes, bringing their
total income tax level to about 23 percent of adjusted gross income, far
below my rate. And not one of them paid more than 35 percent of their
adjusted gross income in federal tax.
¶ I spoke this week to the investigative reporters
Don Barlett and Jim Steele, who are working on a sequel to their
best-selling book “America: What Went Wrong,” first published in 1992. They
said that tax inequities had gotten worse since 1994, when they published
“America: Who Really Pays the Taxes,” and described the tax system as “out
of control.”
¶ Now, “The tax code has been so skewed against
most people, with remarkable tax cuts for folks at the top, that the whole
concept of fairness has gone out the window,” Mr. Steele said. Mr. Barlett,
pointing to disparate rates even among people in the same income brackets,
added: “There’s enormous horizontal inequity, enormous.”
¶ The budget that President Obama unveiled this
week included some hot-button tax measures aimed at some of these
inequities: capping deductions and raising taxes on people earning more than
$1 million (the so-called Buffett Rule), scrapping the alternative minimum
tax and raising the tax on dividend income and carried interest. The liberal
Economic Policy Institute noted, “No budget is perfect,” but applauded the
president’s stab at tax reform. “The need for the Buffett Rule,” it said,
“is largely driven by the preferential tax treatment of investment income
over work income.”
The I.R.S. data makes clear that the differing
treatment of earned and unearned income accounts for most of the disparity
between tax rates for the ultrawealthy and those who make much less.
Salaries and wages accounted for only 8.8 percent of adjusted gross income
for the top 400 taxpayers. Interest and dividends made up 16 percent and net
capital gains accounted for nearly 57 percent. So on average, 73 percent of
their income was unearned and taxed at favorable rates.
For people with incomes of more than $200,000,
salaries and wages make up nearly 50 percent of their adjusted gross income.
Interest income accounted for 4 percent and dividends were just under 5
percent. Capital gains were 17.3 percent. “The people who pay all the taxes
are the same people who are working,” Mr. Barlett said. “If you’re paying a
huge amount of tax, then you’re working.”
While proponents of lower rates for capital gains
have argued that they stimulate capital investment, thereby generating jobs
and economic growth (while others dispute these claims), many people wrote
me to complain that by the same logic, higher rates on earned income
discourage people from working.
Teresa Allen-Piccolo told me that she and her
husband ran a small business in California that manufactured electronic
monitoring systems for the environment. “We represent what almost every
politician purports to love — self-made, no loans, no government assistance,
just hard work,” she wrote. “After decades of hard, virtually unpaid work,
in 2009 and 2010 the business finally picked up. Our total taxes went from
$17,000 to $106,000 in 2010 — about half of our taxable income! What can one
say? Were it not that we are committed to environmental protection and
giving employment, we would be much better off shutting down the business
and just doing some consulting work on the side.”
Jeff Hoopes noted that as a low-paid Ph.D.
candidate in accounting at the University of Michigan, his average tax rate
was low, but his marginal rate reached 35 percent because his earned-income
credit was reduced when he made extra money from “house-sitting, selling
books and tutoring.” He went on: “For providing incentives to work, the
marginal rate is what counts. So while my average rate suggests that I am
lightly taxed (perhaps unfair to others who pay more), my marginal rate
suggests I have lesser incentives to work, as I take home less than 65
percent of what I earn. It is the worst of both worlds.”
Mr. Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on dividends
attacks just one aspect of the disparity between the ultrarich and others,
but it is significant. The top 400 taxpayers reported average dividend
income of $25 million in 2008, which accounted for 4.55 percent of total
dividend income.
That such a tiny sliver of the population would
account for nearly one-twentieth of total dividend income “drives me crazy,”
Mr. Steele said. “Although roughly 50 percent of Americans own stocks or
mutual funds, dividends go overwhelmingly to the top 2 percent of the
taxpayers. Those are the people who rake in the dividends. Why should that
money be taxed at a lower rate?”
Like many defenders of the lower rate, Curtis Dubay,
senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argues that
“the dividends tax is a double tax, since the corporate income that
dividends come from are already taxed 35 percent at the business level.” The
effective rate on dividends, Mr. Dubay maintained, “would stand at more than
63 percent if President Obama’s misguided policy became law. This would
significantly curtail investment and slow economic growth.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
For taxpayers that owe long-term capital gains taxes, the tax code will never be
fair until long-term capital gains are indexed for inflation ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
See the graphs at
http://worldoftak.ning.com/forum/topics/the-long-goodbye-the-declining
http://www.global-rates.com/economic-indicators/inflation/consumer-prices/cpi/united-states.aspx
One thing President Obama never mentions in his quest to raise the taxation
of capital gains is that long-term gains should really be indexed for inflation.
The purchasing power of dollars invested in years earlier is being paid back in
current dollars that will buy a whole lot less. The injustice is that it's
possible to have a purchasing power loss on long term capital gains that
nevertheless gets taxed. Special capital gains rates are intended to give some
relief from this type of injustice and its disincentives to hold long-term
investments.
For example, the purchasing power of a 1913 dollar declined from 24 cents in
1971 to 4.6 cents in 2009. Most if not all the so-called gain of a 1971
long-term investment may well be a purchasing power loss. For example, an Iowa
farm purchased in 1950 may sell for over $1 million gain today that might well
be a purchasing power loss if the farm was purchased or inherited just after
World War 2.
Source:
http://worldoftak.ning.com/forum/topics/the-long-goodbye-the-declining
"Suspended Lawyer Who Wrote ‘Bulletproof Asset Protection’ Pleads Guilty
in Tax Case, Must Pay $40M," by Martha Neil, ABA Journal, February 15, 2012
---
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/suspended_lawyer_who_authored_bulletproof_asset_protection_pleads_guilty_in/
A suspended Colorado lawyer who authored the book
Bulletproof Asset Protection pleaded guilty in federal court in Las
Vegas on Monday to multiple tax-related charges.
William S. Reed, 61, of Santa Barbara, Calif., was
indicted in July, along with two other defendants, on accusations he
participated in a business scheme between 1998 and 2006 that helped others
hide assets from creditors and the Internal Revenue Service, the Las Vegas
Review-Journal reports.
He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the
United States, attempted tax evasion and aggravated identity theft, and
agreed to pay about $40 million to the IRS and the Federal Trade Commission.
The two other defendants await trial.
Reed allegedly had $70,000 in cash hidden in his
vehicle when he was arrested last year, reports KLAS. He faces up to 12
years when he is sentenced in May.
"IRS Warns on ‘Dirty Dozen’ Tax Scams for 2012," by Laura Saunders,
The Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2012 ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2012/02/17/irs-warns-on-dirty-dozen-tax-scams-for-2012/?mod=google_news_blog
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
The American Dream: A Free
Ride
Nearly Half of All Americans Don’t Pay Income Taxes
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/19/chart-of-the-week-nearly-half-of-all-americans-dont-pay-income-taxes/
Case Studies in Gaming the Income Tax Laws
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
To help explain what is really going on with mortgage refinancings and
foreclosures I wrote a teaching case:
A Teaching Case: Professor Tall vs. Professor Short vs. Freddie Mac
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TallVerusShort.htm
Question
Why is the poverty rate in Chile so low relative to the rest of South America?
Answer
See the Chicago Boys at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys
American Dream ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream
On February 22, 2012 message from Paul Williams
Even if it sounds
incredible, it is true. The recent CBO report on income distribution in
the U.S. is a place to start. A useful way to educate oneself about
what we know about inequality is Branko Milanovic (lead economist at the
World Bank research division) The Haves and the Have Nots. There seem
to be so many factually challenged people that simply want to retain
some Pollyanish idea of what America is -- it certainly isn't that
anymore. The number of people in the US living in poverty is close to
25%; based on 2007 data (before the Great Recession) 36 million
Americans experienced food deprivation (Peter Corning, The Fair
Society). If you want a source for learning about income and wealth
distribution visit:
The CIA tracks this
stuff because there is a correlation between a country's Gini
coefficient and social unrest. By 2008 the Gini coefficient for the
U.S. was 45, which is now well into the danger zone. But unlike
accounting academics, the CIA must live in a reality based world, not
one based on the myths peddled by the economists by which we seem so
enthralled.
On February 22, 2012 I replied as follows to Paul Williams
I truly believe that if we abandoned immigration quotas for all nations,
we would have billions rather than millions of people flowing into this
country. It's not that the American Dream is as magnificent as we would
like to believe. Rather, it's that the world nightmare is worse than we
want to even imagine.
Bob Jensen
"The Mobility Myth: Why everyone overestimates American equality of
opportunity," by Timothy Noah, The New Republic, February 8, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/100516/inequality-mobility-economy-america-recession-divergence?page=0,0&passthru=NjY1NzJmOGJhMzZlNGYxZDJkOWE0YTVkYjU4NDZjNzg
When Americans express indifference about the
problem of unequal incomes, it’s usually because they see the United States
as a land of boundless opportunity. Sure, you’ll hear it said, our country
has pretty big income disparities compared with Western Europe. And sure,
those disparities have been widening in recent decades. But stark economic
inequality is the price we pay for living in a dynamic economy with avenues
to advancement that the class-bound Old World can only dream about. We may
have less equality of economic outcomes, but we have a lot more equality of
economic opportunity.
The problem is, this isn’t true. Most of Western
Europe today is both more equal in incomes and more economically mobile than
the United States. And it isn’t just Western Europe. Countries as varied as
Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan all have higher degrees of
income mobility than we do. A nation that prides itself on its lack of class
rigidity has, in short, become significantly more economically rigid than
many other developed countries. How did our perception of ourselves end up
so far out of sync with reality?
IN THE 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that, in
notable contrast to the “aristocratic nations” of Europe, the United States
was a place where “new families are constantly springing up, others are
constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition.” Karl
Marx sounded a similar note in 1865 when he observed that “the position of
wages laborer is for a very large part of the American people but a
probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter
term.” But it was two American writers who probably did the most to shape
our country’s self-image as the land of unbounded opportunity. They were
Horatio Alger, of whom you’ve probably heard, and James Truslow Adams, of
whom you probably haven’t. When Alger and Adams were alive—and also, for
that matter, when Tocqueville and Marx contributed their
observations—American opportunity was a much closer match to their
superlatives than it is now.
Alger wrote Ragged Dick (1868), Luck and Pluck
(1869), and other dime novels for boys about getting ahead through virtue
and hard work. To call these books popular would be an understatement; fully
5 percent of all the books checked out of the Muncie, Indiana, public
library between November 1891 and December 1902 were authored by Alger.
Adams was a more cerebral fellow who wrote books of American history. His
influence stems from the fact that one of these books—The Epic of America
(1931)—introduced the phrase “the American dream” to our national discourse.
Writing at the start of the Great Depression, Adams envisioned not “a dream
of motor cars and high wages merely,” but rather “a dream of a social order
in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest
stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for
what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or
position.”
Born half a century apart, neither Alger nor Adams
could claim to have risen from the bottom. Both came from well-established
families whose American roots dated to the early seventeenth century. Alger
could trace his lineage to three Pilgrims who in 1621 sailed to Plymouth
Plantation on the Fortune, the second English ship to arrive there. Adams—no
relation to the presidential Adamses—was descended from a man who arrived in
Maryland in 1638 as an indentured servant and, within three years, possessed
185 acres. Alger’s father was a Unitarian minister; Adams’s a stockbroker.
Both fathers were men of good breeding and education who struggled to make
ends meet but were able—at a time when more than 90 percent of the
population didn’t finish high school—to obtain higher education for their
sons. Alger went to Harvard; Adams went to Brooklyn Polytechnic and,
briefly, Yale. Both sons followed their fathers into the ministry and
finance, respectively, before they became full-time writers.
Each author was, in his own way, highly successful,
but the upward trajectory of these two literary careers would make poor
material for a Horatio Alger tale. The circumstances of Alger’s job change
are especially problematic. At 34, he vacated the pulpit abruptly when he
was charged with “the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural
familiarity with boys.” Alger did not dispute the accusation, which was
based on the testimony of two teenage boys in his parish, ages 13 and 15,
who said Alger had molested them and on rumors that he’d abused other youths
in similar fashion. After confessing his guilt privately to William James,
the founding father of American psychology, Alger never spoke of it again.
Adams left Wall Street under less lurid circumstances. He simply disliked
the work and resolved to stop once he amassed $100,000. Reviewing his
accounts on his thirty-fifth birthday, he concluded that he’d achieved his
goal—the equivalent of about $2 million in current dollars—and resigned the
following day. Adams spent much of his subsequent life abroad and wrote The
Epic of America in London.
Alger and Adams celebrated America’s capacity for
upward mobility, but neither writer idealized his country to anything like
the extent that would later be credited to the name Horatio Alger and the
phrase “the American dream.” Alger worked into his later juvenile fiction
much moralizing against the robber barons’ self-dealing and cruel treatment
of the downtrodden. “He has done more harm than he can ever repair,” a
character in Alger’s 1889 novel, Luke Walton, laments about a villain
modeled on the Gilded Age stock manipulator Jay Gould. Adams deplored
America’s tendency to celebrate “business and money-making and material
improvement as good in themselves” and its refusal “to look on the seamy and
sordid realities of any situation in which we found ourselves.” He even
complained about America’s maldistribution of wealth. Still, neither writer
had much taste for radical politics. Alger was essentially a mugwump—a
good-government Republican distrustful of machine politics and Free Silver
populism. Adams was a Tory-minded political independent who became a severe
critic of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he deemed financially
irresponsible.
Both men bequeathed to the United States an
exaggerated notion of itself as a mobile society because they lived during
the peak years of American mobility—the latter half of the nineteenth
century and the early years of the twentieth, when the American industrial
revolution was wreaking maximum creative destruction on what had previously
been an agrarian economy. The best way to measure mobility is to calculate
the economic position of an individual relative to the rest of society and
compare that with the economic position of that person’s child relative to
the rest of society once that child has grown to a comparable stage in life.
To calculate mobility for society as a whole, you therefore need income data
over two generations for a large sample of American families. The
government, alas, didn’t collect income data during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, but the Census Bureau did collect data on
occupations, which can serve as a rough proxy.
In a 2005 paper, Joseph Ferrie, an economics
professor at Northwestern, studied census records about the occupations of
fathers and sons between 1850 (the year Alger turned 18) and 1920 (21 years
after Alger’s death and the year Adams turned 42). Ferrie then compared
these records with father-son data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
during the second half of the twentieth century. He divided everyone into
four categories: “unskilled worker,” “farmer,” “skilled or semi-skilled
worker,” and “white-collar worker.” To keep both data sets consistent, he
limited his inquiry to white, native-born males. Ferrie also made some
technical adjustments to allow for the different occupational structures of
the two eras. What he found was that the equivalent of 41 percent of
farmers’ sons advanced to white-collar jobs between 1880 and 1900, compared
with 32 percent between 1950 and 1973. Ferrie’s conclusion held up when he
looked at all four job categories and when he compared other stretches of
the late nineteenth century with other stretches of the late twentieth.
Between the horse-and-buggy days and the interstate-highway era, American
society had become significantly less mobile.
These findings are all the more striking because
the 1950s and 1960s were a period—the last period in the United States, it
turned out—when intergenerational mobility was increasing. The economy was
booming, and men born during the Great Depression and World War II were
enjoying opportunities that their fathers could scarcely imagine. Even so,
mobility in this postwar era was no match for the mobility enjoyed by the
generations of workers who lived during Alger’s lifetime and James Adams’s
youth and early
Adams wrote in The Epic of America that the dream
of living “unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older
civilizations” was “realized more fully in actual life [in the United
States] than anywhere else.” Was this a fantasy? Probably not at the time
Adams was writing. Ferrie and Jason Long, an associate professor of
economics at Colby College, looked at mobility during the late nineteenth
century in both the United States and Great Britain. At that time, England
was still the richest industrial country in the world. But it offered
nothing like the opportunities for economic advancement that were available
in its former colony. In Britain, for example, 53 percent of the sons of
unskilled laborers moved up to skilled and semi-skilled labor or better. In
the United States, fully 81 percent did. This was an era when the loftiest
rhetoric about the United States as the land of opportunity rang true.
AS RECENTLY AS 1987, economists could still be
heard vouching for American mobility. In a speech that year to the American
Economic Association, the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, a
future Nobel laureate, said, “In every country with data that I have seen,
... low earnings as well as high earnings are not strongly transmitted from
fathers to sons.” Five years later, Gary Solon, an economist at the
University of Michigan, would blow Becker’s assertion to smithereens—at
least as it applied to the United States.
To measure economic mobility effectively, you need
access to good longitudinal data on families and income. Until fairly
recently, the pickings were slim. But, by 1992, the University of Michigan’s
Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal study of more than
9,000 families from across the United States, had reached its 24-year mark
and ripened into an unmatched source for detailed information on two
successive American generations. Now old enough to include data on three or
four generations, the PSID is the world’s longest-running “panel survey” of
nationally representative households. (A panel survey is a longitudinal
study in which respondents are interviewed at regular intervals.) Most
contemporary studies of mobility trends in the United States make use of
PSID data.
Solon’s groundbreaking 1992 paper, which drew on
this newly available data, upended our understanding of something that
economists call “intergenerational income elasticity” but that I’ll call
“income heritability.” It’s a measure of how determinative one generation’s
relative income status—what we used to call “station in life”—will be of the
next generation’s relative income status. When Becker stated in 1987 that
income status wasn’t especially heritable, he was working off studies that
showed income heritability to be less than 20 percent, which didn’t seem too
bad. Eighty percent of your economic destiny was in your hands—or at least
out of your parents’ hands.
Perhaps you’re familiar with the following lines
from William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus,” an oft-quoted inspirational poem
from the nineteenth century: “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain
of my soul.” In 1987, it was possible for Americans to believe, with respect
to income: I am the master of 80 percent of my fate: I am the captain of 80
percent of my soul. But, in 1992, when Solon recalculated income
heritability based on the more-reliable PSID data, he found income
heritability to be at least 40 percent “and possibly higher.” I am the
master of 60 percent of my fate.
Or possibly: I am the master of 40 to 50 percent of
my fate. In 2001, Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve
Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to
Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child incomes over
a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like
50 to 60 percent. Mazumder later recalculated Solon’s PSID-based findings
applying a more sophisticated statistical model and found that income
heritability was about 60 percent. Then, in a 2004 study, Mazumder
approached the question from a different angle, examining the correlation in
incomes among siblings, using longitudinal survey data collected by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. That put income heritability at about 50
percent. “The sibling correlation in economic outcomes and human capital are
larger than the sibling correlation in a variety of other outcomes including
some measures of physical attributes,” Mazumder wrote. Most strikingly, he
found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than
height and weight. I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass
index.
It’s important to remember that the mobility trend
for Americans as a whole is not necessarily a trend for every U.S. subgroup.
For instance, upward mobility for women has accelerated in recent decades.
The trend can be hard to track in intergenerational family income data
because, while a contemporary woman will likely outearn her mother, who
lived at a time when society provided far fewer economic opportunities to
women, she won’t likely outearn her father, who faced no gender barriers at
all. At the same time, upward mobility for African Americans has lagged
behind upward mobility for whites. One especially disturbing 2008 analysis
by the Brookings Institution’s Julia Isaacs compared PSID income data from
parents in the late ’60s with PSID income data from their children in the
late ’90s. Isaacs found that only 31 percent of black children born into the
middle fifth of family incomes—dead center of the middle class, where
incomes (in 2006 dollars) ranged from about $49,000 to $65,000—ended up with
higher incomes than their parents had, corrected for inflation. Fully 45
percent fell all the way to the bottom-income fifth (below about $40,000).
By comparison, 68 percent of whites born into the middle-income fifth ended
up with incomes higher than their parents had, and only 16 percent tumbled
all the way to the bottom-income fifth. Where these white parents mostly saw
their children become better off economically than they had been,
corresponding black parents mostly saw their children become worse off.
In the United States, economic mobility is lower
than it was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is
no longer accelerating, as it was during the ’50s and ’60s; and it is either
about the same or a little lower than it was in 1970. “Personally,”
Brookings economist Isabel Sawhill told me in an interview last year, “I
believe that it has slipped.”
MEANWHILE, mobility in the United States has fallen
dramatically behind mobility in other comparably developed democracies. A
2007 study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) combined a number of previous estimates and found income heritability
to be greater in the United States than in Denmark, Australia, Norway,
Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and France. Italy was a little bit
less mobile than the United States. The United Kingdom, which had been far
less mobile than the United States during the late nineteenth century,
brought up the rear, but this time it was just a bit less mobile than the
United States. The OECD’s ranking was based on a somewhat conservative U.S.
estimate of 47 percent income heritability; Mazumder of the Chicago Fed puts
it at 50 to 60 percent, which would rank the United States either tied with
the United Kingdom for last place or dead last after the United Kingdom.
Thanks to a 2012 recalculation by Miles Corak, an economist at the
University of Ottawa, we can now add Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand,
Singapore, and Pakistan to the list of societies that are more mobile than
the United States. (Italy and the United Kingdom were once again found to be
less mobile than the United States, along with Chile, Brazil, Peru, and
China.)
It’s especially striking that Canada should
experience more intergenerational economic mobility than the United States.
The two countries are, after all, similar in more ways than one can count.
The most significant way they differ (at least for the purposes of this
discussion) is that the United States is richer, with a per capita gross
domestic product that’s 20 percent higher. Most migration between the two is
from Canada to the United States, not the other way around. How can Canada
be the land of greater opportunity?
The University of Ottawa’s Corak looked at this
puzzle in a 2010 paper. Examining several existing mobility studies “using
particularly high-quality data,” Corak found that Canada is “up to three
times more mobile than the United States.” The difference arises largely
from disparities at the top and bottom 10 percent of the income scale. If a
father is in the bottom tenth of U.S. incomes, Corak found, his son has a 22
percent likelihood of ending up in the bottom tenth. If a father is in
Canada’s bottom tenth, his son’s likelihood of ending up in the bottom tenth
is 16 percent. At the other end of the income scale, if a father is in the
top tenth of U.S. incomes, his son has a 26 percent chance of ending up in
the top tenth. If a father is in Canada’s top-income tenth, his son’s
likelihood of ending up in the top tenth is 18 percent.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Even if Paul Williams is correct and Timothy Noah is all wrong about the
American Dream, many people who want to sneak illegally into North America are
doing so for important reasons apart from economic reasons. There's a strong
incentive sneak into the U.S. or Canada because it's very unsafe to live in many
other nations having corrupt policing, high kidnapping risks, drug wars, horrid
murder risks, extortion, staggering rape rates, etc.
TED Video
Harvard Thinks Big 2012: 8 All-Star Professors. 8 Big Ideas ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/harvard_thinks_big_2012.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
CBS Sixty Minutes Video
Mozart of Chess: Magness Carlsen
The Youngest Number One Chess Player in History
Magnus is number one in the chess world. That is
sensational. In a very short segment, there are any number of possible
"angles" to convey his remarkable talents and achievements to the public at
large. While admittedly hackneyed in virtually all respects, I generally
have no substantive quarrel with most of the editorial selections of 60
Minutes in this regard. But the part about the potential of following in the
footsteps of Bobby Fischer's mental illness seems deceptively truncated. I
find it very hard to believe that, in any extended discussion of the
subject, Magnus would really leave one with the impression that he is truly
concerned that he will end up in the same sorry state that Fischer did. The
problematic -- or symptomatic -- details of Fischer's early life (including
up until Magnus's current age, for example) are well known. In any
discussion, surely Magnus would convey that, while the Fischer saga
naturally may give rise to momentary self-reflective wonder, it is plain
that Magnus's own family life, overall socialization, behavior, and outlook
bear no resemblance whatsoever to that of Fischer. Anything Magnus conveyed
along these lines obviously ended up on the cutting room floor.
I applaud all the attention that Magnus garners
within the mainstream media. It's good for chess. His publicist would be
wise, however, to develop a list of questions and "angles" to explore that
are more interesting and penetrating (even for a general audience) than what
we see again and again.
Jensen Comment
This was one of the most interesting television segments I ever watched.
The video demonstrates how master chess players are super confident with a
compulsion not just to beat their opponents but to annihilate them.
The only opponent to ever intimidate Magness was the great Russian great
Garry Kasparov.
Kasparov was always one of my heroes until I learned how rude and
unsportsmanlike he was in a match with Magness Carlsen (a kid). This is probably
the only time in the world that Magness was intimidated to a point where he
settled for a tie when he could've won the match.
"How experts recall chess positions," by Daniel Simons, The
Invisible Gorilla, February 15, 2012 ---
http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/blog/2012/02/15/how-experts-recall-chess-positions/
. . .
This question, how do chess experts evaluate
positions to find the best move, has been studied for decades, dating back
to the groundbreaking work of
Adriaan de Groot
and later to work by William Chase and
Herbert Simon.
de Groot interviewed several chess players as they
evaluated positions, and he argued that experts and weaker players tended to
“look” about the same number of moves ahead and to evaluate similar numbers
of moves with roughly similar speed. The relatively small differences
between experts and novices suggested that their advantages came not from
brute force calculation ability but from something else: knowledge.
According to De Groot, the core of chess expertise is the ability to
recognize huge number of chess positions (or parts of positions) and to
derive moves from them. In short, their greater efficiency came not from
evaluating more outcomes, but from considering only the better options. [Note:
Some of the details of de Groot’s claims, which he made before the
appropriate statistical tests were in widespread use, did not hold up to
later scrutiny—experts do consider somewhat more options, look a bit deeper,
and process positions faster than less expert players (Holding, 1992). But
de Groot was right about the limited nature of expert search and the
importance of knowledge and pattern recognition in expert performance.]
Continued in the article (with an interesting concluding video)
Map of ‘terrorism hot spots’ in US ---
http://ihrrblog.org/2012/02/13/map-of-terrorism-hot-spots-in-us/
"The Boy Who Played With Fusion Feature: Taylor Wilson always dreamed of
creating a star. Now he’s become one," by Tom Clynes, Popular Science,
February 14, 2012 ---
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played-fusion?page=all
. . .
Willis’s power supply crackles. The reactor is
entering “star mode.” Rays of plasma dart between gaps in the now-invisible
grid as deuterium atoms, accelerated by the tremendous voltages, begin to
collide. Brinsmead keeps his eyes glued to the neutron detector. “We’re
getting neutrons,” he shouts. “It’s really jamming!”
Taylor cranks it up to 40,000 volts. “Whoa, look at
Snoopy now!” Phaneuf says, grinning. Taylor nudges the power up to 50,000
volts, bringing the temperature of the plasma inside the core to an
incomprehensible 580 million degrees—some 40 times as hot as the core of the
sun. Brinsmead lets out a whoop as the neutron gauge tops out.
“Snoopy’s pegged!” he yells, doing a little dance.
On the video screen, purple sparks fly away from the plasma cloud,
illuminating the wonder in the faces of Phaneuf and Brinsmead, who stand in
a half-orbit around Taylor. In the glow of the boy’s creation, the men
suddenly look years younger.
Taylor keeps his thin fingers on the dial as the
atoms collide and fuse and throw off their energy, and the men take a step
back, shaking their heads and wearing ear-to-ear grins.
“There it is,” Taylor says, his eyes locked on the
machine. “The birth of a star.”
RFID Chip Fraud Risk Video
WTHR_The Risk inside your credit card ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLAFhTjsQHw&sns=em
"How CEO Pay Became a Massive Bubble," An interview with Mihir Desai
Harvard Business School, Harvard Business Review Blog, February 23, 2012
---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2012/02/how-ceo-pay-became-a-massive-b.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Bob Jensen's threads on outrageous executive compensation and golden
parachutes ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation
"For-Profits Get Half of Military Tuition Benefits," Inside Higher Ed,
February 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/02/24/profits-get-half-military-tuition-benefits
Students attending
for-profit colleges received $280 million of the $563
million spent last year by the Department of Defense on
tuition assistance for active-duty members of the
military, according to a
new study by the majority
staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions. Six for-profit college companies
collected 41 percent of
the total expenditure.
The study also analyzed
Department of Defense spending on on education benefits
for military spouses. For-profits received $40 million
of that $65 million, with $12 million going to
for-profits that are not eligible to participate in
federal financial aid programs. As the report noted,
those institutions operate outside of the government's
"regulatory regime set up to ensure minimal levels of
program integrity."
The Senate Study ---
Click Here
http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/files/022312_DOD%20TA%20Data%20Background%20Document.pdf
. . .
The newly released DOD data shows that six of the
top ten recipients of Tuition Assistance are for-profit schools. Those six
companies, alone, collect 41% of all TA dollars.
- American Public Education, Inc.
- Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
- TUI Learning, LLC
- Apollo Group, Inc. (University of Phoenix)
- Columbia Southern University
- Grantham University
Continued in article ---
Click Here
"For-Profits Get Half of Military Tuition Benefits," Inside Higher Ed,
February 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/02/24/profits-get-half-military-tuition-benefits
Students attending for-profit
colleges received $280 million of the $563 million spent
last year by the Department of Defense on tuition
assistance for active-duty members of the military,
according to a
new study by the majority
staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions. Six for-profit college companies
collected 41 percent of the
total expenditure.
The
study also analyzed Department of Defense spending on on
education benefits for military spouses. For-profits
received $40 million of that $65 million, with $12
million going to for-profits that are not eligible to
participate in federal financial aid programs. As the
report noted, those institutions operate outside of the
government's "regulatory regime set up to ensure minimal
levels of program integrity."
The Senate Study ---
Click Here
http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/files/022312_DOD%20TA%20Data%20Background%20Document.pdf
. . .
The newly released DOD data shows that six of the
top ten recipients of Tuition Assistance are for-profit schools. Those six
companies, alone, collect 41% of all TA dollars.
- American Public Education, Inc.
- Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
- TUI Learning, LLC
- Apollo Group, Inc. (University of Phoenix)
- Columbia Southern University
- Grantham University
Continued in article ---
Click Here
70% of Pell Grants to For-Profits
Pell Grant ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pell_Grant
. . .
The Pell Grant is covered by legislation titled the
Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), Title IV, Part A, Subpart 1; 20 U.S.C.
1070a. These federal funded grants are not like loans and do not have to be
repaid. Students may use their grants at any one of approximately 5,400
participating postsecondary institutions.
These federally funded grants help about 5.4
million full-time and part-time college and vocational school students
nationally. For the 2010-2011 school
year, 7 of the top 10 colleges by total Pell Grant money awarded were
for-profit institution
"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
Especially Note the Graphic: Connect the For-Profit University Dots
"Who Enrolls the Most Students With Post-9/11 GI Benefits?" by Ron
Coddington and Michael Sewall, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13,
2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Enrolls-the-Most-Students/65923/
Why do you think the private universities are so popular given that online
degrees are available from most state universities?
"Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private
College (or a for-profit university): A 50-year rise in grade-point averages is being fueled by private
institutions, a recent study finds," by Catherine Rampell. The New York Times,
April 19, 2010 ---
http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109339/want-a-higher-gpa-go-to-a-private-college?mod=edu-collegeprep
US News Rankings ---
http://www.usnews.com/rankings
US News Top Online Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Do not confuse this with the US News project to evaluate for-profit universities
--- a project hampered by refusal of many for-profit universities to provide
data
Phony Education and Training Search Sites
These phony education search programs sponsored by for-profit universities
are getting a bit more sophisticated by salting a very few not-for-profit
programs to make you think they are legitimate education and training search
programs. But in reality they are still phony for-profit university search
sites.
For example, I read in my old zip code 78212 into the search site
http://lpntobsnonline.org/
Sure enough, up pops the University of Phoenix and other for-profit university
alternatives. No mention is made of San Antonio's massive University of Texas
Health Science Nursing Alternative and other non-for-profit nursing education
alternatives in the area.
Boo/poo on this
http://lpntobsnonline.org/ site!
For-profit universities
provide some free Website services in an effort to lure people into signing up
for for-profit programs without ever mentioning that in most instances the
students would be better off in more prestigious non-profit universities such as
state-supported universities with great online programs and extension services.
I'm bombarded with messages like the following one from ---
http://www.paralegal.net/
Then go to the orange box at
http://www.paralegal.net/more/
If you feed in the data that you're interested in a bachelor's degree in
business with an accounting concentration, the only choices given are for-profit
universities. No mention is made of better programs at the Universities of
Wisconsin, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc.
I've stopped linking to the many for-profit university promotional sites because
they are so misleading.
My threads on distance education alternatives are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit universities operating in the gray zone
of fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Hi Steve,
I'm happy that you also made your American Dream come true.
Pell Grants are provide terrific opportunities for students who cannot afford to
go to college. I only wish that traditional universities got a larger share of
these grants vis-a-vis for-profit universities.
The reason that I say this is that I think graduates of traditional universities
face more opportunities for post-graduate studies and career opportunities.
Another reason is that a $2,000 Pell Grant will go further toward in-state
public university tuition than the much more expensive for-profit university
tuition.
Pell Grant ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pell_Grant
. . .
The Pell Grant is covered by legislation titled the
Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), Title IV, Part A, Subpart 1; 20 U.S.C.
1070a. These federal funded grants are not like loans and do not have to be
repaid. Students may use their grants at any one of approximately 5,400
participating postsecondary institutions.
These federally funded grants help about 5.4
million full-time and part-time college and vocational school students
nationally.For the 2010-2011 school year, 7 of the top 10 colleges by total
Pell Grant money awarded were
for-profit institution
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
One year alternative to a two-year MBA program
"An MBA Alternative: MIT Sloan's Master of Finance Program," Bloomberg
News, February 13, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/business-schools/an-mba-alternative-mit-sloans-master-of-finance-program-02132012.html
For years, MIT’s Sloan School of Management offered
no degree to rival the master of finance programs at Princeton, Columbia,
and Carnegie Mellon. That changed in 2008, when the university made finance
its first new one-year master’s program in more than 25 years. (It
previously offered a finance certificate.) “MIT produces new degrees very
rarely,” says Andrew Lo, the director of Sloan’s Laboratory for Financial
Engineering.
Enrollment in the MFin program will increase to 120
students for the class of 2013, up from 57 for the class of 2010. Despite
this growing popularity, however, administrators face a number of industry
challenges, including how Wall Street’s troubles have begun to take a toll
on graduates’ career prospects.
The program reported 92 percent of its 2011 class
had job offers three months after graduation, down from 100 percent for the
class of 2010. More than 220,000 job cuts are expected in the global
financial-services industry this year, eclipsing 174,000 dismissals in 2009,
Bloomberg data show. And in a fluid regulatory environment, teaching finance
grows more complex. The so-called Volcker rule proposes to separate the
investment banking, private equity, and hedge fund businesses of banks from
their consumer lending units.
