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?
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
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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
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
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accounting and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM
(Educators)
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.
Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for
accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting
education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial
accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing,
doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics)
research, publication, replication, and validity testing.
|
CPAS-L
(Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ (Closed
Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo (Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB
and the International Accounting
Standards Board on this financial
reporting blog from Financial Executives
International. The site, updated daily,
compiles regulatory news, rulings and
statements, comment letters on
standards, and hot topics from the Web’s
largest business and accounting
publications and organizations. Look for
continuing coverage of SOX requirements,
fair value reporting and the Alternative
Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such
as the subprime mortgage crisis,
international convergence, and rules for
tax return preparers. |
|
|
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as
well as a practicing CPA)
I found another listserve
that is exceptional -
CalCPA maintains
http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/
and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.
There are several highly
capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and
the answers are often in depth.
Scott
Scott forwarded the following message from Jim
Counts
Yes you may mention info on
your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any
CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is
possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not
have access to the files and other items posted.
Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in
top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and
in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I
will get the request to join.
Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage
people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then
via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in
your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the
inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.
We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in
California.... ]
Please encourage your members
to join our listserve.
If any questions let me know.
Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk
|
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
All
my online pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu