Tidbits on March 29, 2012
Bob Jensen? at Trinity University

It's dreary in the mountains this time of year
I will instead feature pictures (Set 2) of the wild flowers of Texas in March
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Wildflowers/Texas02/TexasWildflowersSet02.htm

 

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

 

 

Tidbits on March 29, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/tidbits032912.htm
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/




Updates for Online Video, Audio, Music, Art, and Electronic Literature
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

The Most Astounding Fact (about the universe) According to Neil deGrasse Tyson --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/the_most_astounding_fact_according_to_neil_degrasse_tyson.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene: Watch the Complete NOVA Series Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/ithe_fabric_of_the_cosmosi_with_brian_greene_watch_the_complete_nova_series_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Astronaut Films Auroras from Above --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/astronaut_films_auroras_from_above.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Genomics in Education --- http://www.nslc.wustl.edu/elgin/genomics/gscmaterials.html

Japan:  "Let's create possibilities in people's minds and courage in people's hearts." ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=SS-sWdAQsYg&vq=medium

101 Year Old Woman Driving Her 80 Year Old Packard ---
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000000895665&playerType=em

The Eagle and the Owl --- http://www.dogwork.com/owfo8/

Duck in a Truck --- http://biggeekdad.com/2010/03/duck-in-a-truck/

1943 Donald Duck video promoting paying our income taxes ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ69X1qt4sQ 
Thank you Barry Rice for the heads up.

World Population --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
TED Video:  Paul Gilding: The Earth is full --- Click Here
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_is_full.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDTalks_video+%28TEDTalks+Main+%28SD%29+-+Site%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Iwo Jima Video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWcDIMrd6eE&feature=player_embedded#at=13

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adzywe9xeIU

Fact Checking Bill Murray: A Short, Comic Film from Sundance 2008 --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/fact_checking_bill_murray_a_short_comic_film_from_sundance_2008.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


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

No.1 hit: Obama, The Musical (Gilbert & Sullivan Obama Spoof) --- http://www.247comedy.com/obama-musical

Jackie Evancho (To Believe) --- http://www.staged.com/video?v=NtK

Willie and Kris at the AVAs --- http://www.youtube.com/v/PU-A7eqadho

Rita Haywood and Well Known Friends Dancing --- http://www.youtube.com/v/PU-A7eqadho

The Vienna Philharmonic At Carnegie Hall
http://www.npr.org/event/music/147507699/the-vienna-philharmonic-at-carnegie-hall

Senior Moments by Golf Brooks --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/9nndS22Qda0?rel=0

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

Civil War Photographs --- http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/02/the-civil-war-part-1-the-places/100241/

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 --- http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art --- http://www.art.org/

Tate Modern: Explore (Art History) --- http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore/

MoMA: Cindy Sherman --- http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/

Rollins Digital Archive (Rollins College history in photographs) --- http://www.rollins.edu/library/archives/digitalarchives.html

Greetings from Milwaukee (historical postcards) --- http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/digilib/postcards/index.cfm

Chicago Public Library: Millennium Park --- http://www.chipublib.org/images/millennium-park/index.php

lice Weston: Great Houses of Cincinnati --- http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/weston/index.html

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

Railroads: The Transformation of Capitalism --- http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/railroads/

Transcontinental Railroad Pictures and Exhibits --- http://cprr.org/Museum/Exhibits.html

Union Pacific Railroad: History and Photos http://www.uprr.com/aboutup/history/index.shtml

Steam and Electric Locomotives of the New Haven Railroad --- http://railroads.uconn.edu/locomotives/index.html

The Erie Railroad Glass Plate Negative Collection
http://libwww.syr.edu/information/spcollections/digital/erierr/

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

Dartmouth Digital Collections: Books --- http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/books.html

Historic Iowa Children's Diaries (1800s) --- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/diaries/index.php

The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa --- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/uipress/bdi/

Prophetic book first published in 1974, edited by William Rickenbacker --- The Twelve-Year Sentence. Laissez Faire Books

Albert Einstein Archive Now Online, Bringing 80,000+ Documents to the Web --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/albert_einstein_archive_now_online_bringing_80000_documents_to_the_web.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Celebrity Homes

The reference to million dollar homes CEOs reminded me of the following Website ---
http://www.celebrityhousepictures.com/
Warning:  This site is somewhat addictive.
Keep in mind that these celebrities generally own multiple homes. On occasion you can choose to look at more than one house.
Some like Sean Penn and Lady Gaga have blocked views of their homes (probably to conceal their addresses).
I could not find the home of George Bush in Maine but I found it under the name Barbara Bush.

You can see the digs of both both wealthy conservatives and liberals like Barbara G. Gordon Liddy in Arizona versus George Clooney in California. Barbara Streisand's multi-million dollar cave in Malibu. George Soros has a nice place in Katonah, NY. Mia Farrow lives in Bridgewater, CT.

The Obama home in Chicago is somewhat hidden by trees.

We had friends in San Antonio who lived near George Strait's house in the Dominion. You can also view George's home in Encinal, Texas.

You can also view homes of celebrities in other nations like one of Fidel Castrol's many houses in Cuba ---
http://www.celebrityhousepictures.com/fidel-castro.php

Sometimes the homes of deceased celebrities are shown, e.g., Elvis Presley.

If you're not listed at this site you've just not yet achieved celebrity status. But to be a super celebrity, you're home will also not be pictured. I could not find the home of Vladimir Putin.

 

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 March 29, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations032912.htm       

World Population --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
TED Video:  Paul Gilding: The Earth is full --- Click Here
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_is_full.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDTalks_video+%28TEDTalks+Main+%28SD%29+-+Site%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
 

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/

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




I would like to congratulate Trinity University for at last filling the Jesse H. Jones Chair that I held for 24 years at Trinity University until I retired in 2006. Jesse Jones was a philanthropist and FDR's Secretary of Commerce even though he was a Republican ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Jones


The School of Business at Rice University is also known as the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business.

March 21, 2012 message from

Hi Bob,

Hope you and Erika are doing well. Mike Wilkins (Texas A&M) will be joining us as the Jones Chair of Accounting and his wife Paige Fields (Texas A&M) will be joining us as the Prassel Professor of Finance.

Sankaran Venkateswar Ph.D., CMA
Associate Professor of Accounting Trinity University
One Trinity Place
San Antonio, Tx 78212

 


Wikipedia Online --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Britannica Online --- http://www.britannica.com/

The End of History on Library Reference Shelves:  Bound Volumes of Britannica are Frozen in Time in the Early Decade of the 21st Century

"Can Britannica Rule the Web? Despite Wikipedia, more people pay to access the encyclopedia website annually than paid for the print edition in any year," by L. Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577285411517536598.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

How would you have written the encyclopedia entry about last week's news that the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was first published in 1768, has stopped putting out a printed version? The media naturally focused on this fact alone—the loss of the printed volume. The more interesting story is whether Britannica can survive online.

Those of us who grew up with the leather volumes tend toward nostalgia. In the pre-digital era, Britannica was the definitive way to impart and search information. The surprise is that for many people Britannica remains a key way to find authoritative knowledge online at a time when Wikipedia is a top-10 website.

In the peak year of 1990, 120,000 sets of the printed Britannica were sold; only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold. Yet a company representative says 500,000 subscribers pay some $70 a year for unlimited access to its website. This means that despite the free alternative of Wikipedia, more people pay to access Britannica online annually than paid for the print version in any year. The company estimates that "tens of millions of people around the world" also have access to the online version through their library, school or college.

This is remarkable considering the great success of Wikipedia, which covers many more topics—in English, four million versus the Britannica's fewer than 100,000—by letting anyone post or update entries, with mostly volunteer editors vetting the results. Britannica hopes there is a place for a brand that claims to be authoritative instead of crowd-sourced.

Britannica has 100 full-time editors who have worked with contributors over the years such as Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman and Alfred Hitchcock (who replied "98.6" when asked by Britannica to list his degrees on its contributor information form). Britannica's marketing division says, "There's no such thing as a bad question—but there are bad answers." In 2008, company president Jorge Cauz told the New Yorker, "Wikipedia is to Britannica as 'American Idol' is to the Juilliard School." (This quote appears in the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Cauz.)

An anecdotal comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia shows the value of the premium source, but also the generally high quality of the crowd-sourced edition. The Britannica entry on itself comes to 30 pages when printed out, while Wikipedia has 23 pages; Britannica covers Wikipedia in three pages while Wikipedia has 39 pages on itself. The Wikipedia entry on the solar system, at 23 pages, is twice as long as the Britannica version. Evolution has a 61-page entry in the Britannica, by a University of California scholar, while Wikipedia has 44 pages, including an exhaustive 288 footnotes.

Still, length is not always the best indicator of value. Britannica has a well-crafted, six-page entry on economist Friedrich Hayek, for example, compared with a 15-page Wikipedia entry that includes random anecdotes alongside more serious analysis, reflecting the group wiki-effort based on consensus rather than a unified approach to a topic.

On the other hand, if you're more interested in actress Salma Hayek, Britannica has less than one page ("known for her sultry good looks and intelligence"), compared with Wikipedia's 11 pages, which include exhaustive detail on her films, TV appearances and charitable work. If you're interested in the foot ailment Morton's Neuroma, Wikipedia has a more complete entry than the Mayo Clinic's, and Britannica has none.

The Wikimedia Foundation that oversees Wikipedia has its own worries. Its strategic plan, posted online, says its biggest risk is the declining number of volunteer editors. Many entries include cautions that the reliability of information hasn't been confirmed. "Declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the Wikimedia projects," the group says. "The success of the projects is entirely dependent upon a thriving, healthy editing community."

Another related issue: "Risk of editorial scandal can't be mitigated; there is an inherent level of risk that we cannot sidestep." This is especially true as Wikipedia adds new languages and countries, including many that censor results. It's not clear that the volunteer model is sustainable, though few would have imagined that Wikipedia could grow to have a goal for this year of serving one billion online readers with 50 million articles in some 280 languages.

Britannica remains a profitable business, especially after dropping its print version, but to survive it will have to be the most accurate source—and make the case that authoritative sources matter. For Wikipedia, the challenge is whether volunteers can sustain what has become the world's largest compendium of facts and sometimes knowledge.

Continued in article

From the Scout Report on March 16, 2012

From now on, the Encyclopedia Britannica will only be published online
Encyclopedia Britannica ends print, goes digital
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/sns-rt-us-encyclopediabritannicabre82c1fs-20120313,0,338011.story

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/

Encyclopedia Britannica to stop printing books
http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/13/technology/encyclopedia-britannica-books/?cnn=yes&hpt=hp_t3

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition
http://www.archive.org/details/EncyclopaediaBritannica1911HQDJVU

Death of a Sales Force
http://www1.salon.com/media/media960510.html

Britannica.com
http://www.britannica.com/

Jensen Comment
Hurried scholars should begin with Wikipedia and then do a fact check in the online Britannica. However, this can be disappointing since there are millions of topics covered in Wikipedia that are not covered in Britannica, particularly biographies of contemporary people. Of course serious scholars should also dig much deeper than what can be found in encyclopedias. Hopefully, such scholars will also contribute their findings to both Wikipedia and Britannca. This includes language translations.

Bob Jensen's threads on how scholars search the Web ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars 

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm


"Make Your Own E-Books with Pandoc, by Lincoln Mullen, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/make-your-own-e-books-with-pandoc/39067?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"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

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

Bob Jensen's threads on E-Books are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm


"Udacity Update:  A firsthand look at what it’s been like to take “Computer Science 101″ through the Internet higher-ed start-up," by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/03/21/udacity-update/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

It’s been a couple of weeks since my first post about the Udacity CS101 course, so here’s an update. Before that, let me mention this nice article in Wired about Udacity and its origins. That article sheds a little light on the questions I had earlier about Udacity’s business model.

So, Units 3 and 4 are now done with the CS101 course. The focus of Unit 3 was mostly on the concept of the list in Python, along with FOR loops and an emphasis on computer memory. Unit 4 was a bit of a left turn into a discussion of computer networks, with an emphasis on the basics of the Internet and the concepts of latency and bandwidth. So, just from this description, you can see one of the things I particularly like about CS101: It’s not just about Python. This is a class that is actually about computer science in general with Python as a tool for understanding it. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I find it easy to stick with CS101 when I’ve always ended up dropping previous attempts to learn Python. Context is a really good motivator. (The current Unit 5 is continuing this holistic trend by delving into algorithm analysis, which happens to be the same thing I’m teaching in my Discrete Structures class now.)

Unit 3 was rough. There were over 40 videos to watch, and two of the homework assignments that had to do with refining the fledgling web crawler program we are writing were just completely over my head. I also realized that I fall into the same trap as my students do: I procrastinate rather than budget my time. What I should have done was sit down for the first two evenings after the unit was released and plow through 20 videos at a time, then spend the remaining 5 days working on 1-2 homework problems a night. What I did was wait until 3 days before the homework was due to start on the videos. The good news is that I got 100% on all the homework I submitted. The bad news is that I only attempts 3/4 of the problems. So it was rough primarily because it reminds me that I’m just like any other student in terms of my tendency not to use time wisely. I’m hoping that can be converted into something positive.

Unit 4 was better. It was shorter, for one thing, and the material was new and interesting for me. “Learn more about computer networks” has been on my Someday/Maybe list for I don’t know how long, and I have finally actually learned more about them. The discussion of data structures was useful too, because I’m learning Python partially to write some software to help study columnar transposition ciphers, and the question of what’s the right data structure in Python to represent permutations of finite sets has come up with me before. As I mentioned before, having a specific project in mind when you learn something is a powerful way to stay engaged when learning it.

I’m slowly starting not to suck as a programmer, I think. I’m still a newbie, and my Discrete Structures students would probably crack up laughing at my attempts at coding. But when we had to write a program in Unit 3 to check the validity of a Sudoku problem — a “three gold star” problem, meaning extra-high difficulty level — and I managed to put together a procedure that works and does so in a nice, clean, organized way, I began to feel that this whole Udacity idea is actually working.