MIT expects students who aim to work in finance,
and who may have opted for an MBA in the past, to gravitate toward an MFin
in the future. Sloan MFin students are younger than MBAs on average (71
percent of the 2011 class had work experience of six months or less, vs. an
average of five years for MBAs). And the MFin student body is predominately
international, with about 78 percent of the 2011 class coming from outside
the U.S. The median salary for 2011 MFin graduates was $82,000, and
BlackRock, Cambridge Associates, Citigroup, Deloitte, and Morgan Stanley
were the class’s top hirers.
Lo spoke with Bloomberg Businessweek‘s
Erin Zlomek about the
program. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation:
With so many cuts in the financial
industry, how are your graduates finding jobs, and what opportunities are
they taking?
The international focus is a strength of our
program and is partly dictated by our diverse class. These students are
eclectic in the kinds of positions they want and the cities they want to
interview in. We have a variety of small and large firms that recruit with
us. Students also go on international job treks. (A recent trip was to Banco
Santander.)
Students who are passionate about finance are
likely interested in the notion of risk and reward and how different
resources are channeled through different securities markets. When this is
true, careers can develop across many industries, even outside of finance.
Take health care. One of the most challenging aspects in health care is
figuring out how to finance innovation–it is very expensive and risky. An
industry as far removed from finance as health care requires financial
innovation, and with the right kind of vehicles, tremendous innovation can
occur.
Also, I think our students recognize that when an
industry is in flux, those are the times when the most opportunities are
being created.
What skills do graduates of the MFin
program tend to have?
Our grads understand particular programming
languages–namely, Matlab, which is common in the financial world. Our
students are trained in areas like risk management and derivatives, and they
know how to deal with financial data. They’ve been exposed to different
trading strategies. They also know how trading systems can fail and cause
significant loss if not properly managed.
How does the application process compare
with that of the MBA?
The applications are quite similar. Where it
differs are the essays: We want the applicant to be specific about why they
are interested in finance. We want applicants to have a good appreciation
for different career paths in the industry. In this program, we are not
trying to turn out a better day trader–we are trying to turn out responsible
financial innovators.
Describe your curriculum.
We start all of our students with a rigorous
introduction into financial theory and cover the basic capital markets,
corporate finance, and accounting. This gives them a solid foundation of the
mathematics and economics of these markets. Students can then take electives
on topics such as investments, risk management, and fixed income. There are
also action learning courses, such as a seminar in financial engineering,
where they get to work on actual problems posed by financial institutions.
There is also an externship, where students spend two to four weeks also
working on actual projects.
Continued in article
Home page of the MIT's Master of Finance Program ---
http://mitsloan.mit.edu/academic/mfin/
Program
- What are the M. Fin. requirements?
Required courses, restricted and general electives, a proseminar, and an
optional Master's thesis. The M.Fin. program easily meets the
Institute's requirement of a minimum of 66 units of graduate level
credit, including at least 42 H-level units.
- How long does it take to complete the program?
Approximately one year. Students typically spend the summer plus two
academic terms (fall and spring) in residence, and graduate in June. MIT
undergraduates who have already taken 15.401 and 15.402 will need just
nine months (fall and spring terms) to complete the program
requirements.
- Would the summer session occupy the full summer term?
No, we plan an intensive program of approximately 6 weeks that begins in
July.
- What happens in the summer for MIT undergraduates who have
already completed 15.401 and 15.402?
These students will be encouraged to take finance jobs or internships
during the summer to gain practical experience.
- Why not offer a degree in Financial Engineering?
Finance is broader than just financial engineering, which suggests
“quants and traders only.” The M.Fin. addresses the broader area of
finance.
- Is there a possiblity for students to attain an internship
in their field of interest while taking classes?
Practical training is an important component of a student's preparation.
M.Fin. students are expected when possible to take advantage of IAP
(January) as an opportunity to gain practical experience in an area of
finance. One opportunity for students is to take advantage of our
optional Research Practicum. During the research practicum, students
spend three months working directly with client teams at companies like
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, BlackRock, and Fairhaven
Capital. International students must check with the ISO to ensure
compliance with immigration regulations before participating in
practical training.
- Can one complete the M.Fin. Program part-time or via
distance learning?
No, the M.Fin. program is full-time only and takes place on the MIT
campus.
Jensen Comment
MIT has no comparable Master of Accounting program, and the number of accounting
courses is quite limited relative to universities attempting to prepare students
to take and pass the CPA examination ---
http://mitsloan.mit.edu/academic/courses-list.php?list=Accounting1
MIT does offer a finance track within its two-year MBA program.
A humanities graduate having no prerequisites in accounting, business, and
economics can be admitted to the MBA program. However, it's not clear how such a
humanities undergraduate could complete a Master of Finance degree in one year.
The online literature is somewhat vague about what an applicant needs to enter
and complete the Master of Finance degree program in one year.
"Flipping out? What you need to know about the Flipped Classroom," by
Andrea Zellner, Inside Higher Ed, February 21, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/flipping-out-what-you-need-know-about-flipped-classroom
Separating Fact from Hype and Wishful Thinking about Education Technology
"Hurdles Remain Before College Classrooms Go Completely Digital," by Dave
Copeland, ReadWriteWeb, February 20, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hurdles_remain_before_college_classrooms_go_comple.php
OnlineUniversities.com came out with an
optimistic infographic last week about how college
classrooms are going digital.
But as someone who makes as much as a quarter of
his income from teaching college classes in any given year, and who also
spends a good amount of time speaking at conferences trying to help
professors incorporate technology and social media into their curriculum,
the view from the trenches is very different than the iPad-in-every-backpack
proponents would have you believe.
This is not to say that tech isn't changing the way
we teach and the way students learn: it most certainly is. But probably not
as fast as some people outside of higher ed think it is.
Since 2006,
Mashery has managed the APIs for more than 100
brands such as The New York Times, Netflix, Best Buy and Hoovers.
Powering the more than 10,000 apps built upon these APIs, Mashery
enables its customers to distribute their content, data or products to
mobile devices and web mashups.
People who say we're at the
dawn of a new way of learning at the college level are overlooking some
rather significant economic and cultural hurdles. At the same time,
academic freedom means professors can choose to implement technology a
lot, a little bit or not at all into their curriculum. And implementing
it "a lot" isn't always a good thing, particularly if it isn't used in a
way that boosts learning outcomes.
We (Don't) Have
The Technology
If you were to visit the
library on the campus where I teach, you would see students waiting to
use outdated desktops in the computer labs and library, particularly
around midterms and finals week. It seems odd at first, considering the
school has a laptop requirement for all undergraduates. That means you
have to have a laptop computer when you enroll, and presumably, as an
instructor, I can require my students to bring them to any class.
But here's the reality:
laptops break, and students can't afford replacements.
The mainstream media has
sold us a myth of college still being the place for the ultra-elite, for
kids who start compiling "brag sheets" in the fourth grade and have
parents that shell out five figures to hire a college admissions coach.
But in practice, most
college students these days are like the ones I teach at a four-year
state college: they are, by-and-large, the first in their family to
attend college. Almost all of my students work, and many work full-time
or multiple part-time jobs. Some are parents. An increasing number are
so-called nontraditional students and are enrolling after an extended
break from education. These students often support families and, in many
case, have college-aged children who need their own laptops.
Now factor in that the
fastest growing segment of higher education are community colleges,
which by-and-large draw kids from working class backgrounds or cater to
people who have been laid off and are trying to get trained for a new
career.
For a lot of students,
replacing a broken laptop is a choice between skipping a rent payment or
sucking it up and waiting in those long lines at the computer lab.
Asking them to shell out for an iPad on top of the laptop just isn't
feasible for many college students, and that means its going to take
longer to get everyone on board with the tech revolution in higher ed.
Tenure Doesn't
Equal Tech Savvy
One of the concerns
among students on the campus where I teach is that the university
employs an alert system that sends them text and email messages if there
is a life-threatening emergency on campus (think Virginia Tech in 2007).
But what are they supposed to do, these students ask, if they're in a
class where the teacher bans them from using smartphones and laptops?
Academic freedom means
professors get to run their classrooms in the way they want, and that
includes choosing the tools they use to teach. Having sat in meetings
where faculty members have threatened to file union complaints because
email means students can - GASP! - contact them at any time, I think
we're a ways off from blanket incorporation of social media and tablet
textbooks across the curriculum.
These same professors,
many of whom predate the Internet era in higher ed, never concede that
email also means fewer student visits during office hours for simple
questions, which means more time to get actual work done. This isn't
meant as a knock on them, but there are varying degrees of enthusiasm
for incorporating tech into teaching and, unlike high schools, tech
enthusiasm can't be mandated by a curriculum committee.
High School's
Chilling Effects
Career academics are
not, however, the only ones to blame. A lot of students come to college
with backward views of what social media is and what it can accomplish.
And most importantly, what is and isn't acceptable on social media.
And why shouldn't
they? They come from schools where teachers can be reprimanded or even
fired for connecting with students on social networks. Several schools
across the country are implementing bans on teachers friending not only
current students but former students on
Facebook.
There's no easy fix for
overcoming these preexisting biases. Step one, as a professor, is make
sure you don't use Facebook for classwork: even though it's the default
social network for so many of us, there's still too much of a creep
factor in crossing that student-professor line (and, frankly, with
Facebook's ever-shifting privacy policies, even if you think you're
protected you may end up seeing stuff about your students you'd be
better off not knowing about).
But that leaves us to
decide which social network we should use with our students. Dedicated
social networks like the one being rolled out for students by Microsoft
seem like a good idea, but my own experience is that a site students
check for reasons other than school tends to produce more frequent
check-ins and a more organic discussion about classwork, which is
exactly what I want to accomplish with social media in my classes.
I tried using
Google+
last September, only to be thwarted in a freshman writing class where
some of the students were not yet 18. Google has since relaxed its age
restrictions, but the social network is still too new for students to
gravitate toward it. In my experiment, students found it confusing, or
at least less intuitive than Facebook, and I was finding most would only
use it if I mandated it.
I've had the best
luck with
Twitter, including the use of it in a film
class so we can discuss the film as we're screening it each week (for a
sample, see this
storify of tweets from the class discussion of Shawshank Redmeption).
But, again, only about half of my students will
use it if I don't require it. And of the students who start using it
because I require it in my class, fewer than 10% will continue to use it
when the semester ends.
Hope On The
Horizon: The Kindle Effect
The people I thought
would be stingiest about adopting technology in their classrooms have,
in many cases, been the most willing to change. I now see a lot of those
seemingly stodgy old English professors walking around campus with a
Kindle tucked under their arm.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the hope and hype of education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Apple does not have a corner on the market for innovations in textbook
authoring
"2 New Platforms Offer Alternative to Apple’s Textbook-Authoring Software,"
by Nick DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17. 2012 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/2-new-platforms-offer-alternative-to-apples-textbook-authoring-software/35495?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Apple’s recent release of free software to build
e-textbooks has brought attention to custom publishing of academic
materials. But Apple’s software, called iBooks Author, lacks easy tools for
multiple authors to collaborate on a joint textbook project. Since most
books aren’t written in isolation, two new publishing platforms seek to make
that group collaboration easier.
The first,
Booktype,
is free and open-source. Once the platform is
installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their
browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time
about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by
dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on
e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also
comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups,
and track books through editing.
Inkling
Habitat, the other new offering, appears to have
even greater ambitions. Where iBooks Author is designed mostly for would-be
amateur publishers, Inkling Habitat creates a cloud-based platform for the
professional market. Matthew MacInnis, Inkling’s chief executive, said the
company’s tool is designed to give the global teams who work on
professionally published textbooks a single outlet to publish interactive
material for the iPad and the Web. Mr. MacInnis said hundreds of users can
access the same textbook content at once, and the software will keep track
of each step in the editing process.
Inkling Habitat also automates some of the editing
process that is unique to e-textbooks, like checking for broken links
between special terms and their definitions in a glossary. Those automatic
functions, Mr. MacInnis said, will allow e-textbook publishing to get easier
without requiring additional staff. “You can’t build the industry up around
digital content if you’re going to throw people at every problem,” he said.
February 20, 2012 message from Bob Jensen to Richard Campbell
Hi Richard,
Are iBooks superior to ToolBooks that will run on the other 99% of the
market?
You don't seem to mention your ToolBooks anymore.
Have you stopped writing ToolBooks?
http://www.sumtotalsystems.com/products/content-creation/toolbook_overview.html
I did not know that iBooks were superior to all eBooks (including ToolBooks)
on the market.
Is that what you're trying to tell us?
Does this justify having to pay Apple a huge royalty on every iBook an
author sells?
I'm sorry, but I despise eBook vendors that do not support open standards.
Apple shot itself in the 1980s with the Mac operating system. Now it's
shooting itself in the other foot by trying to be an iBook hardware
monopoly. The tech world resists vendors that do not support open standards.
Excellent authors trying to make money on iBooks will pay a price!
Windows still has about 92% of the PC Market. Add to this the other
alternatives that won't run iBooks like Linux. The last time I looked Kindle
still had the overwhelming share of the eBook reader market. Seems like an
aspiring author should consider market share.
Personally, at think at this stage of technology, a textbook author should
still focus on eBook and hardcopy open standard alternatives and provide
multimedia supplements. Eventually, hard copy books will have something like
a USB port to a multimedia chip embedded in the binding.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
Bob Jensen's threads on eBooks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm
"2011 Accounting Graduates Earning Average Salaries of $50,000,"
AccountingWeb, January 31, 2012 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/education-careers/2011-accounting-graduates-earning-average-salaries-50000
Accounting major college graduates earned
an average of $50,500. Entry-level accounting and finance jobs tend
to see steady growth. Highest-paying employers of accounting majors
were securities, commodities, and financial investments employers.
Continued in article
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEM_fields
"Re-Engineering Engineering Education to Retain Students," by Josh
Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 19, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/re-engineering-engineering-education-to-retain-students/28745?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Vancouver, British Columbia—Alarmed by the
tendency of engineering programs to hemorrhage undergraduates, at a time
when the White House has called for
an additional million degrees in science, technology, engineering and math
fields—known as STEM—education researchers here at
the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science proposed ways to improve the numbers. At a symposium on engineering
education, one group outlined a broad revamping of curriculum, while another
proposed more modest changes to pedagogy.
The re-evaluation of curriculum is an effort called
Deconstructing Engineering Education Programs. The
project is led by Ilene Busch-Vishniac, the provost of McMaster University
in Ontario and a mechanical engineer, and involves faculty from nine
universities, including large public institutions like the University of
Washington and small private ones like Smith College.
Patricia Campbell, a collaborator on the project
who leads an education-consulting firm in Groton, Mass., said that the time
to get an engineering degree was a major reason that undergraduates dropped
the major. “We call these four-year schools,” she said. “But 64 percent of
STEM undergraduates complete their degrees in six years.” In engineering,
she continued, that was largely due to two factors: a proliferation of
courses, called “topic creep,” and rigid chains of prerequisite courses that
students had to follow to move on to higher courses.
Matthew Ohland, an associate professor of
engineering education at Purdue University, added that the rigid structure
not only prevented students from getting out of these programs with a
degree, but it also kept potential students from migrating in. For example,
he said, an industrial-engineering program might insist its students take a
particular economics course to fulfill the program’s general-education
requirements. But sophomores and juniors might have already taken a related
but different econ course. To join the program, they would have to retake
economics, a strong disincentive.
Ms. Campbell (who was formerly a professor at
Georgia State University) and her colleagues attempted to streamline this
system, focusing on mechanical engineering. At nine schools, they identified
mechanical engineering courses that covered 2,149 topics. But after closely
looking at the coursework, they found a number of similar topics with
different names, and narrowed the list of unique topics to 833. Ultimately
they grouped the courses on those topics into 12 clusters, each of which
contained chains of classes focused around closely related topics, and
required few courses from another cluster. The clusters covered all 833
topics, and instructional times ranged from 52 to 115 hours, with an average
length of 91 hours. That corresponds, roughly, to four hours of course time
each week for one semester on the low end or one year on the high end.
That means, Ms. Campbell said, that a
mechanical-engineering student could cover all the required topics, but do
so in four years, by taking three clusters each year.
It would also, she claimed, meet the standards of
the Accreditation
Board for Engineering and Technology, because it
includes everything that accredited engineering programs do. Mr. Ohland, who
works as an evaluator for the board, said the accreditor is open to new
approaches like these, although he acknowledged there were many of what he
called “horror stories” about the accreditor being very traditional and
resistant to change. “If you do something too wild, you have to convince
[the board] that it won’t hurt students.”
No institution has adopted the cluster formulation.
Ms. Campbell said that faculty members were leery of the new course
formulations, which grouped topics that they usually taught with other
topics they did not. The solution, she said, was team-teaching of a course,
but that’s something that pushes many professors beyond their comfort
levels.
A less-radical approach would be to improve
teaching techniques in existing courses, said another symposium participant,
Susan S. Metz, executive director of the Lore-El Center for Women in
Engineering and Science at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.
She leads the Engage
project, a consortium of engineering schools at 30
institutions, supported by the National Science Foundation, to identify best
practices in teaching.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In accountancy we face somewhat similar problems in that even in four-year
degree programs accounting majors are required to take more courses in their
major than most other majors on campus, including majors in economics, finance,
marketing, and management. To that we now add a fifth year of courses required
to sit for the CPA examination.
But in accountancy we face a different job market than engineers. There are
no shortages of top accounting majors to meet the available entry level jobs in
CPA firms, corporations, and government agencies in most states. There is a
shortage of accounting PhD graduates, but these shortages are not caused by
undergraduate professional accountancy curricula. The main problem lies in that
accountancy PhD degrees take twice as long as most other doctoral degrees and
require mathematics and statistics prerequisites not taken by former accounting
majors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
In the roaring 1990s there was great worry among the CPA firms that
accounting was losing top majors to the soaring bubble of jobs in computer
science, IT, and finance. But that bubble burst big time making homeless people
out of computer science, IT, and finance graduates. Students who had not yet
declared majors returned to the accounting fold in spite of the expanding
requirements to have a fifth year (150-credits) to sit for the CPA examination.
