Tidbits on April 10, 2012
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
This week I
feature Set 1 Photographs of the
Camellias and Azaleas on Our Acreage in Florida in 1980
I was the KPMG Professor of Accounting and Department Chair at Florida State
University 1978-1982
Also featured in this set are pictures of Wakulla Springs and photographs
submitted by Danny Sanchez
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Tallahassee/Set01/Tallahassee1980Set01.htm
Park Finder ---
http://www.llbean.com/parkfinder/search?qei=526066026&qs=3058330&cid=00490488813#lat=43.6615&lon=-70.2555&srhTerm=Portland,ME&tabPos=0
Photographs of Vergennes (Oldest Village in
Vermont)
http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?pid=bixby
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Tidbits on April 10, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/tidbits041012.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/
Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Flight 11 on 9/11/2001 (the pilot who almost went down in this
terrorist crash) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=cLj4akmncsA&feature=channel_video_titl
USS Arizona Survivors ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgE2KiPd3xg&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Advances in Psychology --- The Phobia Workshop ---
http://biggeekdad.com/2010/03/the-phobia-workshop/
We should wait for a safer way to get at this gas --- this is not a long term
efficient solution
Hydraulic Fracturing Concerns ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking
Gasland - OTRAVIREA VOITA A APEI. METODA FRACTIONARII HIDRAULICE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iLal7aUqZRM
Thank you Dan Gheorghe Somnea for the heads up.
Watch a Great Blue Heron Lay an Egg ---
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/great-blue-heron-cam/
Richard Dawkins Rallies for Reason in Washington DC (in
support of atheism) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/richard_dawkins_rallies_for_reason_in_washington_dc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
I Love Lucy: An American Legend ---
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/ilovelucy/Pages/default.aspx
Ballet in Super Slow Motion (And More Culture Around the Web)
---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/ballet_in_super_slow_motion_and_more_culture_around_the_web.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Female Noir Director Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker, Free Online
---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/female_noir_director_ida_lupinos_ithe_hitch-hikeri_free_online.html
Appalachian Voices ---
http://appvoices.org/
Willys Jeep ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=lgwF8mdQwlw&feature=player_embedded
The Art and Science of Violin Making ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/the_art_and_science_of_violin_making.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Monty Python’s Away From it All: A Twisted Travelogue with
John Cleese ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/monty_pythons_iaway_from_it_alli_a_twisted_travelogue_with_john_cleese.html
Orson Welles’ Last Interview and Final Moments Captured on
Film ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/orson_welles_last_interview_and_final_moments_captured_on_film.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
More Culture from Around the Web/Open
Culture Twitter Stream:
Google Doodle Celebrates Mies Van Der Rohe’s Crowning
Achievement
Terry Gross Talks With Matthew Weiner (‘Mad Men’ Creator) On
What’s Next For Don Draper
Will One Researcher’s Discovery in the Amazon Destroy
Chomsky’s Theory of Linguistics?
The Mechanical Universe: 52 Lecture Intro to Physics by
Caltech. Added to the Physics section of our Free Courses List
How to be an Academic Failure: A Guide for Beginners
Recording of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Speech
From Le Monde, “Backstage with Charlie Chaplin,” a Handful of
Very Moving Stills
Kurt
Vonnegut: The Paris Review Interview (1977)
A Rejected & Unpublished Kurt Vonnegut Novella Gets Released
as a $1.99 Kindle Single
Advice on Advice from Literary Greats
Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
First High-Resolution Images of the Wreck of the Titanic
Ballet in Super Slow Motion (And More Culture Around the Web)
is a post from:
Open Culture
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Steve Martin on the Legendary Bluegrass Musician
Earl Scruggs ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/steve_martin_on_the_legendary_bluegrass_musician_earl_scruggs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Earl Scruggs Video Documentary ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK_nqnoWl6o&feature=pyv&ad=3780036702&kw=earl
scruggs banjo
Earl Scruggs and Steve Martin Play Dueling Banjos
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqd7mXvHupU
Also see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icMTVV5Lwaw
Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt Playing Cripple
Creek ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4sqishGuYw
Boston
An offshoot of the Occupy Boston movement has begun what it says will be a
ten-day protest against MTA fare hikes and service cuts ---
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/04/05/mass_fare_hikes_targeted_in_statehouse_protest/
While Poor Charlie just keeps going round and round for decades
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VMSGrY-IlU
Warning: This is America
My Name is America ---
http://www.youtube.com/v/6TPgJSZf5Vw?version=3&autohide=1&autoplay=1
Bach's 'St. John Passion' At Carnegie Hall ---
http://www.npr.org/event/music/149217674/les-violons-du-roy-at-carnegie-hall
Willie Nelson in 1965 (he does have a chin) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=W1bXdXWEKaE
Accordion File (music history) ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Accordion-File/131277/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Newly Discovered Piece by Mozart Performed on His Own Fortepiano
---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/newly_discovered_piece_by_mozart_performed_on_his_own_fortepiano.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Features 17,000
Recordings ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/the_alan_lomax_music_archive_now_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Octavio Medellin: Works of Art and Artistic
Processes ---
http://digitalcollections.smu.edu/all/cul/med/
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
Photos: The 65th Anniversary of D-Day on the
Normandy Beaches ---
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2009/06/05/the-65th-anniversary-of-d-day-on-the-normandy-beaches/
NASA’s Stunning Tour of the Moon ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/nasas_stunning_tour_of_the_moon.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Aerial Photographs of Colorado ---
https://www.cusys.edu/DigitalLibrary/aerials.htm
Big Picture: Glimpses of Life in Academe From
Around the World ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Silent-ProtestsMarch/131287/
John Pugh's Murals ---
http://artofjohnpugh.com/default.asp
Star Gazing from the International Space Station
(and Free Astronomy Courses Online) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/star_gazing_from_the_international_space_station_.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Stones River Battlefield Historic Landscape
Collection (Civil War)
http://library.mtsu.edu/digitalprojects/stonesriver.php
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ---
http://mfah.org/
The Croatian Museum of Naive Art (art history)
---
http://www.hmnu.org/en/default.asp
Gaugin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise (art
history) ---
http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/gauguin/
The Vincent Van Gogh Gallery ---
http://www.vggallery.com/
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago
This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s ---
http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/featured/twhb/exhibition/overview
ARTStem ---
http://www.artstem.org/
Picture Chicago ---
http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/chicago/index.asp
Lincoln Park Architectural Photographs ---
http://digicol.lib.depaul.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/lpnc1
Massachusetts Historical Society: Civil War ---
http://www.masshist.org/online/civilwar/
19th Century Maps by Children ---
http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2010/1/7/19th-century-maps-by-children
From the Scout Report on March 30, 2012
As the Tate Modern prepares to open a Damien Hirst
retrospective,
critics and others offer comment
Damien Hirst retrospective: Is nothing sacred?
http://www.economist.com/node/21550767
'Damien Hirst should not be in the Tate' says critic
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/9168804/Damien-Hirst-should-not-be-
in-the-Tate-says-critic.html
Damien Hirsts are the sub-prime of the art world
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/julian-spalding-damien-
hirsts-are-the-subprime-of-the-art-world-7586386.html
Damien Hirst on death, drink and diamonds
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/visual-arts/damien-hirst-on-death-drink-
and-diamonds-7581167.html
Damien Hirst's Live Stream: Not So Very Lively
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/03/26/damien-hirsts-live-stream-not-so-
very-lively/
Damien Hirst
http://www.damienhirst.com/
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
University of New Hampshire Library: Literature & Poetry ---
Click Here
http://www.library.unh.edu/digital/islandora/solr/search/%20/1/category:Literature%5C%20%2526%5C%20Poetry%2A%7E/dismax
Robert Frost Recites ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’
---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/robert_frost_recites_stopping_by_woods_on_a_snowy_evening.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Robert Frost
Lectures (1947 at Dartmouth College) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87991813
James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/james_joyces_ulysses_a_free_audio_book.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Off-the-record discussions between
Robert Frost and Dartmouth College students 60 years ago
may provide new insights into the poet, as transcripts
are about to be published, the
Associated Press
reported. The sessions were recorded on reel-to-reel
tapes and are becoming public because of the work of an
editor at the Poetry Foundation who came across them
while an undergraduate at Dartmouth. The first
transcript will be published this month in the journal
Literary Imagination, whose editor described the
conversations as “Frost unplugged.”
Inside Higher Ed, February 25, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/25/qt
Robert Frost Poem
Discovered Tucked Away in Book ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6174131
Robert
Frost Poems (Free) ---
http://frost.freehosting.net/poems.htm
Nelson Mandela Archive Goes Online (With Help From
Google) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/nelson_mandela_archive_goes_online_with_help_from_google.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The Animation of Billy Collins’ Poetry: Everyday Moments in
Motion ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/the_animation_of_billy_collins_poetry.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Free Science Fiction, Fantasy & Dystopian Classics on the Web:
Huxley, Orwell, Asimov, Gaiman & Beyond ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/free_science_fiction_fantasy_dystopian_classics_on_the_web.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Free Electronic Literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
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 April 10, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations041012.htm
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
"Google's self-driving car takes blind man on errands," by Salvador
Rodriguez, PhyOrg, April 3, 2012 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-04-google-self-driving-car-errands.html
On Thursday, Google posted a video of a modified
Toyota Prius driving Steve Mahan, who is legally
blind, saying it shows one of the possibilities and benefits that could come
from the technology.
"Where this would change my life is to give me the
independence and the flexibility to go to the places I both want to go and
need to go when I need to do those things," Mahan says in the video.
The
self-driving car took Mahan to Taco Bell for a
quick meal and a dry cleaner to pick up his clothes.
"Look, Ma, no hands," Mahan says. "No hands, no
feet."
Google, which posted the video on its
Google+ account, said the drive took place on a
carefully programmed route in San Jose and showed one of the possibilities
that self-driving cars could offer.
"There's much left to design and test, but we've
now safely completed more than 200,000 miles of computer-led driving,
gathering great experiences and an overwhelming number of enthusiastic
supporters," the
Mountain View, Calif., company said in the post.
Though it's uncertain just how far off self-driving
cars may be from becoming a reality, the process to getting there is
certainly in motion. Just last month, Nevada became the first state to
legalize self-driving cars.
Jensen Comment
This could save a lot of "human" designated drivers a lot of boring times at
parties and in bars. Let Hal take you home. It might be even better when Hal can
explain to your scowling wife how you had to wait in line at the church to get
in your confession (hopefully not your last one).
And think of when you could yawn behind the wheel on a very long trip, flip a
switch, and let Hal do the driving.
Advanced Technological Education
ATE Projects Impact ---
http://www.ateprojectimpact.org/index.html
The Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects
featured here exemplify the National Science Foundation-supported
initiatives for technicians in high-technology fields of strategic
importance to the nation. Two-year college educators have leadership roles
in the projects, which test ways of improving technician education or of
improving the professional development for the faculty who teach
technicians. The projects� collaborative work with industry partners and
educators from other undergraduate institutions and secondary schools
perpetuate innovations that deliver highly-skilled technicians to
workplaces. While each ATE project has its own goals, all the projects are
part of a national effort to ensure that the technical workforce in the
United States has the capacity to compete globally.
THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS
https://www.chronicle-store.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ID=78956&WG=0
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Career Options for Women (developed in Canada) ---
http://careeroptions.org/careeroptions/english_index.htm
GirlGeeks ---
http://www.girlgeeks.org/
"Deloitte Commits $60 Million
in Pro Bono Services to Nonprofit Organizations: New Pledge Totals $110
Million to Make Communities Stronger and Advance Key Women/Girls, Education and
Human Service Organizations," MarketWatch, April 6, 2012 ---
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/deloitte-commits-60-million-in-pro-bono-services-to-nonprofit-organizations-2012-04-06
Thank you Eliot Kamlet for the heads up.
Bob Jensen's threads on careers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Baylor Law School ---
http://www.baylor.edu/law/
The Baylor Law Data Dump
Baylor University School of Law Reveals Each Student's Grade Average, LSAT
Score, Alma Mater, Race, Ethnicity, and Scholarship Amount
Law School Admission Test (LSAT) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSAT
Scoring
The LSAT is a
standardized test in that LSAC adjusts raw scores to fit an expected
norm to overcome the likelihood that some administrations may be more
difficult than others.
Normalized scores are distributed on a scale
with a low of 120 to a high of 180.
The LSAT system of scoring is predetermined and does not reflect test
takers' percentile, unlike the SAT. The relationship between raw questions
answered correctly (the "raw score") and scaled score is determined before
the test is administered, through a process called
equating.
This means that the conversion standard is set beforehand, and the
distribution of
percentiles can vary during the scoring of any particular LSAT.
Adjusted scores resemble a
bell curve, tapering off at the extremes and concentrating near the
median. For
example, there might be a 3-5 question difference between a score of 175 and
a score of 180, but the difference between a 155 from a 160 could be 9 or
more questions. Although the exact percentile of a given score will vary
slightly between examinations, there tends to be little variance. The 50th
percentile is typically a score of about 151; the 90th percentile is around
163 and the 99th is about 172. A 178 or better usually places the examinee
in the 99.9th percentile.
Examinees have the option of canceling their scores within six calendar
days after the exam, before they get their scores. LSAC still reports to law
schools that the student registered for and took the exam, but releases no
score. There is a formal appeals process for examinee complaints,[16]
which has been used for proctor misconduct, peer misconduct, and
occasionally for challenging a question. In very rare instances, specific
questions have been omitted from final scoring.
University of North Texas economist Michael Nieswiadomy has conducted
several studies (in 1998, 2006, and 2008) derived from LSAC data. In the
most recent study Nieswiadomy took the LSAC's categorization of test-takers
into 162 majors and grouped these into 29 categories, finding the averages
of each major:[17]
-
Mathematics/Physics
160.0
-
Economics and
Philosophy/Theology
(tie) 157.4
-
International relations 156.5
-
Engineering 156.2
-
Government/service 156.1
-
Chemistry 156.1
-
History 155.9
-
Interdisciplinary studies 155.5
-
Foreign languages 155.3
-
English 155.2
-
Biology/natural
sciences 154.8
-
Arts 154.2
-
Computer science 154.0
-
Finance 153.4
-
Political science 153.1
-
Psychology 152.5
-
Liberal arts 152.4
-
Anthropology/geography
152.2
-
Accounting 151.7
-
Journalism 151.5
-
Sociology/social
work 151.2
-
Marketing 150.8
-
Business management 149.7
-
Education 149.4
-
Business administration 149.1
-
Health professions 148.4
-
Pre-law 148.3
-
Criminal justice 146.0
The Baylor Law Data Dump ---
http://abovethelaw.com/2012/04/the-baylor-law-data-dump-now-with-race-and-scholarships/2/
If you're interested in this data it may be best to download it now. I don't
expect this to remain on the Web for long.
"The Law School System Is Broken,"
National Jurist, February 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.nxtbook.com/splash/nationaljurist/nationaljurist.php?nxturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nxtbook.com%2Fnxtbooks%2Fcypress%2Fnationaljurist0212%2Findex.php#/18/OnePage
Thank you Paul Caron for the heads up
Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools
I keep receiving messages that Snopes is a site funded by ultra liberal
billionaire George Soros
History of Snopes (a validation site for truth and accuracy versus urban
legends on the Web) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snopes.com
Snopes Home Page ---
http://www.snopes.com/
Snopes founders are admittedly liberal in politics but insist they make every
effort to avoid deception and bias. I honestly have not found any evidence that
they were anything other than fair and balanced in their coverage and readily
admit when they cannot verify a claim.
Snopes FAQs ---
http://www.snopes.com/info/faq.asp
Q: Are you
funded by George Soros?
A: No, we are completely independent and self-supporting; we receive no
funding in any form from any person, group, agency, or organization. And we
wouldn't recognize George Soros if we sat next to him on a bus.
Q: I know
something listed on your site really happened (or is otherwise true), but
your site doesn't list it as true. Why not?
There are several reasons why this might be so:
- We rate an urban legend as "true" when there
is sufficient evidence to indicate that the legend began with a
real-life event. If the actions described in an urban legend play out in
real life after the legend has begun circulating, that is not an
example of what we consider a "true" urban legend; it is a phenomenon
known as "ostension"
(and when someone deliberately enacts the events described by an
urban legend, that is known as "pseudo-ostension").
Many urban legends describe events so general and
plausible that they might very well have happened to somebody,
somewhere, sometime. But since the origins of urban legends can seldom
be traced to specific, identifiable occurrences, we rarely categorize
such legends as "true."
- Many of the texts we discuss contain a mixture
of truth, falsity, and exaggeration which cannot be accurately described
by a single "True" or "False" rating. Therefore, an item's status is
based upon the most important aspect(s) of the text under discussion,
which is summarized in the statement made after the "Claim:" heading at
the top of the page. It is important to make note of the wording of that
claim, since that is the statement to which the status applies.
- Many legends present events that may have
taken place in real life only a few times (or once, or even never) as if
they were frequent and regular occurrences, and we make a distinction
between "This once happened" and "This is a common, on-going
occurrence." For example, many warnings circulated by e-mail
caution readers to be wary of some form of crime or other hazard that is
claimed to be a widespread occurrence but actually has taken place only
in a few unrelated, isolated cases, possibly in the distant past.
Therefore, even though the event described may be "true" in the strictly
literal sense that it is known to have occurred at least once, the
underlying claim (i.e., that the event is a regular, widespread
phenomenon) is not true.
Other FAQs continued at
http://www.snopes.com/info/faq.asp
The Next Thing in For-Profit Education: Bourgeoisie (Elite) versus
Proletariat (Commoner) For-Profit Universities
Both alternatives onsite or online, however, are more expensive than traditional
public universities like the University of Texas for in-state students
Minerva, however, wants to serve top-of-the-line student prospects at lower
costs than prestigious private universities like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford
"Venture-Backed Enterprise Seeks to Satisfy Global Demand for an Elite
Education, Onlinem" by Nick DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 3, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-for-profit-seeks-to-satisfy-global-demand-for-elite-education/35938?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Elite American universities maintain their prestige
by turning away a huge percentage of applicants every year. And the
education entrepreneur Ben Nelson sees an opportunity in this demand for
top-flight education: He wants to reach talented students across the world
and to build a new university that could remake the image of Ivy League
education.
Mr. Nelson, founder of a start-up called the
Minerva Project, believes the minuscule acceptance rates at prestigious
institutions leave some college-bound students without a place where they
can pursue a blue-ribbon degree. So his for-profit enterprise seeks to
satisfy that demand by offering a rigorous online education to the brightest
students around the world who slip through the cracks of highly selective
admissions cycles.
Mr. Nelson said his company, which is calling
itself “the first elite American university to be launched in a century,”
will disregard the barriers that might put the Ivy League beyond the reach
of qualified applicants.
“We don’t care about geography, we don’t care about
how wealthy you are, we don’t care if you’re able to donate or have donated
in the past, or legacy or where your ancestors went to school,” he said. “We
really just want to equalize the playing field.”
The start-up, based in San Francisco, plans to do
so by charging tuition rates “well under half” of those at traditional
top-tier institutions, Mr. Nelson said. The new university is seeking
accreditation, Mr. Nelson added, and will welcome its first class in 2014.
Though he did not specify how big he expects Minerva’s student body to be,
Mr. Nelson said his goal is to make sure no qualified students “get rejected
because we say we’re full.” He added that he expects Minerva to be “far
better represented internationally than a typical American university.”
The company can afford to charge cheaper tuition,
Mr. Nelson said, in part because it expects incoming students to have
already mastered the material that makes up everyday introductory courses.
For instance, Minerva may offer Applied Economic Theory instead of Economics
101, he said.
“What we expect to teach is how you apply and
synthesize that information and how you do something with it,” Mr. Nelson
said.
To create these advanced courses, Minerva will
break down the role of professor into two distinct jobs instead of simply
poaching faculty members from other universities. The company will award
monetary prizes to “distinguished teachers among great research faculty,”
Mr. Nelson said, who will team up with crews to videotape lectures and craft
innovative courses when they are not teaching at their home institutions.
(Mr. Nelson declined to elaborate on the size of the prizes.)
Minerva will then hire a second group of
instructors to deliver the material. Mr. Nelson called them “preceptors,”
who will typically be young graduates of doctoral programs—they will lead
class discussions online, hold office hours, and grade assignments.
After its students graduate, Mr. Nelson said the
university plans to help alumni connect with their peers to create
businesses, do research, and find jobs.
“The Minerva education isn’t just about getting
your four-year degree and then going to work for Goldman Sachs and crossing
your fingers and hoping you’ll do really well,” he said. “It’s actually
playing an active role in facilitating your success afterwards.”
Mr. Nelson’s challenge to the Ivy League is already
flush with cash: The prominent Silicon Valley investment firm Benchmark
Capital has pumped $25-million into Minerva’s coffers—the firm’s richest
seed-stage investment ever.
And the company has attracted some high-profile
advisers. Lawrence H. Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary and
Harvard University president emeritus, is the chair of Minerva’s advisory
board, which includes Bob Kerrey, the U.S. Senate candidate from Nebraska
who is a former president of the New School, among other education
luminaries.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are enormous hurdles that Minerva must leap over before its graduates
compete with graduates of the Ivy League. Among the major hurdles are the
thousands and thousands of Ivy League alumni. Many of those alumni are now in
positions of hiring power, and these executives are not totally unbiased.
Executives of Wall Street firms, for example, have their favorite places to
recruit new employees, and these favorite places are typically their alma
maters.
For example, one of the main reasons many applicants apply to the Harvard
Business School or the Stanford Graduate School of Business at MBA or doctoral
level is have access to the tremendous alumni networking systems of the HBS or
GSB. It will take many years for elitist startups like Minerva to establish
competing alumni networks.
There are other hurdles --- especially accreditation issues. For example, the
AACSB just does not accredit for-profit universities in North America. This has
been a tremendous barrier to for-profit university success in accounting,
finance, and business degree programs.
I think Mike Milken and the Welches (Jack and Suzie) had something like
Minerva elitism in mind when they established their "prestigious" online
business universities, but thus far none of these elitist efforts have been very
successful. Failing to get AACSB accreditation and alumni networking of note
have taken their toll on Mike, Jack, and Suzie. Donald Trump's Trump University
was a loser from get go.
Bob Jensen's threads on distance education education and training
alternatives are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Free University Degrees in Germany: Good News and Bad News
Hi Ali,
College education in Germany, as in many other European nations, is mostly
free. However, many students from the U.S. would be very unhappy if we adopted a
similar system to German Universitäten, Technische Hochschulen/Technische
Universitäten, Pädagogische Hochschulen. Firstly, getting into public
Universitäten is much more competitive than in the United States with a much
higher proportion of high school graduates being diverted to (excellent) trade
schools. Secondly, the Universitäten pedagogy is comprised of huge
student/faculty ratios relative to the United States. Lecture halls are massive
and learning is pretty much very competitive with little help from teachers and
tutors.
I've been a long-time advocate of diverting more U.S. students (not just the
dummies) into technical (trade) schools modeled after the German system. But in
the United States there are many more social and parental pressures to avoid
technical schools in favor of universities. An enormous drawback of this is that
trade schools often get students will lower intelligence and motivation for
studying.
As a result we have an oversupply of college graduates in the United States
and an undersupply of highly skilled workers for both manufacturing and service
industries.
Another situation in Germany and other European countries is that educational
opportunities are not equal for immigrants and women relative to white males. In
Germany the immigrants are overwhelmingly Turkish. A much lower proportion of
Turks and women graduate from Universitäten. Here are studies of possible
interest:
"Children of Turkish Immigrants in Germany and the Netherlands: The Impact
of Differences in Vocational and Academic Tracking Systems" by Maurice Crul
and Jens Schneider, Teachers College Record, 2009 ---
Click Here
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CDoQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tiesproject.eu%2Fcomponent%2Foption%2Ccom_docman%2Ftask%2Cdoc_download%2Fgid%2C330%2FItemid%2C142%2F&ei=0dB-T8iOHYPe0QGi6rDuBw&usg=AFQjCNEdXU4HcvgQwkyFTiWcgnyBMrtQrg
The findings show that more than group
characteristics, systemic and institutional factors can have a decisive role
in promoting or hampering the educational and labor market integration of
young immigrants and the native-born second generation. The greater openness
of the Dutch school system to provide “long routes” and “second chances”
shows its effect in significantly higher shares of Turks in higher
education. On the other side, the dual system of vocational training in
Germany seems to be better suited for labor market integration, especially
because apprenticeships are more practice oriented and do count as work
experience for later application procedures. The Dutch system also offers
better opportunities for girls than does the German system. Yet, the
polarization effect between “high achievement” and “failure” of only partial
integration success is greater in the Netherlands, whereas the overall
advancement is slower, but also less polarizing, in Germany. In this sense,
each country could learn something from its neighbor regarding those
aspects.