Continued in article

The Chronicle of Higher Education has extensively studied performance of distance education
One such study was conducted by senior editor Blumenstyk

The Chronicle
's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade -- in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) --- http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

·         All course materials (including textbooks) online; No additional textbooks to purchase

·         $1,600 fee for the course and materials

·         Woman instructor with respectable academic credentials and professional experience in course content

·         Instructor had good communications with students and between students

·         Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in course, most of whom were mature with full-time day jobs

·         30% of grade from team projects

·         Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized by Goldie

·         Goldie earned a 92 (A-)

·         She gave a positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take other courses if she had the time

·         She considered the course to have a heavy workload

 

There is strong empirical support for online learning, especially the enlightening SCALE experiments at the University of Illinois --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

 

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


iPad 3 Video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8ecN36Ffpc

"The New iPad: It’s in the Apps," by David Pogue, The New York Times, March 7, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/the-new-ipad-its-in-the-apps/

At one of Apple’s trademark press events here,  Tim Cook, the chief executive, took to the stage to unveil this year’s iPad — and a few other surprises.

I’m calling it “this year’s iPad” because it has no other distinguishing name. Apple says the name is not “iPad 3,” even though the previous model was called the iPad 2. And it’s not “iPad HD,” even though its new retina screen has higher resolution than a high-definition TV screen.

I played with it a little Wednesday and I will be doing an extensive review later. For now, here are a few first impressions.

In addition to the retina display, it has:
• a faster processor chip
• a better camera (a five-megapixel)
• 1080p hi-definition video recording (with stabilization)
• voice dictation (speak-to-type — not, however, the whole Siri voice-command feature)
• Personal Hotspot (pay your carrier an extra monthly fee; the iPad broadcasts its Internet signal to nearby laptops and other gadgets over Wi-Fi, wherever you are, even in a car)
• 4G LTE, which means super-high Internet speeds in cities where Verizon Wireless and AT&T have installed 4G networks.

The prices, storage and battery life are identical to the previous iPads’. Which is impressive — 4G is famous as a battery hog. That’s why this new iPad is a tiny bit thicker and heavier than the last one; it needs a beefier battery.

That wasn’t the only news during the unveiling. Apple also revealed that its $100 Apple TV would get a minor upgrade on March 16. It will be able to play movies in 1080p high definition, and it will have a new icon-based software design.

Oh — and movies you buy from Apple’s online store are now available in an online iCloud locker, available for viewing on any Apple gadget, just as music and TV shows are.

To me, though, the most interesting developments were the new apps that Apple has developed for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

GarageBand, for example, has been blessed with several new music-making features. One of them lets up to four people play different instruments simultaneously. Somehow, their four touchscreen devices stay synchronized over Wi-Fi, and they make a master, perfectly synced four-track recording, ready for mixing, editing (there’s a new note-by-note editing mode) and posting online.

My favorite, if Apple’s demo was any indication, will be iPhoto for iOS. (Like GarageBand, it’s a $5 download. GarageBand is a free upgrade if you bought an earlier iOS version..)

In some ways, it goes beyond iPhoto for the Mac, in that its editing tools can do more than affect an entire photo in one swoop. It offers brushes that let you dab with your fingers to brighten, darken, saturate, desaturate or otherwise enhance individual parts of a photo. That’s something you can do in Photoshop, but it’s never been possible in iPhoto. Multitouch is used cleverly; for example, with two fingers you can rotate a photo, zoom in and out, adjust the shadowy “vignette” framing, and so on.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I sure would've liked USB and VGA ports.

 

Humorous iPad Demo --- http://biggeekdad.com/2012/02/ipad-magic-demonstration/
Amazing things you never thought of trying with your iPad.

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


Celebrity Homes

A recent reference to CEOs' multimillion dollar homes reminded me of the following Website ---
http://www.celebrityhousepictures.com/
Warning:  This site is somewhat addictive.
Keep in mind that these celebrities generally own multiple homes. On occasion you can choose to look at more than one house.
Some like Sean Penn and Lady Gaga have blocked views of their homes (probably to conceal their addresses).
I could not find the home of George Bush in Maine but I found it under the name Barbara Bush.

You can see the digs of both both wealthy conservatives and liberals like G. Gordon Liddy in Arizona versus George Clooney in California.
I'm not sure if Al Gore still owns his mansion or if his wife won it in the divorce.
Barbara Streisand has a multi-million dollar cave in Malibu.
Ellen DeGeneres does all right.
Mia Farrow lives in Bridgewater, CT.  Maybe she needs a big house for all her adopted children.

George Soros has a nice place in Katonah, NY.
To his credit he lives in one of the states with the highest income and other taxes rather than choose one of the lowest taxation states like Delaware.
I guess when you have multiple billions of dollars state taxes are not important considerations like they are to accounting professors stretching retirement dollars.

The Obama home in Chicago is somewhat hidden by trees.

We had party friends in San Antonio who lived near George Strait's house in the Dominion. You can also view George's home in Encinal, Texas. Former basketball star David Robinson lives in the same area where visitors must pass through two armed guard check points.

Quite a few of the celebrities listed in this site are current or former sports stars.

You can also view homes of celebrities in other nations like one of Fidel Castro's many (50?) houses in Cuba ---
http://www.celebrityhousepictures.com/fidel-castro.php

Sometimes the homes of deceased celebrities are shown, e.g., look up Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor.

If you're not listed at this site you've just not yet achieved celebrity status. Or maybe you've achieved super-celebrity status that entitles you to an unlisted home at this site..
I could not find the home of Vladimir Putin.

 

March 23, 2012 reply from Roger Collins

Bob,

Thanks for the link; as you say, its quite addictive.

I thought you might like this link - not exactly the homes of current-day celebs, but they were certainly the celebs of their day - and their (first born male) descendants are very comfortably off...



http://www.anglotopia.net/anglophilia/top-11-stately-homes-in-england-best-english-manor-houses/

Ability counts - but it does help one an awful lot to have the right connections - such as, monarchs  :-)  Incidentally, Bess of Hardwick, mentioned in the link, was an amazing - and incredibly tough and ruthless -character who would probably have made mincemeat of the likes of Fuld and Dimond.


Just to round things off, here are two or three links to the current or former homes of Brit pop stars..
.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2119176/Money-buy-love--But-it-buy-George-Harrisons-sprawling-Swiss-mansion-ask-afford-it.html

http://blog.luxuryproperty.com/paul-mccartneys-lavish-real-estate-holdings/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1030594/Eco-campaigner-Sting-flies-solo-private-jet--twice-day.html

Roger Collins
TRU School of Business & Economics


"Aging Professors Create a Faculty Bottleneck At some universities, 1 in 3 academics are now 60 or older," Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-Are-Graying-and/131226/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

When Mary Beth Norton went to work at Cornell University in 1971, she was the history department's first female hire. But now the accomplished professor has a different mark of distinction: She is the oldest American-history scholar at Cornell.

"I've always thought of myself as the sweet young thing in the department," Ms. Norton, who will turn 69 this month, says with a laugh. "But that's not true anymore."

A growing proportion of the nation's professors are at the same point in their careers as Ms. Norton: ­still working, but with the end of their careers in sight. Their tendency to remain on the job as long as their work is enjoyable—or, during economic downturns, long enough to make sure they have enough money to live on in retirement—has led the professoriate to a crucial juncture.

Amid an aging American work force, the graying of college faculties is particularly notable. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of professors ages 65 and up has more than doubled between 2000 and 2011. At some institutions, including Cornell, more than one in three tenured or tenure-track professors are now 60 or older. At many others—including Duke and George Mason Universities and the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Texas at Austin, and Virginia—at least one in four are 60 or older. (See chart below.)

Colleges have been talking about an impending mass exodus of baby-boomer professors for at least the past decade, but it hasn't occurred yet because people in their 60s, in particular, aren't ready to retire. But even with the preponderance of older faculty in academe, experts say that widespread retirements aren't imminent, but instead will most likely take place in spurts over the next 10 years or so as more professors reach age 70.

In the meantime, the challenges of an aging work force are especially salient for colleges. Faculty can retire at will (a perk that began with the end of mandatory retirement in 1994), and young Ph.D.'s are waiting in the wings for jobs. Institutions are also struggling to manage faculty renewal at a time when the position left behind by a retired faculty member might be lost to budget cuts.

Older professors understand what's at stake. But at the same time, they have managed to craft professional and personal lives that they're not ready to walk away from. And some administrators, who are themselves often in the same age bracket as the faculty in question, can relate. Yet their task of preparing for the next generation, while managing the previous one, remains.

Data on faculty ages collected by The Chronicle provides a window into how the shifting demographics of professors is playing out similarly at all types of colleges across the nation. The problem is more pronounced at some places, particularly at elite research institutions like Cornell, where senior professors often have particular freedom to shape their academic pursuits to fit their interests. At other kinds of institutions where the workload isn't as flexible, studies have shown, faculty members are more inclined to retire.

. . . (Insert Graph)

the percentage of professors in their 70s and beyond has doubled since 2000; they now make up 6 percent of the university's 1,500-member faculty. Other places with a sizable percentage of faculty members in their 70s and older include Claremont McKenna College and the University of Texas at Austin, both of which have 7 percent of their faculty in that age group, and the University of Florida, with 6 percent.

The issue of aging faculty is complex, in part because of the nature of academic work. The faces behind the numbers, like Ralph M. Stein of Pace University, are lifelong academics who have often crafted careers at a single institution whose reputation they have helped to build. Their work isn't just a way to earn a living, but instead a major part of their identity. And that can make it difficult for professors to give up their jobs.

Continued in article

July 20, 2011 message from a friend

Have you all heard about the latest Buy-out Proposal at my university?. I think it is that if you are over 63 and have been with the University for 5 years you can retire in January or May of the next academic year. You will get something like 1.7 X your yearly salary in a lump sum (-minus FICA, etc).

What a deal. There are 5 people eligible in our department out of 7 faculty. Three intend to do it, one isn't and one is on the fence.

XXXXX

Jensen Comment
There are many reasons for such deals. The scholastic life of a university aided greatly by infusion of new blood.

But I would certainly hate to be running a university that has to replace half of its business school, its computer science department, its school of engineering, and its half its medical school all at the same time. That's too much of a shock in one year --- and a very expensive shock in professional schools living with heavy salary compression of senior faculty.

This is probably a great deal for faculty with $2 million in TIAA and substantial other savings and a yearning to breathe free. Presumably the University will also provide health insurance until eligible for Medicare.

It may not be such a good deal for faculty having less than $1 million in TIAA and not-so-great outside savings. It may not be such a good deal for faculty with trophy spouses that will not be eligible for Medicare for another ten or more years.

It is probably not a good deal to start Social Security benefits at Age 63 unless you expect to die young. For those that anticipate a long life, the best year to start Social Security collections is probably Age 70 in order to maximize lifetime benefits, although Social Security deals are somewhat uncertain in the present legislative fight over entitlements.

 

Have You Been Invited to Retire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Retire

 


College Student Etiquette

From Grammar Girl in March 2012

What's Up with QDT?

College Student Etiquette ---
http://manners.quickanddirtytips.com/college-student-etiquette.aspx?WT.mc_id=0

How to Estimate Pi with Monte Carlo Methods, Part 1 ---
http://mathdude.quickanddirtytips.com/how-to-estimate-pi-with-monte-carlo-methods-part-1.aspx?WT.mc_id=0

How to Divide Household Chores ---
http://domesticceo.quickanddirtytips.com/dividing-household-chores.aspx?WT.mc_id=0


"The Man Who Broke Atlantic City," Value Investing World, March 16, 2012 --- Click Here
http://www.valueinvestingworld.com/2012/03/man-who-broke-atlantic-city.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ValueInvestingWorld+%28Value+Investing+World%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.


Question
How does Sears price its onsite extended warranties and how it accounts for them in the financial statements?

 

"Consumer Reports is Wrong about Extended Warranties," by Rafi Mohammed, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 23, 2012 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/03/why_consumer_reports_is_wrong.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Jensen Comment
I think on some on-site warranties a lot depends upon where you live or work. I live and work in the boondocks of the White Mountains. Virtually all our appliances are Sears on-site warranties because we live over 100 miles from the closest Sears warranty repair center and most other warranty service centers of vendors that compete with Sears.

I would certainly have had to haul my large snow thrower to a service center the 12+ times Sears came to my home to fix this machine before Sears engineers finally got smart enough to solve what was an engineering problem with the chute cables in cold weather.

I consider the Sears onsite extended warranty price to be reasonably priced for people like me who live in remote parts of the country.

My problem is that on-site extended warranties, even from Sears, do not cover all products. For example, no onsite extended warranty was available for Erika's new sewing machine that we purchased from Sears in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. However, rather than have to take it 100 miles to a Sears service center in Manchester, NH we only have to take it 25 miles to the St. J store, and that Sears store will handle all shipping free of charge to a service center.

I think it would make an interesting case study for accounting students to investigate how it Sears both prices its onsite extended warranties and how it accounts for them in the financial statements.

title:
How do we account for "lifetime" warranties?
author-source:
description:
How do we account for “lifetime warranties” that are not backed by the Federal government?


How do we account for “lifetime warranties” that are backed by the Federal government?

Actually if we assume “going concern” accounting, the accountants and auditors can probably ignore the government backing of warranties as defined at
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/understanding-obamas-auto-warranty-plan/ 

 

But there’s still a question of how to estimate warranty reserves for “lifetime warranties?” Do auditors now have to factor in actuarial life expectancies of buyers of new Chrysler vehicles?

July 9, 2009 message from XXXXX

Bob,

One issue that was brought up earlier was the risk of not being able to collect on a warranty for a new car purchased from GM or Chrysler. I'm looking at new cars. Do you have any idea whether GM will deliver on warranty repairs for a car purchased now?

July 9, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi XXXXX,

The thing to do is read the fine print in the Federal government's so-called guarantee to make good on Chrysler and GM warranties if the companies default.

First take a look at
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/understanding-obamas-auto-warranty-plan/

Then you should read the fine print of the warranty on any GM or Chrysler car you purchase.

One risk is that if GM or Chrysler should fail, parts will become harder and harder to find for cars, especially models that may only have been available for a short time so that there are very few used cars to cannibalize for parts. If both your Chrysler company and your Chrysler transmission (with that dubious "life-time" Chrysler power train warranty) should fail, what happens if there are no longer any needed transmission parts? Ask the dealer to explain this scenario before you buy a Chrysler or a GM car!