The curriculum of accountancy has been and probably always will be dictated
by content of the CPA examination. For example, when the CPA examination
commenced to have larger and tougher problems in governmental accounting,
accounting programs beefed up governmental accounting courses. The same beefing
up is now taking place with ethics content in the curricula. Perhaps this isn't
such a bad thing until more shortages of accounting graduates arise.
The problem with the CPA-exam focus of accounting curricula lies in finding
accounting instructors qualified to teach upper division accountancy, auditing,
tax, and AIS courses. There's a huge shortage of accountancy PhD graduates and
many of them are econometricians not qualified to teach upper division
accounting courses. As a result accounting programs are turning more and more to
the AACSB's Professionally Qualified (PQ) adjunct instructors who are strong in
accountancy but do not have doctoral degrees. A few even have doctoral degrees
but are not interested in doing accountics research and publishing required for
AQ tenure tracks.
Hence even though we could streamline accounting curricula along the same
lines suggested for engineering majors in the above article, I personally don't
think there's a need to meet the supply of available jobs in accountancy in the
United States and Canada.
And apart from engineering and technology, I'm not certain that we are not
deluding high school students about career opportunities in science and
mathematics opportunities. For example, chemistry and physics are now ranked
among the "most useless" majors and students with four-year degrees or even PhD
degrees in these disciplines have to branch into other fields to find careers.
"Texas May Cut Almost Half of Undergrad Physics Programs," Inside
Higher Ed, September 27, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/27/qt#271341
Note that "useless" in context means an oversupply of graduates relative to
job opportunities in a discipline. The jobs themselves may be high paying,
but 300 may apply for a single opening such that the 299 that got turned
away wish they'd majored in some other discipline.
As college
seniors prepare to graduate, The Daily Beast crunches the
numbers to determine which majors—from journalism to psychology
—didn’t pay.
Some
cities are better than others for
college graduates. Some college courses are
definitely hotter than others. Even
some iPhone apps are
better for college
students than others. But when it comes down to it, there’s only
one question that rings out in dormitories, fraternities, and
dining halls across the nation: What’s your major?
Slide Show
01.Journalism
02. Horticulture
03. Agriculture
04. Advertising
05. Fashion Design
06. Child and Family Studies
07. Music
08. Mechanical Engineering Technology
(but not Mechanical
Engineering per se)
09.
Chemistry
10. Nutrition
11. Human Resources
12. Theatre
13. Art History
14. Photography
15. Literature
16. Art
17.Fine Arts
18. Psychology
19. English
20. Animal Science
Prediction Versus Explanation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Purpose
"Higgs ahoy! The elusive boson has probably been found. That is a triumph
for the predictive power of physics," The Economist, February 17, 2012 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21541825
IN PHYSICS, the trick is often to ask a question so
obvious no one else would have thought of posing it. Apples have fallen to
the ground since time immemorial. It took the genius of Sir Isaac Newton to
ask why. Of course, it helps if you have the mental clout to work out the
answer. Fortunately, Newton did.
It was in this spirit, almost 50 years ago, that a
few insightful physicists asked themselves where mass comes from. Like the
tendency of apples to fall to the ground, the existence of mass is so
quotidian that the idea it needs a formal explanation would never occur to
most people. But it did occur to Peter Higgs, then a young researcher at
Edinburgh University, and to five other scientists whom the quirks of
celebrity have not treated so kindly. They, too, had the necessary mental
clout. They got out their pencils and papers and scribbled down equations
whose upshot was a prediction.
The reason that fundamental particles have mass,
the researchers calculated, is their interaction with a previously unknown
field that permeates space. This field came to be named (with no disrespect
to the losers in the celebrity race) the Higgs field. Technically, it is
needed to explain a phenomenon called electroweak symmetry breaking, which
divides two of the fundamental forces of nature, electromagnetism and the
weak nuclear force. When that division happens, a bit of leftover
mathematics manifests itself as a particle. This putative particle has
become known as the Higgs boson, whose possible discovery was announced to
the world on December 13th (see
article).
Physicists demand a level of proof that would in
any other human activity (including other scientific ones) be seen as
ludicrously high—that a result has only one chance in 3.5m of being wrong.
The new results—from experiments done at CERN, the world’s premier
particle-physics laboratory, using its multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron
Collider, the LHC—do not individually come close to that threshold. What has
excited physicists, though, is that they have got essentially identical
results from two experiments attached to the LHC, which work in completely
different ways. This coincidence makes it much more likely that they have
discovered the real deal.
If they have, it would be a wonderful thing, and
not just for science. Though nations no longer tremble at the feet of
particle physicists—the men, and a few women, who once delivered the
destructive power of the atom bomb—physics still has the power to produce
awe in another way, by revealing the basic truths that underpin reality.
Model behaviour
Finding the Higgs would mark the closing of one
chapter in this story. The elusive boson rounds off what has become known as
the Standard Model of physics—an explanation that relies on 17 fundamental
particles and three physical forces (though it stubbornly refuses to
accommodate a fourth force, gravity, which is separately explained by Albert
Einstein’s general theory of relativity). Much more intriguingly, the Higgs
also opens another chapter of physics.
The physicists’ plan is to use the Standard Model
as the foundation of a larger and more beautiful edifice called
Supersymmetry. This predicts a further set of particles, the heavier
partners of those already found. How much heavier, though, depends on how
heavy the Higgs itself is. The results just announced suggest it is light
enough for some of the predicted supersymmetric particles to be made in the
LHC too.
That is a great relief to those at CERN. If the
Higgs had proved much heavier than this week’s announcement implies they
might have found themselves with a lot of redundant kit on their hands. Now
they can start looking for the bricks of Supersymmetry, to see if it, too,
resembles the physicists’ predictions. In particular, in a crossover between
particle physics and cosmology, they will be trying to find out if (as the
maths suggest) the lightest of the supersymmetric partner particles are the
stuff of the hitherto mysterious “dark matter” whose gravity holds galaxies
together.
A critique of pure reason
One of the most extraordinary things about the
universe is this predictability—that it is possible to write down equations
which describe what is seen, and extrapolate from them to the unseen. Newton
was able to go from the behaviour of bodies falling to Earth to the
mechanism that holds planets in orbit. James Clerk Maxwell’s equations of
electromagnetism, derived in the mid-19th century, predicted the existence
of radio waves. The atom bomb began with Einstein’s famous equation,
E=mc{+2}, which was a result derived by asking how objects would behave when
travelling near the speed of light. The search for antimatter, that staple
of science fiction, was the consequence of an equation about electrons which
has two sets of solutions, one positive and one negative.
Eugene Wigner, one of the physicists responsible
for showing, in the 1920s, the importance of symmetry to the universe (and
who was thus a progenitor of Supersymmetry), described this as the
“unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”. Not all such predictions come
true, of course. But the predictive power of mathematical physics—as opposed
to the after-the-fact explanatory power of maths in other fields—is still
extraordinary.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on theory ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm
FTC Identity Theft Center ---
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/
Identity Theft Resource Center
---
http://www.idtheftcenter.org/
Note the tab for State and Local Resources
IRS Identity Protection
Specialized Unit at 800-908-4490
"IRS Warns on ‘Dirty Dozen’ Tax Scams for 2012," by Laura Saunders,
The Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2012 ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2012/02/17/irs-warns-on-dirty-dozen-tax-scams-for-2012/?mod=google_news_blog
Every year during tax season the Internal Revenue
Service releases a list of its least-favorite tax scams. “Scam artists will
tempt people in-person, on-line and by email with misleading promises about
lost refunds and free money. Don’t be fooled by these,” warns Commissioner
Douglas Stives.
The list changes from year to year. Here’s what the
IRS is warning about for this tax season. For more information, click
here, or watch a video
here.
1. Identity theft
“An IRS notice informing a taxpayer that more than
one return was filed in the taxpayer’s name may be the first tipoff the
individual receives that he or she has been victimized.”
2. Phishing
“If you receive an unsolicited
email that appears to be from either the IRS or an organization closely
linked to the IRS, such as the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System, report
it by sending it to
phishing@irs.gov.”
3. Tax-preparer fraud
“In 2012 every paid preparer needs to have a
Preparer Tax Identification Number (PTIN) and enter it on the returns he or
she prepares.”
4. Hiding income offshore
“Since 2009, 30,000 individuals
have come forward voluntarily to disclose [undeclared] foreign financial
accounts. . . With new foreign account reporting requirements being phased
in over the next few years, hiding income offshore will become increasingly
more difficult.”
5. ‘Free money’ from the IRS and tax scams
involving Social Security
“Flyers and advertisements for
free money from the IRS, suggesting that the taxpayer can file a tax return
with little or no documentation, have been appearing at community churches
around the country.”
6. False/inflated income and expenses
“Claiming income you did not earn or expenses you
did not pay in order to secure larger refundable credits such as the Earned
Income Tax Credit could have serious repercussions…. Fraud involving the
fuel tax credit is considered a frivolous tax claim and can result in a
penalty of $5,000.”
7. False Form 1099 refund claims
“In this ongoing scam, the perpetrator files a fake
information return, such as a Form 1099 Original Issue Discount (OID), to
justify a false refund claim on a corresponding tax return.”
8. Frivolous arguments
“Promoters of frivolous schemes
encourage taxpayers to make unreasonable and outlandish claims to avoid
paying the taxes they owe. The IRS has a list of
frivolous
tax arguments that taxpayers should avoid.”
9. Falsely claiming zero wages
“Filing a phony information return
is an illegal way to lower the amount of taxes an individual owes.
Typically, a Form 4852 (Substitute Form W-2) or a ‘corrected’ Form 1099 is
used as a way to improperly reduce taxable income to zero. The taxpayer may
also submit a statement rebutting wages and taxes reported by a payer to the
IRS. ”
10. Abuse of charitable organizations and
deductions
“The IRS is investigating schemes
that involve the donation of non-cash assets – including situations in which
several organizations claim the full value of the same non-cash
contribution. Often these donations are highly overvalued or the
organization receiving the donation promises that the donor can repurchase
the items later at a price set by the donor.”
11. Disguised corporate ownership
“Third parties are improperly used to request
employer identification numbers and form corporations that obscure the true
ownership of the business…. The IRS is working with state authorities to
identify these entities and bring the owners into compliance with the law.”
12. Misuse of trusts
“IRS personnel have seen an increase in the
improper use of private annuity trusts and foreign trusts to shift income
and deduct personal expenses. As with other arrangements, taxpayers should
seek the advice of a trusted professional before entering a trust
arrangement.”
FTC Identity Theft Center ---
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/
Identity Theft Resource Center
---
http://www.idtheftcenter.org/
Note the tab for State and Local Resources
IRS Identity Protection Specialized Unit at
800-908-4490
Tax Foundation Facts & Figures (Free) ---
http://taxfoundation.org/files/ff2012.pdf
Some Interesting State Comparisons on State& Local Taxation, Business
Climate, and Debt Per Capita
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/StateComparisons2012.htm
How Income Taxes Work (including history) ---
http://money.howstuffworks.com/income-tax.htm
Why not start with the IRS? (The best government agency web site
on the Internet)
http://www.irs.gov/
IRS Site Map ---
http://www.irs.gov/sitemap/index.html
FAQs and answers ---
http://www.irs.gov/faqs/index.html
Taxpayer Advocate Service ---
http://www.irs.gov/advocate/index.html
Forms and Publications, click on
Forms and
Publications
IRS Free File Options for Taxpayers Having Less Than $57,000 Adjusted
Gross Income (AGI) ---
http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00.html?portlet=104
Free File Fillable Forms FAQs ---
http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=226829,00.html
Visualizing Economics
Comparing Income, Corporate, Capital Gains Tax Rates: 1916-2011 and Other
Graphics ---
Click Here
http://visualizingeconomics.com/2012/01/24/comparing-tax-rates/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+VisualizingEconomics+%28Visualizing+Economics%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Tax Foundation Facts & Figures (Free) ---
http://taxfoundation.org/files/ff2012.pdf
Bob Jensen's tax filing helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
Humorous
Academic Doublespeak ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AcademicDoublespeak.htm
Serious
"Coming to an Elementary School Near You: Regular Expressions," by
Konrad Lawson, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/coming-to-an-elementary-school-near-you-regular-expressions/38340?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
I added these to the Writing Forum on the AAA Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/c5fdcaace5
Bob Jensen's Helpers for Writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Question
What are you more likely to get in an onsite MIS 333 course at the
University of Texas relative to an online MIS 333?
Answer
A spouse.
"Longhorn Love Stories," by: Danielle Wells , The Financial Education
Daily, February 9, 2012 ---
http://paper.li/businessschools?utm_source=subscription&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=paper_sub
Love is in the air at McCombs, from surprise
proposals in UTC to chance encounterse at Discover BHP. Eight couples from
the classes of 1992 to 2012 share two decades of UT memories, life and love.
Two things are clear: We're not all business, and it pays to take MIS 333K
with Professor Rick Byars.
Continued in article
"Pandoc Converts All Your (Text) Documents." by Lincoln Mullen,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/pandoc-converts-all-your-text-documents/38700?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
For the past few months we ProfHackers have been
running an occasional series about using the command line. I got us started
with a couple posts
explaining why you might want to use the command line
and
how to get started using it. Konrad followed with
a posts about
the uniq
command and
the sort
command for working with
text and data files. Amy added a post about
how the command line let her hack the NOOK Color,
and I wrote about
using pdftk
to manipulate PDFs.
Taking up the command line is easier if you have a
specific problem you’re trying to solve. For me, the problem was that I
wanted to do all of my writing in a
plain text format, like Markdown or
LaTeX. But I need to be able to share my writing
in a variety of formats: HTML for the web, PDF for printed documents or
academic writing, and occasionally RTF or Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.
The best way I’ve found to move between these
formats is
Pandoc.
Pandoc is a command line tool written by a philosophy
professor, John
MacFarlane. Its general use is to take a document
in one format and convert it to another. You can get an idea of the wide
variety of formats Pandoc can translate by looking at an
enlargement of the header diagram.
Here’s an example of how this works. Suppose that
you have a Markdown document like the one we created for the post on
Markdown. (View
pandoc-example.markdown
on GitHub.)
You can convert this to a number of text formats with a simple terminal
command:
Markdown to HTML (HTML
output on GitHub):
pandoc pandoc-example.markdown -o pandoc-example.html
Markdown to LaTeX (LaTeX
output on GitHub):
pandoc pandoc-example.markdown -o pandoc-example.tex
Markdown to DOCX:
pandoc pandoc-example.markdown -o pandoc-example.docx
Markdown to PDF (download
PDF):
pandoc pandoc-example.markdown -o pandoc-example.pdf
That command calls pandoc
, tells it
which file to convert (pandoc-example.markdown
) and tells it
which file to export (e.g., pandoc-example.html
). Pandoc
figures out what types of files these are from the extension, or you can
pass it additional arguments. For some of the formats, you can convert the
other way. For example, you could convert LaTex to Markdown or to a Word
DOCX, or HTML to Markdown or LaTeX. To convert to PDF, though, you’ll need
to have LaTeX installed on your system.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"Apple’s New Security Features for the Mac," by Riva Richmond, The
New York Times, February 17, 2012 ---
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/apples-new-security-features-for-the-mac/
Mountain Lion, the next version of Apple’s Mac
operating system, won’t just adopt more of the iPad and iPhone’s popular
touchy-feely features. It will embrace their behind-the-scenes security
approach, too.
Apple on Thursday introduced a preview of Mountain
Lion, which is due out this summer, only a year after Lion’s introduction.
The new release is mainly intended to take us further down the path trod by
Lion: Making the Mac work more like the iPad and iPhone, while facilitating
the flow of key content across all of a person’s Apple devices. There is
also something less obvious that Mountain Lion aims to carry over from
Apple’s iDevices: no malware or other mischievous programs.
Of course, such nasties are already rare on Macs.
To date there have been just a few Trojan Horses, or programs that pretend
to be something they’re not, most famously a fake antivirus program known as
MacDefender. But thanks to strict controls on how third-party software is
downloaded onto iPhone and iPad — namely, via Apple’s own highly regulated
App Store and no other way — there has been no malware on those gadgets at
all (well, except for some jailbroken devices).
Continued in article
California Regulators Shut Down a For-Profit ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/02/17/california-regulators-shut-down-profit
"Illinois Attorney General Will Sue For-Profit College," Inside
Higher Ed, January 18, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/01/18/illinois-attorney-general-will-sue-profit-college
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Some Things to Ponder When Choosing Between an Accounting Versus History
PhD
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Recent-History-PhDs/130720/
Warning:
It's often misleading to look at percentages of small numbers. For example, 25%
of Brown University history PhD graduates are reported as being employed in
tenure-track jobs, but this is only two of the eight graduates in 2010.
Where Recent History Ph.D.'s Are Working
History departments are facing increased pressure to track where
their Ph.D. recipients end up. Here are employment data for students
who received Ph.D.'s in 2010 from 17 of the top-20 history programs,
as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Officials at history
departments at Cornell and Stanford Universities and at the
University of California at Berkeley said they could not provide
data because they were too busy.
University |
Total No. of Ph.D.'s |
Percent in tenure-track jobs |
Percent in postdocs |
Percent lecturers, sdjuncts, or visiting professors |
Percent in nonteaching academic jobs |
Percent high-school teachers |
Percent in nonacademic jobs |
Percent independent scholars |
Percent unemployed/unknown |
Brown U. |
8 |
25% |
13% |
25% |
|
|
|
|
38% |
Columbia U. |
21 |
28% |
19% |
14% |
10% |
5% |
10% |
|
14% |
Duke U. |
2 |
50% |
|
50% |
|
|
|
|
|
Harvard U. |
13 |
46% |
31% |
|
|
|
15% |
|
8% |
Johns Hopkins U. |
7 |
43% |
28% |
14% |
|
|
14% |
|
|
New York U. |
18 |
56% |
22% |
6% |
6% |
|
|
|
11% |
Northwestern U. |
9 |
33% |
|
22% |
|
11% |
11% |
|
22% |
Princeton U. |
20 |
55% |
15% |
5% |
|
|
|
|
25% |
Rutgers U. |
7 |
43% |
29% |
|
|
|
|
29% |
|
U. of California at Los Angeles* |
21 |
38% |
5% |
33% |
|
|
5% |
|
14% |
U. of Chicago |
25 |
18% |
14% |
55% |
|
|
5% |
|
6% |
U. of Michigan |
20 |
40% |
25% |
20% |
10% |
|
|
|
5% |
U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
15 |
40% |
7% |
20% |
7% |
|
|
|
27% |
U. of Pennsylvania |
10 |
30% |
10% |
50% |
|
|
|
|
10% |
U. of Texas at Austin |
10 |
60% |
|
|
30% |
|
10% |
|
|
U. of Wisconsin at Madison |
15 |
30% |
10% |
20% |
|
|
|
|
10% |
Yale U. |
20 |
55% |
5% |
25% |
|
|
|
|
15% |
*Total includes 1 student who passed away.
Note: Some percentages do not add to 100% due to rounding.
Source: Chronicle reporting
Correction, 2/14/12 at 2:57 p.m.: Numbers for the
University of Wisconsin at Madison have been corrected. The
program had 15 Ph.D. graduates, not 10, and the proportion of
Madison's Ph.D.'s who were lecturers, adjuncts, or visiting
professors was 20 percent, not 50 percent.
In accountancy there are generally fewer PhD graduates than history PhD
graduates in any of the above universities. The large accountancy PhD accounting
mills decades ago, such as the University of Illinois and the University of
Texas, that each produced 10-20 accounting PhD graduates per year have shrunk
down to producing 1-5 graduates per year. Reasons for this are complicated, but
I don't hesitate to give my alleged reasons at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
For comparative purposes compare the above table for History PhD graduates in
2010 with the 2010 column in the table of Accountancy PhD graduates table at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
The largest numbers of accountancy PhD graduates from a single university were
the five graduates at Virginia Tech in 2010. But this may be a 2010 anomaly year
for Virginia Tech that normally produces two or fewer accounting PhD graduates
per year.
It takes a bit of work, but the employment status of 2010 Accountancy PhD
graduates can be determined from the table at
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XSchDoct.pdf
Most 2010 accounting PhD graduates had multiple high-paying tenure track offers
(well over $100,000 for nine-month contracts) and are now in the tenure-track
positions of their first choices in 2010. Many in R1 research universities,
however, will move to tenure track positions in other universities after a few
years on the job. More often than not the first-time moves to other universities
is not due to tenure rejections per se. Sometimes new PhD graduates want to
start out at major R1 research universities to build research publications into
their resumes. But many of these graduates never intended to spend the rest of
their careers in R1 universities that highly pressure faculty year-after-year to
conduct research and publish in top research journals.
Unlike in engineering where most PhD graduates track into private sector
industries, most accounting PhD graduates settle into careers in tenure track in
academe. There are generally no comparative advantages of having a PhD for job
applicants in accounting firms, government, or business corporations. Hence it's
not surprising that most accountancy PhD graduates are in the Academy.
Closing Comment
Of course there are many other things to consider such as the fact that most
accountancy PhD programs admit only students with prior professional experience
in accounting. Accounting PhD programs may also take twice as long to complete
and are replete with courses in mathematics, statistics, econometrics,
psychometrics, and technical data mining. On the other hand, most accountancy
PhD programs offer free tuition and relatively handsome living allowances in
return for some teaching and research assistance. Usually at least one year is
also covered with a full-ride fellowship in an accountancy PhD program.
The KPMG Foundation is now providing great supplemental financial and other
support for minority students interested in accountancy PhD programs. This has
been a very successful program considering how difficult it is to lure minority
students back to the campus when they're successfully employed as CPAs, Treasury
Agents, and other accounting professionals with young families to support ---
http://www.kpmgfoundation.org/foundinit.asp
The Jr. Deputy Accountant finally got around to Texas:
"Don't Worry, We Didn't Forget Those Texas College CPA Exam Results,"
Adrienne Gonzalez, Going Concern, February 15, 2012 ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/dont-worry-we-didnt-forget-those-texas-college-cpa-exam-results
Jensen Comment
Even though I'm proud of the performance of Trinity University in 2011, once
again I remind readers that there is much more variability among small
universities like Trinity University that have so few CPA exam takers each year.
The University of Texas at Austin is consistently at or near the top in Texas
with low variability because it has a relatively large number of CPA exam
candidates each year, and UT has relatively very high admission standards for
the masters of accounting program. Trinity, on the other hand, is more likely to
have good years and bad years due to small sample effects and loss of some of
the best graduates (see below).
Because of Trinity has much higher tuition for an accounting masters degree
than the state universities, there is some attrition of Trinity's four-year
accounting graduates to the state universities, especially to the University of
Texas at Austin. It was always sad to lose some of our best graduates to UT, but
we knew UT would take good care of them.
Texas CPA examination performances are heavily impacted by SAT/ACT/GMAT exam
scores of accountancy graduates. This is consistent with virtually all the other
50 states in the United States. Schools with the highest admission standards
will have the higher performing graduates on average.
I don't attribute high CPA exam scores to curricula focused more heavily on
teaching toward the CPA examination. When I left Trinity University, Trinity was
experimenting with a CPA exam review course at the very strong request of
accounting students in the masters program. I did not teach that course, but
when I retired in 2006 the professor (Katherine Lopez) teaching the CPA review
course was re-assigned to teach my Accounting Theory course. The CPA review
course was dropped from the curriculum without having any adverse impacts on CPA
exam performance of Trinity's graduates. I might add that when I taught
Accounting Theory my students complained that the course really did not help
them on the CPA examination. The topics covered (like accounting for
derivative financial instruments, portfolio theory, risk metrics, financial
structures, and securitization) are considered too complicated for the CPA
examination ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/acct5341.htm
We should not give too much credit to accounting faculty when their top
students do well on the CPA examination. Because those students also are top
performers in terms of SAT/ACT/GMAT exam scores, those students have more
intellectual ability and motivation to get the most out of commercial CPA
examination review courses like Becker, Bisk, Gleim, etc. ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010303CPAExam
Stanford Business asked a random selection of faculty, students, and alumni
about their latest enjoyable non-required reading. Here are some selections that
demonstrate the diversity of the GSB community ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm1201/nw_reading.html?utm_source=Knowledgebase&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=February-12
Truths about student learning that those in academe didn't want the world
to know
The study revealed truths about student learning that those in academe didn't
want the world to know. But now that it does, there's no going back.
"'Academically Adrift': The News Gets Worse and Worse," by Kevin
Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12. 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Academically-Adrift-The/130743/
In the last few months of 2010, rumors began
circulating among higher-education policy geeks that the University of
Chicago Press was about to publish a new book written by a pair of very
smart sociologists who were trying to answer a question to which most people
thought they already knew the answer: How much do students learn while
they're in college? Their findings, one heard, were ... interesting.
The book, Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and
Josipa Roksa, fulfilled that promise—and then some. It was no surprise that
The Chronicle gave prominent coverage to the conclusion that "American
higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large
proportion of students," but few people anticipated that the book would
become the rare piece of serious academic scholarship that jumps the fence
and roams free into the larger culture.
Vanity Fair used space normally allotted to Kennedy
hagiography to call it a "crushing exposé of the heretofore secret society
known as 'college.'" The gossip mavens at Gawker ran the book through their
patented Internet cynicism machine and wrote that "To get a college degree,
you must go into a soul-crushing amount of debt. And what do you get for all
that money? Not learning."
The New Yorker featured Academically Adrift in a
typically brilliant essay by Louis Menand. In one of her nationally
syndicated columns, Kathleen Parker called the book a "dense tome" while
opining that the failure of higher education constituted a "dot-connecting
exercise for Uncle Shoulda, who someday will say—in Chinese—'How could we
have let this happen?'" Her response proved that Kathleen Parker has a gift
for phrasing and did not actually read the book, whose main text runs to
only 144 concise and well-argued pages.
But the definitive evidence of Academically
Adrift's ascension to the very small group of social-science studies whose
findings shape conventional wisdom came when President King, the world-weary
cynic and longtime leader of Walden College, sipped a martini and reacted to
the book's documentation of declining student work by explaining, "That's
why they come! As long as we give them good grades and a degree, their
parents are happy too! Who cares if they can't reason?"
When your research ends up in "Doonesbury," that's
saying something.
In part, it says that the public harbored a latent
distrust of higher education that was activated by empirical evidence that
supported their suspicions. After all, a lot of people have been to college
and have experienced the academic indifference and lack of rigor that Arum
and Roksa documented firsthand.
It also shows what happens when there's a mismatch
between the importance and complexity of a question and the amount of
research designed to answer it. In many ways, the most shocking thing about
Academically Adrift was not what it revealed about what college students
learn. It was that nobody had ever attempted to measure learning in that way
before.
As responsible scholars, the authors were careful
to interpret their findings in ways that emphasized the limitations of their
instruments and sample population. But they couldn't control what happened
after their research entered the zeitgeist. And the lack of other credible
studies providing alternate perspectives on college learning meant that, in
the national higher-education conversation, Academically Adrift became the
only game in town.
Last month the authors released new results that
should only add to our national worries about higher education. While press
coverage of Academically Adrift focused mostly on learning among typical
students, the data actually show two distinct populations of undergraduates.
Some students, disproportionately from privileged backgrounds, matriculate
well prepared for college. They are given challenging work to do and respond
by learning a substantial amount in four years.
Other students graduate from mediocre or bad high
schools and enroll in less-selective colleges that don't challenge them
academically. They learn little. Some graduate anyway, if they're able to
manage the bureaucratic necessities of earning a degree.
The central problem in American higher education
today is that most of the people running things in politics, business, and
academe come from the first group, but most of the actual students enrolled
in college are in the second group. The former cannot see the latter,
because they are blinded by their own experience. And so they think the
problems of the many don't exist.
Now Arum and his colleagues have revealed what
happened to those two groups after they left college and entered the
unforgiving post-recession economy. Despite a barren job market, only 3.1
percent of students who scored in the top 20 percent of the Collegiate
Learning Assessment, which measures critical-thinking skills, were
unemployed. Not infrequently, their colleges helped them land the jobs they
had. Many struck out on their own and were engaged in civic affairs. Those
who got married or cohabitated often did so with someone they met in
college. For students like these, the college-driven job and mating markets
are functioning as advertised.
Graduates who scored poorly on the CLA, by
contrast, are leading very different lives. It's true that business majors,
who were singled out for low CLA scores in Academically Adrift, did better
than most in finding jobs. But over all, students with poor CLA results are
more likely to be living at home with their parents, burdened by credit-card
debt, unmarried, and unemployed.
Continued in article
"The Truth About Harvard," by
Ross Douthat, The Atlantic, March 2005
He paused, flashed
his grin, and went on. "Nevertheless, I have recently decided that hewing to
the older standard is fruitless when no one else does, because all I succeed
in doing is punishing students for taking classes with me. Therefore I have
decided that this semester I will issue two grades to each of you. The first
will be the grade that you actually deserve —a C for mediocre work, a B for
good work, and an A for excellence. This one will be issued to you alone,
for every paper and exam that you complete. The second grade, computed only
at semester's end, will be your, ah, ironic grade — 'ironic' in this case
being a word used to mean lying —and it will be computed on a scale that
takes as its mean the average Harvard grade, the B-plus. This higher grade
will be sent to the registrar's office, and will appear on your transcript.
It will be your public grade, you might say, and it will ensure, as I have
said, that you will not be penalized for taking a class with me." Another
shark's grin. "And of course, only you will know whether you actually
deserve it."
Mansfield had been
fighting this battle for years, long enough to have earned the sobriquet
"C-minus" from his students, and long enough that his frequent complaints
about waning academic standards were routinely dismissed by Harvard's
higher-ups as the out-of-touch crankiness of a conservative fogey. But the
ironic-grade announcement changed all that. Soon afterward his photo
appeared on the front page of The Boston Globe, alongside a story about the
decline of academic standards. Suddenly Harvard found itself mocked as the
academic equivalent of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where all the
children are above average.
You've got to be unimaginatively
lazy or dumb to get a C at Harvard (less than 10% get below a B-)
Harvard does not admit dumb students, so the C students must be unimaginative,
troubled, and/or very lazy.
It doesn't help that Harvard students are
creatively lazy, gifted at working smarter rather than harder. Most of my
classmates were studious primarily in our avoidance of academic work, and
brilliant largely in our maneuverings to achieve a maximal GPA in return for
minimal effort.
"The Truth About Harvard," by Ross Douthat, The Atlantic, March 2005
This may be partly
true, but I think that the roots of grade inflation —and, by extension, the
overall ease and lack of seriousness in Harvard's undergraduate academic
culture —run deeper. Understanding grade inflation requires understanding
the nature of modern Harvard and of elite education in general —particularly
the ambitions of its students and professors.
The students'
ambitions are those of a well-trained meritocratic elite. In the
semi-aristocracy that Harvard once was, students could accept Cs, because
they knew their prospects in life had more to do with family fortunes and
connections than with GPAs. In today's meritocracy this situation no longer
obtains. Even if you could live off your parents' wealth, the ethos of the
meritocracy holds that you shouldn't, because your worth as a person is
determined not by clan or class but by what you do and whether you succeed
at it. What you do, in turn, hinges in no small part on what is on your
résumé, including your GPA.
Thus the professor
is not just a disinterested pedagogue. As a dispenser of grades he is a
gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity professors face upward
pressure from students ("I can't afford a B if I want to get into law
school"); horizontal pressure from their colleagues, to which even Mansfield
gave way; downward pressure from the administration ("If you want to fail
someone, you have to be prepared for a very long, painful battle with the
higher echelons," one professor told the Crimson); and perhaps pressure from
within, from the part of them that sympathizes with students' careerism.
(Academics, after all, have ambitions of their own, and are well aware of
the vicissitudes of the marketplace.)
It doesn't help
that Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working smarter rather
than harder. Most of my classmates were studious primarily in our avoidance
of academic work, and brilliant largely in our maneuverings to achieve a
maximal GPA in return for minimal effort. It was easy to see the classroom
as just another résumé-padding opportunity, a place to collect the grade
(and recommendation) necessary to get to the next station in life. If that
grade could be obtained while reading a tenth of the books on the syllabus,
so much the better.
Jensen Comment
Are elite colleges worth it?
Definitely even if you can only afford one semester before transferring
elsewhere?
They're worth it if only to prove that you were smart enough just to be
admitted.
And this entitles you to wear an elite college's logo for the rest of your life.
You don't have to put add the statement to your sweatshirt that you only lasted
for one term.
Of course there are reasons other than easy A grades to go to elite colleges.
Probably the most important advantage is networking among former students and
among current students who often remain friends and professional contacts for a
lifetime. Graduating from an elite college can open doors to both admission to
prestigious graduate schools (including medical schools), to industry, and
government. Aren't all the present U.S. Supreme Court justices graduates of Ivy
League universities?
Even dropping out of an Ivy League school can open doors. It probably says
more about you to have been admitted to these schools than to have graduated
from them.
Elite colleges are more apt to use their top researchers in the classrooms
than are some of the top state universities who are more apt to give even
lighter teaching loads to top researchers. Of course "lighter" teaching loads
can be defined in a number of ways. Elite university business and law schools
often limit the number of courses taught to one course per semester, but the
number of students in that course may be 100 or more. Secondly, elite schools
like the Harvard Business School require weekly term papers and essay
examinations that only professors are supposed to grade (not teaching
assistants). In the lesser universities, including flagship state universities,
professors having more than 20 students may be allowed to give multiple choice
examinations and not require term papers.
Elite Colleges. especially smaller elite colleges like Swarthmore ranked high
in prestige but not in research, are likely to have teachers for both education
and inspiration. This is not always the case for highly ranked research
universities that are not necessarily in the "elite" class in terms of teaching.
Thomas Toch and Kevin Carey, "Where Colleges Don't Excel," The Washington
Post, April 6, 2007; Page A21 ---
Click Here
Bob Jensen's threads on the greatest scandal in higher education
(grade inflation) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Misbehavior Online in Higher Education, Eds. Laura Wankel and Charles
Wankel. Emerald Publishing Group, 2012 ---
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/books.htm?issn=2044-9968&volume=5
U.S. Government Still Pays Two Civil War Pensions ---
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2012/02/us-government-still-pays-two-civil-war-pensions.html
Thank you Bruce Gunning for the heads up.
The sad state of governmental accounting and accountability ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
John Cassidy ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cassidy_%28journalist%29
Deception Using Statistics Can Become Very Subtle and Complicated
One man's politically biased analysis is another man's scholarly bipartisan
analysis --- so much depends upon the biased eyes of the beholder!
Lying with statistics can be as much a fault of the reader as the writer.
Before reading the February 6 article linked below it might be interesting to
read one of the comments that follow the article:
This is a much more in-depth examination of the
numbers than is available at most any other news outlet. So, thanks for
that. Furthermore, you make a good argument with raw numbers to back the
argument up. All of that being said, the real point as far as I am concerned
is the media's handling of this issue. It's really quite hard to envision
the same type of cheerleading and lack of investigation if Mitt Romney were
president right now. To the contrary, your piece would probably be one
of the more lightweight pieces on the subject as every mainstream news
outlet struggled to dig into the numbers to show how the lower rate was
either not Romney's fault or was not actually good just because it was
lower. Yes, the G.O.P. is making hay out of what they can but it is clear
that the media is doing the same in reverse. Again this piece is one of the
only in-depth pieces I have read on this matter.
Posted 2/7/2012, 5:53:01am by
gudmundsdottir
"The Jobs Report and the 'Missing 1.2 Million'," by
John Cassidy, The New Yorker,
February 6, 2012 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/02/the-jobs-report-and-the-missing-12-million.html
Jensen Comment
I cannot imagine the liberally-biased New Yorker even publishing such an
article if Mitt Romney were president. But I could be mistaken.
Jensen Comment
I cannot imagine the liberally-biased New Yorker even publishing such an
article if Mitt Romney were president. But I could be mistaken.
The same liberal author (John Cassidy) in
2010 published an article in The New Yorker that was critical of
ObamaCare numbers
Fuzzy CBO Accounting Tricks
"ObamaCare by the Numbers: Part 2," by
John Cassidy, The New Yorker,
March 2010 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2010/03/obamacare-by-the-numbers-part-2.html
. . .
The C.B.O.’s analysis can’t be dismissed out of
hand, but it is surely a best-case scenario.
Again, I come back to where I started: the scale of the subsidies on offer
for low and moderately priced workers. If economics has anything to say as a
subject, it is that you can’t offer people or firms large financial rewards
for doing something—in this case, dropping their group coverage—and not
expect them to do it in large numbers. On
this issue, I find myself in agreement with Tyler Cowen and other
conservative economists. Over time, the
“firewall” between the existing system of employer-provided group insurance
and taxpayer-subsidized individual insurance is likely to break down, with
more and more workers being shunted over to the public teat.
At that point, if it comes, politicians of both
parties will be back close to where they began: searching for health-care
reform that provides adequate coverage for all at a cost the country can
afford. What would such a system look like? That is a topic for another
post, but I don’t think it would look much like Romney-ObamaCare.
Read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2010/03/obamacare-by-the-numbers-part-2.html#ixzz0jrFSFK3j
Closing Comment
As an academic, I respect John Cassidy for
being a liberal economist and statistician who is honorable enough to present
both sides of issues when his analysis does not support his politics. Bravo to
John Cassidy! You would never catch Paul Krugman being "in agreement with Tyler
Cowen and other conservative economists" except maybe when he was sending his
consulting-fee bills to Enron.
Paul Krugman's liberal colleague Alan Blinder at Princeton is worse.
How to lie with statistics:
"Four Deficit Myths and a Frightening Fact: We don't have a generalized
overspending problem. We have a humongous health-care problem," by
Alan S. Binder, The Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204468004577164820504397092.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Here's the clinker in Binder's liberal economics analysis:
According to the CBO, if nothing is done, the
primary deficit will bottom out at 2.6% of GDP in 2018 and then rise to 7.4%
of GDP by 2040. Where will the additional 4.8% of GDP come from? Remarkably,
every penny will come from health-care spending, which balloons from 6.6% of
GDP to 11.4% in the projections, or 4.8% more of GDP. This exact match is
just a coincidence, of course. If we use 2050 as the endpoint instead of
2040, the projected primary deficit increases by 6% of GDP, of which
health-care spending accounts for 6.6 percentage points. Yes, you read that
right: Apart from increased health-care costs, the rest of the primary
deficit actually falls relative to GDP.
The CBO projects federal spending on all purposes
other than health care and interest
to be roughly stable as a share of GDP from 2015 to 2035, and then to drift
lower. So no, America, we don't have a generalized overspending problem for
the long run. We have a humongous health-care problem.
The clinker is that health care and interest on the National Debt will soon
become the overwhelming, really overwhelming, components of federal spending.
What will the deficit's share of GDP be after factoring in health care and
interest be Professor Binder? Liberal economists like Princeton's Binder and
Krugman conveniently factor out the big clinkers in their rosy deficit scenrios.
This is analogous to saying that household pending on
all purposes other than food, rent,
utilities, and transportation to be roughly
stable as a share of GDP from 2015 to 2035, and then to drift lower.
Our Pentagon is now in the process of shifting military from other parts of
the world to the vicinity of China.
Did you hear about the scenario that says the only way we can go to war with
China is to borrow the money from China?
I think I'm going to be sick!
Marcel Proust ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and
essayist best known for his monumental
À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of
Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It
was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.
"The Proust index: Advanced economies have gone backwards by a decade as a
result of the crisis," The Economist, February 25, 2012 ---
http://paper.li/businessschools?utm_source=subscription&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=paper_sub
NOW almost five years old, the economic crisis
rumbles on. In order to assess how much economic progress it has undone, The
Economist has constructed a measure of lost time for hard-hit countries. It
shows that Greece’s economic clock has been turned back furthest: it has
been rewound by over 12 years. Elsewhere in the euro area, Ireland, Italy,
Portugal and Spain have lost seven years or more. Britain, the first country
forced to rescue a credit-crunched bank, has lost eight years. America,
where the trouble started, has lost ten (see left-hand chart).
Our clock uses seven indicators of economic health,
which fall into three broad categories. Household wealth and its main
components, financial-asset prices and property prices, are in the first
group. Measures of annual output and private consumption are in the second
category. Real wages and unemployment make up the third. A simple average of
how much time has been lost in each of these categories produces our overall
measure.
Stockmarkets give some of the starkest results.
American equities lost a quarter of their value in the month after the
collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Shares are an important
component of households’ pension-fund wealth, and in that month alone five
years of gains were eradicated. The main indices have improved markedly
since then: the S&P 500 is back to around 90% of its peak value. But they
were at these levels back in the late 1990s, too, so some investors will
have made no capital gains in 13 years. Greek stocks were higher in 1992
than today: 20 years have been wiped away.
Continued in article
"Seven Problems a Recovery Won't Fix." by Umair Haque, The Harvard
Business Reveiw Blog, June 8, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/06/seven_problems_a_recovery_wont.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Bob Jensen's threads on the economic crisis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
"UCLA MBA Applicants Rejected for Plagiarism Totals 52," by: Louis
Lavelle, Business Week, February 2, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2012/02/ucla_mba_applicants_rejected_for_plagiarism_totals_52.html
The number of MBA applicants at UCLA’s
Anderson School of Management that have been
rejected because of plagiarism has grown exponentially, with 40 more
rejected in the second round of applications.
The new cases of plagiarism bring the total to 52.
As we reported yesterday,
12 cases of plagiarism were discovered in a batch
of 870 first-round applications. An additional 40 cases were discovered in
the applications submitted for the second-round, says Elise Anderson, a
spokeswoman for the school. The third round, which has an April 18 deadline,
typically gets another 500 to 700 applications, Anderson says. So it’s
possible that more plagiarized essays will be found in the third round.
The plagiarism was discovered through the use of a
service called Turnitin for Admissions, which scans admissions essays
looking for text that matches any documents in the Turnitin database. The
archive contains billions of pages of web content, books and journals, as
well as student work previously submitted to Turnitin for a plagiarism
check. Turnitin flags any matches it finds, but individual schools determine
if the similarity constitutes plagiarism. The service is now in use by
nearly 20 business schools, including those at
Penn State, Iowa State, Northeastern, and Wake Forest.
Anderson said the school does not currently notify
applicants that their essays will be checked through Turnitin. She said the
school is determining what, if any, disclosure should be made on its web
site.
Research done by Turnitin suggests that plagiarism
in admissions essays is vast. The company's study of 453,000 "personal
statements" received by more than 300 colleges and universities in an
unnamed English-speaking country found that "more that 70,000 applicants
that applied though this system did so with statements that may not have
been their own work." That's more than 15 percent.
For schools that do not currently vet application
essays with Turnitin, the apparent prevalence of plagiarized essays raises
an interesting question: Is it ethical for a school to turn a blind eye to
this and award degrees to people who got their foot in the door by lying?
And for those that do screen essays, there's
another issue. Many students use the same essays (with minor modifications)
at every school they apply to, but there's no mechanism in place to flag
plagiarized essays discovered by one school to all the other schools where
that essay may have been submitted. One way to do this would be for the
school discovering the plagiarism to notify the Graduate Management
Admission Council, and have GMAC send a notice to every school that received
the applicant's GMAT scores.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Doing Evil
Pinterest's user agreement reserves the right of Pinterest to sell personal
images users upload.
"How You Could Get Sued For Using Pinterest," by Dave Copeland, ReadWriteWeb,
February 17, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_you_could_get_sued_for_using_pinterest.php
The Boston Business Journal
stopped using Pinterest one day after setting up
its account after realizing it could be sued for images it uploaded to the
site.
Web editor Galen Moore started playing around with
the rapidly-growing social network on Thursday as a possible way to share
the visual images that the Boston Business Journal uses in its coverage of
real estate development: things like blueprints, artists conceptions and
photos. But by Friday afternoon he had pulled the content after taking a
careful read of
Pinterest's user agreement and finding out the
company reserves the right to sell images users upload.
"Exceptions for publishers of user-generated
content
protect Pinterest, but they don't protect you,"
Moore wrote with a link back to an earlier ReadWriteWeb article. "Unless you
know you have a 'worldwide, irrevocable,' perpetual, non-exclusive,
transferable, royalty-free license,' you'd better tread carefully."
In other words, if you upload an image that doesn't
belong to you and Pinterest sells it, you could be sued for copyright
infringement.
Like Moore, we've asked Pinterest for comment.
We'll update if we hear back from them.
It's unlikely real estate developers, who are
notoriously hungry for publicity of their projects, would quibble with the
business weekly for publishing their plans in the paper and on
Pinterest. And Moore acknowledges in most cases, permission to do so would
be just a phone call away. But not everyone is going to be that lucky, and
for now, Moore and his colleagues are going to sit out the Pinterest craze.
"I hope we'll find another way to use Pinterest
safely. The service shows fascinating potential," Moore wrote. "But if you
operate a business, or have any net worth to speak of, I recommend a careful
read of the fine print."
Castle.so (file sharing utility with no file size limit) ---
https://castle.so/
Bob Jensen's threads on storing and sharing files ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#archiving
Teaching Case: Bribery by Avon in China?
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on February 17,
2012
Foreign Bribe Case at Avon Presented to Grand Jury
by:
Joe Palazzolo and Emily Glazer
Feb 13, 2012
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Foreign Subsidiaries,
Internal Auditing, Internal Controls
SUMMARY: "Federal prosecutors investigating whether U.S. executives
at Avon Products, Inc., broke foreign-bribery laws have presented evidence
in the probe to a grand jury...Authorities are focused on a 2005 internal
audit report by the company that concluded Avon employees in China may have
been bribing officials in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act [FCPA]...."
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Questions ask students to consider what
audit steps they would undertake to investigate the issues identified in the
article. The article is useful in an auditing class to discuss internal
audit functions.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) Describe how Avon sells its products.
2. (Advanced) What is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)? How
do the law's requirement, and general ethics, make it imperative to prevent
illegal payments or other corrupt acts?
3. (Advanced) How might Avon's business model make it difficult to
establish internal controls over items such as possible illegal payments to
foreign officials?
4. (Advanced) Define the internal audit function and compare it to
the audits done by external auditors.
5. (Introductory) How was the Avon Products, Inc. internal audit
function used in connection with the company's Chinese operations? What
evidence did the internal auditors apparently find in 2005?
6. (Advanced) Suppose you are a member of the Avon internal audit
team asked to investigate payments made out of Chinese operations. What
steps would you plan to investigate the propriety of the payments?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
"Foreign Bribe Case at Avon Presented to Grand Jury," by: Joe Palazzolo and
Emily Glazer, The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203315804577209443264460570.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
Federal prosecutors investigating whether U.S.
executives at Avon Products Inc. broke foreign-bribery laws have presented
evidence in the probe to a grand jury, people familiar with the matter said.
Authorities are focused on a 2005 internal audit
report by the company that concluded Avon employees in China may have been
bribing officials in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,
according to three people familiar with the matter. Avon had earlier said it
first learned of bribery allegations in 2008.
The audit found several hundred thousand dollars in
questionable payments to Chinese officials and third-party consultants in
2005, one of these people said. It came as Avon was pursuing a license to
conduct door-to-door sales in China. Some of the payments were recorded on
invoices as gifts for government officials, the person said. Avon secured
China's first such license to a foreign company in 2006.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S.
prosecutors in New York and Washington are trying to determine whether
current or former executives ignored the audit's findings or actively took
steps to conceal the problems, both potential offenses, two people familiar
with the matter said.
Executives at Avon headquarters in New York who saw
the audit report at the time didn't disclose its findings to the board's
audit committee, finance committee or the full board, according to people
familiar with the investigation. Board members didn't learn of the audit
report until after Avon launched its own internal investigation of overseas
bribery allegations in 2008, say the people familiar with the situation.
Legal experts say executives can be liable in
overseas bribery cases even if they didn't authorize illegal payments or try
to hide evidence of bribes. Under a legal concept known as willful
blindness, a person can also be found guilty of taking steps to avoid
learning of wrongdoing, they said, but prosecutors face a higher legal bar.
"We're not aware that a federal grand jury is
investigating this," said an Avon spokeswoman. She declined to confirm
whether there had been an audit in 2005 and declined to discuss how
executives handled any such audit. She said Avon is fully cooperating with
the investigation.
While grand juries gather information to determine
whether there is enough evidence to bring criminal charges, they also can
decline any action.
The investigation of Avon's headquarters comes as
members of Congress pressure the Justice Department to hold more high-level
executives accountable for corruption overseas. In December, the government
unveiled charges against a group of former executives of German conglomerate
Siemens AG. Siemens has said it is cooperating.
Avon opened an internal investigation into possible
bribery in China in 2008, more than two years after the purported audit
report. The company's internal review was later expanded to other regions of
the world. The door-to-door cosmetics company has said the internal probe
was triggered by an employee who sent a letter in 2008 to Chief Executive
Andrea Jung alleging improper spending on travel for Chinese government
officials.
The investigation put a cloud over the 12-year
tenure of Ms. Jung, who won plaudits for securing the direct-sales license
in China. She said in December she would step down once the company finds a
replacement CEO; her announcement came amid pressure from investors
concerned about Avon's financial performance. Avon has said questions about
the company's activities in China kicked off probes by the Justice
Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the audit
committee of Avon's board.
Ms. Jung declined to comment. She has said little
about the investigations in the past, except that the company is cooperating
with the government.
Some high-ranking Avon executives have lost their
jobs in the probe. The company said it fired Vice Chairman Charles Cramb on
Jan. 29 in connection with the overseas corruption probe and another
investigation into allegedly improper disclosure of financial information to
analysts. Mr. Cramb couldn't be reached for comment.
Continued in article
February 17, 2012 reply from Bob Jensen to Jagdish Gangolly
Hi Jagdish,
I never suggested profiling when it comes to things like policies on
investigating and prevention of plagiarism or cheating in general. The
policies must apply to all national origins, and rule enforcement must apply
to every student and faculty member. And this is not a racial thing since
many of our Asian, Irish, Norwegian, and Latin students were born and
educated in the U.S.
What is sad, however, in the United States is when being "street smart" is
synonymous knowing how to get away with cheating relative to people who are
more trusting and are not "street smart."
I do, however, believe that there is relativism of many things in different
nations, including their heritages for bribery customs and norms for
cheating/corruption ---
Corruption Perceptions Index 2009 | Transparency International
http://wbpllc.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/corruption-perceptions-index-2009-transparency-international/
The interactive map is at
http://media.transparency.org/imaps/cpi2009/
As a footnote when viewing the graphic at the above site, I notice how
greatly some nations vary from their neighbors. For example, Argentina is
perceived as being over twice as corrupt than Chile. Italy and France are
more more corrupt than Germany even though all three nations have similar
religious (Catholic) heritages. Religion is probably not the dominant factor
in controlling corruption.
Law and tax rule enforcement, however, can be very powerful. The
least-corrupt nations seem to rise above the other nations in terms of
vigorous law enforcement and tax collections.
However, law enforcement is not synonymous with brutality. Russia, for
example, has a brutal police and prison system that has not quelled
widespread corruption. The same is true for Viet Nam.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
Another Way to Keep Unemployment Statistics Low
Unemployment benefits have time limits that vary be state. Social Security
disability payments continued until the day you die, and in some instances,
after you die. Furthermore, being declared disabled by a phony doctor allows
Medicare to kick in at any age without having to be 65 years old like other
people on Social Security who have not gamed the system.
"Millions of jobless file for disability when unemployment benefits run
out," New York Post via Fox News, February 19, 2012 ---
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/19/report-millions-jobless-file-for-disability-when-unemployment-benefits-run-out/
Being unemployed for too long reportedly is
driving people mad and costing taxpayers billions of dollars in mental
illness and other disability claims.
The New York Post reported Sunday that as
unemployment
checks run out, many jobless are
trying to gain government benefits by declaring themselves unhealthy.