"Second-generation Turkish youth in Europe: Explaining the academic
disadvantage in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland," by Steve Song, Economics
of Education Review, April 13, 2011 ---
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775711000537
This investigation examines the role of students’
home and school variables in producing the achievement gap between
second-generation Turkish students and their native peers in Austria,
Germany, and Switzerland. Using the data from PISA 2006, this study supports
past findings that both home and school resources affect the educational
outcomes of immigrant students in their host society's school system.
Specifically, the findings reveal that in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland,
second-generation Turkish students had significant disadvantages in terms of
allocated resources at home and in school. More often than not, these
disadvantages were found to have significantly negative effects in terms of
second-generation Turkish students’ test outcomes relative to their native
peers. In all three countries, however, the differences between the
second-generation Turkish students and their native peers in terms of their
family/home resources were found to explain more of the achievement gap than
the differences in their schooling resources.
Diversity remains a huge educational problem in Europe as it is in the United
States as well. Finland is ranked as having the best education system in the
world, but then again Finland has the least diversity in the world and low
immigration rates.
Ronald Coase (Nobel Laureate) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase
"How China Made Its Great Leap Forward: Some observers praise its
'state-led capitalism.' But the truth is that leaders, starting with Deng
Xiaoping, loosened Beijing's control," by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang, The
Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577326132059836456.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
China's post-Mao market transformation is one of
the most dramatic and momentous events of our time. It has lifted hundreds
of millions out of extreme poverty, freed one fifth of humanity from
ideological radicalism, revived one of the oldest civilizations, and
inspired all of us to explore the benevolence of the market.
Yet capitalism as currently practiced in China
suffers a severe failing: the lack of a marketplace for ideas. China's
market transformation flourished at the ground level without much help from
Beijing—contrary to its leadership's claims. But the free flow of ideas has
faltered. Until that changes, China will never reach its full potential.
At Mao Zedong's death in 1976, few, if any, could
have foreseen that China, then one of the poorest and most isolated
countries in the world, would become a dynamic market economy in just three
decades. An added surprise is that all this happened under the auspices of
the Chinese Communist Party, which was committed along the way to
modernizing socialism.
When China started reforming and opening up, it had
little knowledge of the market economy. Mao's grandiose but disastrous
policies had gravely impoverished the country materially and intellectually.
China had been isolated from the West and cut off from its own traditions.
With no blueprint, it had no choice but to work within the ruins of
socialism, through tinkering and improvisation. This experimental approach
was helped along the way by the resuscitation of the Confucian tradition of
"seeking truth from facts."
China's road to capitalism was forged by two
movements. One was orchestrated by Beijing; its self-proclaimed goal being
to turn China into a "modern, powerful socialist country." The other, more
important, one was the gross product of what we like to call "marginal
revolutions." It involved a concatenation of grass-roots movements and local
initiatives.
While the state-led reform focused on enhancing the
incentives of state-owned enterprises, the marginal revolutions brought
private entrepreneurship and market forces back to China. Private farming,
for example, was secretly engaged in by starving peasants when it was still
banned by Beijing. Rural industrialization was spearheaded by township and
village enterprises that operated outside state control. Private sectors
emerged in cities when self-employment was allowed to cope with rising
unemployment. Foreign direct investment and labor markets were first
confined to Special Economic Zones.
All these marginal forces had been either harshly
oppressed or heavily regulated during Mao's era. Fortunately, post-Mao
Chinese leaders—most notably Deng Xiaoping—embraced change. Mao's failure
taught them to stay away from ideological hubris and re-embrace pragmatism.
Under their leadership, Beijing admitted its lack of experience in reform.
Local initiatives were first allowed, and later encouraged, to play a
leading role in market-oriented experiments.
Inadvertently, this process led to the relatively
thriving market we see in China today. When Beijing still preached
socialism, local authorities explored new, market-oriented approaches to
revive local economies. While Beijing held tight to political power, it was
no longer a central planner. As provinces, cities and counties all competed
for economic development, China became a giant laboratory of regional
competition.
China's leaders have never given up on socialism,
which in their minds calls for public ownership to ensure shared prosperity
(even though state-owned enterprises have exacerbated inequality and
corrupted politics). They insist on keeping key sectors—including banking,
energy, communication and education—under state monopoly. As a result, many
characterize the Chinese economy as "state-led capitalism." But it was
really the marginal revolutions and regional competition that ushered in
China's economic rise.
In the years to come, China will continue to forge
its own path, but it needs to address its lack of a marketplace for ideas if
it hopes to continue to prosper. An unrestricted flow of ideas is a
precondition for the growth of knowledge, the most critical factor in any
innovative and sustainable economy. "Made in China" is now found everywhere
in the world. But few Western consumers remember any Chinese brand names.
The British Industrial Revolution two centuries ago introduced many new
products and created new industries. China's industrial revolution is far
less innovative.
The active exchange of thoughts and information
also offers an indispensable foundation for social harmony. It is not a
panacea; nothing can free us once and for all from ignorance and falsehood.
But the free flow of ideas engenders repeated criticism and continuous
improvement. It also cultivates respect and tolerance, which are effective
antidotes to the bigotry and false doctrines that can threaten the
foundation of any society.
Continued in article
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.
Jensen Comment
Many of us were weaned on the famous Coase Theorem on economic efficiency with
externality constraints ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
We should wait for a safer way to get at this gas --- this is not a long term
efficient solution
Hydraulic Fracturing Concerns ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking
Gasland - OTRAVIREA VOITA A APEI. METODA FRACTIONARII HIDRAULICE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iLal7aUqZRM
Thank you Dan Gheorghe Somnea for the heads up.
Bob Jensen on the American Dream versus the China Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm
April 6, 2012 message from Roger Collins
Guardian (UK paper) journalist reviews children's
movie, with a dose of Political Economy thrown in...
A sample paragraph..
Unfortunately, capitalism's boast – that it
accords with human nature – is actually capitalism's problem: that it
rewards the most rapacious aspects of human nature, at the expense of
the natural world more generally. Most of capitalism's critics
understand this, and find it mightily frustrating that the right carries
on regardless with the pillaging.
The real problem, however, is that as an
alternative to capitalism, socialism is a turkey, far more concerned
with equality of distribution of the spoils (or, at the very least,
equality of opportunity to have a go at grabbing some) than it is with
tackling human dependence on wealth. One could even argue that socialism
is even more perverse than capitalism, nothing more or less than its
dark and negative mirror. After all, it focuses as obsessively on lack
of money, and denial of access to resources, as the system it opposes
does on accumulation of money, and access to resources. Capitalism
accentuates the positive – wealth. Socialism accentuates the negative –
poverty. The supposedly opposing ideologies are merely opposite sides of
the same coin. It's because wealth itself confers power that Marxism's
logical, unpalatable, unworkable "solution" is redistribution by force
– revolution.
More at ..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/06/deborah-orr-aardman-pirates-capitalism
and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/mar/29/the-pirates-adventure-scientists-review
Roger
Politically correct note.. "Leprosy support groups
have successfully campaigned for the removal of a gag in upcoming Aardman
Animations film The Pirates! in which a victim of the disease loses a limb
as a result of his condition......The scene depicts the Hugh Grant-voiced
Pirate Captain storming a ship in search of booty, only to be informed by
one of its occupants: "Afraid we don't have any gold, old man, this is a
leper boat. See …" The speaker's arm then drops off."
Roger Collins
TRU School of Business & Economics
Knowledge Maps Versus Concept Maps
Knowledge Mapping ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_mapping
April 7, 2012 message from Scott Bonacker
While looking at references to the book "Getting to
Yes" in the context of contemporary politics I came across another mapping
tool.
This is the article - and information about the
tool -
http://litemind.com/getting-to-yes/
There is also a related free product -
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Scott Bonacker CPA -
McCullough and Associates LLC -
Springfield, MO
The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use Them
Concept
Maps ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_maps
Concept Mapping Software ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Description:
Concept mapping (a method of brainstorming) is a technique for
visualizing the relationships between concepts and creating a visual
image to represent the relationship. Concept mapping software
serves several purposes in the educational environment. One is to
capture the conceptual thinking of one or more persons in a way that
is visually represented. Another is to represent the structure of
knowledge gleaned from written documents so that such knowledge can
be visually represented. In essence, a concept map is a diagram
showing relationships, often between complex ideas. With new
mapping software such as the open source Cmap (
http://www.cmap.ihmc.us/download/
), concepts are easily represented with images (bubbles or pictures)
called concept nodes, and are connected with lines that show the
relationship between and among the concepts. In addition, the
software allows users to attach documents, diagrams, images other
concept maps, hypertextual links and even media files to the concept
nodes. Concept maps can be saved as a PDF or image file and
distributed electronically in a variety of ways including the
Internet and storage devices. |
"The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use Them." by
Joseph D. Novak & Alberto J. Cañas, Florida Institute for Human and Machine
Cognition Pensacola Fl, 32502 ---
http://cmap.ihmc.us/Publications/ResearchPapers/TheoryCmaps/TheoryUnderlyingConceptMaps.htm
Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and
representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles
or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts indicated by a
connecting line linking two concepts. Words on the line, referred to as
linking words or linking phrases, specify the relationship between the two
concepts. We define concept as a perceived regularity in events or objects,
or records of events or objects, designated by a label. The label for most
concepts is a word, although sometimes we use symbols such as + or %, and
sometimes more than one word is used. Propositions are statements about some
object or event in the universe, either naturally occurring or constructed.
Propositions contain two or more concepts connected using linking words or
phrases to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic
units, or units of meaning. Figure 1 shows an example of a concept map that
describes the structure of concept maps and illustrates the above
characteristics.
Another characteristic of concept maps is that the
concepts are represented in a hierarchical fashion with the most inclusive,
most general concepts at the top of the map and the more specific, less
general concepts arranged hierarchically below. The hierarchical structure
for a particular domain of knowledge also depends on the context in which
that knowledge is being applied or considered. Therefore, it is best to
construct concept maps with reference to some particular question we seek to
answer, which we have called a focus question. The concept map may pertain
to some situation or event that we are trying to understand through the
organization of knowledge in the form of a concept map, thus providing the
context for the concept map.
Another important characteristic of concept maps is
the inclusion of cross-links. These are relationships or links between
concepts in different segments or domains of the concept map. Cross-links
help us see how a concept in one domain of knowledge represented on the map
is related to a concept in another domain shown on the map. In the creation
of new knowledge, cross-links often represent creative leaps on the part of
the knowledge producer. There are two features of concept maps that are
important in the facilitation of creative thinking: the hierarchical
structure that is represented in a good map and the ability to search for
and characterize new cross-links.
A final feature that may be added to concept maps
is specific examples of events or objects that help to clarify the meaning
of a given concept. Normally these are not included in ovals or boxes, since
they are specific events or objects and do not represent concepts.
Concept maps were developed in 1972 in the course
of Novak’s research program at Cornell where he sought to follow and
understand changes in children’s knowledge of science (Novak & Musonda,
1991). During the course of this study the researchers interviewed many
children, and they found it difficult to identify specific changes in the
children’s understanding of science concepts by examination of interview
transcripts. This program was based on the learning psychology of David
Ausubel (1963; 1968; Ausubel et al., 1978). The fundamental idea in
Ausubel’s cognitive psychology is that learning takes place by the
assimilation of new concepts and propositions into existing concept and
propositional frameworks held by the learner. This knowledge structure as
held by a learner is also referred to as the individual’s cognitive
structure. Out of the necessity to find a better way to represent children’s
conceptual understanding emerged the idea of representing children’s
knowledge in the form of a concept map. Thus was born a new tool not only
for use in research, but also for many other uses.
Psychological Foundations of Concept Maps
The question sometimes arises as to the origin of
our first concepts. These are acquired by children during the ages of birth
to three years, when they recognize regularities in the world around them
and begin to identify language labels or symbols for these regularities (Macnamara,
1982). This early learning of concepts is primarily a discovery learning
process, where the individual discerns patterns or regularities in events or
objects and recognizes these as the same regularities labeled by older
persons with words or symbols. This is a phenomenal ability that is part of
the evolutionary heritage of all normal human beings. After age 3, new
concept and propositional learning is mediated heavily by language, and
takes place primarily by a reception learning process where new meanings are
obtained by asking questions and getting clarification of relationships
between old concepts and propositions and new concepts and propositions.
This acquisition is mediated in a very important way when concrete
experiences or props are available; hence the importance of “hands-on”
activity for science learning with young children, but this is also true
with learners of any age and in any subject matter domain.
Continued in article
"Using Cmap Tools to Create Concept Diagrams for Accounting," by Rick
Lillie, AAA Commons ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/6d0b8c8402
There are many comments following this entry on the AAA Commons
"Making Computer Science a Requirement?" by Robert Talbert,
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 4, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/04/04/making-computer-science-a-requirement/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
Making a new course requirement runs counter to the turf war compromises (e.g.,
at Harvard) of replacing required courses with required categories wherein
students chose from a smorgasbord of alternative courses and even disciplines.
I like to think more in terms of required general education topics. For
example, I've been a long time advocate of requiring personal finance topics,
including some tax education in so far as it affects personal finance. It
depresses me greatly that so many graduates have no understanding of time value
of money, inflation, tax exempt income, tax deductions and strategies, pensions,
financial risk, and other essentials of financial literacy. In support of my
advocacy is the research that concludes financial distress is a leading cause of
divorce, especially distress arising from such rudimentary mistakes as piling up
more credit card debt than can be afforded or buying new cars when gently used
cars may be a better strategy.
Bob Jensen's threads on requiring financial literacy (at least minimal) among
all college graduates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#FinancialLiteracy
Back when Bill Paton was a towering force on campus at the University of
Michigan it was reported to me (I never verified this) that Accounting 101 was a
required course. I suspect that this would be rare today except for selected
majors such as economics, health care administration, and business.
What topics as opposed to courses should be required in gen ed?
April 8 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Tom, Jagdish, and the Others
I think at Trinity University and most other universities the "Common
Curriculum" is intended to be a combination of Skills (e.g., writing and
mathematics), physical fitness, multiple language proficiency, and five
"Fundamental Understandings" ---
http://web.trinity.edu/x1272.xml
My proposal for financial literacy would be to add more into the skills
components.
I think the skill and physical education components deal more with living
skills (including nutrition which is becoming a larger part of physical
fitness) whereas Fundamental Understandings are intended to stimulate
wanting to be educated as opposed to being trained.
When I first arrived at Trinity in 1982, there was a team-taught
Fundamental Understandings course called Quest which as I recall ran over
multiple semesters for something like nine credits. The main purpose at the
time was to give all Trinity Students a truly "common educational
experience" as was typical many universities in this era.
But over the years following Common Curriculum changes at Harvard,
universities replaced the "common experience" of required courses like Quest
with more of a "common curriculum" comprised of smorgasbord of choices in
various categories of Fundamental Understandings.
This was in part due to a movement to give students more freedom of
choice. It also served some turf war issues, especially in departments with
very few majors that found it increasingly difficult to justify their
budgets without have courses in the Common Curriculum smorgasbord.
Thus we now have a dilemma of graduating students who may have never
studied Shakespeare since high school. They may never have studies Hobbes or
Marx simply because they chose other dishes in the smorgasbord such as
African American history great women in literature.
I do not pretend to know what is the ideal common curriculum. One thing
certain that there's far to much important knowledge to cover the waterfront
in a Common Curriculum. I suspect scholars will never be totally satisfied
with the Common Curriculum smorgasbord no matter what great chefs prepared
the food of common knowledge to choose from.
Life would be much easier if all graduates of all universities had to
take a uniform Graduate Record Examination to be certified as a college
graduate. Then every university to teach to that exam much like accounting
educators teach to the CPA examination for a large part of the accounting
curriculum.
In fact, it has become much more difficult to write the GRE, GMAT, LSAT,
MCAT, and other examinations that we now use for graduate school admissions
since college graduates now have smorgasbord rather than common experience
in the Common Curriculum.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
Ignorant Distinctions Between Training and Education
Hi Roger and Don,
I agree that employers are going to assume that students know how to use
MS Office products (maybe not MS Access) and that stressing those basic
skills may even be dysfunctional on a resume. However, mentioning some
advanced skills like computing bond yields or making pivot tables in Excel
might be worth mentioning.
There are some things, however, that most accounting students do not learn
in college that set my students ahead in some CPA firms and corporations
were some advanced skills that probably should not be taught in a basic
computer science course but I think should be taught in an accounting or
finance theory course.
The training skill my students learned was how to value interest rate swaps
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133swapvalue.htm
When teaching such valuation techniques the underlying economic theory
complexities and controversies of derivatives and hedging can "sneaked in"
along the way.
And if your university has access to a Bloomberg or Reuters terminal, it's
even better to teach students how to derive yield curves and then sneak in
the underlying theory of yield curves. Believe me that they will remember
the theory of yield curves better if they also learned how to derive them in
the real world.
My bottom line conclusion is that professors who get on a soap box and
preach that we should educate rather than train in college just do not know
that one of the best ways to educate is to sneak complicated theory in while
teaching some complicated training techniques. I think the General Motors
Institute (GMI) that grants engineering degrees discovered years ago that a
whole lot of mathematics and physics can be taught while teaching mechanical
engineering.
http://www.kettering.edu/about/our-history/gmi
Hence, at the collegiate level when professors rant that we should educate
rather than train I chuckle under my breath that they may not know how to
make students more interested in complicated and controversial theory.
The soap box distinction between training and education is often elaborated
upon out of teaching and learning ignorance, especially at the collegiate
level.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
"How Not to Require Computer Science for All Students," by Robert
Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 6, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/04/06/how-not-to-require-cs1-for-all-students/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
So let’s suppose we
decide
to require computer science for all students
at our university. How are we going to implement that requirement?
Here’s one approach that I believe could turn out to be the wrong
way to do this: Set up a collection of courses, all of which count for
the CS1 requirement, that are aligned to the students’ levels of
technological proficiency. STEM students take a standard
intro-to-programming course, liberal arts majors take a course that
focuses more on office applications, and so on.
But, wait a minute,
didn’t I say last time that I liked
Georgia Tech’s approach, where the single CS1
requirement was satisfied by a number of different courses that are
aimed at different populations? Yes, I did. But favoring a collection
courses with different populations is not the same as favoring a
collection with different outcomes depending on how measure, or
perceive, students’ technological skills when they matriculate.
Targeting different populations is just smart curricular design; setting
different learning outcomes for different students based on their
incoming abilities is borderline anti-educational.
We don’t do this in
writing courses, for instance. Students certainly come into college with
writing skills that are all over the map. Some students are barely
literate while others are highly talented writers. But we don’t say that
we only expect the former to be able to put together basic paragraphs
whereas the latter are expected to write novels. If we are serious about
education, we set and hold high expectations for writing skills for all
students that ask students to really understand the concepts and
processes of writing. We do not say to a student who comes in with low
writing skills, “We’ll remediate you to a basic level but otherwise
we don’t expect as much from you as we do others.”
We don’t do this in
math, either, really. There are certainly different requirements for
math courses at most universities; STEM people take calculus, business
and social science people take statistics, and so on. But these
differences are differences in content, not in expectations. A
statistics course should be neither more nor less quantitatively
rigorous than a calculus course; a liberal arts math course should be
the same way. (I really mean that.) We don’t expect a lesser
understanding of quantitative disciplines in this case; just a
mastery of different aspects.
The reason I bring this
up is that I’m hearing some say, in response to the articles about the
CS requirement, that we should require a course in office applications
and basic digital literacy for those who come in with lesser
technological skill, and that can be their CS course. I think that’s
looking at the problem from the wrong end. It seems that we might want a
global CS requirement because in this era, the quantity and quality of
digital skills that we should expect from students has changed. Office
suite proficiency is necessary but no longer sufficient: We want
students to be able to program (where “programming” is broadly defined),
to articulate how computers and the internet work, and so on. The
question ought to be, where do we want students to end up with
respect to CS, not where are they now. If we want all students
to program — which I think is the true gist of the push to require CS —
then let’s aim high, set the goal, and help students get there. (Which
involves asking “where are they now”, I know.) But let’s not say that
students with low tech proficiencies can’t get there or shouldn’t be
expected to get there.
Compassless Colleges ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz
THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS ---
https://www.chronicle-store.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ID=78956&WG=0
"3 Major Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up," by Nick
DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 5, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/3-major-publishers-sue-open-education-textbook-start-up/35994?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on free textbooks (not such a great alternative in most
instances) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
New Book Lists 'Best' Professors, but Skeptics Question Its Methods
---
http://chronicle.com/article/New-Book-Lists-Best/131422/
Also read the comments
In the meantime on RateMyProfessor
Top Professors versus Hottest Professors versus Top Schools ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/topLists11/topLists.jsp
I think the numerical ratings are garbage, but I've often learned quite a lot
about a professor by reading the actual comments on RateMyProfessor. Usually the
samples are too small and self-selected to get any numerical average that has
any reliability and validity. But even small samples of comments sometimes lend
insights into the way a professor teaches, grades, jokes, shows up late,
dresses, scratches, mumbles, tests, dodges questions, and writes on the board.
For example, I learn a bit when a student writes such things as:
"This guy is a lousy, unprepared, and boring teacher, but virtually every
student gets an A so this is an important section of the course to choose."
"An idiot can get an A+ in this course without any effort. The only
students who got lower grades pestered her for a lot of outside help?"
"The only requirement to ace the course is to be on time for all the
classes and pretend you're tuned in."
iPad App Video (free) : Personalized Feedback With ScreenChomp
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igp7rHZRg4M&feature=youtu.be
Thank you Richard Campbell for the heads up
"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Moving Finger versus Stylus
"The iPad Isn't Ready for Working by Hand," by Jon Mitchell, ReadWriteWeb,
April 7, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_ipad_isnt_ready_for_working_by_hand.php
Last week's release of
Paper for iPad
was a huge boon to the cottage industry of third-party
iPad styluses. It was hardly the first app for drawing or writing
directly on the screen of an iOS device, but it struck a chord. It was just
the right blend of skeuomorphic real-world design and familiar iOS gestures.
I had never even considered a stylus before, but this seemed like my chance.
I travel the Internet in fairly Apple-obsessed
early-adopter circles, so I went with the stylus I'd seen recommended most
often: the
Cosmonaut by Studio Neat. Studio
Neat made the
Glif
camera mount, one of the most celebrated iPhone
peripherals around, so it seemed like a safe bet.
The Cosmonaut arrived in short order in spartan,
Space Race packaging. It's fairly wide to hold like a pen. It's black,
grippy and dense, the exact same length as an iPhone. The business end
exhibits the capacitive properties the touch screen requires: a soft touch
that gives way gradually to pressure, just like a fingertip, but more
precise.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on tools and tricks of the trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Park Finder
This may be of interest to many of you, whether young or old, who are seeking
new outdoor adventures during the upcoming summer months.
The link of interest is the Park Finder link ---
http://www.llbean.com/parkfinder/search?qei=526066026&qs=3058330&cid=00490488813#lat=43.6615&lon=-70.2555&srhTerm=Portland,ME&tabPos=0
Of course us rugged mountain men love LL Bean products, but the accountant in me
also tells me they're probably overpriced relative to my favorite online store
--- Amazon.
Bob Jensen's travel helpers in general are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Travel
After 10 years, the joint (UC Berkeley & Columbia U.) executive MBA program
is shutting its doors as both schools develop new offerings ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-27/haas-columbia-emba-closing-next-year
"Does Income Inequality Promote Cheating?" Inside Higher Ed,
April 5, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/05/does-income-inequality-promote-cheating
Differences Between Students Who Cheat Versus Students Who Don't Cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#CheatingPsychology
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Student Loan Initiative: Alumni Lend To Current Scholars To Finance
College," by Loren Berlin, Huff Post, April 2, 2012 ---
http://paper.li/businessschools?utm_source=subscription&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=paper_sub
Can former students help solve the student loan
crisis? That's the reasoning behind a new loan initiative launched last year
at Stanford University, one of the nation's most elite and expensive
colleges, where undergraduate tuition is now $40,050.
A handful of Stanford alumni created SoFi, a
company that funds student loans with investments from alumni. The company
is based on the peer-to-peer lending model popularized by microfinance
organizations and websites like Kickstarter.com.
SoFi grew out of a recognition that the student
loan market is "unsustainable," said SoFi CEO Mike Cagney in an interview
with The Huffington Post. "You've got the government, the school, the
students, and nobody is invested in another's success … If you take the
government out of the equation and introduce alumni, you create those
connections and that investment."
Student loan debt today totals
more than $1 trillion, a 14-fold increase from 15
years ago. It dwarfs the amount of the nation's credit card debt, which is
just shy of $800 million. Those in the class of 2010 graduated with an
average of more than $25,000 in student loan debt,
according to the
Project on Student Loan Debt. In 2009, nearly 9
percent of student loan holders defaulted on their government loans,
according to the U.S. Department of Education.
I didn't know that in this era of online courses there were still such
things as "correspondence courses."
"Saint Mary-of-the-Woods Told to Repay $42 Million," Inside Higher Ed,
April 4, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/04/saint-mary-woods-told-repay-42-million
"Students Endlessly E-Mail Professors for Help. A New Service Hopes to
Organize the Answers," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 1, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Students-Endlessly-E-Mail/131390/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Meet the Ed-Tech
Start-Ups
It's a golden age for educational-technology
start-ups. The past three years have seen a spike in venture-capital
investment in upstart companies, many founded by entrepreneurs just out of
college. Last month The Chronicle outlined the trend ("A
Boom Time for Education Start-Ups"), but we wanted
to dig deeper.
Below are short features on three such companies,
focusing on the problems they hope to solve and the challenges they face in
selling their unusual ideas. To get a sense of the emerging field, we've
included a
list of a dozen other start-ups competing for a
piece of the action.
Pooja Sankar may eliminate
the need for professors to hold office hours, or to endlessly respond to
student questions by e-mail.
Ms. Sankar, a recent
graduate of Stanford University's M.B.A. program, leads a start-up focused
on finding a better way for college students to ask questions about course
materials and assignments online. Her company, Piazza, has built an online
study hall where professors and teaching assistants can easily monitor
questions and encourage students who understand the material to help their
peers.
At first blush, the service seems unnecessary.
Students can already e-mail questions to professors or fellow students, and
most colleges already own course-management systems like Blackboard that
include discussion features. But Ms. Sankar feels that such options are
clunky. She says professors are finding that Piazza can save them hours each
week by allowing them to post answers to a single online forum rather than
handle a scattershot of student e-mails.
Piazza is a Web site that refreshes with updates as
new questions or answers come in. Professors simply set up a free discussion
area for their course on the service at the beginning of the term and invite
their students to set up free accounts to participate. Ms. Sankar says that
students typically keep Piazza open on their screens as they work on
homework, often staying on the site for hours at a time.
Ms. Sankar, who is 31, was inspired to create the
service based on her own experience as an undergraduate in India, where she
studied at the highly selective Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.
She says she was a shy student, and one of only three women majoring in
computer science, so she often found herself watching from the wings as more
social students collaborated on homework assignments. She felt there had to
be a way to recreate a study hall online, in a way that made it easy for shy
students to ask questions anonymously.
After graduating, she got a master's degree in
computer science at the University of Maryland at College Park, and then
worked as an engineer for Facebook and other companies for a few years. When
she decided to head to Stanford to study business, she was sure she would
not try to start a company of her own, since she found the prospect "too
scary." But a course on entrepreneurship made her realize that the path to a
company was simply a series of "baby steps," and that she wanted to bring
her vision of a better "question-and-answer platform" to life.
She wrote the original version of Piazza herself,
after teaching herself the programming language Ruby on Rails from a book.
By the time she first sought investors, she already had hundreds of students
using the service. She raised an initial round of $1.5-million last year
from the venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, and raised an additional
$6-million from investors in November.
As of yet, the site has no plans to generate
revenue—the service is free and does not carry advertisements. Ms. Sankar
said that she didn't write a business plan for the site, because she doesn't
believe in them, and that she believes that once a critical mass of students
and professors are signed up, revenue models can emerge. When pressed, she
says that in the future the company may charge for advanced analytics for
professors or other extra features.
She spends much of her time seeking feedback from
users and obsessively tinkering with the service in hopes of improving it.
"I am an engineer at heart," she explains.
To spread the word about the site, she has taken an
unusually personal approach. She sends e-mail messages to professors telling
her story and the goal of the site, and asking them to try it.
Greg Morrisett, a computer-science professor at
Harvard University, got one of those e-mails. He said he was curious, but he
was concerned that the site's policy noted that it claimed ownership over
comments posted on the site, which Mr. Morrisett felt violated Harvard's
policies. So he wrote back to Ms. Sankar and said he wasn't able to use it.
"Ten minutes later she wrote back and said, 'We fixed the policy,'" the
professor recalls. (Users now own their own posts.) So he gave it a shot.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Streetsmart, Schoolsmart: Urban Poverty and the Education of Adolescent
Boys by Gilberto Q. Conchas and James Diego Vigil (Teachers College
Press; 196 pages; $76 hardcover, $33.95 paperback). A comparative study of
Vietnamese, African-American, and Latino boys in Southern California; considers
why some become disengaged from school and join gangs, while others do not.
http://chronicle.com/article/Weekly-Book-List-April-2/131409/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Free Textbooks: Advantages and Disadvantages
March 29, message from Ramesh Fernando
Prof. Jensen, I don't know if you have this link
but it's a great site
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/home
Accounting Principles both Financial Accounting and
Managerial Accounting
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/booklist?cat=Business
March 29, 2012 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Ramesh,
Thank you Ramesh.
The Global Text Project seems to offer free alternatives for some textbooks
that are no longer totally free on Freeload Press ---
http://www.textbookmedia.com/Products/BookList.aspx
For example the following textbook is free from the Global Text Project:
8th Edition of Accounting Principles: A Business Perspective
(Managerial) by James Edwards, Roger Hermanson, Susan Ivancevich
[puff] ---
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31779972/Accounting Principles Vol. 2.pdf
The above textbook is 1995 on Freeload Press is $16.95 ---
http://www.textbookmedia.com/Products/ViewProduct.aspx?id=3168
However, lecture and study guides are also available for a fee from Freeload
Press.
My worry about book and other free textbooks in general is how often they
are completely updated. The Global Text download of the 8th edition was last
revised in 2006, and this is 2012. In that period of time there have been
some changes in managerial accounting such as Lean Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/LeanAccountingMain.htm
The Edwards, Hermanson, and Ivancevich book does not mention Lean Accounting
to my knowledge.
Actually, I worry more about the updates for financial accounting
textbooks than updates of managerial accounting textbooks, because the FASB
and IASB are grinding out changes weekly with some things that need to be
put into revised editions of financial accounting textbooks as soon as
possible. Similar problems arise with auditing textbooks. It's virtually
impossible to have a long-term tax textbook that's not updated at least
annually is some way.
A huge problem with free or almost-free textbooks that pay no royalties
to authors is that the authors have fewer incentives to slave over revisions
vis-à-vis commercial textbooks that are paying tens of thousands of dollars
to successful authors year after year after year.
A second huge problem is some popular supplements available from
commercial publishers are not available from free or almost-free servers.
These supplements include test banks, videos, and software.
Teachers who use their own handouts in place of a textbook have some of
the same problems with updates. For example, think of all the financial
accounting handouts (including problems and cases) that must be revised when
the new joint standards ore issued on leases and revenue recognition.
Professors buried in teaching duties and research for new knowledge really
have to struggle to go back over 800 pages of student handouts to constantly
update these handouts. My advice is to find a very current revised textbook
and reduce the handouts to a more manageable 300 pages or less. Of course
the "handouts" can now be digital.
There are course certain courses for which there are no good textbooks
available for major modules of the course. I never found a good accounting
theory textbook that I though was suitable for my accounting theory course.
My students accordingly got 800 pages of my handouts ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/acct5341.htm
But for my AIS course I had a great electronic textbook (Murthy and
Groomer) such that I only needed 300 pages of my handouts ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/acct5342.htm
Incidentally, most free textbooks were once high-priced commercial
textbooks dropped by publishing companies that gave the copyrights back to
the authors. These textbooks were dropped in the past two decades largely
due to publishing company mergers and acquisitions. When Publisher A and
Publisher B have competing textbooks that are virtually identical when A and
B are merged a decision is usually made to drop one of the textbooks even
though it has been somewhat profitable before the merger. I have a number of
relatively close friends that experienced this type of copyright return
including Phil Cooley who had his successful basic finance textbook
copyright returned in one of these publishing house mergers
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
Bob Jensen's threads on free textbooks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, lectures, videos, and course
materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"Notre Dame Tops List of Best (Undergraduate) College Business Programs,"
by Geoff Gloeckler, Bloomberg Business Week, March 20, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-20/notre-dame-tops-list-of-best-college-business-programs
The 2012 Rankings ---
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/ugtable_3-20.html
Bob Jensen's threads on rankings controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"Four Numbers Add Up to an American Debt Disaster," by Caroline Baum,
Bloomberg, March 28, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-28/four-numbers-add-up-to-an-american-debt-disaster.html
Consider the following numbers: 2.2, 62.8, 454,
5.9. Drawing a blank? Not to worry. They don’t mean much on their own.
Now consider them in context:
1) 2.2 percent is the average interest rate on the
U.S. Treasury’s marketable and non-marketable debt (February data).
2) 62.8 months is the average maturity of the
Treasury’s marketable debt (fourth quarter 2011).
3) $454 billion is the interest expense on publicly
held debt in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 30.
4) $5.9 trillion is the amount of debt coming due
in the next five years.
For the moment, Nos. 1 and 2 are helping No. 3 and
creating a big problem for No. 4. Unless Treasury does something about No.
2, Nos. 1 and 3 will become liabilities while No. 4 has the potential to
provoke a crisis.
In plain English, the Treasury’s reliance on
short-term financing serves a dual purpose, neither of which is beneficial
in the long run. First, it helps conceal the depth of the nation’s
structural imbalances: the difference between what it spends and what it
collects in taxes. Second, it puts the U.S. in the precarious position of
having to roll over 71 percent of its privately held marketable debt in the
next five years -- probably at higher interest rates. First Among Equals
And that’s a problem. The U.S. is more dependent on
short- term funding than many of Europe’s highly indebted countries,
including Greece, Spain and Portugal, according to Lawrence Goodman,
president of the Center for Financial Stability, a non- partisan New York
think tank focusing on financial markets.
The U.S. may have had a lot more debt in relation
to the size of its economy following World War II, but the structure was
much more favorable, with 41 percent maturing in less than five years, 31
percent in five-to-10 years and 21 percent in 10 years or more, according to
CFS data. Today, only 10 percent of the public debt matures outside of a
decade.
Based on the current structure, a one
percentage-point increase in the average interest rate will add $88 billion
to the Treasury’s interest payments this year alone, Goodman says. If market
interest rates were to return to more normal levels, well, you do the math.
Some economists have cited the Treasury’s ability
to borrow all it wants at 2 percent as an argument for more fiscal stimulus.
Why not, as long as it’s cheap?
Goodman says the size of the deficit (8.2 percent
of gross domestic product) or the debt (67.7 percent of GDP) is only part of
the problem. The bigger threat is rollover risk: “the same thing that got
countries from Portugal to Argentina to Greece into trouble,” he says. “It’s
the repayment of principal that often provides the catalyst for a market
event or a crisis.”
The U.S. is unlikely to go from
all-you-want-at-2-percent to basket-case overnight. That said, policy makers
would be wise to view recent market volatility as a taste of things to come.
Talking to Goodman, I was reminded of the
Treasury’s standard sales pitch before quarterly refunding operations during
periods of rising yields. Some undersecretary for domestic finance would be
dispatched to tell us that Treasury expected to have no trouble selling its
debt.
I had an equally standard response: At what price?
That seems particularly relevant today. The Federal
Reserve purchased 61 percent of the net Treasury issuance last year,
according to the bank’s quarterly flow-of-funds report. That’s masking the
decline in demand from everyone else, including banks, mutual funds,
corporations and individuals, Goodman says.
Of course, Fed Chairman
Ben Bernanke might look at the same numbers and
see them as a sign of success. His stated goal in buying bonds is to lower
Treasury yields and push investors into riskier assets.
Free to Borrow
Then there’s the distortion in the
relative value of stocks versus bonds to worry
about. Using the 10-year cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio and the
inverse of the 10-year Treasury yield, Goodman says the relationship hasn’t
been this out of whack since 1962.
Continued in article
Video on the History of Debt
"Debt: The First 5,000 Years," by Paul Kedrosky, Kedrosky.com,
September 10, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/09/debt-the-first-5000-years.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InfectiousGreed+%28Paul+Kedrosky%27s+Infectious+Greed%29
Bob Jensen's threads on entitlements and debt ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
I certainly hope this isn't an April Fools Day joke..
"Texas jury slaps $195 million penalty on TaxMasters, CEO Cox (files for
bankruptcy)," by Libloather, Yahoo News, March 30, 2012 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2866808/posts
Jensen Comment
This makes me wonder where this scum bag buried his loot.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Did F. Lee Bailey Have A Fool For A Client?" by Peter J. O'Reilly,
Forbes, April 3, 2012 ---
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2012/04/03/did-f-lee-bailey-have-a-fool-for-a-client/
When I was young, if a person knew the name of only
one lawyer, that lawyer was probably F. Lee Bailey. I remember once taking a
phone call at 1:00 AM from someone wanting to talk to the general manager of
the hotel where I was working. When you called the hotel at 1:00 AM the only
person you would ever get to talk to was the night auditor, who in a 140
room hotel would also run the front desk and answer the phone on third
shift, so that was a ridiculous request. The angry caller informed me that
he was going to sue the hotel and he was hiring F LEE BAILEY ! I knew at the
time that F. Lee Bailey was famous for being a criminal defense attorney. It
was guys like this that needed him.
Probably if that caller ever received a 90 Day
Letter from the IRS. He would make an angry phone call in which he would let
the responsible agent know that he was going to hire F. LEE BAILEY ! to
represent him in Tax Court. That would be mere rhetoric or fancy, though
like the counting sheep hiring Mr. Bailey to represent them against Serta
mattresses.
Seriously, would anybody actually get F. Lee Bailey
to represent him in Tax Court ? You want a tax litigator to represent you
in tax court. Who would want F. Lee Bailey ? And why would F. Lee Bailey
choose to take on a tax case ? As it turns out, there is one person who not
only wanted F. Lee Bailey to represent him, but could actually persuade F.
Lee Bailey to take the case. The client in the case was F. Lee Bailey.
The proverb is that an attorney who represents
himself has a fool for a client. The import of the proverb is that picking
yourself to be your own attorney is a foolish choice. Now the
decision in the case is on the long side and there
are a number of complicated issues. It was not a total win for either Mr.
Bailey or the IRS. Overall, I am not sure that the proverb was actually
proved out in this case. I don’t know that many tax litigators would have
done a lot better with the mess that Mr. Bailey’s difficult client dumped on
him. It may well be that his actual foolishness might not have been so much
in acting as his own lawyer as in the attempts he made to act as his own
accountant. The case could actually form the basis of a novel, so I
probably won’t do it justice, but here are some highlights.
Where Bailey Won – Kind Of
The big issue in the case concerns Mr. Bailey’s
handling of client funds. It is rather on the convoluted side. Claude
DuBoc had entered into a plea agreement with the United States in a
marijuana smuggling case. His sentence was dependent, in part, in how much
property the Government was able to seize from him. Thus it was in his
interest to facilitate seizures, which were complicated by legal, diplomatic
and practical difficulties. In order to address these issues:
the Government entered into a vague and unusual
agreement with Mr. Bailey, under which Mr. Bailey would perform services to
facilitate Mr. Duboc’s forfeiture of his assets, and Mr. Duboc would
transfer 602,000 shares of Biochem Pharma stock to Mr. Bailey, to provide
funds that Mr. Bailey could use to maintain and transfer Mr. Duboc’s foreign
assets. Thomas Kirwin, an Assistant U.S. Attorney who worked for the
Government on the Duboc case (and who later became a U.S. Attorney)
testified at trial that the Duboc case was important and complex and that
the nature of the work that Mr. Bailey undertook to do was “extraordinary”.
Nonetheless, the agreement was completely unwritten.
That brings in my favorite legal proverb – Verbal
contracts are not worth the paper they are printed on. Like “fool for a
client”, the verbal contract proverb probably does not hold up in this
case. The verbal contract did prove to be worth something. The Government
had issues with how Mr. Bailey handled the funds, which resulted in two
lawsuits and his spending 44 days in jail for contempt. So the IRS wanted
to tax him on the value of the stock at the point that he received it.
Because of the agreement the Tax Court ruled that he received the stock as a
trustee and was only taxed when and to the extent that he converted funds to
his personal use. When the Tax Court rules it does not keep score. It
calls the strikes and balls and sends the IRS and the taxpayer back to
recompute. Of the over four million in deficiency, though, that issue
seemed to be worth about half. So I think we can give Mr. Bailey pretty
high marks for his first foray into tax litigation.
On the other hand, he had borrowed against the
stock, which the Tax Court did not find to be a taxable event, but when fees
from other cases were used to pay down the debt, those fees were taxable
income, even though Mr. Bailey never received them.
The Rest Of The Case Is A Mess (Bailey loses here)
Continued in article
In just the one year between filming “Elements” and
filming “NOVA ScienceNow,” there has been a radical change in the equipment the
cameramen (and yes, they’ve all been men) are carrying. The traditional TV
cameras have been replaced by something entirely new: big-sensor tapeless
camcorders.
"S.L.R. Video Cameras for the Pros," by David Pogue, The New York
Times, April 3, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/slr-videocameras-for-the-pros/
Garbage Statistics
How do law schools (read that lawyers) lie with statistics?
Why are so many lower ranking law school doing so much better in placing their
graduates than the prestigious law schools?
"When True Numbers Mislead: 98% Employment "Not Fully Accurate
Picture," ASU Dean Says," by Brian Tamanaha (Washington U.), Balkinization, April 2,
2012 ---
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2012/04/when-true-numbers-mislead-98-employment.html
Turkey times for overstuffed law schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools
"4G or Not 4G: A Guide to Cut Through All the 'Fast' Talk," by Walter
S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577307630825596396.html
Of all the confusing technology terms used in
consumer marketing today, perhaps the most opaque is "4G," used to describe
a new, much faster generation of cellular data on smartphones, tablets and
other devices. It sounds simple, but there are many varieties of 4G and
conflicting claims.
AT&T T -0.30% claims "The nation's largest 4G
network," and T-Mobile says it has "America's largest 4G network." Verizon
Wireless boasts "America's fastest 4G network," and Sprint S -0.17% says it
had the first 4G network.
Yet the technology used by T-Mobile, and mostly
comprising AT&T's 4G network, isn't considered "real" 4G at all by some
critics, and the one used by Sprint has proven to be a dead end and is being
abandoned. The flavor being used by Verizon is now being adopted by its
rivals, but won't be interoperable among them.
It's a headache for consumers to grasp. So here's a
simplified explainer to some of the most common questions, based on
interviews with top technical officials at all four major U.S. wireless
carriers.
What is 4G?
It's the fourth and latest generation technology
for data access over cellular networks. It's faster and can give networks
more capacity than the 3G networks still on most phones. There's a technical
definition, set by a United Nations agency in Europe, and a marketing
definition, which is looser, but more relevant to most consumers.
Who needs 4G?
It's mostly for people with smartphones, tablets
and laptops who often need fast data speeds for Web browsing, app use and
email when they're out of the range of Wi-Fi networks. It can give you the
same or greater data speeds as home or office Wi-Fi when you're in a taxi.
In hotels and airports, it's often faster than public Wi-Fi networks.
How does 4G differ from another term
being advertised, 'LTE'?
LTE, which stands for "Long Term Evolution," is the
fastest, most consistent variety of 4G, and the one most technical experts
feel hews most closely to the technical standard set by the U.N. In the
U.S., it has primarily been deployed by Verizon, which offers it in over 200
markets. AT&T has begun deploying it, offering LTE in 28 markets so far.
Sprint and T-Mobile are pivoting to LTE, though they have no cities covered
by it yet.
What are these other versions of
4G?
Sprint uses a technology called WiMax. T-Mobile and
AT&T deployed a technology called HSPA+, a faster version of 3G that they
relabeled as 4G, and which many technical critics regard as a "faux 4G."
Sprint will begin switching to LTE later this year, and T-Mobile in 2013.
How fast is 4G?
Claims vary and performance depends upon the type
of device, location, and time. In my tests, 4G phones, tablets and data
modems for laptops typically deliver from three to 20 times the download
speeds of 3G devices. The speed king is LTE. The LTE devices I've used have
typically averaged download speeds of between 10 and 20 megabits per second,
with frequent instances of over 30 megabits per second. The other forms of
4G have generally produced download speeds well under 10 mbps in my tests.
But all of these are better than 3G, which in my tests on all networks and
many devices, averages download speeds of under 2 mbps. The Digital Solution
How does LTE compare with common wired
home Internet speeds?
Although it is wireless, LTE is often faster than
most Americans' wired home Internet service. According to Akamai, a large
Internet company, the average broadband speed in the U.S. in the third
quarter of 2011 was a mere 6.1 mbps.
How does LTE compare with Wi-Fi?
Wi-Fi is usually a wireless broadcast of a wired
Internet service, so, if the average U.S. broadband speed is 6.1 mbps,
that's around what the average Wi-Fi speed is. But, in public places, the
shared Wi-Fi is often much, much slower than LTE. In tests I did this week
at Dulles Airport near Washington, and at a hotel outside Boston, the public
Wi-Fi networks delivered well under 1 mbps on the new iPad. But the Verizon
LTE cellular network on the iPad averaged over 32 mbps in both places.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
A Historic and Dysfunctional Alternative to Expensive Malpractice Claims
"Violent Crimes in China’s Hospitals Spread Happiness," by Adam
Minter, Bloomberg, March 29, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-29/violent-crimes-in-china-s-hospitals-spread-happiness.html
Last Friday afternoon, Wang Hao, a young internist
at the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University in northeast
China, was brutally murdered by a disgruntled patient. It was a spectacular
crime, but it was not an unusual one: Violence against doctors, including
murder, is commonplace and reportedly increasing. In 2006, the last year for
which detailed records on patient-doctor violence was reported publicly
(including violence perpetrated by patient family members and friends), the
Chinese Ministry of Health stated that 5,519 medical personnel had been
“injured” in disputes -- a substantial increase over previous years. And on
March 29, the China Daily cited an “official source” who said that in 2010,
17,000 violent incidents took place, affecting roughly 70 percent of all
public hospitals in China.
Why so much violence against one of the caring
professions? Chinese media, and microblogs, are filled with theories.
In 2007, Xinhua, the state-owned news agency,
explained it as a function of “patients' families and friends [becoming]
more likely to use violence to vent their rage over hospital errors.”
There’s some truth to that. China lacks a credible and independent medical
malpractice system to determine compensation for medical errors. But that’s
just the beginning. The more critical issue relates to the comically low
compensation medical professionals receive (the starting salary for a doctor
is around $500 per month). To supplement their income, they legally receive
commissions on prescriptions and medical services. On Thursday, Shanghai
media reported that the city’s doctors also commonly notify funeral homes of
impending patient deaths in exchange for kickbacks.
Chinese patients often enter a hospital prepared to
pay bribes for the care that they need. I’ve personally witnessed a “tip”
handed to a doctor in advance of a surgical procedure at a top Shanghai
hospital. They can also be tricked into undergoing unnecessary but
revenue-generating procedures. Three years ago, for instance, at another
Shanghai hospital, I was told I should get a CT scan so as to better
understand the causes of a sinus infection, and then asked to purchase a
Percocet prescription to manage my pain. I didn’t need either. Combine this
norm, however, with crowded waiting rooms, high and expensive hurdles to see
specialists, and a pointed lack of means to civilly contest malpractice and
one can see why resentment against the Chinese medical profession has boiled
for decades.
Last Friday’s murder, even in the context of other
Chinese patient-doctor murders, doesn’t reveal much about the scale of
patient bitterness in China. That proof is provided by an astonishing online
poll posted by People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese
Communist Party, a few hours after news of the murder went viral in China.
The now deleted survey (posted as an attachment to this article) asked
readers to express their feelings about Wang Hao’s murder by clicking on
emoticons symbolizing feelings ranging from anger (a red fuming face) to
happiness (a yellow smiley face). Shockingly, of the first 6,161 readers to
respond to the poll, 4,018 --- 65 percent -- chose happiness. Anger came in
a distant second with 14 percent. The third choice, sadness (a teary, yellow
face) received 6.8 percent.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
What do extreme alternatives of violence versus multi-million dollar malpractice
recovery claims have in common?
Answer
Both can lead to physicians and hospitals refusing high risk medical services.
For example, when Romney Care was implemented in Massachusetts it made
obstetrics unprofitable to hospitals having to bear enormous expenses of
obstetrics malpractice insurance. It's common for courts to pass on costly
judgments in sympathy for parents who had a defective baby even though the
hospitals and doctors did nothing wrong. As a result of not being able to cover
expenses of malpractice insurance and lawsuit risks, quite a few hospitals in
Massachusetts closed down their obstetrics services. They would probably do the
same under risk of being damaged by disgruntled Chinese parents.
Bob Jensen's threads on health care are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"Professor Hopes to Support Free Course With Kickstarter, the ‘Crowd
Funding’ Site," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education,
March 29, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professor-hopes-to-support-free-course-with-kickstarter-the-crowd-funding-site/35864?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Free online courses for the masses are all the
rage—and many are being run by start-ups hoping to profit by selling related
materials and services. Jim Groom thinks that’s too commercial, so he’s
raising money for the online course he co-teaches at the University of Mary
Washington using Kickstarter, the popular “crowd funding” service.
In a campaign
released today, the professor makes his plea in an
irreverent video that mixes in clips from a 90s true-crime show, and video
interviews with students and professors shot from unusual angles. He
explains that last year he ran the course, which is on digital storytelling
and is called DS106, using his own equipment. But the class has grown so
large that he needs a new server to keep it going, and he estimates that
will cost him $2,900.
He’s asking for contributions ranging from $1 to
$3,000, and those who give will get what he describes as “DS106 schwag”—a
T-shirt, a bumper sticker, or a desk calendar with a different creative
assignment for each day. Some of the rewards reflect the quirky nature of
the course itself: For $100 you can have one of the course assignments named
after you.
The campaign will run for a couple of weeks. If he
hasn’t met his goal of $4,200 (a price that figures in the server cost and
the price of the schwag), then the project gets nothing and all of those who
pledged keep their money. If the target is met, the deal is on. If the goal
is exceeded, he says he will use the extra money to add other enhancements
to the course.
In an interview this week, Mr. Groom stressed that
the course is “not about him,” and he criticized the way some massive online
courses rely on what amounts to a celebrity professor to attract students.
He used the word “community” frequently to describe the group of professors
and students involved in the course.
The idea for the campaign came from Tim Owens,
another instructional technologist at Mary Washington. “I’ve wanted to do a
Kickstarter for so long, but I’ve never been able to think of what could we
do,” he said. When he heard Mr. Groom wondering where they could come up
with $2,900, he suggested the crowd-funding site.
Mr. Groom argues that crowd funding could be a
model for other free online-education projects. Even some of the largest,
such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare effort, have mostly relied on grants for
support and
have struggled to find a long-term way to stay afloat.
“It’s like a PBS model” of pledge drives, Mr. Groom
said.
The Chronicle asked the folks at
Kickstarter whether other educational efforts have used the site to raise
money. A representative from the company pointed us to these five campaigns,
all of which succeeded:
—SmartHistory:
Raised $11,513 for a Web site created by two art historians.
—Punk
Mathematics: Raised 28,701 for a book of mathematical stories.
—Open
Educational Resources for Typography: Raised $13,088 to develop
teaching materials for courses on typography.
—Trade
School: Raised $9,133 to run a program that turns storefronts into
temporary trade schools.
—Brooklyn
Brainery: Raised $9,629 to set up a collaborative school whose
courses would cost $25 for four weeks.
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the growth of distance education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation
Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives for distance education and training
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Arts in Accounting and Finance
I encountered the following interesting site that attempts to merge education
of the arts and sciences (especially STEM) ---
http://www.artstem.org/
It made me think about how somewhat similar experiments might be attempted
with education in accounting, finance, economics, and business. For example,
could we have playwrights in accounting labs and in such education centers as
the Trading Rooms at Bentley College? ---
http://tradingroom.bentley.edu/
There is what I now conclude is probably a failed experiment at the
University of North Texas on merging humanities into accounting courses at the
University of North Texas under one of the Accounting Education Change
Commission (AECC) experiments ---
http://aaahq.org/AECC/changegrant/chap11.htm
Perhaps the UNT experiment failed because it was more of a merger in the
classroom of humanities and accounting teachers. the ARTstem program mentioned
above is more focused on the merger of humanities and science students in joint
projects. Students in traditional accounting courses like intermediate and
accounting did not want have accounting content deleted by to make room for
humanities modules. On the other hand, if selected accounting, finance,
economics, and business courses made an attempt to draw in humanities majors who
could conduct joint projects in a manner somewhat similar to the way ARTstem
works, there might be more opportunity for merging humanities and business.
This might also be one of the ways for accounting, finance, economics, and
business students to become more involved in NCUR ---
http://www.weber.edu/ncur2012/
"Humanities Initiatives at Duke and Stanford," Inside Higher Ed,
June 29, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/29/qt#263684
In an era when many scholars worry about lack of
attention and funds for the humanities, Duke and Stanford Universities on
Tuesday announced separate, foundation-supported efforts in the humanities.
Duke announced a five-year, $6 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation for the "Humanities Writ Large"
initiative, which will support visiting scholars and new faculty
appointments, undergraduate research, humanities labs, and support for
interdisciplinary collaborations across departments and institutions.
Stanford announced a $4 million endowment -- half
of the funds from the family of an alumnus and the other half from the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation -- to support top humanities graduate
students.
Humanities Versus Business --- That is the Question ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#HumanitiesVsBusiness
Jensen Comment
Nearly 20 years ago Trinity University hosted the annual NCUR conference. There
were no accounting student submissions to be refereed that year and in most
years. We were told that accounting students rarely contribute submissions. So I
wrote a paper about this with the two Trinity University faculty members who
coordinated the NCUR presentations on Trinity's campus that year.
"Undergraduate Student Research Programs: Are They as Viable for
Accounting as They are in Science, Humanities, and Other Business Disciplines?"
by Robert E. Jensen, Peter A. French and Kim R. Robertson,
Critical Perspectives on Accounting , Volume
3, 1992, 337-357.
James Irving's Working Paper entitled "Integrating
Academic Research into an Undergraduate Accounting Course"
College of William and Mary, January 2010
ABSTRACT:
This paper describes my experience incorporating academic research into the
curriculum of an undergraduate accounting course. This research-focused
curriculum was developed in response to a series of reports published
earlier in the decade which expressed significant concern over the expected
future shortage of doctoral faculty in accounting. It was also motivated by
prior research studies which find that students engaging in undergraduate
research are more likely to pursue graduate study and to achieve graduate
school success. The research-focused curriculum is divided into two
complementary phases. First, throughout the semester, students read and
critique excerpts from accounting journal articles related to the course
topics. Second, students acquire and use specific research skills to
complete a formal academic paper and present their results in a setting
intended to simulate a research workshop. Results from a survey created to
assess the research experience show that 96 percent of students responded
that it substantially improved their level of knowledge, skill, and
abilities related to conducting research. Individual cases of students who
follow this initial research opportunity with a deeper research experience
are also discussed. Finally, I supply instructional tools for faculty who
might desire to implement a similar program.
January 17, 2010 message (two messages combined) from Irving,
James
[James.Irving@mason.wm.edu]
Hi Bob,
I recently completed the
first draft of a paper which describes my experience integrating research
into an undergraduate accounting course. Given your prolific and insightful
contributions to accounting scholarship, education, etc. -- I am a loyal
follower of your website and your commentary within the AAA Commons -- I am
wondering if you might have an interest in reading it (I also cite a 1992
paper published in Critical Perspectives in Accounting for which you were a
coauthor).
The paper is attached with
this note. Any thoughts you have about it would be greatly appreciated.
I posted the paper to my SSRN
page and it is available at the following link:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1537682 . I appreciate your willingness to read
and think about the paper.
Jim
January 18, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Jim,
I�ve given your paper a cursory
overview and have a few comments that might be of interest.
You�ve overcome much of the
negativism about why accounting students tend not to participate in
the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). Thank you
for citing our old paper.
French, P., R. Jensen, and K. Robertson. 1992. Undergraduate student
research programs:re they as viable for accounting as they are in
science and humanities?"
Critical
Perspectives on Accounting
3 (December):
337-357. ---
Click Here
Abstract
This paper reviews a recent thrust in academia to stimulate more
undergraduate research in the USA, including a rapidly growing
annual conference. The paper also describes programs in which
significant foundation grants have been received to fund
undergraduate research projects in the sciences and humanities.
In particular, selected humanities students working in teams in
a new �Philosophy Lab� are allowed to embark on long-term
research projects of their own choosing. Several completed
projects are briefly reviewed in this paper.
In April 1989,
Trinity University hosted the Third National Conference on
Undergraduate Research (NCUR) and purposely expanded the scope
of the conference to include a broad range of disciplines. At
this conference, 632 papers and posters were presented
representing the research activities of 873 undergraduate
students from 163 institutions. About 40% of the papers were
outside the natural sciences and included research in music and
literature. Only 13 of those papers were in the area of business
administration; none were even submitted by accounting students.
In 1990 at Union College, 791 papers were presented; none were
submitted by accountants. In 1991 at Cal Tech, the first
accounting paper appeared as one of 853 papers presented.
This paper
suggests a number of obstacles to stimulating and encouraging
accounting undergraduates to embark on research endeavours.
These impediments are somewhat unique to accounting, and it
appears that accounting education programs are lagging in what
is being done to break down obstacles in science, pre-med,
engineering, humanities, etc. This paper proposes how to
overcome these obstacles in accounting. One of the anticipated
benefits of accounting student research, apart from the
educational and creative value, is the attraction of more and
better students seeking creativity opportunities in addition to
rote learning of CPA exam requirements. This, in part, might
help to counter industry complaints that top students are being
turned away from accounting careers nationwide.
In particular you seem to have picked up on our
suggestions in the third paragraph above and seemed to be breaking
new ground in undergraduate accounting education.
I am truly amazed by you're
having success when forcing undergraduate students to actually
conduct research in new knowledge.
Please keep up the good work and maintain your
enthusiasm.
1
Firstly, I would suggest that you focus on the topic of replication
as well when you have your students write commentaries on published
academic accounting research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
I certainly would not expect intermediate
accounting students to attempt a replication effort. But it should
be very worthwhile to introduce them to the problem of lack of
replication and authentication of accountancy analytic and empirical
research.
2
Secondly, the two papers you focus on are very old and were never
replicated.. Challenges to both papers are private and in some cases
failed replication attempts, but those challenges were not published
and came to me only by word of mouth. It is very difficult to find
replications of empirical research in accounting, but I suggest that
you at least focus on some papers that have some controversy and are
extended in some way.
For example, consider the controversial paper:
"Costs of Equity and Earnings Attributes," by Jennifer Francis, Ryan
LaFond, Per M. Olsson and Katherine Schipper ,The Accounting
Review, Vol. 79, No. 4 2004 pp. 967�1010.
Also see
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/179269527.html
Then consider
"Is Accruals Quality a Priced Risk Factor?" by John E. Core, Wayne
R. Guay, and Rodrigo S. Verdi, SSRN, December 2007 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=911587
This paper was also published in JAE in 2007 or 2008.
Thanks to Steve Kachelmeier for pointing this controversy (on
whether information quality (measured as the noise in accounting
accruals) is priced in the cost of equity capital) out to me.
It might be better for your students to see how
accounting researchers should attempt replications as illustrated
above than to merely accepted published accounting research papers
as truth unchallenged.
3.
Have your students attempt critical thinking with regards to
mathematical analytics in "Plato's Cave" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#Analytics
This is a great exercise that attempts to make them focus on
underlying assumptions.
4.
In Exhibit 1 I recommend adding a section on critical thinking about
underlying assumptions in the study. In particular, have your
students focus on internal versus external validity ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#SocialScience .
You might look into some of the
research ideas for students listed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#ResearchVersusProfession
5.
I suggest that you set up a hive at the AAA Commons for
Undergraduate Research Projects and Commentaries. Then post your own
items in this hive and repeatedly invite professors and students
from around the world to add to this hive.
keywords:
Accounting Research, Analytics, Empirical Research,
Undergraduate Research
From Bryn Mawr College
Serendip [Often makes use of Flash Player] ---
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/
Born in 1994
First website on Bryn Mawr College campus
Hosted the Bryn Mawr College website, c. 1995-96
Hosted the College Library's first website
Over 4 million unique visitors in 2009
More than 26,000 pages
Averages more than
20,000 unique visitors per day
More than 99% of its visitors are from off-campus
Home of
Center for Science in Society, 2001 - present
Hosted
College Diversity Conversations, c. 2004-06
Most popular exhibit:
Mind and
Body: Rene Descartes to William James
translated into Spanish and Russian
Significant exhibits from the last several years:
Serendip's Exchange (2006- present)
Ant Colonies: Social Organization Without a Director (2006)
Exploring Emergence: The World of Langton�s Ant (2005)
Education and Technology: Serendip's Experiences 1994-2004
Thinking About Segregation and Integration (2003)
Hosted the first
Bryn Mawr College undergraduate course to welcome alumnae into
online discussion with current students (2007)
Notable Annual Milestones:
2007:
Serendip's new materials are
now created in a Content Management System (CMS), Drupal, which extends
Serendip's interactivity and functionality in significant ways. Almost
all pages may be appended with comments from any visitor from the web,
and Serendip automatically analyzes its own content and generates
related links to relevant material.
Serendip publishes an expanded collection of
hands-on activities for teaching biology to middle school or high school
students, a project of Dr. Ingrid Waldron, faculty member in the
Biology Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and her
colleagues. There are now 23 interactive activities, and its home page
averages 400 visitors/day. The most popular downloads are currently
Is Yeast Alive and Mitosis and Meiosis. The collection is
the first search result in Google for the terms, teaching biology.
Serendip offers blog technology to K-12 teachers
attending
summer institutes.
Serendip hosts the first
Bryn Mawr College undergraduate course to welcome alumnae into
online discussion with current students.
2006: Serendip
surpasses 3 million unique visitors in 2006.
Serendip becomes yet more expansive in its outreach,
publishing articles by and conversations with scholars in
art
history,
psychoanalysis,
philosophy of science,
writing,
geology and philosophy, among others. Interacting with and
publishing Serendip
readers' stories grows, and storytelling across the humanities and
sciences, as well as storytelling as a biological process is a major
focus.
Getting it Less Wrong evolves,
and is quoted in the New York Times, among other places on the
web.
Serendip continues to develop partnerships with two
arts organizations, the
Wilma Theater in Philadelphia and the
Bryn Mawr Film Institute. Among several Wilma productions, Serendip
offers an online forum for Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and
Paul Grobstein is a panelist in a Wilma discussion series centered
around the play.
2005: Serendip
partners with Alice Lesnick (Education) at Bryn Mawr College to publish
an online book developed in an undergraduate Education course,
Empowering Learners: A Handbook for the Theory and Practice of
Extra-Classroom Teaching.
A sampling of
university courses around the world which use Serendip materials is
compiled.
Serendip surpasses 2 million unique visitors in 2005.
2004: Serendip
hosts
The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: Exploring the
Significance of Diversity, an undergraduate course taught by Anne
Dalke (English) and Paul Grobstein (Biology) at Bryn Mawr College, the
first undergraduate course that we are aware of that could be taken for
English or Biology credit.
Serendip publishes
Writing Descartes: I Am, and I Can Think, Therefore ... , an essay
by Paul Grobstein and an ongoing experiment in story sharing and story
evolution among many colleagues.
Serendip surpasses 1 million unique visitors in 2004.
2003:
Serendip's Home Page changes to suggest different ways to navigate
through Serendip's more than 10,000 pages in a non-hierarchical fashion.
In teacher workshops, Philadelphia-area teachers were
encouraged to create their own web pages in the "experimental sandbox,"
using wiki technology.
Serendip partners with Ray McDermott (Stanford) and
Herve Varenne (Columbia) to publish an online version of
Culture as Disability supplemented by online discussion.
Bob Jensen's links to scholarly sites categorized by discipline ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to the "Free Tutorials"
Nepotism and Insider Trading in Washington DC
Congress is our only native criminal class.
Mark Twain ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Attributed to Aesop
Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project
Under a power purchase agreement (PPA) between
SolarReserve and NV Energy, all power generated by the Crescent Dunes
project in the next 20 years will be sold to Nevada Power Company for $0.135
per kilowatt-hour.[3] In late September, Tonopah received a $737 million
loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).[
Nepotism in Washington DC
Pacific Corporate Group ---
http://www.pcgfunds.com/
Financial Report ---
http://www.pcgfunds.com/PDF/GIPS_PCG_Core%20Performance_Composite__123106_D&T.pdf
Ron Pelosi ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Pelosi
"$737 million in green-tech loan to company connected to Pelosi family?"
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/09/29/737-million-in-green-tech-loan-to-company-connected-to-pelosi-family/
Tonapa Solar Home ---
http://www.tonopahsolar.com/
The
Tonopah Solar company in Harry Reid's Nevada received a $737 million loan
from the Department of Energy.
* The project will produce a 110 megawatt power system and employ 45
permanent workers.
* That's only costing us $16 million per job.
*
One of the investment partners in this endeavor is Pacific Corporate Group
(PCG).
* The PCG executive director is Ron Pelosi, who is the brother-in-law of
Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi Alleged Insider Trading---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Pelosi#Allegations_of_insider_trading
In November 2011, 60 Minutes alleged that Pelosi
and several other member of Congress had used information they gleaned from
closed sessions to make money on the stock market. The program cited
Pelosi's purchases of Visa stock while a bill that would limit credit card
fees was in the House. Pelosi denied the allegations and called the report
"a right-wing smear.
The Wonk (Professor) Who Slays Washington
Insider trading is an asymmetry of information between a buyer and a seller
where one party can exploit relevant information that is withheld from the other
party to the trade. It typically refers to a situation where only one party has
access to secret information while the other party has access to only
information released to the public. Financial markets and real estate markets
are usually very efficient in that public information is impounded pricing the
instant information is made public. Markets are highly inefficient if traders
are allowed to trade on private information, which is why the SEC and Justice
Department track corporate insider trades very closely in an attempt to punish
those that violate the law. For example, the former
wife of a partner in the auditing firm Deloitte & Touche was recently sentenced
to 11 months exploiting inside information extracted from him about her
husband's clients. He apparently did was not aware she was using this inside
information illegally.
In another recent case, hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11
years for insider trading.
Even more commonly traders who are damaged by insiders typically win enormous
lawsuits later on for themselves and their attorneys, including enormous
punitive damages. You can read more about insider trading at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading
Corporate executives like Bill Gates often announce future buying and selling
of shares of their companies years in advance to avoid even a hint of scandal
about exploiting current insider information that arises in the meantime. More
resources of the SEC are spent in tracking possible insider information trades
than any other activity of the SEC. Efforts are made to track trades of
executive family and friends and whistle blowing is generously rewarded.
Question
Trading on insider information is against U.S. law for every segment of society
except for one privileged segment that legally exploits investors for personal
gains by trading on insider information. What is that privileged segment of
U.S. society legally trades on inside information for personal gains?
Hints:
Congress is our only native criminal class.
Mark Twain ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Attributed to Aesop
Answer (Please share this with your students):
Over the years I've been a loyal viewer of the top news show on television ---
CBS Sixty Minutes
On November 13, 2011 the show entitled "Insider"
is the most depressing segment I've ever watched on television ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7387951n&tag=contentMain;contentBody#ixzz1dfeq66Ok
Also see
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/congress-trading-stock-on-inside.html
Jensen Comment
- It came as no surprise that many (most?) members of the U.S. House of
Representatives and the U.S. Senate that writes the laws of the land made it
illegal for to trade in financial and real estate market by profiting
personally on insider information not yet available, including pending
legislation that they will decide, wrote themselves out of the law making
it legal for them to personally profit from trading on insider information.
What came as a surprise is how leaders at the very top of Congress make
millions trading on inside information with impunity and well as immunity.
- The Congressional leader that comes off the worst in this Sixty
Minutes "Insider" segment is former House Speaker and current Minority
leader Nancy Pelosi.
When confronted with specific facts on how she and her husband made some of
their insider trading millions she fired back at reporter Steve Kroft with
an evil glint saying what is tantamount to: "How dare you question me about
insider trades that are perfectly legal for members of Congress. Who are you
to question my ethics about exploiting our insider trading privileges. Back
off Steve or else!" Her manner can be extremely scary. Other Democratic
Party members of Congress come off almost as bad in terms of insider trading
for personal gain.
- Current Speaker of the House,
John
Boehner, is more subtle. He denies making any of his personal portfolio
investment decisions and denies communicating with the person he hires to
make such decision. However, that trust investor mysteriously makes money
for Rep. Boehner using insider information obtained mysteriously. Other
Republican members of Congress some off even worse in terms of insider
trading.
- Members of Congress on powerful committees regularly make insider
profits on legislation currently being written into the law that is still
being held secret from the public. One of my heroes, former Senator
Judd Gregg,
is no longer my hero.
- Everybody knows that influence peddling in Congress by lobbyists, many
of them being former members of Congress, is a dirty business of showering
gifts on current members of Congress. What is made clear, however, is that
these lobbyists are personally getting something in return from friendly
members of Congress who pass along insider information to lobbyists. The
lobbyists, in turn, peddle this insider information back to the private
sector, such as hedge fund managers, for a commission. Moral of story:
Voters do not stop insider trading by a member of Congress by voting him or
her out of office if they become peddlers of insider information obtained,
as lobbyists, from their old friends still in the Congress.
- Five out of 435 members of the House of Representatives are seeking to
sponsor a bill to make it illegal for representatives and senators to profit
from trading on inside information. The Sixty Minutes show demonstrates how
Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, and other House leaders have buried that effort
so deep in the bowels of the legislative process that there's no chance in
hell of stopping insider trading by members of Congress. Insider trading is
a privilege that attracts unethical people to run for Congress.
"CONGRESS THE CORRUPT," by Anthony H. Catanach Jr. and J. Edward Ketz,
Grumpy Old Accountants, January 9, 2012 ---
http://blogs.smeal.psu.edu/grumpyoldaccountants/archives/474
The Christmas and New Year’s break allows
university faculty not only to enjoy family and friends, but also it
supplies a moment to do some nontechnical reading. After all, we don’t need
that much time to look over our teaching notes. Faculty need something
constructive to do during the three or four weeks we have off, and catching
up on our reading fits in marvelously.
We read two interesting books during this break.
The first is
Throw Them All Out by Peter Schweizer.
The subtitle tells it all: “How politicians and their friends get rich off
insider stock tips, land deals, and cronyism that would send the rest of us
to prison.” For example, the author discusses how Speaker Nancy Pelossi
(Democrat) and her husband garnered Visa IPO shares in 2008 after intimating
that she would introduce legislation which would prove very costly to Visa.
Of course, Pelosi backed off her threat once she and her husband received
those IPO shares. Schweizer also gives the example of Speaker Dennis
Hastert (Republican), who used his knowledge of a proposed interchange for
Interstate 88 to buy acreage on the cheap and sell it for its new market
value. Hastert realized millions in profits.
Worse, the ethics rules of the House and the Senate
allow these things to occur. In some twisted logic, Congress permits its
members to engage in insider trading and land deals and regulatory
intimidation. It has legalized what is criminal for the rest of us.
We also read
China in Ten Words by Yu Hua. The text
is part autobiographical, part historical, and part social commentary. Mr.
Hua describes China in ten chapters, each titled with a single word. The
words he chooses are people, leader, reading, writing, Lu Xun, revolution,
disparity, grassroots, copycat, and bamboozle. With these words, he
describes the incredible social and economic changes in China during his
life-time, starting with the Cultural Revolution from 1966 until late 1970s,
which was followed by the economic revolution to the present.
The description records incredible changes in
China, such as the nation’s becoming the second largest economic power in
the world. It also traces the failings of this transformation, such as
ranking about 100th in the world in per capita income. The
contradiction between these two measures foreshadows social conflict that
must be dealt with sooner or later.
What proved serendipitous, even ironic, in this
reading is to note the connection between the books. In certain ways the
two countries show similar contradictions and shortcomings. Yu Hua
discusses “today’s large-scale, multifarious corruption” in China; but the
U.S. Congress engages in similar dishonesty.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Competency-Based College Credit ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ECA
"Online Education Is Everywhere. What’s the Next Big Thing?" by Marc
Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-education-is-everywhere-whats-the-next-big-thing/32898?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Western Governors University (a nonprofit, competency- based online
university) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University
Also see http://www.wgu.edu/home2
New Charter University (a for-profit, self-paced, competency-based
online university) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Charter_University
"No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month
Tuition for Online Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education,
March 29, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/No-Financial-Aid-No-Problem/131329/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
It's a higher-education puzzle: Students are
flocking to Western Governors University, driving growth of 30 to 40 percent
each year. You might expect that competitors would be clamoring to copy the
nonprofit online institution's model, which focuses on whether students can
show "competencies" rather than on counting how much time they've spent in
class.
So why haven't they?
Two reasons, says the education entrepreneur Gene
Wade. One, financial-aid regulatory problems that arise with self-paced
models that aren't based on seat time. And two, opposition to how Western
Governors changes the role of professor, chopping it into "course mentors"
who help students master material, and graders who evaluate homework but do
no teaching.
Mr. Wade hopes to clear those obstacles with a
start-up company, UniversityNow, that borrows ideas from Western Governors
while offering fresh twists on the model. One is cost. The for-profit's new
venture—New Charter University, led by Sal Monaco, a former Western
Governors provost—sidesteps the loan system by setting tuition so cheap that
most students shouldn't need to borrow. The price: $796 per semester, or
$199 a month, for as many classes as they can finish.
"This is not buying a house," says Mr. Wade,
co-founder and chief executive of UniversityNow. "This is like, do I want to
get cable?"
Another novelty: New Charter offers a
try-it-before-you-buy-it platform that mimics the "freemium" model of many
consumer Web services. Anyone can create an account and start working
through its self-paced online courses free of charge. Their progress gets
recorded. If they decide to pay up and enroll, they get access to an adviser
(who helps navigate the university) and course specialists (who can discuss
the material). They also get to take proctored online tests for course
credit.