It's also not clear whether the Government's warranty backup plan will cover Fiats when Chrysler begins to sell Fiats. Wouldn't that be a kick in the butt when our Federal government backs up Italian car warranties but not Ford Motor Company warranties?

 Bob Jensen

A15. Lifetime means lifetime
This is put in writing by Chrysler at http://www.chrysler.com/en/lifetime_powertrain_warranty/faq.html
Jensen Comment
I'm not certain President Obama really understands that he is now backing up each new Chrylser's powertrain for a "lifetime" which attorneys can claim provides coverage until the buyer dies. Do you want to buy each of your newborns a new Chrysler? What a bummer if this also includes Fiats.

How anxiously are you awaiting a FIAT with a Chrysler boilerplate?
When FIAT entered the U.S. market and failed in the 1970s it was called "Fix It Again, Tony"
Why does the Second Italian Navy use glass bottom boats? To look for the first Italian Navy.
Who put the seven bullets into Benito Mussolini? Three hundred Italian marksmen.

Among the 38 automobile models tested for reliability in 2008 ---
http://www.which.co.uk/reviews/cars-and-motoring/index.jsp
Honda and Toyota at the top of the 2008 reliability list, followed closely by Daihatsu, Lexus, Mazda, and Subaru. This largely mirrors the latest Consumer Reports predicted reliability ranking, though there Scion was at the top and Mazda placed 12th with Consumer Reports due to a different model line-up. Fiat ranked 35th (out of 38), followed by Renault, Land Rover, and Chrysler/Dodge. Jeep is the highest-rated brand from Chrysler, with its 29th place just barely keeping it in the “Poor” category. Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge are categorized as “Very poor.” In total, Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge provide similar reliability, and it isn’t good.
Consumer Reports, May 5, 2009 ---
http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2009/05/chrysler-and-fiat-reliability-merger-of-equals.html
Consumer Reports online subscribers can see how brands compare.--- Click Here
Jensen Comment
My 1989 Cadillac is ten times more reliable than my 1999 Jeep Cherokee. I don't plan to shift gears into a FIAT. My next car up in these mountains will probably be a Subaru station wagon (with all-wheel drive).

Tips on Personal Finance --- http://twitter.com/EverydayFinance

Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

 


Robert Shiller --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Shiller

Walt Whitman --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman

Myths of Economic Inequality
"Walt Whitman, First Artist of Finance (Part 1)," by Yale Economist Robert Shiller, Bloomberg, March 5, 2012 --- 
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-05/walt-whitman-first-artist-of-finance-part-1-robert-shiller.html

"Finance Isn’t as Amoral as It Seems (Part 2)," by Yale Economist Robert Shiller, Bloomberg, March 5, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-06/finance-isn-t-as-amoral-as-it-seems-part-2-commentary-by-robert-shiller.html
Don't forget to read the mostly negative comments.

"Don’t Resent the Rich; Fix the Tax Code (Part 3)," by Yale Economist Robert Shiller, Bloomberg, March 6, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-07/don-t-resent-the-rich-fix-the-tax-code-part-3-robert-shiller.html
Don't forget to read the mostly negative comments.

"Logic of Finance Can Banish Corruption (Part 4)," by Yale Economist Robert Shiller, Bloomberg, March 7, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-08/finance-logic-can-banish-corruption-part-4-commentary-by-robert-shiller.html
Don't forget to read the mostly negative comments.
Bob Jensen's threads on fraud and corruption --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
 

The American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

On the Myths of Income Inequality
Part 1 by Yale by Robert Shiller, Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a Fellow at the Yale International Center for Finance

"Walt Whitman, First Artist of Finance (Part 1)," by Robert Shiller, Bloomberg, March 4, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-05/walt-whitman-first-artist-of-finance-part-1-robert-shiller.html

One of the myths surrounding economic inequality in our society is that high incomes are often the result of selfishness and narrow-mindedness, rather than idealism and humanity. We tend to think that those in careers other than our own are fundamentally different kinds of people.

Personality and character differences are, indeed, somewhat associated with occupation. But we tend to attribute the behavior of others to personality differences far more often than is warranted.

We tend to think of philosophers, artists or poets as the polar opposite of chief executive officers, bankers or businesspeople. But the idea that those involved in business have personalities fundamentally different from those in other walks of life is belied by the fact that many often combine or switch careers. Consider a few examples.

Continued in article

March 23. 2012 reply from Roger Collins

Two of seventeen comments on Robert Shiller's article...
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Peon2012 2 weeks ago

as far as I can tell all this article points out is that koons and hirst are much more financially successful than Whitman and Thoreau. 1) Hirst and Koons can't be considered artists, they are nothing better than con men. 2) during his time on Walden Pond Thoreau did everything he could to avoid transactions with outsiders. Taking one word, from one sentence of his and misconstruing it totally perverts his whole philosophy 3) why has an economics professor chosen a sample size of about 5? What about Tolstoy who sought to give his entire legacy to the people? Rembrant who died penniless? Kerouac, Orwell who endured poverty for their art, Lucian Freud who gambled his money away cos he found it an impediment to painting..

This article is a poorly research justification of the writers' existing beliefs.Written for an audience which wants to hear it.

   Like
   Reply

   4 Likes

Frederic Mari in reply to Peon2012 2 weeks ago

I'd be slightly less ferocious and presume that Dr. Shiller's views are more innocent than you do. However, I think that  this comment "What about Tolstoy who sought to give his entire legacy to the people? Rembrant who died penniless? Kerouac, Orwell who endured poverty for their art, Lucian Freud who gambled his money away cos he found it an impediment to painting..." is key.

Sure, everyone needs to make a living and I don't actually believe that many people believe "high incomes are often the result of selfishness and narrow-mindedness". High incomes are the result of being in the right place, at the right time with the right tools. And, if you become rich enough, then you can manipulate the marketplace and the laws to be sure that the time, the place and your tools remain connected, for your greater benefit...

Also: "People in the most spiritually minded professions -- those who work in the church, the arts or philanthropy, for example -- are routinely involved in managing financial resources and executing deals and contracts".

I wouldn't think anyone is in any doubt that the church, the arts and NGOs are ideal place for crooks wanting to make a quick buck. You can use the coat of virtue to cover all kinds of financial shenanigans... Not for nothing are successful churches so rich, on average...

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

It will be interesting to see Part 2 of this series.

Roger

The American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

 


Every now and then the so-called "quants" in economics and finance make enormous mistakes. Probably the best known mistake, before the trillion-dollar CDO mistakes that came to light the collapse of the real estate market in 2007, was the 1993 "Trillion Dollar Bet" made by two Nobel Prize winning quants and their partners in Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) that came within a hair of destroying most big banks and investment firms on Wall Street ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#LTCM

Whenever I get news of increased power of quants on Wall Street, I think back to "The Trillion Dollar Bet" (Nova on PBS Video) a bond trader, two Nobel Laureates, and their doctoral students who very nearly brought down all of Wall Street and the U.S. banking system in the crash of a hedge fund known as Long Term Capital Management where the biggest and most prestigious firms lost an unimaginable amount of money --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTCM

The Trillion Dollar Bet transcripts are free --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2704stockmarket.html
However, you really have to watch the graphics in the video to appreciate this educational video --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stockmarket/

Can the 2008 investment banking failure be traced to a math error?
Recipe for Disaster:  The Formula That Killed Wall Street --- http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/recipe-for-disaster-formula-that-killed.html 

Some highlights:

"For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart." The article goes on to show that correlations are at the heart of the problem.

"The reason that ratings agencies and investors felt so safe with the triple-A tranches was that they believed there was no way hundreds of homeowners would all default on their loans at the same time. One person might lose his job, another might fall ill. But those are individual calamities that don't affect the mortgage pool much as a whole: Everybody else is still making their payments on time.

But not all calamities are individual, and tranching still hadn't solved all the problems of mortgage-pool risk. Some things, like falling house prices, affect a large number of people at once. If home values in your neighborhood decline and you lose some of your equity, there's a good chance your neighbors will lose theirs as well. If, as a result, you default on your mortgage, there's a higher probability they will default, too. That's called correlation—the degree to which one variable moves in line with another—and measuring it is an important part of determining how risky mortgage bonds are."

I would highly recommend reading the entire thing that gets much more involved with the actual formula etc.

The “math error” might truly be have been an error or it might have simply been a gamble with what was perceived as miniscule odds of total market failure. Something similar happened in the case of the trillion-dollar disastrous 1993 collapse of Long Term Capital Management formed by Nobel Prize winning economists and their doctoral students who took similar gambles that ignored the “miniscule odds” of world market collapse -- -
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#LTCM  

The rhetorical question is whether the failure is ignorance in model building or risk taking using the model?

Also see
"In Plato's Cave:  Mathematical models are a powerful way of predicting financial markets. But they are fallible" The Economist, January 24, 2009, pp. 10-14 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout

 

Learning From Mistakes
"School for quants: Inside UCL’s Financial Computing Centre, the planet’s brightest quantitative analysts are now calculating our future," by Sam Knight, Financial Times Magazine, March 2, 2012 ---
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/0664cd92-6277-11e1-872e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1oEeYcqi8

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0664cd92-6277-11e1-872e-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1pxufR2kw

On a recent winter’s afternoon, nine computer science students were sitting around a conference table in the engineering faculty at University College London. The room was strip-lit, unadorned, and windowless. On the wall, a formerly white whiteboard was a dirty cloud, tormented by the weight of technical scribblings and rubbings-out upon it. A poster in the corner described the importance of having a heterogenous experimental network, or Hen.

Every now and again, though, the discussion became comprehensible. The students discussed annoyances – so much data about animals! – and possibilities. One of the PhD students, Ilya Zheludev, talked about “Wikipedia deltas” – records of deleted sections from the online encyclopaedia. Immediately, the students hit on the idea of tracking the Wikipedia entries of large companies and seeing what was deleted, and when.

The mood of the meeting was casual and exacting at the same time. Galas, who is from Gdansk and once had ambitions to be a hacker, is something of a giant at the Financial Computing Centre. One of the first students to enrol in 2009, he has a gift for writing extremely large computer programs. In order to carry out his own research, Galas has built an electronic trading platform that he estimates would satisfy the needs of a small bank. As a result, what he says goes. Galas closed the meeting by giving the undergraduates a hard time about the overall messiness of their programming. “I like beauty!” he declared, staring around the room.

The Financial Computing Centre at UCL, a collaboration with the London School of Economics, the London Business School and 20 leading financial institutions, claims to be the only institute of its kind in Europe. Each year since its establishment in late 2008, between 600 and 800 students have applied for its 12 fully funded PhD places, which each cost the taxpayer £30,000 per year. Dozens more applicants come from the financial industry, where employers are willing to subsidise up to five years of research at the tantalising intersection of computers, data and money.

As of this winter, the centre had about 60 PhD students, of whom 80 per cent were men. Virtually all hailed from such forbiddingly numerate subjects as electrical engineering, computational statistics, pure mathematics and artificial intelligence. These realms of knowledge contain concepts such as data mining, non-linear dynamics and chaos theory that make many of us nervous just to see written down. Philip Treleaven, the centre’s director, is delighted by this. “Bright buggers,” he calls his students. “They want to do great things.”

In one sense, the centre is the logical culmination of a relationship between the financial industry and the natural sciences that has been deepening for the past 40 years. The first postgraduate scientists began to crop up on trading floors in the early 1970s, when rising interest rates transformed the previously staid calculations of bond trading into a field of complex mathematics. The most successful financial equation of all time – the Black-Scholes model of options pricing – was published in 1973 (the authors were awarded a Nobel prize in 1997).

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout


From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on March 23, 2012

Disney's $200 Million Charge
by: Erica Orden
Mar 20, 2012
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
 

TOPICS: Earnings Forecasts, Financial Accounting, Financial Statements, Fiscal Year, Segment Analysis, Segment Margins

SUMMARY: The article describes a significant loss in one segment of Walt Disney Co.'s operations, Studio Entertainment, based on poor box office results for the first 10 days of the movie's release. The earnings guidance being offered by management in advance of fiscal third quarter earnings, the quarter will end at approximately March 31, 2012 based on a 52-week fiscal year ending around September 30. Questions ask students to access financial statement filings on Form 10-K and 10-Q to confirm information in the article.

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: NOTE: Instructors will want to delete the following information: the answer to question 5 can be found in the 10-Q filing for the quarter ended April 2, 2011 and filed on May 5, 2011, and available at http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1001039&accession_number=0001193125-11-134405&xbrl_type=v. Click on notes to financial statements, Segment Information, and see the $77 million segment operating income for the Studio Entertainment segment in the second panel.

QUESTIONS: 
1. (Introductory) What is the impact of one movie, "John Carter," on the operations of Walt Disney Co.?

2. (Introductory) Is this impact on Disney's total operations or something else? Explain.

3. (Advanced) Based on information given in the article, determine Walt Disney Co.'s fiscal year end date. Why do you think this company has such a year end date?

4. (Advanced) Access the most recent filing of Walt Disney Company's annual financial statements by clicking on the live link to Walt Disney Co. in the article, scrolling down the page, and clicking on SEC Filings in the lower right hand corner. Search for filings on Form 10-K. Find information on Disney's operating segments and confirm your answers to questions 2 and 3, explaining how you do so.

5. (Advanced) Disney "rarely offers such advance financial guidance" as it is giving in the information on which this article reports. Why do you think the company is doing so now?

6. (Advanced) According to the article, the expected loss of between $80 million and $120 million Disney has announced compares to "an operating profit of $77 million during the same quarter last year." In what financial statement filing can you find that information?
 

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

 

"Disney's $200 Million Charge," by Erica Orden, The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577291972883469132.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid

Walt Disney Co. DIS +0.05% expects to lose $200 million on its science-fiction epic "John Carter," the company said on Monday, citing the costly movie's weak box-office performance.

As a result, Disney added, its movie studio is expected to report an operating loss of between $80 million and $120 million for its fiscal second quarter, ending March 31. Disney won't report its earnings for the quarter until May, and rarely offers such advance financial guidance.

Walt Disney Co. DIS +0.05% expects to lose $200 million on its science-fiction epic "John Carter," the company said on Monday, citing the costly movie's weak box-office performance.