More than 10.5 million
people -- about 5.3 percent of the population aged 25 and 64 -- received
disability checks in January from the federal government, the Post wrote, a
18 percent jump from before the recession.
Among those claiming
disability, 43 percent are asking for benefits because of mental illness,
the Post wrote. A growing number of those people are older, former
white-collar workers.
Disability claims come
from the
Social Security Trust Fund, which is set to go
broke in 2018. Congress last week agreed to dip into the revenue stream to
give a 2-percentage point tax break to working Americans.
The Post noted that the
more people file for disability claims, the better for the
unemployment
picture since those people are
removed from the jobless rolls.
"The Public-Union Albatross What it means when 90% of an agency's workers
(fraudulently) retire with disability benefits (before age 65)," by Philip
K. Howard, The Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204190704577024321510926692.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
The indictment of seven Long Island Rail Road
workers for disability fraud last week cast a spotlight on a troubled
government agency. Until recently, over 90% of LIRR workers retired with a
disability—even those who worked desk jobs—adding about $36,000 to their
annual pensions. The cost to New York taxpayers over the past decade was
$300 million.
As one investigator put it, fraud of this kind
"became a culture of sorts among the LIRR workers, who took to gathering in
doctor's waiting rooms bragging to each [other] about their disabilities
while simultaneously talking about their golf game." How could almost every
employee think fraud was the right thing to do?
The LIRR disability epidemic is hardly unique—82%
of senior California state troopers are "disabled" in their last year before
retirement. Pension abuses are so common—for example, "spiking" pensions
with excess overtime in the last year of employment—that they're taken for
granted.
Governors in Wisconsin and Ohio this year have led
well-publicized showdowns with public unions. Union leaders argue they are "decimat[ing]
the collective bargaining rights of public employees." What are these
so-called "rights"? The dispute has focused on rich benefit packages that
are drowning public budgets. Far more important is the lack of productivity.
"I've never seen anyone terminated for
incompetence," observed a long-time human relations official in New York
City. In Cincinnati, police personnel records must be expunged every few
years—making periodic misconduct essentially unaccountable. Over the past
decade, Los Angeles succeeded in firing five teachers (out of 33,000), at a
cost of $3.5 million.
Collective-bargaining rights have made government
virtually unmanageable. Promotions, reassignments and layoffs are dictated
by rigid rules, without any opportunity for managerial judgment. In 2010,
shortly after receiving an award as best first-year teacher in Wisconsin,
Megan Sampson had to be let go under "last in, first out" provisions of the
union contract.
Even what task someone should do on a given day is
subject to detailed rules. Last year, when a virus disabled two computers in
a shared federal office in Washington, D.C., the IT technician fixed one but
said he was unable to fix the other because it wasn't listed on his form.
Making things work better is an affront to union
prerogatives. The refuse-collection union in Toledo sued when the city
proposed consolidating garbage collection with the surrounding county.
(Toledo ended up making a cash settlement.) In Wisconsin, when budget cuts
eliminated funding to mow the grass along the roads, the union sued to stop
the county executive from giving the job to inmates.
No decision is too small for union micromanagement.
Under the New York City union contract, when new equipment is installed the
city must reopen collective bargaining "for the sole purpose of negotiating
with the union on the practical impact, if any, such equipment has on the
affected employees." Trying to get ideas from public employees can be
illegal. A deputy mayor of New York City was "warned not to talk with
employees in order to get suggestions" because it might violate the "direct
dealing law."
How inefficient is this system? Ten percent? Thirty
percent? Pause on the math here. Over 20 million people work for federal,
state and local government, or one in seven workers in America. Their
salaries and benefits total roughly $1.5 trillion of taxpayer funds each
year (about 10% of GDP). They spend another $2 trillion. If government could
be run more efficiently by 30%, that would result in annual savings worth $1
trillion.
What's amazing is that anything gets done in
government. This is a tribute to countless public employees who render
public service, against all odds, by their personal pride and willpower,
despite having to wrestle daily choices through a slimy bureaucracy.
One huge hurdle stands in the way of making
government manageable: public unions. The
head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
recently bragged that the union had contributed $90 million in the 2010
off-year election alone. Where did the
unions get all that money? The power is imbedded in an artificial legal
construct—a "collective-bargaining right" that deducts union dues from all
public employees, whether or not they want to belong to the union.
Some states, such as Indiana, have succeeded in
eliminating this requirement. I would go further: America should ban
political contributions by public unions, by constitutional amendment if
necessary. Government is supposed to serve the public, not public employees.
America must bulldoze the current system and start
over. Only then can we balance budgets and restore competence, dignity and
purpose to public service.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the entitlements disaster are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
A Mobile Phone and Tablet in One Device
"Mobile Device That's Better for a Jotter Than a Talker," by Walter S.
Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204792404577225230450572346.html
Lots of folks carry a smartphone, and, at least
some of the time, tote a second mobile device—an iPad or other tablet. But
some people might prefer a product that combines the two. Similarly, many
have come to love the finger-controlled interface popularized by Apple, but
might prefer at times to use a stylus, a common tool in the pre-iPhone days.
Samsung is hoping to offer all of the above. On
Sunday, it's introducing to the U.S. a phone-tablet hybrid with a large
5.3-inch screen that uses a stylus as well as your fingers. It's called the
Galaxy Note and costs $300 with a two-year AT&T contract.
While the Note could be mistaken for a small
tablet, Samsung insists it's a phone that merely offers some of the
roominess of a tablet. And in fact, it runs the last purely phone-oriented
version of Google's Android operating system, called Gingerbread. This
product positioning may be due to bad memories of another company's effort
to sell such a 'tweener: Dell's 5-inch Streak, which was marketed as a
tablet that could make calls and failed miserably in 2010.
After testing the Galaxy Note, I have decidedly
mixed feelings about it. It isn't a very practical phone and, as a tablet,
it can't match the experience of the iPad, which is more spacious and has
over 150,000 apps designed for it. However, I can see where some folks might
consider the 5-inch screen a good trade-off for much better portability than
other tablets, and Samsung has done some very interesting work in making the
stylus, which is stored in a slot on the device, useful.
As a mobile phone, the Galaxy Note is positively
gargantuan. It's almost 6 inches long and over 3 inches wide. When you hold
it up to your ear, it pretty much covers the entire side of your face. You
look like you're talking into a piece of toast.
The Note is so big, an iPhone can almost fit within
its display. And it dwarfs even the more-bloated crop of recent Android
phones, like Samsung's own Galaxy S II series, whose screen can be as large
as 4.5 inches. And while it can fit into a large pocket or handbag, the Note
isn't going to slip unobtrusively into your jeans or a small purse. It
weighs 6.28 ounces, nearly 30% more than the iPhone and nearly 50% more than
some Galaxy S II models.
For people who use Bluetooth earpieces all the
time, or who primarily use the speakerphone function, the Note's size may
not be a problem. But for the rest, the Note is just too large to go without
a more reasonably sized phone, which defeats the one-device argument.
Voice quality in normal use was good. But, in my
limited tests of its Bluetooth voice capabilities, the caller on the other
end felt the Note sounded significantly worse than the iPhone or other
Android models I've tested.
However, as a data device, I liked the Note a lot.
Its screen sports a high resolution that made photos, videos and text look
very good. It uses AT&T's high-speed LTE data network, where available, and
in my tests it was very fast. The larger screen enabled more of a Web page
to be visible without scrolling than on typical phones.
Like all Android devices, it has fewer, and, in my
opinion, generally lower-quality third-party apps than the iPhone. But those
I tried worked well. The Note was consistently speedy and responsive.
The 8-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel front
camera both did a good job. Photos and videos I shot from the rear camera
were excellent. But I found the sheer size of the Note undercuts its
convenience as a camera and there's no dedicated camera button or quick way
to launch the camera when the screen is locked, as there is on some other
phones.
In moderate mixed use, where I played music and
videos, surfed the Web, texted, used email constantly and took pictures, the
Note's battery lasted more than a full day between charges.
Unlike Apple, Samsung allowed AT&T to load a bunch
of its own apps you might not want on the Note, like a $10 to $15 a month
program for locating family members via cellphone GPS. A particularly
egregious example is a Yellow Pages app that's jammed into the very top of
your contact list.
Another drawback: While other Android phones I've
tested can be plugged into either a PC or a Mac so you can manually transfer
files onto them, I couldn't get the Note to do this with either of two Macs
I tested with it. It did work with Windows machines.
The stylus is a big plus, at least for users who
like to jot down notes, create sketches or annotate documents in a way
that's much more precise than using a fingertip. Even on the iPad, which
wasn't designed for a stylus, third-party styli have become quietly popular,
but Samsung has taken the idea much further.
The Note's stylus, called the S Pen, can be used
instead of a finger to launch and operate apps. But that isn't its main
purpose. It's meant to work closely with a special app called S Memo that
allows you to take notes or make sketches. These can be saved or shared via
email or text messaging, or uploaded to sites like Facebook. They can
include photos or typed text.
The software allows the stylus to draw in different
colors and widths and to emulate a brush or marker.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology
Joe Hoyle advises students on how to improve their test scored in
Intermediate II ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-can-you-get-better.html
Because of the six-month time limits these are not like eBooks that you can
purchase for a lifetime
Harvard Business Review's Online Self-Paced Learning Programs in Accounting
---
Click Here
http://hbr.org/product/financial-accounting-online-course-introductory-se/an/4001HB-HTM-ENG?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
The Harvard Business School has not been as generous as MIT's Sloan School in
open sharing free learning materials ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#sloan-school-of-management
MIT's Open Sharing Courses in General ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
MITx Opens Enrollment for First Interactive Online Course; For a Time MITx
Certificates Will Be Free ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mitx-opens-enrollment-for-first-interactive-online-course-pilot-certificates-will-be-free/35396?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
The bad news is that MITx Certificates are in no way equivalent to MIT course
credits. The good news is that there is open admission, free course video and
other materials used in on-campus courses, and some prestige associated MIT's
sponsorship of the MITx Certificate program. The MITx is an outreach program to
students who really want to put the time and effort into learning on their own
from outstanding materials provided by MIT. Only a small percentage of MITx
students around the world may actually master the tough learning materials, but
their numbers may dominate.
The first prototype MITx course is “6.002x: Circuits and Electronics." If
only a small percentage of MITx Certificate recipients superbly master this
course, it could well be far more students than the total number of on-campus
students who superbly master this course this term.
"Will MITx Disrupt Higher Education?" by Robert Talbert, Chronicle
of Higher Education, December 20, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/12/20/will-mitx-disrupt-higher-education/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on the MITx Certificate program ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Harvard Presents Free Courses with the Open Learning Initiative ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2010/08/harvard_presents_free_courses_with_its_open_learning_initiative.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, course certificates, lecture videos,
and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Apple Corp. earned billions in profits but paid a lower tax rate than Mitt
Romney ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/134tn0777.pdf
TED --- http://www.ted.com/
TED Quotes (on Valentines Day they're about love, at least sort of)
---
http://www.ted.com/quotes
Jensen Comment
I read somewhere, can't remember just now, that UCLA is contemplating the
purchase of TED. TED is a fabulous open sharing site of lectures of famous
scholars.
Bob Jensen's Valentines Day edition of Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Bob Jensen's Valentines Day special edition of photographs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Impatiens/ImpatiensSet02/ImpatiensSet02.htm
Question
How are Canadian university pension funds like U.S. entitlement programs
(ignoring huge differences in scale)?
Billions and Billions of Loonies
"Canadian Universities' Growing Pension Deficits," Inside Higher Ed,
February 15, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/02/15/canadian-universities-growing-pension-deficits
Thirteen Canadian universities have seen their pension
deficits grow from $680 million to $3.2 billion in the last three years,
Financial Post reported. Some universities
have responded to these trends by increasing employee contributions or
changing retirement eligibility dates.
Bob Jensen's threads on entitlements ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Running against the tide of professional school popularity among college
applicants
Colorado College (slightly over 2,000 students) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_College
Colorado College is known for its non-conventional
"block plan," which divides the year into eight
academic terms called "blocks"; a single class is
taken during each block. CC routinely ranks very high in the U.S. News &
World Report listings for liberal arts colleges.
"Intro to Colorado College," by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed,
February 20, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/20/presidents-class-lesson-her-and-students-about-how-college-works
Jill Tiefenthaler’s class at Colorado College on
the economics of higher education is a chance for students to develop not
only a better understanding of some of the major issues confronting higher
education, but also to learn a little bit more about their own institution.
Learning more about the college was why
Tiefenthaler wanted to teach the class in the first place. Tiefenthaler, who
became the college’s president in July after serving as provost at Wake
Forest University, is well-versed is the economic challenges facing higher
education and institutions like Colorado College. But she wanted to teach
the class as her own introduction to Colorado’s unique block schedule, in
which students take one class at a time for three and a half weeks -- a
total of four classes per semester.
“I felt that it was important for me to teach –
here in particular – because the block system is very different, and
teaching would give me a good sense of what faculty members do during the
semester,” Tiefenthaler said.
So for part of January and February, Tiefenthaler,
her co-teacher and husband Kevin Rask, and a group of 12 students wrestled
with some of the issues Tiefenthaler considers on a daily basis – from why
education costs so much to the roles boards and faculty should play in
governing an institution – while also helping the new professors get
acclimated to the schedule.
Teaching What You Know
Tiefenthaler and Rask, who met in graduate school
at Duke University, have worked together in the past. Both are economists by
training, and while Tiefenthaler started getting involved in big-picture
higher education issues as an administrator, Rask started using
institutional examples in his classes to make econometrics more relatable to
students.
They taught a class on the economics of higher
education when they were at Wake Forest, but when they decided to teach it
at Colorado, they had to rework the syllabus to fit the block schedule. They
also tried to make better use of the unique structure and resources at their
disposal, including field trips to local higher education institutions such
as the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and state government
offices.
Rask and Tiefenthaler said there’s a back-and-forth
between them about what they should teach based on their own interests.
Rask, who describes himself as “a faculty brat” who grew up at Ohio State
University, enjoys teaching about individual choice issues, such as
admissions, financial aid, why students choose majors, and how those choices
relate to earnings after graduation. Tiefenthaler, the administrator, likes
teaching the broad, institutional issues, such as the future of the research
university model and the for-profit sector and how its changing higher
education. “There’s this pull back and forth between us,” Rask said. “It
makes us good complements.”
The point of the class, Rask and Tiefenthaler said,
is to teach econometrics through the lens of higher education. About half
the readings deal with current issues and half of them are from economics
journals. Most classes are discussions, with some lectures on the more
difficult material. Tiefenthaler said she has had to mix up pedagogical
models to keep student engaged during the two-and-a-half-hour block.
The syllabus touches on many of the issues that
have been in the news recently. One of the major readings is Why Does
College Cost So Much? by Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman, two
economics professors at the College of William and Mary, which Tiefenthaler
also assigned to her governing board. Students also learned about the
economic benefits for getting a degree, the disputes in Texas about
measuring the productivity of public university faculty members, and the
decrease in state support for public institutions.
For the most part, Colorado College doesn’t have to
worry about many of the economic issues facing many other colleges and
universities. The university has a stable economic outlook with high demand
– it had its most applications ever for this fall’s class – and a fairly
large endowment. It is a liberal arts college in a part of the country known
for large public universities, giving the college a clear niche. But
Tiefenthaler said class discussions have hit at issues Colorado faces. The
rate at which alumni give to the college is lower than those of many of
Colorado’s peer institutions. One of the class readings noted that alumni
who live close to an institution tend to give more and give more often.
Given Colorado's distance from many population centers, that's not a benefit
the college has. “At Colorado College, 60 percent of our alumni live more
than 1,000 miles from us,” Tiefenthaler said. “We have to figure out a way
to keep engaging them even if they are far away.”
Tiefenthaler brought a trustee into class one day
to discuss with students what about the institution they would like to see
change. “He didn’t want ‘We don’t like the food,’ he wanted big-picture,”
said Joey Wolf, a senior in the class. “For the most part we’re happy with
the school, but we did come up with a few solutions.”
Aside from the issues the class tackled together,
each student had to write a final paper that was an econometric study on
some higher education topic of their choosing. Laura Putnam, a senior
mathematical economics major from Vermont, wrote hers on major selection to
coincide with a thesis she’s working on. Wolf tried to estimate how much
revenue an NFL-caliber college football player brought to a university. On
Tuesday night he was just wrapping up his analysis, which had to be turned
in the next day.
Several college and university presidents teach
classes during their presidencies, and their commitment to the classroom
varies. Some might teach a full class or only one day a week, while others
might pop in and out of a class co-taught with another professor.
The commitment was slightly different for
Tiefenthaler. Because of the block plan, she had to block out much of her
day for three and a half weeks. She rescheduled travel and meetings to make
sure she could be around campus for the two-and-a-half-hour block.
Teaching the class was important to Tiefenthaler,
not just to help her understand the block schedule, but also to better
understand student culture at Colorado. “When I’ve been an administrator, it
has helped connect me to the mission,” she said. “It’s easy to forget about
what we do here, and when you teach you get that opportunity, you get at the
core of the college’s mission. You get to know the students in a way that
you can only know them when you’re teaching. I sometimes see students at
events, dinners, and at office hours, but when you teach them in a class you
get to know them intellectually, which helps you get a sense of the school.”
Because Tiefenthaler has presidential obligations
to fulfill, Rask handles many of the out-of-class duties, such as office
hours. But students in the class noted that, when they had questions for
Tiefenthaler, she replied promptly to e-mails.
Rask said he noticed a difference between teaching
with his wife when she was a provost and teaching with her now that she’s
president. “Most students didn’t know what a provost is,” he said. With the
president in the class, there was a little bit more formality. “During the
first few classes with her in it, I don’t think they were quite how to deal
with her,” Rask said. “But by the end of the first week they were pretty
normal with her.” Colorado College classes are fairly informal, Tiefenthaler,
Rask, and students said. Students and professors call each other by their
first names both in and out of the classroom. “It wasn’t Professor
Tiefenthaler or President Tiefenthaler, it was Jill,” Wolf said.
A Culture of Engagement
The class was designed for upper-level students who
have already taken some economics courses, and many of the students are
economics majors. By the time Tiefenthaler decided to offer the class,
students had already finalized their schedules, so the students had to drop
a class to pick up the president's.
Some students said it was the subject matter that
interested them more than the fact that the president was teaching it, but
the latter was a nice perk. Putnam said she had already been interested in
some of the issues the class would tackle. She’s writing her senior thesis
on how students choose their majors and whether economic factors play into
that decision. “The fact that there was a class about what my thesis was
about and that it was being taught by the president, of course I’m taking
that class,” she said.
Wolf, who said he is already done with the
requirements for his economics major, said having Tiefenthaler in the
classroom was a big draw. "If she wasn't teaching it, I'm not sure I would
have taken it," he said. "I had never met her, and this was a great
opportunity to do that. I didn't know if she'd ever offer this again."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
What President Tiefenthaler fails to mention about the history of Colorado
College is its experiment in dropping the Department of Business. Some business
courses were folded into what is now termed the Department of Economics and
Business, but the overwhelming curriculum in that department focuses on
economics with fewer and fewer business and accounting courses over time ---
http://www2.coloradocollege.edu/dept/EC/prog.asp
I don't see how students aspiring to become CPAs, tax accountants, and CMAs
would choose Colorado College since there are so few courses in accounting now
available ---
http://www2.coloradocollege.edu/dept/EC/courseoff.asp
Students going elsewhere for an accounting masters degree would have to make up
quite a few undergraduate accountancy courses no longer available at Colorado
College, especially since what accounting and business courses are available at
Colorado College are taught in such short time blocks (eight blocks per academic
year).
The choice of departments at Colorado College is very unique in the academic
world. For example, there are departments of Southwest Studies and Sports
Science Studies but no departments of accounting, engineering, and nursing popular in so many
colleges and universities. ---
http://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/dept/
In the above link it is claimed that the most popular majors at Colorado
College are as follows:
art •
biology •
economics •
English • environmental
science •
geology •
history • international
political economy • political
science •
sociology
From Paul Caron's Tax Prof Blog on February 20, 2012 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/
I am thrilled that our
Law Professor
Blogs Network has been named one of
The 10 Best Websites for Law Students by The
National Jurist:
For law students
who know what legal field they are interesyted in
Law
Professor Blogs is a great resource. Broken
down by specialty, the blogs on the site are created by law professors,
for law professors. The blogs contain links to recent news in their
fields, as well as abstracts of newly published papers.
The other sites in the Top 10 are:
Bob Jensen's threads on accountancy and tax news sites are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
From the Scout Report on February 17, 2012
Flapcast ---
http://flapcast.com/
This new approach to podcasts is billed as "Your
podcasts. With syrup on top." The folks at Flapcast take a humorous and
helpful approach to the wide, wide, world of podcasts. Their program allows
users to place podcasts into the cloud for others to enjoy. Visitors are
encouraged to use the program to discuss podcasts of note, and they can also
search all of the podcasts uploaded to Flapcast. This version is compatible
with all operating systems.
Textmotivate ---
https://www.textmotivate.com/
Looking for a bit more motivation? Why not try
Textmotivate? The program allows users to receive brief text messages that
will help remind them of upcoming goals. Visitors just need to sign up for
an account, and they can tweak the settings to be reminded at certain
intervals over a number of days, weeks, or months. The program has a few
preloaded goals that many people might be interested in, such as quitting
smoking, and users are encouraged to add their own. This version is
compatible with all operating systems.
New insights into the function of the stripes found on zebras
How The Zebra Got Its Stripes
http://news.discovery.com/animals/zebra-stripes-120209.html
Zebra Stripes Evolved to Keep Flies Away
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/296757/20120210/zebra-stripes-evolved-keep-flies-away-study.htm
The Zebra's Stripes: A Personal No-Fly Zone
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/11/146737329/the-zebras-stripes-a-personal-no-fly-zone
HowStuffWorks: Are zebras black with white stripes or white with black
stripes?
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/zoology/mammals/zebra-stripes.htm
Zebras, Zebra Pictures, Zebra Facts
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/zebra/
Natural History Notebooks: Zebras
http://nature.ca/notebooks/english/zebra.htm
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Science Oxford Live [iTunes] ---
http://www.scienceoxfordlive.com/
Researchers Without Borders ---
http://researcherswithoutborders.org/
Amser links in mathematics and science ---
http://amser.org/
From SUNY Albany: How to Improve Your Digital
Photography
Masters of Photography (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Xu4PNWkV4
Masters of Photography (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqmco1C6L_E
Mathematics Meets Photography ---
http://www.maa.org/mathhorizons/MH-Sept2011_MathPhotography.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Science Oxford Live [iTunes] ---
http://www.scienceoxfordlive.com/
Center for the Study of Regional Competitiveness in Science & Technology ---
http://artsci.wustl.edu/scienceandtechnology/
Science Friday ---
http://www.sciencefriday.com/
Interactive Physlets ---
http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/physics/physlets.html
Physics to go videos ---
http://www.physics.org/article-interact.asp?id=59
Chem51A: Organic Chemistry ---
http://ocw.uci.edu/courses/course_banner.aspx?id=73
The Seed Biology Place ---
http://www.seedbiology.de/
Scale of the Universe ---
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/332213/589217_scale_of_universe_enhanced.swf
Digital Geology of Idaho ---
http://geology.isu.edu/Digital_Geology_Idaho/
National Weather Service: Weather Education ---
http://www.weather.gov/om/edures.shtml
National Science Foundation: Predicting Seasonal Weather ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/autumnwinter
National Science Foundation: Disasters [Flash Player] ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/disasters/index.jsp
Booker T. Washington Papers ---
http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/volumes.html
Booker T. Washington's West Virginia Boyhood
http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh32-1.html
The APS Archive of Teaching Resources (physiology) ---
http://www.apsarchive.org
Anatomy and Physiology Learning Module ---
http://msjensen.cehd.umn.edu/Webanatomy/default.asp
HyperHeart ---
http://library.med.utah.edu/kw/pharm/hyper_heart1.html
Online Radiology Images ---
http://rad.usuhs.edu/medpix/
Radiology Education ---
http://www.radiologyeducation.com/
Everyday Miracles: Medical Imagery in Ex-Votos
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/exvotos/
Radiology Anatomy Teaching Modules ---
http://www.rad.washington.edu/academics/academic-sections/msk/teaching-materials
Yale School of Medicine: Diagnostic Radiology ---
http://radiology.yale.edu/education/resources.html#dept
Clara Barton National Historic Site (nursing) ---
http://www.nps.gov/features/clba/feat0001/flash.html
American Association of Colleges of Nursing ---
http://www.aacn.nche.edu/index.htm
News on Nursing ---
http://www.nursingadvocacy.org/news/news.html
Geriatric Nursing Teaching Resources ---
http://www.nursing.umn.edu/Hartford/facultyteachingresources/
National Institute on Aging ---
http://www.nia.nih.gov/
Alliance for Aging Research ---
http://www.agingresearch.org/
Healthfinder.gov ---
http://www.healthfinder.gov/
Howard Hughes Medical Institute: 2011 Holiday Lectures [Flash Player] ---
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/lectures
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
Population Action International (Video) ---
http://www.populationaction.org/Video
Pygmies.org ---
http://www.pygmies.org/
Map of ‘terrorism hot spots’ in US ---
http://ihrrblog.org/2012/02/13/map-of-terrorism-hot-spots-in-us/
Online Historical
Population Reports ---
http://www.histpop.org/ohpr/servlet/
State of World Population 2008 (read a free chapter) ---
http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2008/en/
University of Michigan Population Studies Center:
Survey Methodology Paper Series ---
http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/series-list.html?sc=ng
The State of the News Media 2011 ---
http://stateofthemedia.org/?src=pp-footer
Project for Excellence in Journalism: Numbers ---
http://www.journalism.org/by_the_numbers
Global Journalist ---
http://www.globaljournalist.org/
The Media Institute ---
http://www.mediainstitute.org/
Project for Excellence in Journalism: Analysis: Our Studies ---
http://www.journalism.org/research_and_analysis/Studies
Extra! (fairness in media reporting) ---
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4
Drew Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round ---
http://www.aladin0.wrlc.org/gsdl/collect/pearson/pearson.shtml
Knight Digital Media Center (journalism tutorials) ---
http://knightdigitalmediacenter.org/
Remembering Eve Arnold, Pioneering Photojournalist ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/remembering_eve_arnold_pioneering_photojournalist.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%
Maynard Institute for Journalism Education ---
http://www.maynardije.org/
Project for Excellence in Journalism: Analysis: Our Studies ---
http://www.journalism.org/research_and_analysis/Studies
Institute for Strategic Dialogue [government ---
http://www.strategicdialogue.org/home/
Miller-McCune (Journalism, Business, and
Research Magazine) ---
http://www.miller-mccune.com/
Healthfinder.gov ---
http://www.healthfinder.gov/
Economics U$A: 21st Century Edition ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series79.html
Senator William H. Proxmire Collection ---
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/topics/proxmire/
Metropolis: New York City Water and Transit Infrastructure in Photographs
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=industry&col_id=186
Big Apple History - PBS Kids Go!
http://pbskids.org/bigapplehistory/index-flash.html
African American Oral History Collection ---
http://digital.library.louisville.edu/collections/afamoh/
MoMA: Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence (feminist modern art) ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/sanjaivekovic/
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
Researchers Without Borders ---
http://researcherswithoutborders.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Population Action International (Video) ---
http://www.populationaction.org/Video
Pygmies.org ---
http://www.pygmies.org/
MoMA: Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence (feminist modern art) ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/sanjaivekovic/
Society of Antiquaries of London: Making History: 300 Years of Antiquaries in
Britain ---
http://makinghistory.sal.org.uk/
Robert Adams: The Place We Live (photography) ---
http://artgallery.yale.edu/adams/
Illinois Wesleyan University: Historic Images ---
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_iwu_histph.php?CISOROOT=/iwu_histph
Illinois State Museum: Audio-Video Barn ---
http://avbarn.museum.state.il.us/
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society ---
http://dig.lib.niu.edu/ISHS/index.html
Senator William H. Proxmire Collection ---
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/topics/proxmire/
Metropolis: New York City Water and Transit Infrastructure in Photographs
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=industry&col_id=186
Big Apple History - PBS Kids Go!
http://pbskids.org/bigapplehistory/index-flash.html
Ward Morgan Photography, Southwest Michigan 1939-1980 ---
http://cdm16259.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p124301coll2
University of Michigan Collections (Images, Photographs) ---
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?page=groups#um-
Aerial Photography: Florida ---
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/aerials
Burgert Brothers Collection of Tampa Photographs ---
http://guides.lib.usf.edu/content.php?pid=86148&sid=640824#
Robertson & Fresh Photograph Collection of Tampa Photographs ---
http://guides.lib.usf.edu/content.php?pid=86148&sid=640895#
African American Oral History Collection ---
http://digital.library.louisville.edu/collections/afamoh/
Clara Barton National Historic Site (nursing) ---
http://www.nps.gov/features/clba/feat0001/flash.html
Booker T. Washington Papers ---
http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/volumes.html
Booker T. Washington's West Virginia Boyhood
http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh32-1.html
Alabama Department of Archives and History: Online Multi-Media Collection ---
http://www.archives.alabama.gov/video/
The Roderic C. Knight Musical Instrument Collection ---
http://www.oberlin.edu/library/digital/knight/default.html
MakingMusic
2 (Encyclopedia of Musical Instruments)
http://homepage.mac.com/davidahmed/makingmusic.html
The Sousa Archives and Center For American Music
(marching band) ---
http://www.library.illinois.edu/sousa/
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
The Roderic C. Knight Musical Instrument Collection ---
http://www.oberlin.edu/library/digital/knight/default.html
MakingMusic
2 (Encyclopedia of Musical Instruments)
http://homepage.mac.com/davidahmed/makingmusic.html
The Sousa Archives and Center For American Music
(marching band) ---
http://www.library.illinois.edu/sousa/
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/
February 14, 2012
February 15, 2012
Ice Baths for Sore Muscles Can Work
Study: Even Some Vigorous Activity Boosts Kids’ Heart Health
Could Sleep Problems Predict Alzheimer's?
Antibiotics Do Not Reduce Symptoms of Sinus Infection
Is That ‘New Car Smell’ Toxic?
Even a Little Air Pollution Raises Heart Attack Risk
Whitney Houston's Death Raises Addiction Questions
Scarred Hearts Healed After Heart Attack
Young Adults on Parents’ Health Insurance Have More Access to Care
February 16, 2012
February 17, 2012
February 18, 2012
February 20, 2012
February 21, 2012
February 22, 2012
February 23, 2012
February 24, 2012
February 25, 2012
Condom Knowledge Not Common Knowledge
Can the Scent of Rosemary Make You Smarter?
It's Flu Season, CDC Says
Citrus Fruits May Lower Women's Stroke Risk
Dementia: Some Antipsychotic Drugs Riskier Than Others
Overly Strict, Controlling Parents Risk Raising Delinquent Kids
New Guidelines to Help Breast Cancer Survivors
FDA Panel Votes in Favor of Weight Loss Pill Qnexa
Aspirin, Walking Can Reduce Leg Pain From Narrowed Arteries
February 27, 2012
Howard Hughes Medical Institute: 2011 Holiday Lectures [Flash Player]
---
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/lectures
Healthfinder.gov ---
http://www.healthfinder.gov/
Forwarded by Paula
I just took a leaflet out of my mailbox informing
me that I can have sex at 79.
I'm so happy, because I live at number 71. So it's
not too far to walk home afterwards. And it’s the same side of the street. I
don’t have to cross the road!
February 6, 2012 message from David Albrecht
Bob
A friend sent these to me. They're pretty funny.
Dave
There are 3 of them, don't wanna miss any of them, they are a hoot and
short (about 30 seconds each).
http://www.youtube.com/v/gBnvGS4u3F0?hl=en&fs=1&autoplay=1
http://www.youtube.com/v/mgCIKGIYJ1A?hl=en&fs=1&autoplay=1
http://www.youtube.com/v/LuVPnW0s3Vo?hl=en&fs=1&autoplay=1
Forwarded by Paula
A lady goes to the bar on a cruise ship and orders a Scotch with two drops of
water. As the bartender gives her the drink she says 'I'm on this cruise to
celebrate my 80th birthday and it's today.' The bartender says 'Well, since it's
your birthday, I'll buy you a drink. In fact, this one is on me.' As the woman
finishes her drink the woman to her right says 'I would like to buy you a drink,
too.' The old woman says 'Thank you. Bartender, I want a Scotch with two drops
of water.' 'Coming up' says the bartender
As she finishes that drink, the man to her left says 'I would like to buy you
one, too.' The old woman says 'Thank you. Bartender, I want another Scotch with
two drops of water.' 'Coming right up' the bartender says.
As he gives her the drink, he says 'Ma'am, I'm dying of curiosity. Why the
Scotch with only two drops of water?' The old woman replies 'Sonny, when you're
my age, you've learned how to hold your liquor... Holding your water, however,
is a whole other issue.' '
OLD' IS WHEN.... Your sweetie says 'Let's go upstairs and make love' and you
answer: 'Pick one, I can't do both!'
OLD' IS WHEN... Your friends compliment you on your new alligator shoes And
you're barefoot! '
OLD' IS WHEN... A sexy babe or hunk catches your fancy ... And your pacemaker
opens the garage door!
OLD' IS WHEN... Going braless pulls all the wrinkles out of your face.
OLD' IS WHEN.... You don't care where your spouse goes ... Just as long as
you don't have to go along.
OLD' IS WHEN... You are cautioned to slow down by the doctor instead of by
the police
'OLD' IS WHEN.. 'Getting a little action' Means you don't need to take any
fiber today
OLD' IS WHEN... 'Getting lucky' means you find your car ... In the parking
lot.
OLD' IS WHEN... An 'all nighter' means not getting up To use the bathroom.
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/
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accounting and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM
(Educators)
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.
Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for
accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting
education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial
accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing,
doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics)
research, publication, replication, and validity testing.
|
CPAS-L
(Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ (Closed
Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo (Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB
and the International Accounting
Standards Board on this financial
reporting blog from Financial Executives
International. The site, updated daily,
compiles regulatory news, rulings and
statements, comment letters on
standards, and hot topics from the Web’s
largest business and accounting
publications and organizations. Look for
continuing coverage of SOX requirements,
fair value reporting and the Alternative
Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such
as the subprime mortgage crisis,
international convergence, and rules for
tax return preparers. |
|
|
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as
well as a practicing CPA)
I found another listserve
that is exceptional -
CalCPA maintains
http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/
and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.
There are several highly
capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and
the answers are often in depth.
Scott
Scott forwarded the following message from Jim
Counts
Yes you may mention info on
your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any
CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is
possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not
have access to the files and other items posted.
Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in
top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and
in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I
will get the request to join.
Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage
people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then
via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in
your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the
inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.
We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in
California.... ]
Please encourage your members
to join our listserve.
If any questions let me know.
Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk
|
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
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.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