The project is the latest in a series of
experiments that use technology to rethink the economics of higher
education, from the $99-a-month introductory courses of StraighterLine to
the huge free courses provided through Stanford and MIT.
For years, some analysts have argued that ready
access to Pell Grants and federal loans actually props up colleges prices,
notes Michael B. Horn, executive director for education at Innosight
Institute, a think tank focused on innovation. That's because institutions
have little incentive to charge anything beneath the floor set by available
financial aid.
"Gene and his team are basically saying, the heck
with that—we're going to go around it. We think people can afford it if we
offer it at this low a price," Mr. Horn says. "That could be revolutionary."
Yet the project faces tall hurdles: Will employers
value these degrees? Will students sign on? And, with a university that
lacks regional accreditation right now—New Charter is nationally accredited
by the Distance Education and Training Council, and is considering seeking
regional accreditation—will students be able to transfer its credits?
Mr. Wade banks on appealing to working adults who
crave easier access to education. When asked who he views as the
competition, his reply is "the line out the door at community college." In
California, where Mr. Wade is based, nearly 140,000 first-time students at
two-year institutions couldn't get into any courses at all during the
previous academic year, according to a recent Los Angeles Times editorial
about the impact of state budget cuts.
Mr. Wade himself benefited from a first-class
education, despite being raised without much money in a housing project in a
tough section of Boston. Growing up there, during an era when the city
underwent forced busing to integrate its schools, felt like watching a
"train wreck" but walking away unscathed. He attended high school at the
prestigious Boston Latin School. With assistance from Project REACH, a
program to help Boston minorities succeed in higher education, he went to
Morehouse College. From there his path included a J.D. from Harvard Law, an
M.B.A. from Wharton, and a career as an education entrepreneur.
The 42-year-old founded two earlier companies:
LearnNow, a charter-school-management outfit that was sold to Edison
Schools, and Platform Learning, a tutoring firm that served low-income
students. So far, he's raised about $8 million from investors for
UniversityNow, whose New Charter subsidiary is a rebranded, redesigned, and
relocated version of an online institution once called Andrew Jackson
University. Breaking a Traditional Mold
To build the software, Mr. Wade looked beyond the
traditional world of educational technology, recruiting developers from
companies like Google. Signing up for the university feels more like
creating an account with a Web platform like Facebook than the laborious
process of starting a traditional program—in fact, New Charter lets you join
with your Facebook ID. Students, whether paying or not, start each class by
taking an assessment to establish whether they're ready for the course and
what material within it they need to work on. Based on that, the system
creates a pathway to guide them through the content. They skip stuff that
they already know.
That was part of the appeal for Ruben Fragoso, who
signed up for New Charter's M.B.A. program three weeks ago after stumbling
on the university while Googling for information about online degrees. Mr.
Fragoso, 53, lives in Albuquerque and works full time as a logistics
coordinator for a solar power company. The Mexican-born father of two earned
a bachelor's degree 12 years ago from Excelsior College. With New Charter,
he mostly teaches himself, hunkering down in his home office after dinner to
read and take quizzes. By week three, he hadn't interacted with any other
students, and his instructor contact had been limited to a welcome e-mail.
That was fine by him.
He likes that he can adjust his schedule to
whatever fits—one course at a time if a subject is tough, or maybe three if
he prefers. His company's education benefits—up to $5,000 a year—cover the
whole thing. With years of business experience, he appreciates the option of
heading quickly to a final test on a subject that is familiar to him.
Continued in article
US News Rankings ---
http://www.usnews.com/rankings
US News Top Online Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Do not confuse this with the US News project to evaluate for-profit universities
--- a project hampered by refusal of many for-profit universities to provide
data
'Honor Roll' From 'U.S. News' of Online Graduate Programs
in Business
Institution |
Teaching
Practices and Student Engagement |
Student
Services and Technology |
Faculty
Credentials and Training |
Admissions
Selectivity |
Arizona State U., W.P. Carey School of Business |
24 |
32 |
37 |
11 |
Arkansas State U. |
9 |
21 |
1 |
36 |
Brandman U. (Part of the Chapman U. system) |
40 |
24 |
29 |
n/a |
Central Michigan U. |
11 |
3 |
56 |
9 |
Clarkson U. |
4 |
24 |
2 |
23 |
Florida Institute of Technology |
43 |
16 |
23 |
n/a |
Gardner-Webb U. |
27 |
1 |
15 |
n/a |
George Washington U. |
20 |
9 |
7 |
n/a |
Indiana U. at Bloomington, Kelley School of Business |
29 |
19 |
40 |
3 |
Marist College |
67 |
23 |
6 |
5 |
Quinnipiac U. |
6 |
4 |
13 |
16 |
Temple U., Fox School of Business |
39 |
8 |
17 |
34 |
U.
of Houston-Clear Lake |
8 |
21 |
18 |
n/a |
U.
of Mississippi |
37 |
44 |
20 |
n/a |
Source: U.S. News & World
Report
Jensen Comment
I don't know why the largest for-profit universities that generally provide more
online degrees than the above universities combined are not included in the
final outcomes. For example, the University of Phoenix alone as has over 600,000
students, most of whom are taking some or all online courses.
My guess is that most for-profit universities are not forthcoming with the
data requested by US News analysts. Note that the US News
condition that the set of online programs to be considered be regionally
accredited does not exclude many for-profit universities. For example, enter in
such for-profit names as "University of Phoenix" or "Capella University" in the
"College Search" box at
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-phoenix-20988
These universities are included in the set of eligible regionally accredited
online degree programs to be evaluated. They just did not do well in the above
"Honor Roll" of outcomes for online degree programs.
For-profit universities may have shot themselves
in the foot by not providing the evaluation data to US News for online
degree program evaluation. But there may b e reasons for this. For example, one
of the big failings of most for-profit online degree programs is in
undergraduate "Admissions Selectivity."
Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education
alternatives are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Bob Jensen's threads on distance education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Never assume that the elite, Ivy League departments
are the highest-ranked or have the best placement rates. Some of the
worst-prepared job candidates with whom I've worked have been from humanities
departments at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Do not be dazzled by abstract
institutional reputations. Ask steely-eyed questions about individual advisers
and their actual (not illusory) placement rates in recent years.
See article below
Jensen Comment
I think the above quotation is more wishful thinking than fact. In my opinion
the prestige of the overall university is still one of the most important
factors to tenure track appointments except in disciplines have a few stars that
are so respected that their doctoral students jump to the front of the placement
line. More likely than not these stars are in prestigious universities even if
they jumped from the Ivy League ship.
My advice is to enroll in the most prestigious university you can get into.
In doctoral programs, at least in accounting, the programs are virtually free in
most cases, although living costs in some locales may be problematic if the
university does not provide reasonably-priced housing for doctoral students.
In accounting its more important to match your aptitude to the doctoral
program. For example, if you really want to focus on accounting history and
avoid much of the advanced mathematics, two programs have accounting history
tracks (Case Western and Ole Miss.). In most other AACSB-accredited universities
having accounting doctoral programs be prepared for advanced mathematics,
statistics, and econometrics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
"Graduate School Is a Means to a Job," by Karen Kelsky, Chronicle
of Higher Education, March 27, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-Is-a-Means-to/131316/
One of the most common questions I hear from
graduate students, whether they are in their first or their final year, is
what they can do now to prepare for the academic job market.
Excellent question. As a graduate student, your
fate is in your own hands, and every decision you make—including whether to
go to graduate school at all, which program to go to, which adviser to
choose, and how to conduct yourself while there—can and should be made with
an eye to the job you wish to have at the end.
To do otherwise is pure madness. I have
no patience whatsoever with the "love" narrative (we do what we do because
we love it and money/jobs play no role) that prevails among some advisers,
departments, and profoundly mystified graduate students. But for those
graduate students and Ph.D.'s who actually want a paying tenure-track job
and the things that go with it—health insurance, benefits, and financial
security—here is my list of graduate-school rules, forged after years of
working in academe as a former tenured professor and now running my own
career-advising business for doctoral students.
Before Graduate School
Ask yourself what job you want and whether an
advanced degree is actually necessary for it.
Choose your graduate program based both on its
focus on your scholarly interests and its tenure-track placement rate. If it
doesn't keep careful records of its placement rate, or does not have an
impressive record of placing its Ph.D.'s in tenure-track positions, do not
consider attending that program.
Choose your adviser the same way. Before committing
to an adviser, find out how many Ph.D.'s that potential mentor has placed in
tenure-track positions in recent years.
Go to the highest-ranked graduate department you
can get into—so long as it funds you fully. That is not actually because of
the "snob factor" of the name itself, but rather because of the ethos of the
best departments. They typically are the best financed, which means they
have more scholars with national reputations to serve as your mentors and
letter writers, and they maintain lively brown-bag and seminar series that
bring in major visiting scholars with whom you can network. The placement
history of a top program tends to produce its own momentum, so that
departments around the country with faculty members from that program will
then look kindly on new applications from its latest Ph.D.'s. That, my
friends, is how privilege reproduces itself. It may be distasteful, but you
deny or ignore it at your peril.
Never assume that the elite, Ivy League departments
are the highest-ranked or have the best placement rates. Some of the
worst-prepared job candidates with whom I've worked have been from
humanities departments at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Do not be dazzled by
abstract institutional reputations. Ask steely-eyed questions about
individual advisers and their actual (not illusory) placement rates in
recent years.
Meet, or at least correspond, with your potential
adviser ahead of time so that you understand whether he or she has a
hands-on approach to professionalization training and will be personally
invested in your success.
Do not attend graduate school unless you are fully
supported by—at minimum—a multiyear teaching assistantship that provides a
tuition waiver, a stipend, and health insurance that covers most of the
years of your program. The stipend needs to be generous enough to support
your actual living expenses for the location. Do not take out new debt to
attend graduate school. Because the tenure-track job market is so bleak,
graduate school in the humanities and social sciences is, in most cases, not
worth going into debt for.
Apply to 6 to 10 graduate programs. If you are
admitted with funding to more than one, negotiate to get the best possible
package at your top choice.
Be entrepreneurial before even entering graduate
school to locate and apply for multiple sources of financial support. Do not
forget the law of increasing returns: Success breeds success and large
follows small. A $500 book scholarship makes you more competitive for a
$1,000 conference grant, which situates you for a $3,000 summer-research
fellowship, which puts you in the running for a $10,000 fieldwork grant,
which then makes you competitive for a $30,000 dissertation writing grant.
Early in Graduate School
Never forget this primary rule: Graduate school is
not your job; graduate school is a means to the job you want. Do not settle
in to your graduate department like a little hamster burrowing in the wood
shavings. Stay alert with your eye always on a national stage, poised for
the next opportunity, whatever it is: to present a paper, attend a
conference, meet a scholar in your field, forge a connection, gain a
professional skill.
In year one and every year thereafter, read the job
ads in your field, and track the predominant and emerging emphases of the
listed jobs. Ask yourself how you can incorporate those into your own
project, directly or indirectly. You don't have to slavishly follow trends,
but you have to be familiar with them and be prepared to relate your own
work to them in some way.
Have a beautifully organized and professional CV
starting in your first year and in every subsequent year. When I was a young
assistant professor, a senior colleague told me that her philosophy was to
add one line a month to her CV. Set that same goal for yourself. As a junior
graduate student, you may or may not be able to maintain that pace, but keep
it in the back of your mind, and keep your eye out for opportunities that
add lines to your CV at a brisk pace.
Make strong connections with your adviser and other
faculty members in your department, and in affiliated departments. Interact
with them as a young professional, respectfully but confidently. Eschew
excessive humility; it inspires contempt. Do not forget the letters of
recommendation that you will one day need them to write.
Minimize your work as a TA. Your first year will be
grueling, but learn the efficiency techniques of teaching as fast as you
can, and make absolutely, categorically, sure that you do not volunteer your
labor beyond the hours paid. Believe me, resisting will take vigilance. But
do it. You are not a volunteer and the university is not a charity. You are
paid for hours of work; do not exceed them. Teach well, but do not make
teaching the core of your identity.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I also don't necessarily advise minimizing experience as a teaching assistant
and/or a research assistant. These experiences can be crucial to your later
quest for tenure. Firstly, there's the value of TA and RA experience in and of
itself. Secondly, there's the importance of those all-important letters of
recommendations from professors that you served under as a doctoral student.
Why Do They Hate Us?
Jill Kronstadt, an associate professor of English at Montgomery College, was in
the middle of grading papers Sunday when she came across a Washington Post
opinion piece questioning whether college professors work hard enough ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/27/newspaper-op-ed-sets-debate-over-faculty-workload-and-faculty-bashing
Why do they hate us?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Hate
The Zombie Guns are Coming --- Honest and Truly They Will Make Tasar Weapons
Look Like Childrens Toys
"Putin targets foes with 'zombie' gun which attack victims' central nervous
system," by Christopher Leake and Will Stewart, Daily Mail, March 31,
2012 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123415/Putin-targets-foes-zombie-gun-attack-victims-central-nervous-system.html
Mind-bending ‘psychotronic’ guns that can
effectively turn people into zombies have been given the go-ahead by Russian
president Vladimir Putin.
The futuristic weapons – which will attack the
central nervous system of their victims – are being developed by the
country’s scientists.
They could be used against Russia’s enemies and,
perhaps, its own dissidents by the end of the decade.
Sources in Moscow say Mr Putin has described the
guns, which use electromagnetic radiation like that found in microwave
ovens, as ‘entirely new instruments for achieving political and strategic
goals’.
Mr Putin added: ‘Such high-tech weapons systems
will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons, but will be more acceptable
in terms of political and military ideology.’
Plans to introduce the super- weapons were
announced quietly last week by Russian defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov,
fulfilling a little-noticed election campaign pledge by president-elect
Putin.
Mr Serdyukov said: ‘The development of weaponry
based on new physics principles – direct-energy weapons, geophysical
weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, and so
on – is part of the state arms procurement programme for 2011-2020.’
Specific proposals on developing the weapons are
due to be drawn up before December by a new Defence Advanced Research
Projects Agency.
Research into electromagnetic weapons has been
secretly carried out in the US and Russia since the Fifties. But now it
appears Mr Putin has stolen a march on the Americans. Precise details of the
Russian gun have not been revealed. However, previous research has shown
that low-frequency waves or beams can affect brain cells, alter
psychological states and make it possible to transmit suggestions and
commands directly into someone’s thought processes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Egads!
I was going to joke about thawing out K-rations but had second thoughts.
When Johnnie comes marching home he won't be much use to anybody.
"The European Higher Education Area: Retrospect and Prospect," by Kris
Olds, Inside Higher Ed, March 22, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/european-higher-education-area-retrospect-and-prospect
The Modernision of Higher Education in Europe, 2010-2012 ---
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201012/ldselect/ldeucom/275/275.pdf
No more free NYT lunch (except for employees like college professors and
students who get free access through their employers)
"NY Times Paywall Nears Half a Million Monthly Subscribers," by David
Strom, ReadWriteWeb, March 23, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ny_times_paywall_nears_half_a_million_monthly_subs.php
In a year the New York Times has succeeded in
gathering nearly half a million digital subscribers. Next month
it will tighten things up for non-subscribers, only allowing 10 free
articles per month (where 20 per month are
presently allowed). It is clear that the paywall experiment for the Times is
working quite well.Ryan
Chittum writes about his own expectations for the paywall and mistaken
assumptions in the Columbia Journalism blog today.
The
Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications
offers programs that combine the enduring skills and
values of journalism with new techniques and knowledge that are essential to
thrive in a digital world.
Continued in article
1 |
The Wall Street Journal |
New York |
New
York |
2,117,796 |
1,994,121 |
(Dow
Jones)
News Corporation |
2 |
USA
Today |
McLean |
Virginia |
1,829,099 |
|
Gannett Company |
3 |
The New York Times |
New York |
New
York |
916,911 |
1,339,462 |
The New York Times Company |
4 |
Los Angeles Times |
Los Angeles |
California |
605,243 |
948,889 |
Tribune Company |
5 |
San Jose Mercury News |
San Jose |
California |
577,665 |
636,999 |
MediaNews Group |
6 |
The Washington Post |
Washington |
District of Columbia |
550,821 |
852,861 |
The Washington Post Company |
7 |
Daily News |
New York |
New
York |
530,924 |
584,658 |
Daily News, L.P. |
8 |
New York Post |
New York |
New
York |
522,874 |
355,784 |
News Corporation |
9 |
Chicago Tribune |
Chicago |
Illinois |
437,205 |
780,601 |
Tribune Company |
10 |
Chicago Sun-Times |
Chicago |
Illinois |
419,407 |
421,453 |
Sun-Times Media Group |
11 |
The Dallas Morning News |
Dallas |
Texas |
404,951 |
582,252 |
A.
H. Belo Corporation |
12 |
Houston Chronicle |
Houston |
Texas |
364,724 |
587,984 |
Hearst Corporation |
13 |
The Philadelphia Inquirer/
Philadelphia Daily News |
Philadelphia |
Pennsylvania |
343,710 |
488,287 |
Philadelphia Media Network |
14 |
The Arizona Republic |
Phoenix |
Arizona |
337,170 |
511,764 |
Gannett Company |
15 |
The Denver Post |
Denver |
Colorado |
324,970 |
519,838 |
MediaNews Group |
16 |
Newsday |
Melville |
New
York |
298,759 |
362,221 |
Cablevision |
17 |
Star Tribune |
Minneapolis |
Minnesota |
296,605 |
516,134 |
The Star Tribune Company |
18 |
Tampa Bay Times |
St. Petersburg |
Florida |
292,441 |
429,048 |
Times Publishing Company |
19 |
The Oregonian |
Portland |
Oregon |
260,248 |
304,739 |
Advance Publications |
20 |
The Plain Dealer |
Cleveland |
Ohio |
254,372 |
403,001 |
Advance Publications |
21 |
The Seattle Times |
Seattle |
Washington |
253,742 |
346,991 |
The Seattle Times Company |
22 |
Detroit Free Press |
Detroit |
Michigan |
246,169 |
614,226 |
Gannett Company |
23 |
San Francisco Chronicle |
San Francisco |
California |
235,350 |
292,459 |
Hearst Corporation |
24 |
The Star-Ledger |
Newark |
New
Jersey |
229,255 |
337,416 |
Advance Publications |
25 |
The Boston Globe |
Boston |
Massachusetts |
219,214 |
356,652 |
The New York Times Company |
26 |
The San Diego Union-Tribune |
San Diego |
California |
218,614 |
296,272 |
The San Diego Union-Tribune |
27 |
The Sacramento Bee |
Sacramento |
California |
210,925 |
268,321 |
The McClatchy Company |
28 |
The Kansas City Star |
Kansas City |
Missouri |
209,258 |
305,113 |
The McClatchy Company |
29 |
St. Louis Post-Dispatch |
St. Louis |
Missouri |
196,232 |
360,450 |
Lee Enterprises |
30 |
The Sun |
Baltimore |
Maryland |
195,561 |
343,552 |
Tribune Company |
Jensen Comment
The NYT has a much lower daily rate than the WSJ and USA Today. I certainly hope
the NYT succeeds in being able to employ its many reporters. Neither Bob Jensen
nor the Huffington Post news aggregators pay reporters to gather news
first-hand on the streets of virtually all nations. We rely on NYT, WSJ, ,the
WP, London Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and other
traditional media companies to pay reporters and/or pay significant fees to the
Associated Press for original news. TV networks read the newspapers and
blogs of these news papers to find news to report on television.
And keep in mind that these reporters don't just listen for news on the
streets. The conduct inside investigations by seeking out whistle blowers. Many
of the convictions of public and private fraudsters can be traced back to
newspaper investigations. In other words, if these leading newspapers fold or
cut back greatly on their investigation efforts, crooked legislators, city
officials, corporate criminals, and union leaders requiring kickbacks will jump
for joy.
The most important ingredient of national freedom is freedom of the press.
What dictatorships fear most are news leaks.
"Why Socialist Cuba Prohibits Social Media: The regime fears
Cuban-to-Cuban chatter even more than it does communication with the outside
world," by Mary Anastasia O'Ogrady, The Wall Street Journal, March
25, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577299510054444278.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
That was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio last week at a
Washington conference titled "Cuba Needs a (Technological) Revolution: How
the Internet Can Thaw an Island Frozen in Time." The event was sponsored by
Google Ideas, a for-profit venture of the giant Internet search enterprise,
and the nonprofit Heritage Foundation. I was asked to kick off things with a
Rubio interview. So I began by asking him what he makes of the Cuban
military's reference last year to technology that allows young people to
exchange thoughts digitally as "the permanent battlefield."
Mr. Rubio responded that it isn't communication
with the outside world that the regime fears the most, but Cuban-to-Cuban
chatter. "I think Raúl Castro clearly understands that his regime cannot
survive a Cuban reality where individual Cubans can communicate [with] each
other in an unfettered manner." He called "unfiltered access to the Internet
and social media" Cuba's "best hope" of avoiding "a stagnated dictatorship"
for "the next 50 years that would survive even the death of Raul and Fidel."
Mr. Rubio would like to see the U.S. go after the
goal of turning Cuba into a Wi-Fi hot spot—that is, finding a way to provide
wireless Internet access to Cubans so they can both receive and send data in
real time. "That's what U.S. policy should really begin to focus on, a
21st-century effort."
It won't be easy with today's technology. While
Internet experts tell me it is possible to expand two-way Wi-Fi
communications to those that the regime has not approved to use its new
fiber optic cable, access would likely be quite limited. Nevertheless, Mr.
Rubio's proposal goes to the heart of the Cuban government's vulnerability.
The pope on his visit to Cuba today will see and
hear what the military dictatorship wants him to see and hear, not the kind
of public debate he would witness in a normal country. He will not see what
Mr. Rubio is talking about—emboldened Cuban dissidents who have no use for
the "revolution" of a half-century ago and if given access to real-time
communications would endeavor to overthrow their oppressors.
"If Cubans were able to communicate with each
other, if Cubans in Santiago [de Cuba] were able to figure out what was
happening in Havana and vice versa," Mr. Rubio said, there would be a real
chance for change. "If these groups were able to link up with one another
and coordinate efforts and conversation and so forth, the Cuban government
wouldn't last very long. It would collapse under the weight of that
reality."
Some of Mr. Rubio's comments suggest that he is
over-optimistic about whether technology can create island hot-spots from
afar. But if and when it can, there is little doubt that social media would
play a role in bringing about change, as it did, for better or worse, in the
overthrow of Egypt's Mubarak.
Closer to home, Mr. Rubio pointed out, it has
already made a difference. Referring to the tea party movement, he said,
"Fifteen years ago if you wanted to organize a group of people to do
anything politically, you needed a big, burdensome organization to
coordinate it. Today anyone with access to Facebook and Twitter can be an
organizer, and it's happening all over this country, it's happening all over
the world, and it will happen in Cuba."
Continued in article
"Why Bayesian Rationality Is Empty, Perfect Rationality Doesn’t Exist,
Ecological Rationality Is Too Simple, and Critical Rationality Does the Job,"
Simoleon Sense, February 15, 2010 ---
Click Here
http://www.simoleonsense.com/why-bayesian-rationality-is-empty-perfect-rationality-doesn%e2%80%99t-exist-ecological-rationality-is-too-simple-and-critical-rationality-does-the-job/
Easier than Bayes
"Chances Are," by Steven Strogatz, The New York Times, April 25,
2010 ---
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/chances-are/
Learning Management Systems ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system
Blackboard Still Wants to Have a Monopoly on Learning Management Systems (LMS/CMS)
Where's the government antitrust system when it's needed?
As far as its promises to keep Moodle, Moodlerooms and NetSpot unchanged, I
think that really means that they will truly remain unchanged as technology
progresses such that Blackboard will become the only (expensive) source for LMS/CMS
systems. Bah Humbug!!!!
"Blackboard Buys 2 Leading Supporters of Open-Source Competitor Moodle," by
Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/blackboard-buys-2-leading-supporters-of-open-source-competitor-moodle/35837?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
For years, colleges looking for course-management
software considered a choice between Blackboard’s dominant commercial
product or an open-source alternative such as Moodle or Sakai. Now
Blackboard essentially owns the open-source alternatives as well.
On Monday, Blackboard officials announced that the
company has purchased two leading supporters of Moodle, Moodlerooms and
NetSpot. Both deals are complete, though officials would not disclose the
sale prices. The company also hired one of the founders of the Sakai project
to lead its efforts to support colleges using that open-source software. The
moves are part of the company’s newly announced Blackboard Education Open
Source Services group.
In the past Blackboard has purchased competitors
and then either disbanded them,
as it did with Prometheus, or merged the competing
product with its own,
as it did with WebCT. This time Blackboard said it
is leaving the companies alone, allowing them to run under their current
brand names with their existing staffs. No layoffs are anticipated, said Ray
Henderson, president of academic platforms at Blackboard.