As a result, Disney added, its movie studio is expected to report an operating loss of between $80 million and $120 million for its fiscal second quarter, ending March 31. Disney won't report its earnings for the quarter until May, and rarely offers such advance financial guidance.

Continued in article


Teaching Case
When Rosie Scenario waved goodbye "Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income"

From The Wall Street Journal Weekly Accounting Review on August 19, 2011

Groupon Bows to Pressure
by: Shayndi Raice and Lynn Cowan
Aug 11, 2011
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
 

TOPICS: Advanced Financial Accounting, SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, Segment Analysis

SUMMARY: In filing its prospectus for its initial public offering (IPO), Groupon has removed from its documents "...an unconventional accounting measurement that had attracted scrutiny from securities regulators [adjusted consolidated segment operating income]. The unusual measure, which the e-commerce had invented, paints a more robust picture of its performance. Removal of the measure was in response to pressure from the Securities and Exchange Commission...."

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is useful to introduce segment reporting and the weaknesses of the required management reporting approach.

QUESTIONS: 
1. (Introductory) What is Groupon's business model? How does it generate revenues? What are its costs? Hint, to answer this question you may access the Groupon, Inc. Form S-1 Registration Statement filed on June 2, 011 available on the SEC web site at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/000104746911005613/a2203913zs-1.htm

2. (Advanced) Summarize the reporting that must be provided for any business's operating segments. In your answer, provide a reference to authoritative accounting literature.

3. (Advanced) Why must the amounts disclosed by operating segments be reconciled to consolidated totals shown on the primary financial statements for an entire company?

4. (Advanced) Access the Groupon, Inc. Form S-1 Registration Statement filed on June 2, 011 and proceed to the company's financial statements, available on the SEC web site at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/000104746911005613/a2203913zs-1.htm#dm79801_selected_consolidated_financial_and_other_data Alternatively, proceed from the registration statement, then click on Table of Contents, then Selected Consolidated Financial and Other Data. Explain what Groupon calls "adjusted consolidated segment operating income" (ACSOI). What operating segments does Groupon, Inc., show?

5. (Introductory) Why is Groupon's "ACSOI" considered to be a "non-GAAP financial measure"?

6. (Advanced) How is it possible that this measure of operating performance could be considered to comply with U.S. GAAP requirements? Base your answer on your understanding of the need to reconcile amounts disclosed by operating segments to the company's consolidated totals. If it is accessible to you, the second related article in CFO Journal may help answer this question.
 

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
 

RELATED ARTICLES: 
Groupon's Accounting Lingo Gets Scrutiny
by Shayndi Raice and Nick Wingfield
Jul 28, 2011
Page: A1

CFO Report: Operating Segments Remain Accounting Gray Area
by Emily Chasan
Aug 15, 2011
Page: CFO

 

"Groupon Bows to Pressure," by: Shayndi Raice and Lynn Cowan, The Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2011 ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/131e06c48071898b

Groupon Inc. removed from its initial public offering documents an unconventional accounting measurement that had attracted scrutiny from securities regulators.

The unusual measure, which the e-commerce had invented, paints a more robust picture of its performance. Removal of the measure was in response to pressure from the Securities and Exchange Commission, a person familiar with the matter said.

In revised documents filed Wednesday with the SEC, the company removed the controversial measure, which had been highlighted in the first three pages of its previous filing. But Groupon's chief executive defended the term Wednesday. [GROUPON] Getty Images

Groupon, headquarters above, expects to raise about $750 million.

Groupon had highlighted something it called "adjusted consolidated segment operating income", or ACSOI. The measurement, which doesn't include subscriber-acquisitions expenses such as marketing costs, doesn't conform to generally accepted accounting principles.

Investors and analysts have said ACSOI draws attention away from Groupon's marketing spending, which is causing big net losses.

The company also disclosed Wednesday that its loss more than doubled in the second quarter from a year ago, even as revenue increased more than ten times.

By leaving ACSOI out of its income statements, the company hopes to avoid further scrutiny from the SEC, the person familiar with the matter said. The commission declined comment.

Groupon in June reported ACSOI of $60.6 million for last year and $81.6 million for the first quarter of 2011. Under generally accepted accounting principles, the company generated operating losses of $420.3 million and $117.1 million during those periods.

Wednesday's filing included a letter from Groupon Chief Executive Andrew Mason defending ACSOI. The company excludes marketing expenses related to subscriber acquisition because "they are an up-front investment to acquire new subscribers that we expect to end when this period of rapid expansion in our subscriber base concludes and we determine that the returns on such investment are no longer attractive," the letter said.

There was no mention of when that expansion will end, but the person familiar with the matter said the company reevaluates the figures weekly.

Groupon said it spent $345.1 million on online marketing initiatives to acquire subscribers in the first half and that it expects "to continue to expend significant amounts to acquire additional subscribers."

The latest SEC filing also contains new financial data. Groupon on Wednesday reported second-quarter revenue of $878 million, up 36% from the first quarter. While the company's growth is still rapid, the pace has slowed. Groupon's revenue jumped 63% in the first quarter from the fourth.

The company's second-quarter loss was $102.7 million, flat sequentially and wider than the year-earlier loss of $35.9 million.

Groupon expects to raise about $750 million in a mid-September IPO that could value the company at $20 billion.

The path to going public hasn't been easy. The company had to file an amendment to its original SEC filing after a Groupon executive told Bloomberg News the company would be "wildly profitable" just three days after its IPO filing. Speaking publicly about the financial projections of a company that has filed to go public is barred by SEC regulations. Groupon said the comments weren't intended for publication.

Continued in article

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


American Council on Education --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Council_on_Education

"ACE Introduces New Web Site to Help Colleges Assist Veterans," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/ace-introduces-new-web-site-to-help-colleges-assist-veterans/41608?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The American Council on Education has unveiled a new interactive, online resource for colleges looking to create “veteran friendly” services for military veterans, who are enrolling in greater numbers under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The new Toolkit for Veteran Friendly Institutions highlights best practices that many institutions already use to assist student veterans—including on-campus centers, counseling services, and faculty training—as well as a searchable database of resources. The site offers tips, for instance, on how colleges should appropriately identify veterans during the application process in order to get an accurate count of how many students have served in the military—and follow up with them as they progress toward their degrees. “Not all veterans of the armed forces identify themselves as ‘veterans’ (particularly women, National Guard and Reserve members, and those who may not have experienced combat),” the site advises. “Asking ‘Have you ever served in the United States Armed Forces?’ rather than ‘Are you a veteran?’ may have a large impact on the number and accuracy of responses you receive.”

For-Profit Colleges receive over 70% of the Pell Grant fellowships.
For-Profit Colleges receive over 50% of the military-funded veterans tuition.
Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit colleges operating in the gray zone of fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


A Carnegie-Mellon Professor says the widening gap between the top 1% and the remaining 99% is no proof that capitalism is unjust

"A Look at the Global One Percent:  The remarkable similarity in income distribution across countries over the past century means domestic policy has less effect than many believe on who gets what," by Allan Meltzer, The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204653604577249852320654024.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

While the Occupy Wall Street movement may be waning, the perception of growing income inequality in America is not. For those on the left, the widening gap between the top 1% of earners and the remaining 99% is proof that American capitalism is unjust and should be traded in for an economic model more closely resembling the social democracies of Europe.

But an examination of changes in income distribution over nearly 100 years, not just in the United States but elsewhere in the developed world, does not bear this out. In a 2006 study titled "The Evolution of Top Incomes in an Egalitarian Society," Swedish economists Jesper Roine and Daniel Waldenström compared the income share of the top 1% of earners in seven countries from the early 1900s to 2004. Those countries—the U.S., Sweden, France, Australia, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands—all practice some type of democratic capitalism but also a fair amount of redistribution.

As the nearby chart from the Roine and Waldenström study shows, the share of income for the top 1% in these seven countries generally follows the same trend line. That means domestic policy can't be the principal reason for the current spread between high earners and others. Since the 1980s, that spread has increased in nearly all seven countries. The U.S. and Sweden, countries with very different systems of redistribution, along with the U.K. and Canada show the largest increase in the share of income for the top 1%.

The main reasons for these increases are not hard to find. Adding a few hundred million Chinese and Indians to the world's productive labor force after 1980 slowed the rise in income for workers all over the developed world. That's the most important factor at work. The top 1% gain relatively because they are less affected by the hordes of newly productive workers.

But the top 1% have another advantage. Many of them have unique skills that are difficult to replicate. Our top earners include entrepreneurs, rock stars, professional athletes, surgeons and lawyers. Also included are the managers of large international corporations and, yes, bankers and financiers. (Interestingly, the Occupy movement seldom criticizes athletes or rock stars.)

The most dramatic change shown in the chart is the decline in the top 1% of Swedish earners' share of total income to between 5%-10% in the 1960s from well over 25% in 1903. The Swedish authors explain that drop as mainly due to the decline in real interest rates that lowered incomes of rentiers who depended on interest and dividends. Capitalist development, not income redistribution, brought that change.

Income-redistribution programs that became widespread in the 1960s and 1970s had a much smaller influence than market forces. Between 1960 and 1980, the share going to the top 1% declined, but the decline is modest. The share of the top percentile had been reduced everywhere by 1960. Massive redistributive policies in Sweden did more than elsewhere to lower the top earners' share of total income. Still, the difference in 1980 between Sweden and the U.S. is only about four percentage points. As the chart shows, the top earners in both countries began to increase their share of income in 1980.

The big error made by those on the left is to believe that redistribution permits the 99% or 90% to gain at the expense of top earners. In much current political discussion, this is taken as an unchallenged truth. It should not be. The lasting opportunity for the poor is better jobs produced by investments, many of which are financed by those who earn high incomes. It makes little sense to applaud the contribution to all of us made by the late Steve Jobs while favoring policies that reduce incentives for innovators and investors.

Our system is democratic capitalism. In every national election, the public expresses its preference for taxation and redistribution. It is a democratic choice, not a plot controlled by one's most despised interest group. The much-maligned Congress is unable to pass a budget because it is elected by people who have conflicting ideas about taxes and redistribution. President Obama wants higher tax rates to pay for more redistribution now. The Republicans, recalling Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and much of the history of democratic capitalist countries, want lower tax rates and less regulation to bring higher growth and to help pay for some of the future health care and pensions promised to an aging population.

Regardless of one's economic philosophy, the public deserves an accurate presentation of the reasons for the change in income distribution. The change is occurring in all the developed countries. The chart shows that policies that redistribute wealth and income have at most a modest effect on income shares. As President John F. Kennedy often said, the better way is "a rising tide that lifts all boats."

Mr. Meltzer, a professor of public policy at the Tepper School, Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author most recently of "Why Capitalism?" just published by Oxford University Press.

"Adam Smith vs. Crony Capitalism:  The Scottish philosopher's suspicions about business people were well-founded," by Sheldon Richman, Reason Magazine, March 9, 2012 ---
http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/09/adam-smith-vs-crony-capitalism

I admit it: I like Adam Smith. His perceptiveness never fails to impress. True, he didn’t foresee the marginal revolution that Carl Menger would launch a century later (with, less significantly in my view, Jevons and Walras), but give the guy a break. The Wealth of Nations is a great piece of work.

One thing I find refreshing in Smith is his wariness of business people. This is something we ought to frequently remind market skeptics. Smith knew the difference between being sympathetic to the competitive economy—which he called the “system of natural liberty”—and being sympathetic to owners of capital (who might well have acquired it by less-than-kosher means, that is, through political privilege). He knew something about business lobbies.

This famous passage from book 1, chapter of Wealth is often quoted by opponents of the free market:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The quote is used to justify antitrust law and other government intervention. But as has often been pointed out in response, Smith had no such policies in mind. We know this because he immediately follows with:

It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Prime Beneficiaries

Government should do nothing to encourage or enable attempts to limit competition. But of course government does that all the time at the behest of business and to the detriment of consumers and workers. Hampering competition raises prices for the former and weakens bargaining power—and therefore lowers wages—for the latter. Those groups would be the prime beneficiaries of freed markets.

That’s not the only time Smith expresses his anti-business sentiment. In the next chapter he discusses the division of income among landlords, workers, and owners of capital. Here Smith and the classicals suffered from their lack of marginal analysis, subjectivism, and thoroughgoing methodological individualism. As Professor Joseph Salerno has written,

Regarding the question concerning the determination of the incomes of the factors of production, the Classical analysis was almost completely worthless because, once again, it was conducted in terms of broad and homogeneous classes, such as “labor” “land” and “capital.” This diverted the Classical theorists from the important task of explaining the market value or actual prices of specific kinds of resources, instead favoring a chimerical search for the principles by which the aggregate income shares of the three classes of factor owners—laborers, landlords and capitalists—are governed. The Classical school’s theory of distribution was thus totally disconnected from its quasi-praxeological theory of price, and focused almost exclusively on the differing objective qualities of land, labor, and capital as the explanation for the division of aggregate income among them. Whereas the core of Classical price and production theory included a sophisticated theory of calculable action, Classical distribution theory crudely focused on the technical qualities of goods alone.

“Narrow the Competition”

Nevertheless, Smith’s chapter contains another perceptive skeptical reference to “those who live by profit.” He writes:

Merchants and master manufacturers are . . . the two classes of people who commonly employ the largest capitals, and who by their wealth draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness of understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects, than with regard to the latter. . . . The interest of the dealers . . . in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. [Emphasis added.]

Smith harbored no romanticism about those who have long seen rent-seeking as the path to wealth not available in the freed market. In case we didn’t quite get his point, Smith goes on:

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [that is, 'those who live by profit'], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." [Emphasis added.]

Continued in article

The American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm


Question
Does acceptance of racial cultural and religious diversity correlate with national "happiness?
How about gender diversity?
Scroll way down at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

The American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

American Dream --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream
Often the goal of an American Dream is not so much betterment of your own life but betterment of the lives of your children and grandchildren.
The Hendersons featured in this article have two of their own girls plus a girl and boy that they adopted in China.

Could it be that tax revisionists in Denmark are beginning to anticipate (by reducing tax rates)
value added from something like an American Dream being introduced in Denmark?