In an unexpected move, Blackboard also announced
that it will continue to sell and maintain the Angel course-management
system, which
it bought three years ago, indefinitely. It had
previously announced that Angel would be discontinued in 2014.
Blackboard has purchased so many commercial
competitors over the years that college officials have long joked that it
would next buy open source, too. The funny part was that such a move would
be impossible, because open-source projects are built under a license that
prevents any one entity from owning the code. Of course, Blackboard hasn’t
bought Moodle or Sakai, but it is doing the next best thing in purchasing
leading companies that support those programs and bringing in people who
helped build the alternatives.
That might not amuse college officials who chose
Moodle or Sakai specifically to avoid Blackboard’s orbit, said Trace A.
Urdan, an analyst at Signal Hill. “People looking to open source as an
alternative to Blackboard are going to be put off by it,” he said. “This is
going to turn some of the Moodlerooms customers off.”
Lou Pugliese, chief executive of Moodlerooms, said
in an interview late Monday that he is not worried about defectors, and
instead stressed that the move will help colleges that use other Blackboard
products and want to link them to Moodle.
Bradley C. Wheeler, chief information officer at
Indiana University at Bloomington who has been active in the development of
Sakai, said it remains to be seen whether Blackboard’s news is good or bad
for the open-source software movement in academe. “Does it cause software to
mature faster” because of Blackboard’s deep pockets, he asked, “or at some
point and time does a value conflict arise?”
Officials from Moodlerooms, NetSpot, and Blackboard
recently traveled to Australia to tell the inventor of Moodle, Martin
Dougiamas, of their plans, and in a way, to ask for his blessing. He is
quoted in a press release by Blackboard as saying that he will continue to
consider Moodlerooms and NetSpot official Moodle partners. “The decision of
Moodlerooms and NetSpot to work under Blackboard may sound very strange at
first to anyone in this industry,” said Mr. Dougiamas in a statement issued
by Blackboard. “But it’s my understanding that these three companies have
some good plans and synergies.”
Mr. Henderson of Blackboard
wrote on his blog that the meeting was “a bit
surreal for all present.”
Leaders of Blackboard, Moodlerooms, and NetSpot
issued a public “statement of principles” swearing commitment to supporting
open-source software development.
In an interview, Mr. Henderson highlighted
Blackboard’s growing diversity of products and services beyond just
providing course-management software. “We are definitely keen to grow our
services businesses,” he said.
It is unclear what Blackboard’s announcements today
mean to new upstart providers of learning-management systems, some of which
have
enjoyed support of venture capitalists excited about education-technology
companies.
Josh Coates, chief executive of
Instructure, argued that colleges will now see the
choice as between software that began development nearly a decade ago and
platforms built more recently. “Moodle’s a crappy product, so people don’t
want to use it,” he said in an interview Monday. “Moodle and Blackboard came
from the same decade, which was a long time ago.”
Continued in article
"Open-Source Leaders Who Backed Blackboard's Moodle Move Reassure
Advocates," Inside Higher Ed, March 28, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/03/28/open-source-leaders-who-backed-blackboards-moodle-move-reassure-advocates
Jensen Comment
Sorry Martin! I just don't trust Blackboard promises over the long-term future,
epecially after you're long gone.
"3 Reasons Why Blackboard Will Change Its Name," by Joshua Kim,
Inside Higher Ed, March 27, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/3-reasons-why-blackboard-will-change-its-name
Bob Jensen's threads on Blackboard ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Blackboard.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the history of course authoring software and LMS/CMS
systems ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
Question
What was the first LMS/CMS system sold in a box of floppy disks?
Answer
The Plato project at the University of
Illinois and various military and corporate training applications entailed
software development alongside applications development. A DOS outgrowth of
Plato software became known at
Tencore.
However, the first CMS/LMS system sold in a box
of floppy disks was called Owls Guide that evolved from U.S. Navy research
funding.
Following the introduction of Owl's
Guide, a raft of off-the-shelf options appeared in the 1980s. There were two
types of course authoring options that are discussed below. The Course
Management System (CMS) software had many features that were not available in
what Jensen and Sandlin defined as Alternative Software. In Chapter 3, they
identified ten CMS packages for computerizing complete courses. They started
with hypertext utilities and then added hypermedia authoring features in the
early 1990s. Most of the established products below have survived to 1999 with
sales for corporate training, but virtually none of them ever had profitable
sales to colleges and universities. The ten leading 1994 CMS packages
identified and discussed on considerable detail in
Chapter 3
of Jensen and Sandlin (1994) were as follows (most of the links below probably
no longer are active):
-
Quest
from Allen Communication
- Tourguide
from American Training International ( Tourguide is no longer listed as a
product at Infotec.)
-
Multimedia
ToolBook from
Asymetrix Corporation Click2Learn SumTotal Systems
- Lesson Builder
from the Center for Education Technology in Accounting (this product never
was completed)
-
Tencore
from Computer Teaching Corporation
-
Course Builder
from Discovery Systems International, Inc.
- Training Icon Environment (TIE)
from Global Information Systems Technology, Inc.
- tbtAuthor
from HyperGraphics Corporation (HyperGraphics
no longer lists tbtAuthor in its product line)
-
Authorware from
Macromedia Corporation
- Personal Education Authoring Kit (PEAK)
from Major Educational Resources Corp. PEAK is for Mac users only and has
been discontinued. However, while they last you can get free copies at
800-989-5353
Blast from the Past
Jensen and Sandlin Book entitled Electronic Teaching and
Learning: Trends in Adapting to Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Networks in Higher
Education
(both the 1994 and 1997 Updated Versions)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245cont.htm
Trying to Tax Away Inequality is Naive and Dysfunctional
"Trying to Tax Away Inequality is Naive and Dysfunctional
"Lead Essay:: What to Do about Inequality," by David B. Grusky,
Boston Review, March/April 2012 ---
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.2/ndf_david_b_grusky_inequality.php ," by David B. Grusky,
Boston Review, March/April 2012 ---
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.2/ndf_david_b_grusky_inequality.php
Jensen Comment
This does not mean that increasing taxes at all levels (including the rich) is
not a bad idea to a point that brings more fairness into the tax code and raises
some revenue for deficit reduction. Taxpayers at all levels of wealth and income
are probably getting too much of a break with a tax code that is absurdly
complex and literally being written by too many lobbyists.
Case Studies in Gaming the
Income Tax Laws ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
"Why Some Multinationals Pay Such Low Taxes,"
by Justin Fox, Harvard Business
Review Blog, March 26, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/03/why-some-multinationals-pay-su.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
The American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm
To
help explain what is really going on with mortgage refinancings and foreclosures
I wrote a teaching case:
A Teaching Case: Professor Tall vs. Professor Short vs. Freddie Mac
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TallVerusShort.htm
South Carolina Governor to be Indicted Not Indicted for Tax Fraud
"Haley indictment imminent? Stay tuned…," Palmetto Public Record, March 29,
2012 ---
http://palmettopublicrecord.org/2012/03/29/haley-indictment-imminent-stay-tuned/
Two well-placed legal
experts have independently told Palmetto Public Record they expect the U.S.
Department of Justice to issue an indictment against South Carolina Gov.
Nikki Haley on charges of tax fraud as early as this week.
A highly ranked federal official has also privately
confirmed rumblings of an investigation and possible indictment of the
governor, though the official was not aware of the specific timeframe.
Yesterday, Palmetto Public Record
exclusively reported that the Internal Revenue
Service has been investigating since March of 2011 the Sikh worship center
run by Gov. Haley’s father. At least
five lawsuits have been filed against the Sikh
Society of South Carolina since 2010, alleging that the group bilked
contractors out of nearly $130,000 for the construction of a new temple.
Gov. Haley is reported to have managed the temple’s
finances as late as 2003, and our sources believe any indictment would
center on what happened to the missing money.
Palmetto Public Record will post a story later this
afternoon detailing the temple’s shady finances and the governor’s possible
involvement. Stay tuned…
Tax Prof Paul Caron later amended his blog with the following links on
April 1, 2012 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/
Following up on Friday's post,
Report: DOJ to Indict SC Gov. Nikki Haley on Tax Fraud Charges:
Governor Haley's office obtained
this letter
from the IRS.
The Palmetto Public Record, the source of
the original story, issued this
curious response:
We're glad the IRS
stated today that they apparently found nothing untoward regarding the
temple's finances, and we're glad (as Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey says)
the lengthy chapter regarding Gov. Haley's involvement seems to be
closed. Since no normal person would have been able to get the
IRS to send them such a letter within a day of these questions hitting
the blogosphere, and since the IRS certainly didn't answer our
phone calls, the only way to get an answer to our questions was by
taking them to the public. ... [T]he IRS certainly sent Gov. Haley's
chief of staff a letter quickly regarding a situation from which she
claims to be so distant. ...
As journalists,
all we can do is ask questions, and tell you what we see and hear. We're
glad the latest IRS letter answers some of our questions, but it
definitely doesn't answer all of them -- and it may create a few more
once the chips are finished falling. Until these questions (and many
other outstanding ethics questions regarding the way the governor's
office operates) are answered, you can bet we'll continue to
ask them.
Jensen Comment
It would seem that the Palmetto Public Record violated journalism ethics
by not verifying rumors before making headlines about them.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
The government frequently garnishes wages for government student loan
repayments (read that deducting installments for loan repayments before
employees get their paychecks). This is in fact happening now for one of our
sons and his wife.
Question
Can the government also attach Social Security retirement payments for
government student loan repayments?
"Senior citizens continue to bear burden of student loans," by Ylan Q. Mui,
The Washington Post, April 1, 2012 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/senior-citizens-continue-to-bear-burden-of-student-loans/2012/04/01/gIQAs47lpS_story.html
The burden of paying for college is wreaking havoc
on the finances of an unexpected demographic: senior citizens.
New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York shows that Americans 60 and older still owe about $36 billion in
student loans, providing a rare window into the dynamics of student debt.
More than 10 percent of those loans are delinquent. As a result, consumer
advocates say, it is not uncommon for Social Security checks to be garnished
or for debt collectors to harass borrowers in their 80s over student loans
that are decades old.
That even seniors remain saddled with student loans
highlights what a growing chorus of lawmakers, economists and financial
experts say has become a central conflict in the nation’s higher education
system: The long-touted benefits of a college degree are being diluted by
rising tuition rates and the longevity of debt.
Some of these older Americans are still grappling
with their first wave of student loans, while others took on new debt when
they returned to school later in life in hopes of becoming more competitive
in the labor force. Many have co-signed for loans with their children or
grandchildren to help them afford ballooning tuition.
The recent recession exacerbated this problem,
making it harder for older Americans — or the youths they are supporting in
school — to get good-paying jobs. And unlike other debts, student loans
cannot be shed in bankruptcy. As a result, some older Americans have found
that a college degree led not to a prosperous career but instead to a
lifetime under the shadow of debt.
“A student loan can be a debt that’s kind of like a
ball and chain that you can drag to the grave,” said William E. Brewer,
president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. “You
can unhook it when they lay you in the coffin.”
Sandy Barnett, 58, of Illinois thought she was
doing the right thing when she decided to pursue a master’s degree in
clinical psychology in the late 1980s. She had worked her way through
college but said she took out a loan of about $21,000 to pay for graduate
school so she would have more time to focus on her studies.
But even after earning her master’s, Barnett
struggled to find a job that paid more than $25,000 a year and soon fell
behind on her payments. She suffered through a layoff, a stretch of
unemployment and the death of her husband — while her student loan ballooned
to roughly $54,000.
Barnett filed for bankruptcy in 2005, but she
couldn’t get out from under her student loan debt. She said a collection
agency began garnishing the wages from her full-time job as a customer
service representative a year ago, and now money is so tight that she must
choose between buying gas and buying food. An air conditioner for her mobile
home is an unimaginable luxury.
“I shake my head every day at the thought that I’m
working for nothing,” Barnett said. “It’s really a black hole because
there’s no end in sight.”
Department of Labor (DOL) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Labor
"EBSA Cracks Down on Retirement Plan Advisors: Advisors take
heed: The DOL arm that rides herd over retirement plans is ramping up its
enforcement efforts," by Melanie Waddell, AdvisorOne, March 26, 2012 ---
http://www.advisorone.com/2012/03/26/ebsa-cracks-down-on-retirement-plan-advisors?t=legal-compliance
Prominent retirement planning officials are warning
advisors to make sure that the retirement plans they advise are compliant
with Department of Labor rules, as the DOL’s regulatory arm responsible for
policing these plans is cracking down.
So far this year, the DOL’s Employee Benefits
Security Administration (EBSA) has significantly raised its enforcement
efforts in what Andy Larson, director of the Retirement Learning Center,
says should serve as a wake-up call to advisors who advise retirement plans
and plan sponsors.
In 2011, EBSA said it had closed 3,472 civil cases
and obtained monetary results of nearly $1.39 billion. EBSA also closed 302
criminal cases that resulted in 129 individuals being indicted and 75 cases
being closed with guilty pleas or convictions. DOL also wants to increase
the number of its enforcement personnel from 913 to 1,003 this year.
Larson says those EBSA enforcement numbers are
“astonishing” and warns that many advisors are surprisingly still unaware
that the DOL has jurisdiction over them.
What’s the biggest area EBSA is zeroing in on?
Fiduciary negligence. EBSA is “seeing very high levels of non-compliance
with fiduciary” duties. When the EBSA releases its reproposed fiduciary rule
in the first half of this year, the rule “will affect advisors and their
fiduciary role,” not plan sponsors, Larson says.
In light of this, Larson said, advisors should
ensure they have a “strong documentable fiduciary process.”
As Larson notes, since the Employee Retirement
Income Security Act (ERISA) was put into place, DOL and the Internal Revenue
Service’s Employee Plans Unit have had joint authority “to ride herd” over
retirement plans. But service providers have gotten accustomed to the IRS
taking the lead in enforcement actions, and have failed to notice over the
last two years that the EBSA “is showing up through the unlocked back door
and finding problems,” Larson says.
Because the IRS has been the primary enforcer of
ERISA rules, “service providers have developed their models to include
mechanisms with IRS requirements,” but may have failed to include “DOL-type
protections in their service models,” Larson says.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's helpers (not advice) for personal finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Bye By Blackberry!
"The End of RIM As We Know It," by Dan Frommer, ReadWriteWeb,
March 29, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_end_of_rim_as_we_know_it.php
The important bits from RIM's earnings release
(PDF)
include:
- Sales down 25% year-over-year to $4.2 billion,
for the quarter ending on March 3. (For context, Apple's iPhone revenue
grew 133% year-over-year in Q4, and even struggling Motorola's mobile
device sales grew 5%.)
- A net loss of $125 million, versus a profit of
$934 million a year ago.
- "The company expects continued pressure on
revenue and earnings throughout fiscal 2013." It will also stop making
public predictions of how it's going to do financially. (So as not to
keep missing those numbers, and end up looking worse.)
- RIM's former co-CEO Jim Balsillie - who was
often the face of the company - will leave its board of directors. And
its COO and CTO are leaving.
- RIM is "undertaking a comprehensive review of
strategic opportunities including partnerships and joint ventures,
licensing, and other ways to leverage RIM's assets and maximize value
for our stakeholders." In other words, figuring out what to do next.
This is a completely different company than the one
that helped lead the smartphone revolution over the past decade, and even
than the one we knew just a year ago, when it was at least still profitable.
(Its rise and fall, captured in the chart above, is worth a look.)
Not only is RIM in worse financial shape, but all
bets are off for its recovery.
There is a very real chance that RIM will come out
of this as the property of another company, or at least very different than
it is today. If it stays independent, it will have to become smaller and
more nimble before maybe becoming successful again.
Jensen Comment
The graph resembles those cartoon sales graphs in The New Yorker.
"The Disruptive Power of iMessage," by David Pogue, The New York
Times, March 22, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/the-disruptive-power-of-imessage/
You could argue that Apple has changed the way we
do things several times. The way we buy music, use our phones, operate our
computers and so on. But the world has pretty much overlooked one of Apple’s
greatest ideas yet: messages.
It started with iMessages, an iPhone/iPad app that
lets you send text messages between Apple hand-held gadgets without cost.
Instead of using the cellphone network (and paying 20 cents each or
whatever), texts you send using this little app get sent across the
Internet, costing you pretty much nothing.
These Apple messages have many advantages over
regular text messages. For example, the tiny word “received” appears beneath
any message you send to let you know that your recipient’s gadget has
received it. (If the recipient has turned on “Show read receipts” in
Settings, you’ll even see the word “read” to let you know that the person
has actually read the message.)
If you’re in a back-and-forth conversation, the
text messages show up on a single screen, scrolling up in conversation
balloons like a chat session. While the other guy is typing, you see “…” in
his balloon, so you know he’s working on a response and not just ignoring
you.
You can send pictures and videos through Messages.
And you aren’t held to the usual 160-character limit of phone text messages.
And if you have more than one iGadget — say, an
iPhone and an iPad — you’ll find the same message threads on each one. You
can pick up on a chat from wherever you left off on a different machine.
Above all, Messages means that you can keep your
text messages. They’re not locked onto your phone, like regular text
messages. And they don’t scroll away forever, like regular text messages.
You can go back and refer to them whenever, and they’re backed up every time
you back up your device.
So: Messages is cool. And coolly clever, the way it
cuts the cellphone company out of the revenue stream. But that’s not the big
news.
¶Apple announced recently that this summer, it will
release a new version of Mac OS X called Mountain Lion. And Mountain Lion
will come with a new Mac app called Messages. You can download the beta
version of Messages free, right now, even before Mountain Lion is available.
(It’s actually just a beefed-up version of the previous iChat program, and
still includes all of its audiochat and videochat features.)
¶O.K., this is where things get crazy. Suddenly
your computer and your phone are sharing the same communications stream.
¶First, this means that you can now send text
messages from your computer, using a full keyboard, which is a fairly
radical change right there.
¶You’ve been able to do that computer-to-phone
trick before, but it’s been tricky. For years, I’ve been using Google Voice
to send text messages for that very reason: on its Web page, I can send text
messages, free, to phones, with the full comfort of mouse and keyboard. And
you could sent text messages from chat programs — but only with special
codes, and, of course, without the ability to resume the conversation on a
different device.
¶But Messages is the first time there’s been a
low-friction, mass-available way to send computer-to-phone messages.
¶The second huge change is that now you have your
entire hard drive full of attachments — photos, videos, documents — to send
to people’s phones. From your computer.
¶Third, Messages preserves all of these exchanges,
just as the iPhone did. But it’s far more useful to have your transcripts on
the actual computer. Now you can archive them, search them, copy and paste
them, print them, forward them and so on.
¶Finally, Messages blurs the line between text
messages, chats and e-mail. Or maybe it erases the line completely, and
creates something entirely new.
¶(One wild side effect: It gives birth to this
frequently asked question: “Are you on the phone or the Mac?” For the first
time, there’s no way to know. You can’t tell if someone’s being terse
because she’s tapping out her responses with one finger on glass, or because
she’s on her computer but just distracted.)
Continued in article
Free PSAT Practice Exams ---
http://www.testpreppractice.net/PSAT/Default.aspx
"SAT Prep on the Web: : A) a Game; B) Online Chat; C) All of the
Above," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal,
November 3, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704462704575590383273883818.html
This Saturday, high-school students around
the country will sit for hours of silent testing that will determine
some portion of their future: That's right, it's SAT time. For both
parents and kids, the preparation for taking the standardized test
is stressful and expensive, often involving hours of studying and
several hundreds of dollars spent on classes, workbooks and tutors.
And many kids will take these tests more than once.
So this week I tried a Web-based form of
test prep called Grockit that aims to make studying for the SAT,
ACT, GMAT, GRE or LSAT less expensive and more enjoyable.
Grockit.com offers lessons, group study and solo practice, and does
a nice job of feeling fun and educational, which isn't an easy
combination to pull off.
A free portion of the site includes group
study with a variety of questions and a limited number of solo test
questions, which are customized to each student's study needs. The
$100 Premium subscription includes full access to the online
platform with unlimited solo practice questions and personalized
performance analytics that track a student's progress. A new
offering called Grockit TV (grockit.com/tv) offers free eight-week
courses if students watch them streaming live twice a week.
Otherwise, a course can be downloaded for $100 during the course or
$150 afterward. Instructors hailing from the Princeton Review and
Kaplan, among other places, teach test preparation for the GMAT
business-school admissions test and SAT.
For the sake of testing, I focused on the
SAT and plunged back into the depths of reading, writing and (gulp)
math to get a sense of what students see and do on Grockit.com. In a
short period of time, I found myself wanting to go back to the site
to get better at certain sections or to earn more Experience Points,
which result in badges and unlock new levels of study, both of which
can be optionally posted to outside networks like Facebook or
Twitter. By default, everyone can see one another's points, which
invites healthy competition; these can also be hidden if you'd
rather keep them private.
I tested both the free version of
Grockit.com, which includes an SAT writing diagnostic test, and the
extra offerings of a $100 Premium account, including diagnostic
tests for writing, reading and math to evaluate my strengths and
weaknesses in taking the SAT. The free version had too many messages
that constantly notified me of what I could do with a paid account
and prompted me to upgrade.
Along with completing practice questions
with strangers and instructors, I got a friend of mine to also use
Grockit.com so we could compete together in Grockit's Speed
Challenge Games. These are included in the free portion and they
reward the fastest person who answers a question correctly—but also
display incorrect guesses, thus narrowing the possible answers for
those who don't answer first. It was more fun for me to play against
someone I knew, but I can imagine kids preferring the anonymity of
competing with strangers when they don't answer questions correctly.
In an introductory video, Grockit founder
and chief product officer Farb Nivi describes the site by saying,
"It's like having a complete multimedia textbook and workbook
online, at your fingertips." But for kids (and from my experience,
adults), the computer isn't an easy place to concentrate. On any
given PC, especially one used by a teenager, instant-message
indicators are chiming, Facebook updates and Twitter tweets are
waiting to be checked, music is playing in the background and emails
are flowing into inboxes. Plus, the Grockit site is just a tab away
from other websites and distractions. And the site has no way of
working in a distraction-free mode, like how the new Microsoft
Office for Mac offers Full Screen View, which quiets any alerts or
pop-up distractions.
It also isn't necessarily comfortable for
students to read extensive text (like in reading questions for the
SAT) on a vertical computer screen. The site will run on the iPad,
which can be held on a lap for more comfortable reading, but many
students don't own one of these.
Part of the way Grockit is made more fun is
by purposely incorporating social networking into the experience. As
people work on questions, they can instant message with one another
in a right-side panel about tips for answering questions or simply
for commiserating about studying. These IMs don't make indicator
sounds, so they aren't too intrusive, but they can't be fully
closed. I saw several chats among teens about nothing in particular,
as well as some test-taking tips from instructors and other
students.
Grockit encourages users to "be nice" in
chats because all conversations are logged; people can also flag one
another for offensive remarks. Chats are also archived on your page
so you can reread them for tips and study hints. If you find
someone's tip helpful or if you simply like a person, you can award
him or her with Grockit Points, which show up beside a name and
profile photo. Users' ages or last names aren't displayed.
Grockit offers one-on-one tutoring for a
fee of $50 an hour, and I tried one session for math. My instructor
and I used Skype to audio chat throughout the session and he took
advantage of a whiteboard in Grockit, where he could write out the
steps in an algebra problem to demonstrate how to solve for X.
Around 40 instructors are employed for
Grockit, but anyone can run a practice session, even other students.
I signed up for a scheduled practice session at 8 p.m. that I
assumed was run by an instructor, and later found out it was run by
a student. Grockit instructors can also pop into sessions at any
given time to help students, and one did during my session. Grockit
works on a system of transparency so users can evaluate all
teachers. My tutor had five-star rating and did a great job
reminding me of algebra rules.
If you're looking for an inexpensive and
more enjoyable way to study for big tests, Grockit is a viable and
easily accessible option. But its proximity to the rest of the Web
could prove much more distracting than the old SAT workbook.
—See a video with Katherine Boehret on
Web-based test-prep software at WSJ.com/PersonalTech.
Email her at
mossbergsolution@wsj.com
End of the Cuban Dream
Trying to Inspire Ambition Among People Used to Free Housing and Medical Care
Plus Almost Free Food, Transportation and Everything Else
"On the road towards capitalism Change is coming to Cuba at last. The United
States could do far more to encourage it," The Economist, March 24, 2012 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21551047
IN 1998 Pope John Paul II visited Cuba, prompting
outsiders to await a political opening of the kind that brought down
communism in his native Poland. Sadly, even two decades after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, Cuba remains one of the handful of countries around the
world where communism lives on. Illness forced Fidel Castro to step down in
2006, but his slightly younger brother, Raúl, is in charge, flanked by a
cohort of elderly Stalinists. When Pope Benedict XVI visits the island next
week, expectations will be more muted.