Does the American Dream add more good than harm?

A Message from Jim Peters on the AECM

A couple of years ago, 60 minutes interview a bunch of Danish citizens because the Danes had once again topped the international surveys as the happiest people on earth. Americans, as with most international measures, were somewhere in the middle of the pack. The Dane's advice to Americans was to dump the American Dream because it caused more harm than good. The core of the American Dream seems to be equating wealth to happiness and setting off on a constant quest for more wealth. The Danes advice was to focus more on non-economic sources of happiness and learn to appreciate what you have.

Obviously, all this is an anathema to Americans and some of the reaction to the Dane's comments included epithets like "losers" and "hippies." But, the fact is that they are happier than Americans.

Jim

Jensen Comment
I take issue with Jim's quoted phrase that the American Dream in America "caused more harm than good." In my opinion, most of what we have that is good in America was built in one way or another on somebody's American Dream, a somebody willing to take financial and even physical risks, work tirelessly to build or rebuild something (possibly making creative innovations along the way), and pass the fruits of entrepreneurial labor on so that other Americans can find jobs and other Americans can enjoy the goods and services provided by the American Dreams of others.

Continued with pictures at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

The China Dream:  Rise of the Billionaire Tiger Women from Poverty
"Tigress Tycoons,"
by Amy Chua, Newsweek Magazine Cover Story, March 12, 2012, pp. 30-39 ---
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/03/04/amy-chua-profiles-four-female-tycoons-in-china.html

Like a relentless overachiever, China is eagerly collecting superlatives. It’s the world’s fastest-growing major economy. It boasts the world’s biggest hydropower plant, shopping mall, and crocodile farm (home to 100,000 snapping beasts). It’s building the world’s largest airport (the size of Bermuda). And it now has more self-made female billionaires than any other country in the world.

This is not only because China has more females than any other nation. Many of these extraordinary women rose from nothing, despite living in a traditionally patriarchal society. They are a beguiling advertisement for the New China—bold, entrepreneurial, and tradition-breaking.

Four standouts among China’s intriguing new superwomen are Zhang Xin, the factory worker turned glamorous real-estate billionaire, with 3 million followers on Weibo (China’s Twitter); talk-show mogul Yang Lan, a blend of Audrey Hepburn and Oprah Winfrey; restaurant tycoon Zhang Lan, who as a girl slept between a pigsty and a chicken coop; and Peggy Yu Yu, cofounder and CEO of one of China’s biggest online retailers. None of these women inherited her money, and unlike many of the richest Chinese who are reluctant to draw public scrutiny to their path to wealth, they are proud to tell their stories.

How did these women make it to the top in the wild, wild East? Did they pay a price, either in their family or their professional lives? What was it that distinguished them from their famously hardworking compatriots? As I set out to explore these questions, my interest was partly personal. All four of my subjects lived for extended periods in the West. As a Chinese-American, and now the infamous Tiger Mom, I was curious: how “Chinese” were these new Chinese tigresses?

It turns out that each of these women, in her own way, is a dynamic combination of East and West. Perhaps this is one secret to their breathtaking success.

Zhang Xin is a rags-to-riches tale right out of Dickens. She was born in Beijing in 1965. The next year Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and millions, including intellectuals and party dissidents, were purged or forcibly relocated to primitive rural areas. Children were encouraged to turn in their parents and teachers as counterrevolutionaries. Returning to Beijing in 1972, Zhang remembers sleeping on office desks, using books for pillows. At 14 she left for Hong Kong with her mother, and for five years she worked in a factory by day, attending school at night.

“I was a miserable kid,” she told me. With her chic cropped leather jacket and infectious laughter, the cofounder of the $4.6 billion Soho China real-estate empire is today an odd combination of measured calculation and warm spontaneity. “My mother drove me in school so hard. That generation didn’t know how to express love.

“But it wasn’t just me. It was all of China. I don’t think anybody was happy. If you look at photos from those days, no one is smiling.” She mentioned the contemporary artist Zhang Xiaogang, who paints “cold, emotionless” faces. “That’s exactly how we all grew up.”

. . .

But the four women I interviewed are a new breed. Progressive, worldly, and open to the media, they are in many ways not representative of China, past or present. Perhaps they are merely the lucky winners of the 1990s free-for-all in China, a window that may already be closing. Or perhaps they are the forerunners of a China still to come, in which paths to success are far more open. Each has found a way to dynamically fuse East and West, to staggering commercial success. It may still be a long way off, but if China can achieve a similar alchemy—melding its tremendous economic potential and traditional values with Western innovation, the rule of law, and individual liberties—it would be a land of opportunity tough to beat.

"Asian Women Taking GMAT On the Rise," by Allison Damast, Business Week, February 29, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/asian-women-taking-gmat-on-the-rise

If slow and steady wins the race, female business school applicants are making their way closer and closer to the finish line. In the last testing year, a record 106,800 women took the exam, making up 41 percent of all test takers, up from 40 percent the year before, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which offers the exam. This is the third consecutive year that more than 100,000 women have sat for the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), with much of the increase continuing to be driven by East Asian women, says Michelle Sparkman-Renz, GMAC’s director of research communications.

“It’s quite significant,” Sparkman-Renz says. “When we first saw it happen in 2009, you wondered if it was a fluke or part of the recession. But we’ve continued to see a new generation of women in MBA and master’s programs, so it feels like it is here to stay.”

This year’s report is good news for business schools, at which women are still far from a majority on most campuses. Female enrollment at most top U.S. business schools still hovers at just over 30 percent, though many business schools are making more concerted efforts to attract women. This year, women make up 45 percent of the MBA class at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School—the largest number in the school’s history—and female enrollment jumped by nearly 40 percent this year at several schools, including Harvard Business School.

About 70 percent of full-time MBA programs reported having made specialized outreach to women last year, up from 54 percent in 2010, GMAC says. Specialized master’s programs are also increasing their efforts in this area, with half of master’s of accounting programs and a quarter of master’s of finance programs reporting that they are trying to increase the proportion of women in their applicant pool. Business schools, especially those in the U.S., are trying to take advantage of surging interest from female applicants, says Elissa Ellis-Sangster, director of the Forté Foundation, a consortium of 39 business schools working to increase the number of women pursuing MBAs.

“A lot of these outreach-and-marketing efforts in master’s programs is directed towards reaching those younger women students,” she says. “Schools are reaching deeper into the pipeline than ever before.”

U.S. women still lead the way when it comes to testing volume among women worldwide, even though fewer overall took the exam last year. There were 45,735 U.S. women who took the GMAT in 2011, down from 50,053 in 2010—a nearly 8 percent decrease. GMAC attributes the decline to a strengthening U.S. economy, which typically results in a reduction in applications to MBA programs.

East Asian and Southeast Asian women are largely making up the difference. Of the 10 global regions that GMAC tracks, women in East and Southeast Asia accounted for the largest portion of test takers last year—58 percent, up from 54.6 percent in 2010—and are part of a rapidly growing younger female GMAT pipeline. Worldwide, women younger than 25 now make up more than half, or 54 percent, of female examinees, up from 45.5 percent in 2010, GMAC says.

Nowhere is this trend more evident than in China, where younger women are looking to burnish their resumes by getting master’s degrees from prestigious Western business schools, says Peter von Loesecke, chief executive officer and managing director of the MBA Tour, which organizes admissions events with leading business schools in major cities around the world. Women made up 64 percent of all GMAT test takers in China last year, up from 62 percent in 2010, GMAC said.

The proportion of women registering for MBA Tour events in Beijing and Shanghai jumped from 47 percent in 2006 to 56 percent in 2010, von Loesecke says. Increasingly, many of these women have limited or no work experience. In 2010, the vast majority of registrants without work experience were women; in 2011, so many female registrants fell into that category that for the first time the organization denied some younger women admission to the Beijing and Shanghai tours, von Loesecke says.

“Rather than wait several years in a less-valued job to get an MBA, more Chinese women than men are opting for a master’s to launch their careers sooner,” von Loesecke wrote in an e-mail.

Continued in article

The American Dream versus the China Dream versus the Danish Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

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


Saylor.org: Free Education --- http://www.saylor.org/

Free lectures, videos, courses, and certificate credit from prestigious universities (including MITx) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Hard Choices for Developing Countries
"'World-Class' vs. Mass Education, by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/09/international-educators-debate-higher-education-priorities-developing-countries

Should developing nations expend their money and energy trying to build "world-class" universities that conduct job-creating research and educate the nation's elite, or focus on building more and better institutions to train the masses?

That question -- which echoes debates within many American states about relative funding for flagship research universities vs. community colleges and regional institutions -- drew barely a mention in the summary statement that emerged from an unusual symposium at the University of Oxford's Green Templeton College in January (though it was addressed a bit more directly in a set of recommendations released last month).

But the issue of whether developing nations should emphasize excellence or access as they build and strengthen their higher education systems undergirded much of the discussion of the three-day event, flaring at times into sharp disagreement among the attendees over "the extent to which the emerging world should be part of the educational arms race," says Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne.

Different observers would define that race differently, and with varying degrees of sympathy and scorn. But in general, most experts on higher education would equate it with the push to have institutions in the top of worldwide rankings (or "league tables," as they're called in much of the world) -- rankings dominated by criteria such as research funding and student selectivity as opposed to measures that emphasize democratic student access

Continued in article

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

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


National Center for Education Statistics --- http://nces.ed.gov/

Public.Resource.Org --- http://public.resource.org/

Jim Martin's listing of economic indicators on MAAW ---
http://maaw.info/EconomicIndicators.htm

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


"45,000 Students Cheated (and got caught) in British Universities in 3 Years," Inside Higher Ed, March 11, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/03/12/45000-students-cheated-british-universities-3-years 

Question
Why would you suspect that the error in this 45,000 estimate is not symmetrical about the number 45,000?

The answer is obvious if you accept the fact that many students also cheated but just did not get caught?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/45000-caught-cheating-at-britains-universities-7555109.html

The punishments for those who get caught seem rather light.

The accused

Clare Trayner, 23, was a geography student at Royal Holloway who was accused of cheating after anti-plagiarism software flagged up her essay

"Everyone was emailed to collect their essay, but mine was held back. I was then told to attend a formal meeting as I had been caught committing plagiarism. I knew I hadn't cheated but I wasn't clear on what the problem was.

"I was told one paragraph had been flagged up as resembling the content on an internet site. Eventually I was found guilty of plagiarism but as it was my first time I would be only marked down by 10 per cent on that module. My mark for the module went from a high 2:1 to a 2:2."

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


"The Battle Against Bad PowerPoint," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/techtherapy/2012/03/08/episode-93-the-battle-against-bad-powerpoint/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Video Tips on How to Improve Laptop Presentations ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/improving-powerpoint-style-presentations/32126?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads on bad PowerPoint are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#PowerPointHelpers


Outcomes Assessment

March 10, 2012 message from Penny Hanes

Can anyone point me to some good information on course specific outcomes assessment in an accounting program?

Penny Hanes,
Associate Professor
Mercyhurst University

March 11. 2012 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Penny,

Respondus has some testing software:

October 13, 2009 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

For anyone teaching online, this software is a "must-have". They have released a new (4.0) version with improved integration of multimedia. Below are some videos (created in Camtasia) that demonstrate key features of the software.

http://www.respondus.com/

They have tightened up the integration with publisher test banks.
Richard J. Campbell

mailto:campbell@rio.edu

Bob Jensen's threads for online assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#Examinations

There are different levels that you can approach such a topic. Many are based on the mastery learning theory of Benjamin Bloom ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Bloom


The best known accounting course assessment experiment using Bloom's Taxonomy, for an set of courses for an entire program, was funded by an Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) grant to a very fine accounting program at Kansas State University. The results of this and the other AECC experiences are available from the AAA (ISBN 0-86539-085-1) ---
http://aaahq.org/AECC/changegrant/cover.htm
The KSU outcomes are reported in Chapter 3 ---
http://aaahq.org/AECC/changegrant/chap3.htm
I think Lynn Thomas at KSU was one of the principal investigators.

Michael Krause, Le Moyne College, has conducted some AAA programs on Bloom's Taxonomy assessment.
Susan A. Lynn, University of Baltimore, has done some of this assessment for intermediate accounting.
Susan Wolcott, Canada's Chartered Accountancy School of Business, has delved into critical thinking assessment in accounting courses

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


One reason Mexico has the lowest poverty rate (along with Chile as a free trade country) south of the Rio Grande

A few days ago on the AECM listserv I mentioned that, in spite of all the media hype about drug gang violence in Mexico, the Mexican work force is quite good and competes very well with its neighbors to the south and north. In fact maybe this is why Chrysler is building a huge factory in Mexico to make Fiats to be sold in America. Uncle Sam now owns Chrysler but seems willing to let Chrysler build yet another factory in Mexico.

"Two ways to make a car," The Economist, March 10-16, 2012, pp. 48-49 --- http://www.economist.com/node/21549950

. . .

By throwing open its market under the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada and a host of other bilateral trade accords, Mexico has become a base from which carmakers export to both halves of the Americas, and worldwide. Volkswagen, for example, makes all its Beetles and Jettas there. Although Nissan produces some vehicles at a Renault plant in Brazil, most of those it sells in Latin America come from two plants in Mexico. In all, 2.1m of the 2.6m vehicles produced in Mexico last year were exported. In this section

By contrast, in Brazil the main aim of public policy has been to push carmakers to build local factories from which to supply the country’s huge domestic market. Only 540,000 of the 3.4m vehicles manufactured in the country last year were exported. Around three-quarters of Brazil’s car exports go to Argentina. Mercosur, to which both countries belong, has long aspired roughly to balance trade in cars and car parts between the two.

. . .

Mexico suffered a big shake-out of its industry when NAFTA came into effect in 1994. A decade ago it saw several hundred thousand jobs in assembly plants go to China. But openness to global competition has made Mexico’s surviving industries highly efficient. Industrial production has grown again in the past two years. Manufacturing’s share of GDP has remained steady at between 17% and 18% since 2003.

In contrast, Brazil’s government sees the country’s domestic market as an asset to be protected. And it sees imports from China, made even cheaper by the strength of the real, as a threat to its industry. “The regional economy has been threatened by predatory competition that has taken hold around the globe,” said Fernando Pimentel, the industry minister, last year. “Developed countries are those that have industry and we’re going to protect our own.”

Yet Brazil’s growing protectionism risks locking in high costs. The country has “a competitiveness problem, not a trade problem,” says Ricardo Mendes of Prospectiva, a consultancy in São Paulo. Manufacturing’s share of GDP has fallen from 17.2% in 2000 to 14.6% in 2011. Falling industrial production was one reason Brazil’s economy grew by just 2.7% last year. The blame lies mainly with high interest rates and other domestic burdens.

Mercosur was supposed to provide a bigger market for Brazilian industry. But Brazil is now locked in a series of trade spats with Argentina, which is even more protectionist. Débora Giorgi, Argentina’s industry minister, and Guido Mantega, Brazil’s finance minister, recently suggested that Mercosur should raise its common external tariff. That will not go down well with Uruguay and Paraguay, the group’s smaller members. But even if it did, it looks like a recipe for industrial decline.

 


"Asian Women Taking GMAT On the Rise," by Allison Damast, Business Week, February 29, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/asian-women-taking-gmat-on-the-rise

If slow and steady wins the race, female business school applicants are making their way closer and closer to the finish line. In the last testing year, a record 106,800 women took the exam, making up 41 percent of all test takers, up from 40 percent the year before, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which offers the exam. This is the third consecutive year that more than 100,000 women have sat for the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), with much of the increase continuing to be driven by East Asian women, says Michelle Sparkman-Renz, GMAC’s director of research communications.

“It’s quite significant,” Sparkman-Renz says. “When we first saw it happen in 2009, you wondered if it was a fluke or part of the recession. But we’ve continued to see a new generation of women in MBA and master’s programs, so it feels like it is here to stay.”

This year’s report is good news for business schools, at which women are still far from a majority on most campuses. Female enrollment at most top U.S. business schools still hovers at just over 30 percent, though many business schools are making more concerted efforts to attract women. This year, women make up 45 percent of the MBA class at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School—the largest number in the school’s history—and female enrollment jumped by nearly 40 percent this year at several schools, including Harvard Business School.

About 70 percent of full-time MBA programs reported having made specialized outreach to women last year, up from 54 percent in 2010, GMAC says. Specialized master’s programs are also increasing their efforts in this area, with half of master’s of accounting programs and a quarter of master’s of finance programs reporting that they are trying to increase the proportion of women in their applicant pool. Business schools, especially those in the U.S., are trying to take advantage of surging interest from female applicants, says Elissa Ellis-Sangster, director of the Forté Foundation, a consortium of 39 business schools working to increase the number of women pursuing MBAs.

“A lot of these outreach-and-marketing efforts in master’s programs is directed towards reaching those younger women students,” she says. “Schools are reaching deeper into the pipeline than ever before.”

U.S. women still lead the way when it comes to testing volume among women worldwide, even though fewer overall took the exam last year. There were 45,735 U.S. women who took the GMAT in 2011, down from 50,053 in 2010—a nearly 8 percent decrease. GMAC attributes the decline to a strengthening U.S. economy, which typically results in a reduction in applications to MBA programs.

East Asian and Southeast Asian women are largely making up the difference. Of the 10 global regions that GMAC tracks, women in East and Southeast Asia accounted for the largest portion of test takers last year—58 percent, up from 54.6 percent in 2010—and are part of a rapidly growing younger female GMAT pipeline. Worldwide, women younger than 25 now make up more than half, or 54 percent, of female examinees, up from 45.5 percent in 2010, GMAC says.

Nowhere is this trend more evident than in China, where younger women are looking to burnish their resumes by getting master’s degrees from prestigious Western business schools, says Peter von Loesecke, chief executive officer and managing director of the MBA Tour, which organizes admissions events with leading business schools in major cities around the world. Women made up 64 percent of all GMAT test takers in China last year, up from 62 percent in 2010, GMAC said.

The proportion of women registering for MBA Tour events in Beijing and Shanghai jumped from 47 percent in 2006 to 56 percent in 2010, von Loesecke says. Increasingly, many of these women have limited or no work experience. In 2010, the vast majority of registrants without work experience were women; in 2011, so many female registrants fell into that category that for the first time the organization denied some younger women admission to the Beijing and Shanghai tours, von Loesecke says.

“Rather than wait several years in a less-valued job to get an MBA, more Chinese women than men are opting for a master’s to launch their careers sooner,” von Loesecke wrote in an e-mail.

Continued in article

The American Dream versus the China Dream versus the Danish Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

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


Question
Where is there currently the least amount of grade inflation?

 

States Graded by Accountability
The Center for Public Integrity, March 2012
http://www.iwatchnews.org/2012/03/19/8423/grading-nation-how-accountable-your-state

 

 

 

Fraud Beat
"Contest for Funniest New Jersey Joke Has a Winner," by Jonathan Weil, Bloomberg, March 22, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-22/contest-for-funniest-new-jersey-joke-has-a-winner.html

Did you hear the latest joke about New Jersey? A group of investigative journalists this week released a report calling it the least corruptible state in the country. How did that happen?

Easy. We bribed them.

ll kidding aside, this is a state where in 2009 three mayors, two assemblymen and five rabbis were among 44 charged in a single money-laundering and bribery sting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One of those mayors, Peter Cammarano, was from Hoboken, where I live. He was sentenced to 24 months in prison. Five years before his arrest, another former Hoboken mayor, Anthony Russo, pleaded guilty to corruption charges. His son now sits on the city council.

In New Jersey, we expect corruption. It’s built into the system. We have 566 municipalities, the most per capita of any state. Local governments tax the citizenry dry, while preserving the opportunities for graft that flow from operating redundant public services. The state legislature likes it this way and always has. Whadayagonnado?

So it was quite a story this week when the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based nonprofit, ranked New Jersey as the state with the lowest corruption risk in the U.S. (Local corruption didn’t count, it said. Only “corruption risk” in state government did.) There’s a simple explanation for how the group reached its conclusion, too: Its methodology was awful. Answering Questions

Here’s how the center got the New Jersey data for its nationwide “State Integrity Investigation.” Last year, it hired Colleen O’Dea, a freelance journalist who worked for about 26 years at the Daily Record in Morris County, to answer a list of 330 questions about New Jersey state government. Each called for a numerical score. O’Dea, 49, said she interviewed 26 people for the assignment, five in person. The center paid her $5,000.

The center also hired a former local newspaper editor to review her work. From there, the center provided O’Dea’s responses to another Washington-based nonprofit called Global Integrity. That group fed the answers into an algorithm, said Randy Barrett, a Center for Public Integrity spokesman. The results from the algorithm were used to generate letter grades in 14 categories and an overall score for New Jersey of 87 percent, or a B+.

The center hired reporters for every other state, too, along with “peer reviewers” to read their responses. Each reporter got the same list of queries. The center called this investigative reporting. Really, though, it was just a bunch of people answering questionnaires.

For example, O’Dea gave New Jersey a top score of 100 percent when asked to evaluate this statement: “In practice, the state-run pension funds disclose information about their investment and financial activity in a transparent manner.”

How did she decide that? The questionnaire said to give a high score if such information was available online at little or no cost. Her notes, posted on the center’s website, say she asked someone at the New Jersey State League of Municipalities about this. “Very transparent,” her notes said. The center gave the state an “A” in the category of “state pension-fund management,” based partly on O’Dea’s answer to that question.

Now consider that, in August 2010, New Jersey became the only state ever sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC said the state for years lied to municipal- bond investors about the underfunded condition of its two largest pension plans. New Jersey settled without admitting or denying the agency’s claims. Making a Difference

When I asked O’Dea in a telephone interview if she knew about the SEC lawsuit, she said she didn’t. Later, she e-mailed me to say that she had, in fact, been aware of it, and that “the state has since owned up to the issue.”

Either way, it’s hard to believe New Jersey deserves an A for how it manages its pension funds. Yet for all we know, this grade could have made the difference between finishing No. 1 in the rankings or not. The center ranked Connecticut No. 2 with an overall grade of B, or 86 percent, one point behind New Jersey.

Another example from the survey: “In practice, the state- run pension funds have sufficient staff and resources with which to fulfill their mandate.” O’Dea gave another top score. This time she listed a second source, in addition to the fellow from the league of municipalities: a spokesman at the New Jersey Department of the Treasury. He told her the answer was yes.

And so forth. The center gave New Jersey’s insurance department a B+. One of the inputs was the 100 percent score O’Dea awarded in response to this statement: “In practice, the state insurance commission has a professional, full-time staff.”

Her notes listed two sources: Someone from the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of New Jersey, and a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance. Both said the statement was true. (Imagine that.) O’Dea said the sources she chose “seemed to logically have knowledge of the question.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
All jokes aside, President Obama's home town is still the most corrupt city in the United States

"Chicago Called Most Corrupt City In Nation," CBS Chicago TV, February 14, 2012 ---
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/02/14/chicago-called-most-corrupt-city-in-nation/

A former Chicago alderman turned political science professor/corruption fighter has found that Chicago is the most corrupt city in the country.

He cites data from the U.S. Department of Justice to prove his case. And, he says, Illinois is third-most corrupt state in the country.

University of Illinois professor Dick Simpson estimates the cost of corruption at $500 million.

It’s essentially a corruption tax on citizens who bear the cost of bad behavior (police brutality, bogus contracts, bribes, theft and ghost pay-rolling to name a few) and the costs needed to prosecute it.

“We first of all, we have a long history,” Simpson said. “The first corruption trial was in 1869 when alderman and county commissioners were convicted of rigging a contract to literally whitewash City Hall.”

Corruption, he said, is intertwined with city politics

“We have had machine politics since the Great Chicago Fire of 1871,” he said. “Machine politics breeds corruption inevitably.”

Simpson says Hong Kong and Sydney were two similarly corrupt cities that managed to change their ways. He says Chicago can too, but it will take decades.

He’ll be presenting his work before the new Chicago Ethics Task Force meeting tomorrow at City Hall.

University of Illinois at Chicago Report on Massive Political Corruption in Chicago
"Chicago Is a 'Dark Pool Of Political Corruption'," Judicial Watch, February 22, 2010 ---
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2010/feb/dark-pool-political-corruption-chicago

A major U.S. city long known as a hotbed of pay-to-play politics infested with clout and patronage has seen nearly 150 employees, politicians and contractors get convicted of corruption in the last five decades.

Chicago has long been distinguished for its pandemic of public corruption, but actual cumulative figures have never been offered like this. The astounding information is featured in a lengthy report published by one of Illinois’s biggest public universities.

Cook County, the nation’s second largest, has been a “dark pool of political corruption” for more than a century, according to the informative study conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago, the city’s largest public college. The report offers a detailed history of corruption in the Windy City beginning in 1869 when county commissioners were imprisoned for rigging a contract to paint City Hall.

It’s downhill from there, with a plethora of political scandals that include 31 Chicago alderman convicted of crimes in the last 36 years and more than 140 convicted since 1970. The scams involve bribes, payoffs, padded contracts, ghost employees and whole sale subversion of the judicial system, according to the report. 

Elected officials at the highest levels of city, county and state government—including prominent judges—were the perpetrators and they worked in various government locales, including the assessor’s office, the county sheriff, treasurer and the President’s Office of Employment and Training. The last to fall was renowned political bully Isaac Carothers, who just a few weeks ago pleaded guilty to federal bribery and tax charges.

In the last few years alone several dozen officials have been convicted and more than 30 indicted for taking bribes, shaking down companies for political contributions and rigging hiring. Among the convictions were fraud, violating court orders against using politics as a basis for hiring city workers and the disappearance of 840 truckloads of asphalt earmarked for city jobs. 

A few months ago the city’s largest newspaper revealed that Chicago aldermen keep a secret, taxpayer-funded pot of cash (about $1.3 million) to pay family members, campaign workers and political allies for a variety of questionable jobs. The covert account has been utilized for decades by Chicago lawmakers but has escaped public scrutiny because it’s kept under wraps. 

Judicial Watch has extensively investigated Chicago corruption, most recently the conflicted ties of top White House officials to the city, including Barack and Michelle Obama as well as top administration officials like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual and Senior Advisor David Axelrod. In November Judicial Watch sued Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's office to obtain records related to the president’s failed bid to bring the Olympics to the city.

title:
Best and Worst Run States in America — An Analysis Of All 50 (Debt, Government, Governmental, Entitlements, States, California, Massachusetts, Wyoming, Minnesota)
citation:
From the AICPA CPA Letter Daily on December 7, 2011
 
For the second year, 24/7 Wall St. ranked the 50 states according to how well they are run. Factors included the state's financial health, standard of living, education system, employment rate, crime rate and how efficiently the state uses its resources to provide government services. 24/7 Wall St. determined that Wyoming is the best-run state and California is the worst run. 24/7 Wall St.
 
http://247wallst.com/2011/11/28/best-and-worst-run-states-in-america-an-analysis-of-all-50/
brief description:
 

Jensen Comment
The best-run state is Wyoming. The worst-run state is California  Most of the Top Ten best-run states have relatively low populations. Small seems to be better in terms of state government efficiency, although social programs and cold weather in those states tend to repel welfare and Medicaid recipients from around the nation. It's difficult to draw liberal versus conservative explanations for best-run states since liberal states of Vermont and Minnesota are mixed in the Top Ten along with the conservative states of Wyoming, Utah, and the two Dakota states.

Minnesota has the least debt per capita, but the union-run state of Massachusetts has the most debt per capita. This is somewhat interesting because both Minnesota and Massachusetts are viewed as liberal states (more so in the days of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale). The relatively conservative southern states tend to be below the median on state debt per capita. The western states are more variable. I accuse Taxachusetts of being union-run in part because Boston refuses to allow Wal-Mart stores until Wal-Mart becomes unionized.

When it comes to debt per capita there is less denominator effect than I suspected beforehand, although small populations become a huge factor behind the high debt loads per capita in Alaska, Rhode Island, and Delaware. Alaska can also afford a higher debt load because of vast untapped natural resources.

I watched two very liberal commentators from Boston on television last night arguing that more debt load in Taxachusetts to support increased spending for social programs was a good investment of that state's economy. This seems to be questionable given where Taxachusetts already stands in relation to debt per capita.

Bob Jensen's threads on state taxation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
You have to scroll down to find the state tax comparisons.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#GovernmentalAccounting

Bob Jensen's threads on political corruption are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#Lawmakers

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudUpdates.htm


With all the media focus on Governor Walker's recall challenge (funded my labor unions across the nation) in Wisconsin, less attention is given to states where there's somewhat more harmony with unions and voters.

Sometimes what it takes is Democratic Party leaders to achieve fiscal sanity (California excepted) because labor unions are tied so close to the Democratic Party.

"The Democrat Who Took on the Unions:  Rhode Island's treasurer Gina Raimondo talks about how she persuaded the voting public, labor rank-and-file and a liberal legislature to pass the most far-reaching pension reform in decades," by Allysia Finley, The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204136404577207433215374066.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

So this is Gina Raimondo? The state treasurer who single-handedly overhauled Rhode Island's pension system and has unions screaming bloody murder? I had imagined her a bit, well, bigger. If not larger than life like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, then at least life-size. Ms. Raimondo couldn't be much taller than five feet, which may have caused some to underestimate her. That isn't the only thing that may have surprised people.

The former venture capitalist is a Democrat, which means that she believes in government as a force for good. But "a government that doesn't work is in no one's interest," she says. "Budgets that don't balance, public programs that aren't funded, pension funds that are running out of money, schools that aren't funded—How does that help anyone? I don't really care if you're a Republican or Democrat or you want to fight about the size of government. How about a government that just works? Put your tax dollar in and get a return out the other end."

Yes, that would be nice. Unfortunately, public pensions all over the country are gobbling up more and more taxpayer money and producing nothing in return but huge deficits. It's not even certain whether employees in their 20s and 30s will retire with a pension, since many state and municipal pension systems are projected to run dry in the next two to three decades.

That included Rhode Island's system until last year, when Ms. Raimondo drove perhaps the boldest pension reform of the last decade through the state's Democratic-controlled General Assembly. The new law shifts all workers from defined-benefit pensions into hybrid plans, which include a modest annuity and a defined-contribution component. It also increases the retirement age to 67 from 62 for all workers and suspends cost-of-living adjustments for retirees until the pension system, which is only about 50% funded, reaches a more healthy state.

Several states have increased the retirement age or created a new tier of benefits for future workers, but reforms that only affect not-yet-hired employees don't save much money. A lot of "people say we've done pension reform when all they've done is tweaked something," Ms. Raimondo points out. "This problem will not go away, and I don't know what people are thinking. By the nature of the problem, it gets bigger and harder the longer you wait."

The problem was particularly acute in Rhode Island since there are more retirees collecting pensions than workers paying into the system. Plus, as Ms. Raimondo says, "it's a small state with not a lot of growth, an expensive cost structure in government, and it's not a good combination." Making the state even more expensive by raising taxes would have caused many Rhode Islanders to leave. When the now-bankrupt town of Central Falls raised property taxes to finance worker pensions, many residents fled, sending the city into a tailspin.

Because there has been little legislative or public support for raising taxes, the Ocean State has been cutting public services to pay its pension bills. A few years ago Ms. Raimondo read "an article in the paper about libraries closing and public bus service being cut nights, weekends and holidays, and I just thought it doesn't have to be this way." The story made her consider a bid for treasurer.

In the last 15 years, Ms. Raimondo, who is 40 and the mother of two children, has helped found two venture-capital firms, Village Ventures and Point Judith Capital. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and has a bachelor's in economics from Harvard and law degree from Yale. Still, serving as treasurer of the smallest state in the country probably wouldn't be the next career step for someone with such impressive credentials and ambition.

Continued in article

But the public unions are still pushing their burdens on taxpayers
"Public Unions Send Medical Bills to Taxpayers," by Jason Polan, Bloomberg, March 15, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-15/unions-send-doctor-bills-to-taxpayers-steven-greenhut.html

The U.S. public pension mess, with its $2 trillion to $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities, is such a volcano of gloom that it takes a potentially bigger problem to turn our eyes away from it.

Turn your attention instead to the size of the taxpayer- backed health-care obligations for public employees.

“Frankly, if you want to look at a truly scary set of unfunded liabilities, health care for retirees is a better choice than pensions,” said California Treasurer Bill Lockyer in an October speech meant to play down the pension crisis.

Not that Lockyer or his Democratic and union allies want to reduce any benefits that are at the heart of the problem. In their view, the real scourge is “pension envy” or perhaps “health-care envy” -- the failure of the private sector to keep up with government-benefit levels.

States and localities make their own decisions on how to finance these health-care policies. Far more government employees than private workers receive health and dental care -- and those plans cost more, require lower employee contributions and provide more comprehensive coverage.

Such generosity comes at a cost to taxpayers and municipal budgets, especially given the “promise now, pay later” approach of officials. As a recent Bloomberg News article noted, while most public pension plans are 75 percent funded, the figure for health-care plans is only 4 percent nationwide. So unlike pensions, governments are setting aside little money in advance to pay for their future obligations. Courts Back Unions

Public-sector unions and their allies have foiled even modest efforts to scale back pensions, and the courts have done the rest. Now the unions are gearing up to fight changes in health-care plans, as well -- an issue that has reared its head after Stockton, California, announced that it was possibly headed toward a Chapter 9 bankruptcy driven by $417 million in liabilities caused by an absurdly generous lifetime medical plan.

The unions’ job is considerably easier thanks to a California Supreme Court decision in November that will make it as hard to change health-care benefits as it is to deal with pensions.

It’s not that leaders in California, which is in the deepest public-employee-related fiscal hole, don’t understand the scope of the problem. Controller John Chiang released a report in February that acknowledges a $62.1 billion unfunded health-care liability.

“California should pay $4.7 billion in 2011-12 to pay for present and future retiree health benefits,” according to Chiang’s office. “In the 2011-12 budget act, the state provided $1.71 billion to only cover current retirees’ health and dental benefits.”

With pensions, government employers and employees contribute a percentage of income into retirement funds. The liabilities depend on how well the funds perform, with higher estimated rates of return leading to a lower predicted debt and vice versa. But as Bloomberg News reported, “States haven’t financed almost 96 percent of the $627.4 billion they were projected to owe for future retiree benefits in 2010.” They try to pay these health-care costs as they go.

Few governments have the excess cash available to prepay these already promised benefits. But often there are straightforward ways to solve the problem. In 2006, Orange County cut its $1.4 billion health-care liability, in a model effort touted not just by the Republican board of supervisors but by the union representing county workers. The union said the deal demonstrated its willingness to help fix the system. Reforms Overturned

Retirees had been placed in the same medical pool as current workers. Because retirees are older, their health-care costs are higher, so the county was subsidizing the rates for retirees. The county separated the pool, raised the monthly contributions paid by retirees and reduced the unfunded liability by $815 million. But the retirees’ group sued the county and took the case to the state Supreme Court, which ruled in a way that has made it far easier to challenge cutbacks of these benefits.

Continued in article

U.S. Government Still Pays Two Civil War Pensions (boy are these guys old)---
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.

Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of pension accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#Pensions

Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting


From the Scout Report on March 9, 2012

Weathermob --- http://weathermob.me/ 

Can you crowdsource the weather? That might be difficult, but you can certainly use Weathermob to crowdsource information, opinions, news, and updates about the weather. After downloading the application, visitors can get updates about local weather conditions or add their own observations in the form of tags and commentary. Also, visitors can follow weather report updates from family and friends all over the world. This version of Weathermob is compatible with devices running iOS 4.0 and newer.


Academia.edu --- http://www.academia.edu/ 

For academics all over the world, Academia.edu is a place "to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow." Currently, over one million academics have signed up, and there are over 1.2 million papers available online here. It is completely free to sign up, and registered members can share their own professional work, follow other academics, and also look up analytical statistics on various works in the database. This site is compatible with all operating systems.

Jensen Comment
This site has a very international focus. In Accounting there's contact information to international accountants and links to over 50 papers.


Can peer-to-peer car sharing "go big"?
Let a Stranger Drive Your Car? More Owners Say 'Yes'
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/06/147962028/let-a-stranger-drive-your-car-more-owners-say-yes

Personal car-sharing is a new twist on auto rentals
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/15/local/la-me-personal-car-sharing-20120215

Zipcar invests in Wheelz
http://www.boston.com/Boston/businessupdates/2012/02/zipcar-invests-
wheelz/VUMLqJn40Y2EEuvIEfCRtL/index.html


Wheelz receives $13.7 million to expand beyond Stanford
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/02/23/wheelz-receives-13-7-million-to-expand-beyond-stanford/

A brief history of car sharing
http://www.portlandonline.com/transportation/index.cfm?a=370287&c=45195

Taking the Wheel: Manufacturers' Catalogs from the First Decade of American
Automobiles
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&col_id=153


From the Scout Report on March 16, 2012

PDF to HTML Converter --- http://www.pdftohtml.net/ 

If you're looking for a way to convert pdf files to html, this helpful application can do just that. Visitors just need to click the browse button here to locate the pdf that they wish to transfer. After doing this, they will supply their own email, and seconds later, they will have the converted file. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


Hubii --- http://www.hubii.com 

Are you tired of looking through news items online that aren't relevant to your locale? Hubii gives users the ability to connect with items specifically geared towards to their immediate locations and various interests. The application uses users' current locations to look for categories of news in the region. Visitors can watch the three-minute video here to get started as well. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


"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


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


Education Tutorials

Saylor.org: Free Education --- http://www.saylor.org/

TED, Known for Idea Talks, Releases Educational Videos --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/ted-known-for-idea-talks-releases-educational-videos/35745?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/

Free lectures, videos, courses, and certificate credit from prestigious universities (including MITx) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Do the Math (careers for math teachers) --- http://crr.math.arizona.edu/dtm.php

World Population --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
TED Video:  Paul Gilding: The Earth is full --- Click Here
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_is_full.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDTalks_video+%28TEDTalks+Main+%28SD%29+-+Site%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
 

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


Khan Academy --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy
Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/

On March 11, 2012 CBS Sixty Minutes broadcast a great module on the Khan Academy ---
Khan Academy: The future of education?  Click Here
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57394905/khan-academy-the-future-of-education/?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
 

With the backing of Gates and Google, Khan Academy and its free online educational videos are moving into the classroom and across the world. Their goal: to revolutionize how we teach and learn. Sanjay Gupta reports. Web Extras

Khan Academy: The future of education? Khan Academy: School of the future Khan Academy in the classroom More »

(CBS News) Sal Khan is a math, science, and history teacher to millions of students, yet none have ever seen his face. Khan is the voice and brains behind Khan Academy, a free online tutoring site that may have gotten your kid out of an algebra bind with its educational how-to videos. Now Khan Academy is going global. Backed by Google, Gates, and other Internet powerhouses, Sal Khan wants to change education worldwide, and his approach is already being tested in some American schools. Sanjay Gupta reports.

The following script is from "Teacher to the World" which aired on March 11, 2012. Sanjay Gupta is the correspondent. Denise Schrier Cetta, producer. Matthew Danowski, editor.

Take a moment and remember your favorite teacher - now imagine that teacher could reach, not 30 kids in a classroom, but millions of students all over the world. That's exactly what Sal Khan is doing on his website Khan Academy. With its digital lessons and simple exercises, he's determined to transform how we learn at every level. One of his most famous pupils, Bill Gates, says Khan -- this "teacher to the world," is giving us all a glimpse of the future of education.

35-year-old Sal Khan may look like a bicycle messenger, but with three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, his errand is intensely intellectual. In his tiny office above a tea shop in Silicon Valley, he settles in to do what he's done thousands of times before.

 

[Sal Khan: We've talked a lot now about the demand curve and consumer surplus. Now let's think about the supply curve.]

 

He's recording a 10-minute economics lesson. It's so simple - all you hear is his voice and all you see is his colorful sketches on a digital blackboard.

Watch Internet phenomenon Sal Khan's video lessons

[Khan: In this video we are going to talk about the law of demand.]

 

When Khan finishes the lecture, he uploads it to his website - where it joins the more than 3,000 other lessons he's done. In just a couple of years he's gone from having a few hundred pupils to more than four million every month.

 

Sanjay Gupta: Has it sunk in to you that you are probably the most watched teacher in the world now?

 

Khan: I, you know, I try not to say things like that to myself. You don't want to think about it too much because it can I think paralyze you a little bit.

 

[Khan: So if we get rid of the percent sign, we move the decimal over...]

 

He's amassed a library of math lectures...

 

[Khan: 12 plus four is sixteen...]

 

Starting with basic addition and building all the way through advanced calculus.

 

[Khan: We are taking limited delta x approach to zero. It's the exact same thing.]

 

But he's not just a math wiz, he has this uncanny ability to break down even the most complicated subjects, including physics, biology, astronomy, history, medicine.

 

Gupta: How much reading do you do ahead of time?

 

Khan: It depends what I'm doing. If I'm doing something that I haven't visited for a long time, you know, since high school I'll go buy five textbooks in it. And I'll try to read every textbook. I'll read whatever I can find on the Internet.

 

[Khan: Let's talk about one of the most important biological processes...]

Continued in article

The Always-Popular Open Sharing Salmon Khan
"An Outsider Calls for a Teaching Revolution," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/An-Outsider-Calls-for-a/130923/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

In just a few short years, Salman Khan has built a free online educational institution from scratch that has nudged major universities to offer free self-guided courses and inspired many professors to change their teaching methods.

His creation is called Khan Academy, and its core is a library of thousands of 10-minute educational videos, most of them created by Mr. Khan himself. The format is simple but feels intimate: Mr. Khan's voice narrates as viewers watch him sketch out his thoughts on a digital whiteboard. He made the first videos for faraway cousins who asked for tutoring help. Encouraging feedback by others who watched the videos on YouTube led him to start the academy as a nonprofit.

More recently Mr. Khan has begun adding what amounts to a robot tutor to the site that can quiz visitors on their knowledge and point them to either remedial video lessons if they fail or more-advanced video lessons if they pass. The site issues badges and online "challenge patches" that students can put on their Web résumés.

He guesses that the demand for his service was one inspiration for his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to start MITx, its self-guided online courses that give students the option of taking automatically graded tests to earn a certificate.

Mr. Khan also works the speaking circuit, calling on professors to move away from a straight lecture model by assigning prerecorded lectures as homework and using class time for more interactive exercises, or by having students use self-paced computer systems like Khan Academy during class while professors are available to answer questions. "It has made universities—and I can cite examples of this—say, Why should we be giving 300-person lectures anymore?" he said in a recent interview with The Chronicle.

Mr. Khan, now 35, has no formal training in education, though he does have two undergraduate degrees and a master's from MIT, as well as an M.B.A. from Harvard. He spent most of his career as a hedge-fund analyst. Mr. Khan also has the personal endorsement of Bill Gates, as well as major financial support from Mr. Gates's foundation. That outside-the-academy status makes some traditional academics cool on his project.

"Sometimes I get a little frustrated when people say, Oh, they're taking a Silicon Valley approach to education. I'm like, Yes, that's exactly right. Silicon Valley is where the most creativity, the most open-ended, the most pushing the envelope is happening," he says. "And Silicon Valley recognizes more than any part of the world that we're having trouble finding students capable of doing that."

 

Jensen Comment
Important takeaways from the Sixty Minutes video is that there are currently 40-50 million users of Khan Academy. This has to be the future of learning technical modules, although inspiration, learning motivation, and learning certification (e.g., grades) must have other sources. I might note that the video modules used in the Khan Academy are very similar to the Camtasia Videos that I prepared to teach technical details to my students in accounting theory and AIS ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
These videos may not run on Windows 7 machines because of something bad that happened with Windows 7 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/VideoCodecProblems.htm

The $50 million grant from the Gates Foundation enabled the Khan Academy to hire some sophisticated engineers who, among other things, have written software for tracking learning progress of users.

The most wonderful feature of the technical learning modules at the Khan Academy is that there are thousands of them and they are all free. Students aged 10-100 can learn a vast amount of technical things if they are inspired and motivated to do so for learning's sake. They are great supplements for courses being taken for grades and transcripts. But they still only cover selected disciplines in math, science, technology, and social science. The coverage is still lacking in fields like accounting, law, and business except where quantitative methods like statistical analysis may come into play. But the Khan Academy is not finished adding new modules by any means.

I might add that I found some relatively advanced-level accountancy modules at the Khan Academy such as CDO accounting and fair value accounting. But the Khan Academy still does not come close to covering what we teach in accountancy, auditing, tax and AIS relative what is taught in a mathematics curriculum.

I suspect it may one day become a little like YouTube where experts will add video modules to Khan Academy. However, the postings to Khan Academy will no doubt be subjected to quality control filters.

This is the wave of technical learning in the future. Video modules will not, however, replace the importance of team learning, studies of complicated cases that do not have definitive solutions (e.g., Harvard Business School Cases), and interactions with faculty and students that inspire and motivate students to want to learn more and more and more.

Lastly, I want to note that I don't see any way possible not to love Sal Khan. He's an inspiration to the world.

Saylor.org: Free Education --- http://www.saylor.org/

Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/

Free lectures, videos, courses, and certificate credit from prestigious universities (including MITx) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

The Institute of Physics: Content Tailored for Teachers --- http://www.iop.org/tailored/teachers/

Albert Einstein Archive Now Online, Bringing 80,000+ Documents to the Web --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/albert_einstein_archive_now_online_bringing_80000_documents_to_the_web.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Most Astounding Fact (about the universe) According to Neil deGrasse Tyson --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/the_most_astounding_fact_according_to_neil_degrasse_tyson.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene: Watch the Complete NOVA Series Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/ithe_fabric_of_the_cosmosi_with_brian_greene_watch_the_complete_nova_series_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Nova Video:  The Fabric of the Cosmos ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html#fabric-time 

The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene: Watch the Complete NOVA Series Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/ithe_fabric_of_the_cosmosi_with_brian_greene_watch_the_complete_nova_series_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Astronomy Education Review --- http://aer.aas.org/

Astronaut Films Auroras from Above --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/astronaut_films_auroras_from_above.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Astronomical Society of the Pacific: Educational Resources ---
http://www.astrosociety.org/education/resources/resources.html

Journal of Young Investigators (mostly STEM topics in science, engineering, and technology) --- http://www.jyi.org/

Genomics in Education --- http://www.nslc.wustl.edu/elgin/genomics/gscmaterials.html

Genetic/Genome Lesson Plans --- http://www.kumc.edu/gec/lessons.html

The Montana-Yellowstone Geologic Field Guide Database --- http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/mtroadlogs/index.html

Council on Undergraduate Research on the Web --- http://www.cur.org/quarterly/webedition.html

Freshman Research Initiative (at the University of Texas)  --- http://fri.cns.utexas.edu

HERA: Humanities in the European Research Area (research funding and news) --- http://www.heranet.info/

Science Friday --- http://www.sciencefriday.com/ 

Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science --- Click Here
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-01sc-introduction-to-electrical-engineering-and-computer-science-i-spring-2011/ 

Radiology Education --- http://www.radiologyeducation.com/

CTisUS (CT Scans) --- http://www.ctisus.com/teachingfiles

NOVA: Separating Twins --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/separating-twins.html

Conception to Birth Visualized --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/conception_to_birth_visualized.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

American Institute of Architects: Blueprint for America Initiatives --- http://aia150.org/bl150_default.php

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

HERA: Humanities in the European Research Area (research funding and news) --- http://www.heranet.info/

Science Friday --- http://www.sciencefriday.com/ 

Bureau of Land Management: Public Land Statistics --- http://www.blm.gov/public_land_statistics/index.htm

National Center for Education Statistics --- http://nces.ed.gov/

Public.Resource.Org --- http://public.resource.org/

Bureau of Land Management: Public Land Statistics --- http://www.blm.gov/public_land_statistics/index.htm 

American Institute of Architects: Blueprint for America Initiatives --- http://aia150.org/bl150_default.php

Our New Kentucky Home (immigrant stories) --- http://history.ky.gov/immigration/

World Population --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
TED Video:  Paul Gilding: The Earth is full --- Click Here
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_is_full.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDTalks_video+%28TEDTalks+Main+%28SD%29+-+Site%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
 


While Roger and Jagdish are expounding on despicable rich overly-fed horses who nevertheless are providing, in trickle-down economics, more food for the sparrows on the fields and roads, let me expound on the tramps and hobos who have little or no ambition to better themselves or anybody else in life. Technically the hobo is not as opposed to work as a tramp and may even be a part-time dropout as opposed to being a homeless tramp who is pretty well committed to permanently dropping out of the labor market.

These hobos and tramps nevertheless have Big Rock Candy Mountain dreams. They're part of what Karl Marx called the Industrial Reserve Army, but a genuine tramp has no intention of being called up for work. Today hobos and tramps don't ride the rails quite as much, but the tramps make up the greater part of the chronic "homeless" population on the streets of America.

See the attached quotation.

Source
Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (Folklore and Society),
by Hal Rammel,
University of Illinois Press,
ISBN-10:
025201717X,
Page 1

Burl Ives' Rendition --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPqrTaVXJhI

The National Hobo Convention still takes place every year, but in the 1940s and 1950s it was a more serious event in tiny Britt, Iowa. These hitchhikers on the freight trains arrived in Britt from all over the nation in days when quite a few trains passed through Britt each day. Britt is about 20 miles from where I grew up ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britt,_Iowa

National Hobo Convention --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Hobo_Convention

Hobo Museum --- http://www.hobo.com/museum.html

Note the Hobo Videos --- http://www.hobo.com/videos.html

My open sharing grandmother used to bake big noon meals that she shared with every hobo or tramp that arrived on our back porch for one of her well-known dinners ---
Short story entitled My Glimpse of Heaven:  What I learned from Max and Gwen
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm

Of course not every person out of work who begged for food at our back door was a genuine hobo or tramp. Some of them were out of luck and looking for steady work. The genuine tramp, for one reason or another, had no ambition for work and only took on odd day jobs out of utter desperation and hunger. Often the reason for being homeless was alcoholism or some form of mental illness, although in other cases it was just a form of rebellion against conforming to norms of society.  A hobo, as opposed to a tramp, may be a successful worker for part of the year and a tramp-like person for other parts of the year ---
http://www.hobo.com/videos.html

The candidates for Hobo King and Hobo Queen each year in Britt were often the same bums each year who would refuse any and every chance for a job. They went by colorful names such as Boxcar Willy, Stray Cat, Air Choke, Baked Beans, Spittin' Kitten, etc. Although in days of old most of them were heavy into whiskey, today they might be more into weed or other narcotics. Heroine addicts and heavy narcotics abusers, however, seldom leave the big city streets for a couple of August carnival days in Britt, Iowa.


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

Wolfram Alpha Computational Database ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/

Math Interactives --- http://www.learnalberta.ca/content/mejhm/index.html

Do the Math (careers for math teachers) --- http://crr.math.arizona.edu/dtm.php

How to Buy a Car Using Game Theory --- Click Here
http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2012/02/29/video-how-to-buy-a-car-using-game-theory/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mindyourdecisions+%28Mind+Your+Decisions%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNrLfylgHE0

"When Agencies Go Nuclear: A Game Theoretic Approach to the Biggest Sticks in an Agency’s Arsenal," by Brigham Daniels, George Washington University, February 2012 ---
http://groups.law.gwu.edu/lr/ArticlePDF/80-2-Daniels.pdf

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


History Tutorials

Albert Einstein Archive Now Online, Bringing 80,000+ Documents to the Web --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/albert_einstein_archive_now_online_bringing_80000_documents_to_the_web.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Albert Einstein Quotations --- Click Here

Civil War Photographs --- http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/02/the-civil-war-part-1

Our New Kentucky Home (immigrant stories) --- http://history.ky.gov/immigration/

Chicago Public Library: Millennium Park --- http://www.chipublib.org/images/millennium-park/index.php

Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network --- http://www.philageohistory.org/geohistory/

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 --- http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Rollins Digital Archive (Rollins College history in photographs) --- http://www.rollins.edu/library/archives/digitalarchives.html

Dartmouth Digital Collections: Books --- http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/books.html

Tate Modern: Explore (Art History) --- http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore/

MoMA: Cindy Sherman --- http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/

Railroads: The Transformation of Capitalism --- http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/railroads/

Greetings from Milwaukee (historical postcards) --- http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/digilib/postcards/index.cfm

Historic Iowa Children's Diaries (1800s) --- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/diaries/index.php

The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa --- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/uipress/bdi/

Iowa Folklife --- http://www.uni.edu/iowaonline/folklife_v2/ 

Montana State Historic Preservation Office --- http://mhs.mt.gov/shpo/

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art --- http://www.art.org/

Alice Weston: Great Houses of Cincinnati --- http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/weston/index.html

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

Bureau of Land Management: Public Land Statistics --- http://www.blm.gov/public_land_statistics/index.htm

Iwo Jima Video --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWcDIMrd6eE&feature=player_embedded#at=13

World Population --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
TED Video:  Paul Gilding: The Earth is full --- Click Here
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_is_full.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDTalks_video+%28TEDTalks+Main+%28SD%29+-+Site%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

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

 

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/

March 8, 2012

March 9, 2012

March 10, 2012

March 12, 2012

March 16, 2012

March 20. 2012
  • Schools Can Say No to 'Pink Slime' Ground Beef
  •  

    March 21, 2012

    March 22, 2012

    March 23, 2012

     


    "Free course by Jay Uhdinger: Success does not equal happiness : Generally Thinking," Generally Thinking, March 2012 ---
    http://generallythinking.com/free-course-by-jay-uhdinger-success-does-not-equal-happiness/





     




    No.1 hit: Obama, The Musical (Gilbert & Sullivan Obama Spoof) --- http://www.247comedy.com/obama-musical


    Fact Checking Bill Murray: A Short, Comic Film from Sundance 2008 --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/fact_checking_bill_murray_a_short_comic_film_from_sundance_2008.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


    Senior Moments Video by Golf Brooks --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/9nndS22Qda0?rel=0


    Duck in a Truck --- http://biggeekdad.com/2010/03/duck-in-a-truck/


    Forwarded by Auntie Bev

    APHORISM -  A short, pointed sentence that expresses a wise or clever observation or a corny, but cute general truth.

    1. The nicest thing about the future is . . . that it always starts tomorrow.

    2. Money will buy a fine dog, but only kindness will make him wag his tail.

    3. If you don't have a sense of humor, you probably don't have any sense at all.

    4. Seat belts are not as confining as wheelchairs.

    5. A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you're in deep water.

    6. How come it takes so little time for a child who is afraid of the dark to become a teenager who wants to stay out all night?

    7. Business conventions are important. . .because they demonstrate how many people a company can operate without.

    8. Why is it that at class reunions you feel younger than everyone else looks?

    9. Scratch a cat . . . and you will have a permanent job.

    10. No one has more driving ambition than the teenage boy who wants to buy a car.

    11. There are no new sins; the old ones just get more publicity.

    12. There are worse things than getting a call for a wrong number at 4 a.m. - like, it could be the right number.

    13. No one ever says "It's only a game" when their team is winning.

    14. I've reached the age where 'happy hour' is a nap.

    15. Be careful about reading the fine print. . . . there's no way you're going to like it.

    16. The trouble with bucket seats is that not everybody has the same size bucket.

    17. Do you realize that, in about 40 years, we'll have thousands of old ladies running around with tattoos?

    (And rap music will be the Golden Oldies!)

    18. Money can't buy happiness -- but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Cadillac than in a Yugo.

    19. After 60, if you don't wake up aching in every joint, you're probably dead.

    20. Always be yourself because the people that matter don't mind . . . and the ones that mind don't matter.

    21. Life isn't tied with a bow . . . . . . . .. but it's still a gift.

    and REMEMBER...."POLITICIANS AND DIAPERS SHOULD BE CHANGED OFTEN AND FOR THE SAME REASON".

     




     




    Humor Between March 1-31, 2012 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book12q1.htm#Humor033112  

    Humor Between February 1-29, 2012 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book12q1.htm#Humor022912 

    Humor Between January 1-31, 2012 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book12q1.htm#Humor013112  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     




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

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

    Online Distance Education Training and Education --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
    For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone of Fraud  (College, Inc.) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

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

    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