Yet a momentous change has begun in Cuba in the
meantime. The country has started on the road towards capitalism; and that
will have big implications for the United States and the rest of Latin
America.
The journey, as our
special
report this week explains, will be painfully slow.
No active dissent from one-party rule is allowed: dozens of opponents of the
regime have been arrested ahead of the pope’s visit. Sceptics will note that
Fidel Castro opened up the island’s economy a little in the early 1990s,
after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of its subsidies,
only to stop when he found a new benefactor in Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.
But this time seems different. Raúl Castro, though
no democrat, is clearly a more practical man than his brother. He recognises
that time is running out for his island. The population is shrinking and
ageing, the economy is hopelessly unproductive and the state can no longer
pay for the paternalist social services of which Cuba was once proud.
Meanwhile, Mr Chávez’s health and his hold on power are uncertain.
The changes Raúl Castro has introduced are almost
certainly irreversible. Much of Cuban farming is, in effect, being
privatised. In all, around a third of the country’s workforce is due to
transfer by 2015 to an incipient private sector. As well as employing
others, Cubans can now buy and sell houses and cars, even as the number of
mobile phones and computers on the island is rising fast. This looks like a
turning point similar to Deng Xiaoping’s revolution in China.
No man is an island
Reform is moving slowly partly because Mr Castro is
ambivalent. He insists, as Deng did, that his aim is to sustain, not
dismantle, the Communist Party’s control. There are also obstacles to
reform. Bureaucrats fear losing power and perks; ordinary people fear rising
prices. Popular opposition forced Mr Castro to drop a proposal to scrap the
ration books that give all Cubans some subsidised food.
But going too slowly is now as dangerous for the
Castros as going too fast. Cubans are unhappy. Their schools and hospitals
are not as good as they were. Inequalities of income now exist alongside
those of power. There is much resentment of the opportunities afforded to
insiders and denied to everyone else. Having raised Cubans’ hopes of change,
Raúl Castro urgently needs to create some winners from the reforms—and that
means pushing ahead. Small businesses must be allowed to become medium and
large ones. Foreign investment should be welcomed. And the ration books
should go, with subsidies targeted at the poor.
The other reason for urgency is that the Castros
have failed to groom a successor. When Fidel, who is 85, dies, change will
doubtless accelerate, but the regime will not fall apart: Raúl is the
important one now. Yet whoever takes over from him—and a partial handover
may start as soon as 2013—will not have the brothers’ revolutionary
credentials. Cubans will judge their next leader strictly on his or her
present performance. The longer Raúl tarries over placing the economy on a
sustainable footing, the greater the risk that a post-Castro leadership will
be swept away on a tide of popular anger.
Time for America to get over its 50-year
tantrum
Few will mourn this regime. But there are several
reasons for all sides to prefer an orderly transition to capitalism and
democracy in Cuba. The sudden collapse of communism risks civil war, or at
least the danger that Cuba’s formidable security and intelligence agencies
will become hired guns at the service of drug trafficking and organised
crime. The presence of 1.2m Cuban-Americans in south Florida makes it likely
that the United States would get dragged into any conflict.
Continued in article
The American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouseHotel.htm
Internal Control!
What's internal control?
Academic Standards Control!
What is academic standard control?
"Audit Finds Chicago State U. Lost Track of 950 Computers,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 23, 2012 ---
A state audit released on Thursday found that
$3.8-million worth of equipment, including 950 computers, is missing from
Chicago State University, the
Chicago Tribune
reports. The university has come under fire in the past for
questionable spending by a
former president,
Elnora D. Daniel, including a 2007 audit that
detailed university-sponsored “leadership seminars” on
Caribbean cruises. According to the latest audit,
over the past four years the university has mistakenly awarded $123,000 in
federal aid and $20,000 in
state grants to students. The university issued a
statement saying the administration of Wayne D. Watson, who took over from
Ms. Daniel in 2009, was using a “proactive approach” to deal with the
problems, but acknowledged that “these things take time.”
Jensen Comment
The fraud gets even worse. Because state revenues are based, in part, on
enrollment it became impossible to flunk out of Chicago State University. Even
David Albrecht's dog could enroll in CSU and never flunk out.
I propose changing the abbreviation from CSU to CSI.
Question
How do you stay in college semester after semester with a grade average of 0.0?
"Chicago State Let Failing Students Stay," Inside Higher Ed, July 26,
2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/26/qt#266185
Chicago State University officials have been
boasting about improvements in retention rates. But an investigation by
The Chicago Tribune found that part of
the reason is that students with grade-point averages below 1.8 have been
permitted to stay on as students, in violation of university rules. Chicago
State officials say that they have now stopped the practice, which the
Tribune exposed by requesting the G.P.A.'s of a cohort of students. Some of
the students tracked had G.P.A.'s of 0.0.
Jensen Comment
There is a bit of integrity at CSU. Professors could've just given the students
A grades like some other high grade inflation universities or changed their
examination answers in courses somewhat similar to the grade-changing practices
of a majority of Atlanta K-12 schools. Now that CSU will no longer retain low
gpa students, those other practices may commence at CSU in order to keep the
state support at high levels. And some CSU professors may just let students
cheat. It's not clear how many CSU professors will agree to these other ways to
keep failing students on board.
Oops!
Everything is OK in context. I forgot this is Chicago (the most corrupt city in
the United States)
Bob Jensen's threads on Professors Who Cheat and Allow Students to Cheat
are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Rewarding Teaching," by Dean Dad, Inside Higher Ed, March 13,
2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/rewarding-teaching
What would it look like if, say, the Federal
government were to decide to prioritize good college-level teaching at the
same level that it supports university research?
This piece in IHE addressed the question, but it
struck me as falling badly short of reality.
Briefly, the piece suggests that Congress establish a National Pedagogy
Foundation as a sort of counterpart to the NEH or the NSF. By pooling a
pile of money into a project to award grant funds to deserving projects that
promise to advance quality teaching, it suggests, we’d be much more likely
to see tenure committees take teaching as seriously as they take research.
Until then, “internal mission creep” on the ground -- in which each stratum
of higher education imitates those higher -- will defeat the best
intentions.
The author works at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I mean that
in the nicest possible way.
Encouraging good teaching in the context of a research university is
important, and the remedy offered here may have some limited traction in
that context. But outside that context, it misses the point.
Quick quiz: Among community colleges with tenure systems, which counts more:
teaching or research?
Teaching. That has always been true. And that makes sense, given the
mission of the institution. Grants are lovely, of course, but they aren’t
required for tenure, and they wouldn’t make much difference on the ground.
(If the good folks at Harvard would like to investigate what it means to
value good teaching, I suggest a field trip to nearby Bunker Hill Community
College.)
Followup quiz: which of the following has more students taking classes:
research universities or community colleges?
Community colleges, by a substantial margin. So if you want to make a
measurable difference in the quality of teaching for a broad population,
you’d start here. Harvard can wait.
So let’s say, then, that we wanted the Federal government to help improve
the caliber of teaching at community colleges, and even at four-year public
state colleges. What would a National Pedagogy Foundation have to do?
My first thought is to define the mission. Is the goal to improve
actually-existing teaching quickly, or to be transformative over time? If
it’s the former, the only serious answer -- the ONLY serious answer -- is a
massive, sustained infusion of operating funds into college budgets. Not
conditional funding, or “seed” funding, or funding with strings: straight-up
operational funding. And it would have to come with “matching”
requirements, to keep the states and localities from cheaping out and just
using the new money as an excuse to cut their own contributions.
I really can’t emphasize this enough. Grants require project managers, and
come with expiration dates. Money with expiration dates doesn’t mesh with
well with tenure; typically, any faculty hired would be on the cusp of
tenure just when the money goes away. So too much of the money is lost to
administrative costs, and that which remains can’t be used for faculty. But
with committed, sustained operating funding, the existing administrative
infrastructure will do, and we could actually hire faculty.
If it’s meant to be transformative, then it needs to be both competitive,
substantial, and sustained. (The competition could be based on how plausibly
innovative the proposals are, and how scalable they are. No more boutique
programs.) It needs to be long-term enough that the institution can risk
failure of the first version without necessarily losing the funding.
Anything truly transformative will be high-risk; in this fiscal climate,
colleges will be risk-averse because they have to be.Continued in
article
"Why Do They Hate Us? Part 2," by Thomas H. Benton (actually William Pannapacker), Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Do-They-Hate-Us-Part-2/125066/
Jensen Comment
I think this could well become another black hole for for taxpayers if for no
other reason than so much will be raked off by administrators before the rewards
finally trickle down to the teachers themselves. And there will be endless
debates about what constitutes "good teaching." I don't equate good teaching
with popularity with students. Good teachers in my opinion are teachers who
challenge students to the maximum of their abilities while at the same time
inspire them to want to learn more and more after the courses come to an end.
Performance along these lines is very difficult to assess in part because proof
of success comes so many years after the courses end.
And "Rewarding Teaching" does not just equate to entirely to paychecks and
other benefits that depend upon money alone. Respected professionals generally
take pride in their professionalism no matter what money flows in from a task.
We should not expect every task to have a carrot for genuine professionals.
For an example of non-professionalism we can point to those hundreds of
teachers in Atlanta who cheated by revising student test scores just so those
teachers could receive higher paychecks. This type of cheating unprofessional
because it was "cheating." But to make matters worse these cheating teachers
were depriving their students of incremental money for added remedial study that
could've raised their performance levels. These teachers were not robbing from
the rich to give to the poor. These teachers were depriving the poor so they
themselves could have higher standards of living. Even if these cheating
teachers were "under paid" there self-serving actions at the expense of their
weakest students are not justified.
March 27, 2012 reply from Zane Swanson
The purpose of higher education in universities
and/or community college is simple to say ”learning” but difficult to
measure. Whose teaching is of higher value: 1) those who started Einstein on
his path or 2) the professors who offer their classes to hundreds on the
internet today? Granted pedagogy has a name, but the research/value of it is
to me only in its application in my classroom. I don’t mean to be
egotistical on this one, but on the other hand I don’t find the politics of
pedagogy metrics to be satisfying (and certainly not entertaining).
Zane Swanson
March 28, 2012 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Zane,
I discuss assessment in general at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm
Assessment/Learning Issues:
Measurement and the No-Significant Differences (in terms of pedagogy)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#AssessmentIssues
Two items indirectly related to your concerns are the following:
Coaches Graham and Gazowski ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#Randy
The Criterion Problem ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#CriterionProblem
And here's a case of possible interest
From The Wall Street Journal
Accounting Weekly Review on November 17, 2006
TITLE: Colleges, Accreditors Seek Better Ways to Measure Learning
REPORTER: Daniel Golden
DATE: Nov 13, 2006 PAGE: B1
LINK:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116338508743121260.html?mod=djem_jiewr_ac
TOPICS: Accounting
SUMMARY: The article discusses college- or university-wide accreditation
by regional accreditation bodies and reaction to the Spellings Commission
report. Questions extend the accreditation discussion to AACSB
accreditation.
QUESTIONS:
1.) What is accreditation? The article describes university-wide
accreditation by regional accrediting bodies. Why is this step necessary?
2.) Does your business school have accreditation by Association to
Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)? How does this accreditation
differ from university-wide accreditation?
3.) Why are regional accrediting agencies planning to meet with Secretary
Spellings?
4.) Did you consider accreditation in deciding where to go to college or
university? Why or why not?
5.) Do you think improvements in assessing student learning are
important, as the Spellings Commission argues and accreditors are now
touting? Support your answer.
SMALL GROUP ASSIGNMENT: Find out about your college or university's
accreditation. When was the last accreditation review? Were there any
concerns expressed by the accreditors? How has the university responded to
any concerns expressed?
Once these data are gathered, discuss in class in groups:
Has this information been easy or difficult to find? Do you agree with
the assessment of concerns about the institution and/or the university's
responses?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
TITLE: Colleges, Accreditors Seek Better Ways to Measure Learning
REPORTER: Daniel Golden
DATE: Nov 13, 2006 PAGE: B1
LINK:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116338508743121260.html?mod=djem_jiewr_ac
At the University of the South, a highly
regarded liberal-arts college in Sewanee, Tenn., the dozen professors
who teach the required freshman Shakespeare course design their classes
differently, assigning their favorite plays and writing and grading
their own exams.
But starting next fall, one question on
the final exam will be the same across all of the classes, and
instructors won't grade their own students' answers to that question.
Instead, to assure more objective evaluation, the professors will trade
exams and grade each other's students.
The English department adopted this change
-- despite faculty grumbling about losing some classroom independence --
under pressure from the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges.
The association, one of the six regional groups that accredit nearly
3,000 U.S. colleges, told the University of the South that, to have its
accreditation renewed, it would have to do a better job of measuring
student learning. Without such accreditation, the school's students
wouldn't qualify for federal financial aid.
The shift "does cut into the individual
faculty member's autonomy, and that's disturbing," says Jennifer
Michael, an associate professor. "On the other hand, it's making us
think about how do we figure out what students are actually learning.
Maybe having them take and pass a course doesn't mean they've learned
everything we think they have."
Regional accreditors used to limit their
examinations to colleges' financial solvency and educational resources,
with the result that well-established schools enjoyed rubber-stamp
approval. But now they are increasingly holding colleges, prestigious or
not, responsible for undergraduates' grasp of such skills as writing and
critical thinking. And prodded by regional accreditors, colleges are
adopting various means of assessing learning in addition to classroom
grades, from electronic portfolios that collect a student's work from
different courses to standardized testing and special projects for
graduating seniors.
The accreditors aren't moving fast enough
for the Bush administration, though. In the wake of a federally
sponsored study published in 2005 that showed declining literacy among
college-educated Americans, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
and a commission she appointed on the future of higher education want
colleges to be more accountable for -- and candid about -- student
performance, and they have criticized accreditors as barriers to reform.
Congress sets the standards for
accreditors, and the Education Department periodically reviews
compliance with those standards. Congress identified "success with
respect to student achievement" as a requirement for accreditation in
1992, and then in 1998 made it the top priority. That imperative, along
with the advent of online education, has spurred accreditors to rethink
their longtime emphasis on such criteria as the number of faculty
members with doctorates. Since 2000, several regional accreditors have
revamped their rules to emphasize student learning.
"Accreditors have moved the ball forward,"
says Kati Haycock, a member of the Spellings commission and the director
of the nonprofit Education Trust in Washington, D.C., which seeks better
schooling for disadvantaged students. "Not far enough, not fast enough,
but they have moved the ball forward."
An issue paper written for the commission
by Robert Dickeson, a former president of the University of Northern
Colorado, complained that accreditation "currently settles for meeting
minimum standards," and it called for replacing regional accreditors
with a new national foundation. "Technology has rendered the quaint
jurisdictional approach to accreditation obsolete," Mr. Dickeson wrote.
The commission didn't endorse that
recommendation, but its final report last month cited "significant
shortcomings" in accreditation and called for "transformation" of the
process. In a Sept. 22 speech marking the release of the report,
Secretary Spellings said that accreditors are "largely focused on
inputs, more on how many books are in a college library than whether
students can actually understand them....That must change."
David Ward, a commission member and the
president of the American Council on Education, a higher education
advocacy group, declined to sign the report, in part because he objected
to its criticism of accreditors as overly simplistic.
Russell Edgerton, president emeritus of
the American Association for Higher Education, says "there's no question
that American colleges are underachieving," but he argues that
accreditors are rising to the challenge. "Ten years ago, I would have
said that regional accreditors are dead in the water and asleep at the
wheel," he says. But "there's been a kind of renaissance within
accreditation agencies in the past five to six years. They're helping
institutions create a culture of evidence about student learning."
Mr. Edgerton also thinks the federal
government's emphasis on new accountability measures is flawed because
it bypasses the judgment of traditional arbiters like faculty and
accreditors. "The danger is that the standardized testing approach in
K-12 would slop over into higher education," he says. "Higher ed is
different."
Jerome Walker, associate provost and
accreditation liaison officer for the University of Southern California,
agrees that the administration's attacks on accreditors are unfair. The
Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which accredits USC, "has
been extremely sensitive" to student learning, he says.
According to the Western Association's
executive director, Ralph Wolff, the group revamped its standards in
2001 to require colleges to identify preparation needed by entering
freshmen and the expectations for student progress in critical thinking,
quantitative reasoning and other skills. Its accreditation process now
takes four years, up from 1½, and it features a detailed, peer-reviewed
proposal for improvement and two site visits, including one devoted to
"educational effectiveness."
Historically, research universities like
USC "used to blow off" accreditation, Mr. Wolff says. "Now this has
become a real challenge for them in a good way."
Encouraged by Mr. Wolff, USC last year
assigned the same two essay questions -- one about conformity, another
based on a quotation from ethicist Robert Bellah -- to freshmen in a
beginning writing course and juniors and seniors in an advanced course.
A group of faculty then evaluated the essays without knowing the
students' names or which course they were taking. The reassuring
outcome, according to Richard Fliegel, assistant dean for academic
programs, was that juniors and seniors "demonstrated significantly more
critical thinking skills" than freshmen, and that advanced students who
had taken the first-year course outperformed transfer students who
hadn't taken beginning writing at USC.
Because the writing initiative is tailored
to USC's curriculum, the results -- while helpful to administrators and
accreditors -- wouldn't necessarily help the public compare USC to other
schools. That is a big drawback as far as the Bush administration is
concerned. "I have two kids in college now," says Vickie Schray, deputy
director of the Spellings commission. "It's a huge expense. Yet there's
very little information on return of investment or ability to shop
around for the greatest value."
She adds, though, that it is a
"misconception" to think that the administration wants to have "one
standardized test for all institutions" or to extend the testing
requirements of the "No Child Left Behind" law for K-12 schools to
higher education.
Even so, one standardized test of critical
thinking, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, is becoming popular. It
adjusts for students' scores on the SAT and ACT college-entrance exams,
potentially allowing more meaningful comparisons of the value added by
colleges. The number of schools using the assessment has soared from 54
two years ago to 170 this year. Among those using the test this fall:
the University of Texas at Austin, Duke University, Arizona State
University and Washington and Lee University.
Roger Benjamin, president of the nonprofit
Council for Aid to Education, which sponsors the test, says state
officials and university administrators have been the principal forces
behind its increasing use. "Accreditors are coming to the party, but a
bit late," Mr. Benjamin says.
Meanwhile, Secretary Spellings plans to
meet with accreditors in late November to discuss how to "accelerate the
focus on student achievement," Ms. Schray says. Accreditors say they
welcome the opportunity to tout their progress. "We have made a lot of
reforms," says the Western Association's Mr. Wolff. "We'd like to bring
the secretary up-to-date on the significance of these reforms and the
impact they're already having on institutions."
"Looking for Solutions in a Rapidly Changing Health Care Environment,"
Knowledge@wharton, University of Pennsylvania, March 28, 2012 ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2963
While the U.S. health care system is not yet on
life support, it remains a fragmented and unwieldy structure whose rising
costs bear little relation to improvements in access or quality. This is
despite the introduction of patient management programs, some restructuring
of insurance models and efforts to adjust incentives for decision making all
across the care continuum.
But during the keynote presentations and panel
discussions at Wharton's 18th Annual Health Care Business
Conference titled, "Innovation in a Changing Health Care Environment," the
emphasis was on solutions. Participants analyzed some of the ways that
individual companies are digging deep into the system to come up with
approaches that rely on new technology, new business models and new
marketing strategies.
Two keynote speeches served as thematic bookends to
the day's discussions. The morning kickoff keynote by Glenn D. Steele Jr.,
president and CEO of Geisinger Health System, defined the scope of the
problem in dollars and disease. Steele focused on the inverse relationship
between cost and quality, citing several studies that found that more than
50% of health care spending in the U.S. is wasted or actually harmful. The
conference ended with a keynote by Robert Pearl, president and CEO of The
Permanente Medical Group, who stated that the survival of the U.S. depends
on reining in health care costs. He challenged the audience to save the
country from economic collapse by redesigning how health care is delivered
and paid for.
Overall, conference presenters provided a
ground-level view of what some of the problems, and solutions, look like in
this transformative time.
Strategizing for Survival
The cost of health care is directly related to our
larger national economic health, as noted by Pearl. "Our problems go back 40
years.... Costs have been rising 7% to 8% a year; health care is 18% of GDP
this year, and it is set to double again, to 36% of GDP, by 2030.... That
leaves no money for education, infrastructure, police and fire." The current
players, he added, are strategizing for survival today because the
trajectory is unsustainable, and change will come. "Currently, we are
fragmented, piecemeal, paper-based and leaderless."
According to David Jones, Jr., chairman and
managing director of Chrysalis Ventures, a private equity and venture
capital firm, the days for tinkering around the edges are gone. "The
provider side re-engineering is doomed to failure because of a fundamental
governance problem. You heard in the keynote this morning that 40% to 50% of
the money spent is useless or actually harmful to outcomes. All of the
change initiatives are focused on solving it in an incremental way."
Jones described that as a "pants-on-fire
problem.... I don't think there is a possibility in the world that a bunch
of ungovernable non-profits with no motivation to change quickly will go
after that problem. I think the solution ultimately -- like the Greek
[economic bail-out] solution or the GM solution -- is that you must have
restructuring in the traditional financial sense. Everyone talks about
hospitals going bankrupt because of politics. That is nonsense. Bankruptcy
is a restructuring, and the system is going to change dramatically."
This urgency, and a new economy driven by
information technology, have created an environment in which change is
happening no matter what laws are passed or what the courts uphold or
overturn, conference participants stated.
"Good regulations, bad regulations: Change has
thrown the pickup sticks into the air, and they will come down in other
ways," Jones said. "The iPhones have taken over the world. More than 80% of
doctors use an iPhone or a smartphone. You can't wall off change. The health
plans are changing fast. As a venture capitalist, that is exciting stuff."
Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini told the conference that
his firm is evolving into a health technology company with a big insurance
vehicle attached. Bertolini discussed Aetna's competitors' similar
investments in electronic health record software that is transforming the
nature of the health insurance industry. "UnitedHealth recently announced
its Optum healthcare cloud which is meant to be a collaboration platform.
It's not Epic, it's not Cerner, it's not McKesson [referring to some of the
dominant electronic health record software companies]. It's got a lot of
resources behind it; it's got a lot of cash flow, and I think it's worth
watching."
Jones of Chrysalis also referred to insurance
company investments in software that are changing the way patients are cared
for. As an example, he cited Humana's platform called Vitality, an incentive
system to encourage individuals to make good choices about eating,
exercising and other health issues. While the problems remain, solutions are
starting to emerge either through creative new business models,
technological advances or creative patient engagement initiatives, he said.
Recovering Costs
According to Jones, Congress did not offer true
health reform with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act, but instead offered health insurance reform that will address how
consumers pay for health care. "Health insurance is a dysfunctional,
shrinking market on the private side. Plans aren't changing voluntarily;
they are changing because their old business model was crushed and
destroyed. We are getting rid of the chokehold that insurance brokers have
on health care. An 8% to 12% commission goes to Joe Box-of-Donuts," he said,
referring to the fact that health insurance brokers get a commission that is
built into the cost of the price of health insurance. The regional health
insurance exchanges (HIEs) that have been established under the Affordable
Care Act eliminate health insurance brokers -- and their commissions - and
allow patients to buy insurance directly from a pool of health plans, Jones
added. "The health exchanges will drive out that cost and will focus on
brand value."
By eliminating the insurance brokers -- the middle
men in the system -- patients will focus on the value of the insurance
product and choose a tool that works for their situation out of a menu of
options offered through a health insurance exchange, Jones said. As direct
consumers of health insurance, he added, patients will be required to ascend
a learning curve about their options.
According to John Keith, a principal at Deloitte,
"No matter how exchanges evolve, when consumers start looking at their local
networks and what they are getting for their dollar, there will be chaos for
a few years. There will be a period of adjustment as people realize they are
responsible for those costs, and that will drive change down the road."
Providers and suppliers will compete for business
in this new paradigm, where cost and quality are expected to be in
alignment, said Keith. "This is truly an opportunity for real change. ACOs
(Accountable Care Organizations) aren't anything new," Keith added,
referring to the outcomes-based payment system being piloted by Medicare as
mandated in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. "Bundled payment
systems have been around since DRGs (Diagnosis Related Groups), and there
have been lots of revolutions, like HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations).
They all resulted in very minimal change. Fee for service abhorred
information, but economic duress is causing price pressure, and it opens the
door to an industry focused on value, and demands collaborative tools. We're
going from a feudal system to a Renaissance."
Response to Consumers
Consumers as patients are still at the nexus of
change, either as they gravitate toward providers who are convenient and
effective, or as they learn to manage the health dollars that are spent, if
not directly out of pocket, then on their behalf either by an employer or a
government program, conference participants suggested. "People will behave
like they do in normal consumer markets," said Ashish Kaura, a partner at
Booz & Company. "What are the cornerstones of the consumer markets? Three
things: One is value in product design, which is standardization and driven
by what most people need. Two is simplicity: It must be easy to navigate to
get the information you need. You don't want to spend five hours on the
phone. Three is trust: The biggest value for payers today is trust."
Permanente's Pearl also noted the influence of
consumers on the direction of health care. Consumer demands will need to
drive innovation, since the current uncertainty in the regulatory and
financial environment has many investors waiting on the sidelines for a
clear signal, he said. "Find a single business able to achieve success if
R&D and finance are fighting each other."
According to David Kirchoff, president and CEO of
Weight Watchers, products like Weight Watchers' online tracking system --
which engages patients in their ongoing care -- have succeeded because they
work: Patients use them, they get results and tackling obesity bends the
cost curve down in a host of related diseases, especially diabetes.
"The challenges of obesity are complicated to
solve," he added. "People have difficult choices surrounded by a sea of
temptations. What's at stake? The future of the health care system. There is
a strong link between obesity and diabetes. If you have a BMI (Body Mass
Index) over 30, you are 500% more likely to have diabetes." Today, 10% of
Americans have diabetes, he says. "By 2050, it is expected to be one-third.
This is not a vanity [issue]. This is a health condition that is a function
of the choices we make in our daily lives."
Ultimately, providers and suppliers -- the
pharmaceutical and medical device companies -- will be required to prove
their value in the marketplace or face extinction, according to conference
panelists. Payment systems continue to move at accelerated speed toward a
value-based model with payment for quality and outcomes, and move away from
a fee-based system that simply pays for individual services or products for
which there is no proof of efficacy. Due to this proof-of-concept
stringency, the pharmaceutical sector is financially riskier than it used to
be, but there is still opportunity. That means bio-pharmaceutical investors
are keeping their wallets buttoned until later in the clinical trial
process, panelists said during a discussion about the risks of biopharma
investment.
Luke Duster, a principal at Capital Royalty, a
private equity firm providing royalty-based financing to health care
companies, reported that "last year, there were $90 billion in royalties
[paid to biopharma investors]. There are late stage investment
opportunities, but smaller companies are starved for cash flow because there
is less investment in early stage. We are still raising capital, but only
raising one-third as much as [we did] at the peak. Only the strongest are
surviving."
Duster said he sees more cooperation between the
FDA and industry to move products through the pipeline. He identified drugs
with companion diagnostics as a growth area. Companion diagnostics represent
an opportunity in that market segment because the diagnostic test identifies
genetic markers and so takes the guesswork out of whether the drug will be
effective in a particular patient with an identifiable genetic mutation.
This assures outcomes and, by extension, guarantees the value of the product
to the payer. In companion diagnostics, a genetic test is developed to
identify whether a patient has a particular marker that indicates a specific
drug will work in that patient -- thus the name "companion diagnostic" --
because the diagnostic is tied directly to the efficacy of one particular
pharmaceutical product.
As to the role the FDA is playing in creating a
risk-averse pharmaceutical sector, Ronald W. Lennox, a partner with CHL
Medical Partners, a venture capital firm that focuses on seed and
early-stage companies in the medical sector, said it is the FDA's own
aversion to clinical risk that is trickling down to investors. "FDA
approvals ought to be a balance of risk and benefit. If one million people
benefit from a drug, how many shouldn't? Are we willing to risk one adverse
event? We are tilting toward no adverse events at all, with little regard to
patients who will benefit. Partly it is because of the litigious U.S.
population and partly because we have trials on a small population and we
try to extrapolate from 2,000 clinical trial patients to millions of
patients. That is hard to do."
Finding that Magic Mix of Providers
Panelists discussed the way that transformed
payment models based on outcomes are half of a solution; it is incumbent on
providers to transform what the payers are paying for. Moving from a fee for
service system where a product or service is paid because it was delivered
to an individual patient, to an outcomes-based value model -- where the
payment is determined by overall performance delivered at a population level
-- requires systems to generate the metrics to support reimbursement,
panelists noted.
Emad Rizk, president of McKesson Health Solutions,
talked about what that looks like from a provider's perspective. "Down here
at the execution level, it is ugly. So let's just look at where delivery
systems can go. Supposedly, you have managed populations, which means you
have to have the data. You have to stratify; you have to put processes
together to intervene, measure outcomes and then demonstrate those outcomes.
Then you have to go show the payer that you did it.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on health care ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"'Social-Media Blasphemy' Texas researcher adds 'Enemy' feature to
Facebook," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March
23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/College-20-Social-Media/131300/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Dean Terry has 400 friends on Facebook, but he
wants some virtual enemies.
Mr. Terry, who is director of the emerging-media
program at the University of Texas at Dallas, says a major flaw of the
popular social network is that it's all sunshine and no rain: The service
encourages users to press the "like" button, but offers no way to signal
which ideas, products, or people they disagree with. And "friend" is about
the only kind of connection you can declare.
Real-world relationships are more complicated than
that, so social networks should be too, the scholar argues. He's not
alone—more than three million people have voted for a "dislike" feature on
an
online petition on Facebook.
But Mr. Terry has decided to take action,
protesting the ethos of Facebook by literally rewiring the service. Or at
least, adding the ability to declare "enemies."
"It's social-media blasphemy, in that we're
suggesting that you share differences you have with people and share things
that you don't like instead of what you do like," he told me last week. "I
think social media needs some disruption. It needs its shot of Johnny
Rotten."
Here's what he's done. Last month he and a student
released a Facebook plug-in called
EnemyGraph, which
users can install free and name their enemies, which then show up in their
profiles. "We're using 'enemy' in the same loose way that Facebook uses
'friends,'" Mr. Terry explained. "It really just means something you have an
issue with."
The scholar would have preferred to use "dislike,"
but the word is literally banned by the service to prevent developers from
creating a dislike button. Critics of Facebook say the social network's
leaders want to keep the service friendly to advertisers who might object to
users publicly scorning their products.
Mr. Terry wondered if Facebook would even allow his
plug-in application to pass the company's approval process, and even though
it did, he still believes administrators will shut it down if it becomes
popular. The day I talked with Mr. Terry, only 300 people were using it, but
at that point no national media had picked up the story.
Facebook officials declined to talk about the new
app. The only response a spokesperson would give was a one-sentence e-mail
addressing the company's position on creating a "dislike" button: "At some
point we may consider it, but for the time being, we are working on what we
believe are more high-impact features."
Who was Mr. Terry so eager to diss? "One of the
first things I put was the band Journey," he said of his enemy list, "just
because they annoy me, and I thought it was funny." He has also enemied
Deepak Chopra and the color red.
The programming stunt might win Mr. Terry some real
enemies among people who think the best thing about Facebook is its relative
lack of negativity. After all, many online forums are prone to vicious flame
wars that lead reasonable people to steer clear. What's wrong with keeping
an online world like Facebook nice?
To Mr. Terry, that's where his role as an educator
comes in. "What we all do in the program is help our students think
critically about social media," he says, noting that that is the main goal
of EnemyGraph. "On Facebook you're the product—it's commoditized
expression," he argues, and he wants students and others to recognize that.
"I'm not telling students not to use it, I'm just telling them to understand
what's happening when they use it."
A graduate research assistant, Bradley Griffith,
did the actual coding, and he made an even stronger case for the service
than Mr. Terry did. "It's dangerous for us as a society to move in this
direction where everything has its worst qualities removed from it," Mr.
Griffith told me.
Virtual Dissent
EnemyGraph points to a new form of social protest,
one that could only happen in a virtual realm. In the physical world,
scholars calling for social change might write up their suggestions, or
stage symbolic protests, and hope their arguments prompt leaders to make
changes. In online communities, it is possible to promote change by creating
a new technical feature or service.
As Mr. Griffith put it, "academics have always had
ideas about society, but we could only really talk about it, and now we can
do it."
Consider another work of online protest by Mr.
Terry and Mr. Griffith. Last fall they built a searchable Web archive of
Twitter messages that had been deleted by users. The service was possible
because while deleting a Twitter message stops it from being distributed, it
can live on, since in some cases it has already been captured by archival
services that mine Twitter for information. Called
Undetweetable,
the service disturbed many observers, some of whom criticized its creators
for giving new life to comments that users had chosen to remove.
The goal of Undetweetable was to raise awareness of
how persistent anything posted online can be—and how easy it is for
outsiders to secretly pluck those messages to analyze them in various ways.
"Someone said, These are the nicest people who will
ever steal your data," said Mr. Terry, referring to one of the bloggers who
wrote about the service. "Because we're not going to do anything nefarious
with it."
Undetweetable did start a conversation. It
attracted a stream of users after being mentioned by The Wall Street
Journal and popular technology blogs including Gizmodo. It operated for
only five days—until Mr. Terry got an e-mail from Twitter asking that he
shut down the service because it violated Twitter's rules. He complied.
"This is the way you call attention to certain
kinds of things on the Net," he said. "You have to make something that
people can use. Some of these things need to be experienced firsthand."
Alex Halavais, an associate professor of
communications at Quinnipiac University and president of the Association of
Internet Researchers, said he expected to see more of this kind of high-tech
intervention by scholars as more researchers in the humanities gain skills
in programming and comfort using social media. "Increasingly there are
faculty who feel confident doing this," he said.
A Tool for
Cyberbullies?
A social critique is one thing. But what if adding
an "enemy" button leads to increases in cyberbullying, bringing real harm to
users uninterested in the scholars' points?
Mr. Terry believes that the feature will not spark
hateful speech. "It's not necessarily going to make us fight, it's just
going to make us have a conversation," he argues.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on social media are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Selling the debt in the left pocket to the right pocket: The Fed is
all smoke and mirrors
"Fed Is Buying 61 Percent of U.S. Government Debt," by Bob Adelmann, The New
American, March 29, 2012
http://thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary-mainmenu-43/11357-fed-is-buying-61-of-us-government-debt
In his attempt to explode the myth that there is
unlimited demand for U.S. government debt, former Treasury official Lawrence
Goodman
explained that there
is high perceived demand because the Federal Reserve is doing most
of the buying.
Wrote Goodman,
Last year the Fed
purchased a stunning 61% of the total net Treasury issuance, up from
negligible amounts prior to the 2008 financial crisis.
This not only creates
the false impression of limitless demand for U.S. debt but also blunts any
sense of urgency to reduce supersized budget deficits.
What about Japan and China? Aren’t they the major
purchasers of U.S. debt? Not any more, notes Goodman. Foreign purchases of
U.S. debt dropped to less than 2 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
from almost 6 percent just three years ago. And private sector investors —
banks, money market and bond mutual funds, individuals and corporations —
have cut their buying way back as well, to less than 1 percent of GDP, down
from 6 percent. This serves to hide the fact that the government can’t find
outside buyers willing to accept rates of return that are below the
inflation rate (“negative interest”) given the precarious financial
condition of the government. It also hides the impact of $1.3 trillion
deficits from the public who would likely get much more concerned if real,
true market rates of interest were being demanded for purchasing U.S. debt,
as such higher rates would increase the deficit even further. Finally it
takes pressure off Congress to “do something” because there is no public
clamor over the matter, at least for the moment.
One of those promoting the myth that buyers of U.S.
debt must exist because interest rates are so low is none other than one of
those recently seated at the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee table,
Alan
Blinder. Now a professor of economics at Princeton
University, Blinder was vice chairman of the Fed in the mid-nineties and
should know all about the Fed’s manipulations and machinations in the money
markets. Apparently not.
On January 19 Blinder
wrote in the Wall Street Journal that
Strange as it may seem
with trillion-dollar-plus deficits, the U.S. government doesn’t have a
short-run borrowing problem at all. On the contrary, investors all over the
world are clamoring to lend us money at negative real interest rates.
In purchasing power
terms, they are paying the U.S. government to borrow their money!
Blinder
repeated the error in front of the Senate Banking
Committee just one week later: "In fact, world financial markets are eager
to lend the United States government vast amounts at negative real interest
rates. That means that, in purchasing power terms, they are paying us to
borrow their money!"
Aggressive promotion of a myth never makes it a
fact. All it does is hide, for a period, the reality that the world isn’t
willing to lend to the United States at negative interest rates. This places
the burden on the Fed to make the myth appear real by expanding its own
balance sheet and gobbling up U.S. debt.
There are going to be consequences. As Goodman put
it,
The failure by officials
to normalize conditions in the U.S. Treasury market and curtail ballooning
deficits puts the U.S. economy and markets at risk for a sharp
correction…. [Emphasis added.]
In other words, budget
deficits often take years to build or reduce, while financial markets react
rapidly and often unexpectedly to deficit spending and debt.
The
recent
release by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
of future inflation expectations provides little assurance either as it
mimics the line that inflation will stay low for the foreseeable future: "In
CBO’s forecast, the price index for personal consumption expenditures
increases by just 1.2 percent in 2012 and 1.3 percent in 2013."
With the Fed continuing to buy U.S. government
debt, which keeps interest rates artificially low, when will reality set in?
Amity Shlaes has the answer.
Writing in Bloomberg last week, Shlaes explains:
The thing about [price]
inflation is that it comes out of nowhere and hits you….
[It] has happened to us
before. In World War I … the CPI [Consumer Price Index] went from 1 percent
for 1915 to 7 percent in 1916 and 17 percent in 1917….
In 1945, all seemed
well. Inflation was at 2 percent, at least officially. Within two years that
level hit 14 percent.
All appeared calm in
1972, too, before inflation jumped to 11 percent by 1974 and stayed high for
the rest of the decade….
One thing is clear:
pretty soon, we’ll all be in deep water.
Doug Casey agrees: “Don’t think there are no
consequences to our unwise fiscal and monetary course; a potentially ugly
tipping point is more likely than not at some point.”
Coninued in article
The Zimbabwe School of Economics: In effect
printing $2 trillion
"The High Cost of the Fed's Cheap Money Encouraging consumption at the
expense of saving inhibits long-term economic growth,"
by Andy Laperriere, The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203753704577255641618477730.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
During the past three years, the Federal Reserve
has tripled the size of its balance sheet—in
effect printing $2 trillion—something it
had never done in its nearly 100-year history. The Fed has lowered
short-term interest rates to zero and signaled that it will keep them at
that level for years. Inflation-adjusted short-term rates, or real rates,
have been in the minus 2% range during the past couple of years for the
first time since the 1970s.
The unfortunate fact is, as Milton Friedman
famously observed, there is no free lunch. After the Fed's loose monetary
policy helped spur the boom-bust in
Artificially reducing Treasury yields provides a
near-term benefit as federal borrowing costs are lower, but this unusually
low cost of borrowing is enabling Congress and the president to run an
unsustainable fiscal policy that could eventually lead to an economic
calamity. Governments like Greece and Italy benefited from artificially low
rates for years, and those low rates undoubtedly played a key role in those
governments not confronting their serious fiscal imbalances.
Low rates have helped those who have been able to
borrow or refinance their debts at lower rates, especially homeowners. But
this has come at a high cost to savers. Zero rates are a major problem for
any saver, but it is especially difficult for those in or near retirement.
Government bonds are investments that now offer return-free risk.
The Fed is hoping the lack of return in
certificates of deposit and bonds (or more accurately, negative returns,
adjusted for inflation) will prompt investors to take on more risk by
investing in stocks, high-yield corporate bonds and other investments. This
is pushing people who have a low risk tolerance to take on more risk than
may be advisable.
Moreover, QE and ZIRP are specifically designed to
discourage saving and encourage people to consume more now to boost
near-term gross domestic product. But saving is deferred consumption—people
save to earn a return so that they may consume more in the future (say, for
retirement or a major purchase). Scores of economists have testified before
Congress for decades that Americans don't save enough and that this inhibits
long-term economic growth. Prosperity does not come from spending; it comes
from work, saving and investment.
Defenders of QE and ZIRP would say that rather than
borrowing economic growth from the future, these policies merely smooth the
economic cycle and reduce the economic dislocation associated with deep
recessions or weak recoveries. Of course, that was the rationale for the
exceptionally low rates during the 2002-2004 period, which, like today, were
specifically aimed at depressing saving and encouraging consumption. Rather
than smooth the economic cycle, that strategy helped create an historic
boom-bust.
Some say we must encourage higher consumption
because it accounts for more than 70% of GDP, and the recovery is too
fragile to risk allowing a rise in the savings rate. But the recession was
officially over two years ago. For at least the past decade, monetary policy
has consistently punished prudent savers.
Worse, the Fed is promising to keep these policies
in place for years to come. When do we ever get to the point where we allow
interest rates to return to some kind of natural equilibrium and allow the
economy to gradually rebalance in a way that would boost long-term economic
growth?
There is no doubt the Fed is doing what it believes
is best. But in addition to the risk of inflation inherent in QE and ZIRP,
which Chairman Ben Bernanke has said he is 100% confident he can prevent,
Fed officials are dismissive of the notion that there are significant costs
or trade-offs associated with the policy they are pursuing.
This is disconcerting. Is there really no chance,
zero chance, the Fed will be late to pick up signs of inflation? What
accounts for such confidence—given that the Fed dismissed criticisms from
2002-2004 that its policies would distort economic decisions and cause
hard-to-predict imbalances, that it was oblivious to the housing collapse
well into 2007, and that to this day many Fed officials refuse to accept
that monetary policy played any role in creating the housing bubble?
During the bubble, Fed officials argued they
couldn't spot bubbles in advance, but that an aggressive monetary policy
response could limit the downside impact if a bubble were to burst. As it
turns out, the dislocation from the housing bust and the financial crisis
have been far more costly than almost anyone imagined. Shouldn't that cause
policy makers inside and outside of the Fed to ask hard questions as it
pursues its unprecedented campaign of quantitative easing and zero
rates?housing, it's remarkable how little attention has been devoted to
exploring the costs of Fed policy.
A few critics of quantitative easing (QE) and the
zero interest rate (ZIRP) have correctly pointed out that these policies
weaken the dollar and thereby reduce the purchasing power of American
paychecks. They increase the risk of future inflation, obscure the true cost
of the unsustainable fiscal policy the federal government is running, and
transfer wealth from savers to debtors.
But QE and ZIRP also reduce long-term economic
growth by punishing savers, reducing saving and investment over the long
run. They encourage the misallocation of resources that at a minimum is
preventing the natural rebalancing of our economy and could sow the seeds of
another painful boom-bust.
One intended effect of a loose monetary policy is a
weaker dollar, which can help gross domestic product by boosting exports.
But a weaker dollar also raises import prices (such as oil prices) for
American consumers. For the average American family, this adverse impact has
likely outweighed any positive impact from QE and ZIRP.
The cost of a weaker dollar for most people is not
offset by temporarily higher stock prices for two reasons. First, most
Americans don't own much stock. Second, stock prices are not going to be
higher 10 years from now because of the Fed's policies, so the effect is to
bring forward equity returns, not increase long-term returns.
Bob Jensen's threads on the pros and cons of the bailout as it evolved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
"I Said It Before and I Still Believe It: There Are No Short Cuts," by
Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, March 19, 2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/03/i-said-it-before-and-i-still-believe-it.html
Before I ever started this blog, I wrote a short
little teaching book titled “Tips and Thoughts on Improving the Teaching
Process in College--A Personal Diary.” I wanted to push myself to think
about teaching and I wanted to encourage other folks to think about
teaching. The book was a bit of work but it seemed like everyone would
benefit. When finished, I put it up on web at https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~jhoyle/
and forgot about it. However, the book got a very nice review in The
Chronicle of Higher Education and people started sending me questions or
suggestions. For a while, I got emails from teachers around the world. What
fun.
Eventually, I wanted to add to those original
essays. I had more thoughts on teaching. Plus, I missed the writing. But,
instead of starting a second book, I created this blog which has allowed me
to stretch out the thinking and writing process indefinitely.
A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with a former
student of mine who has gone on to get a Ph. D. and is now beginning her
first tenure-track position. She recently joined the faculty of a major
university. She told me that she had gone back to my original Teaching Tips
book and that one essay in particular had been extremely meaningful to her
as she began her career as a teacher. I was touched that she had consulted
my writings as she started her teaching. So, I decided to reprint the essay
that she said was helping her. So, JPD, this one is for you.
Continued in article
"FTC releases final privacy report, says ‘Do Not Track’ mechanism may be
available by end of year," by Hayley Tsukayama, Washington Post,
March 27, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/ftc-releases-final-privacy-report-says-do-not-track-mechanism-may-be-available-by-end-of-year/2012/03/26/gIQAzi23bS_story.html
The Federal Trade Commission on Monday outlined a
framework for how companies should address consumer privacy, pledging that
consumers will have “an easy to use and effective” “Do Not Track” option by
the end of the year.
The FTC’s report comes a little over a month after
the White House released a “privacy bill of rights” that called on companies
to be more transparent about privacy and grant consumers greater access to
their data but that stopped short of backing a do-not-track rule.
The FTC also said it plans to work with Web
companies and advertisers to implement an industry-designed do-not-track
technology so as to avoid a federal law that mandates it. The Digital
Advertising Alliance, which represents 90 percent of all Web sites with
advertising, is working with the Commerce Department and FTC to create an
icon that would allow users an easy way to stop online tracking.
But the enforcement agency said that if the
companies aren’t able to get the technology launched by the end of the year,
lawmakers should force those companies to offer consumers a similar option
to stop tracking.
“Although some companies have excellent privacy and
data securities practices, industry as a whole must do better,” the FTC
said.
In its report, the agency called on companies to
obtain “affirmative express consent” from consumers before using data
collected for a different purpose and encourage Congress to consider
baseline privacy legislation and measures on data security and data brokers.
The FTC also reiterated its recommendations that
Congress pass legislation to provide consumers with access to their personal
data that is held by companies that compile data for marketing purposes.
The 73-page report focuses heavily on mobile data,
noting that the “rapid growth of the mobile marketplace” has made it
necessary for companies to put limits on data collection, use and disposal.
According to a recent report from Nielsen, 43 percent of all U.S. mobile
phone subscribers own a smartphone.
The commission called on companies to work to
establish industry standards governing the use of mobile data, particularly
for data that reveals a users’ location.
Commissioner Thomas Rosch dissented from the other
commissioners in a 3-1 vote on the privacy report. Rosch said that while he
agrees with much of what the agency released Monday, he disagrees with the
commission’s approach to the framework, which focuses more on what consumers
may deem “unfair” as opposed to actual deception perpetrated by companies.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on computer and networking security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on March 30,
2012
Tax Breaks Exceed $1 Trillion: Report
by: John D. McKinnon
Mar 24, 2012
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
Click here to view the video on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Tax Laws, Tax Reform, Taxation
SUMMARY: The article reports on a "...new report by the
non-partisan Congressional Research Service [which] underscores how
far-reaching..." are many of the most costly tax provisions in the U.S. tax
code. As highlighted in the related video, these items are likely to become
a focused issue in this election year. "House Republicans proposed in their
new budget this week to reduce or eliminate an unspecified array of tax
breaks in order to offset the costs of lowering top tax rates for both
corporations and individuals to 25% from the current 35%." President Obama
proposed reducing the top corporate tax rate only, from 35% to 28%, with
corresponding proposals to eliminate certain corporate tax breaks, such as
deductibility of the cost of corporate jets and tax treatment of foreign
earnings.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is useful to summarize the types
of items considered to be "tax breaks," and the current, election-year
proposals to simplify the U.S. tax code.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) Who produced the report on which this article is
based? How do you think the information was obtained?
2. (Introductory) Why is this report useful in considering ways to
overhaul the U.S. tax code?
3. (Advanced) What kinds of items are characterized as "tax breaks"
in the document on which this article reports?
4. (Advanced) Specifically describe the tax treatment of each of
the items listed in the graphic entitled "Popular Provisions." Who benefits
from each of these items?
5. (Advanced) Based on your answer to question 2, explain why
"House Republicans dismissed the report's significance saying it only
confirms that overhauling the tax code will be politically challenging."
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
"Tax Breaks Exceed $1 Trillion: Report," by: John D. McKinnon, The Wall
Street Journal, March 24, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303812904577299923495453562.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
A congressional report detailing the value of major
tax breaks shows they amount to more than $1 trillion a year—roughly the
size of the annual federal budget deficit—and benefit wide swaths of the
population.
The figures could be useful to lawmakers of both
parties and President Barack Obama, who are looking for ways to shrink
future deficits and offset the anticipated cost of overhauling the
much-criticized U.S. tax code, an effort likely to include tax-rate cuts.
Both parties are looking to trim or eliminate tax breaks to achieve those
goals.
Mr. Obama has suggested eliminating breaks for
corporate jets and oil and gas companies to reduce deficits. He also has
raised the possibility of reducing tax breaks for U.S. multinationals that
ship jobs overseas, as a way to offset the cost of lowering the corporate
tax rate to 28% from the current 35%. Research Report
House Republicans proposed in their new budget this
week to reduce or eliminate an unspecified array of tax breaks in order to
offset the costs of lowering top tax rates for both corporations and
individuals to 25% from the current 35%.
The new report, by the nonpartisan Congressional
Research Service, underscores how far-reaching many of the tax breaks are,
which makes changing them a politically daunting task.
They include the exclusion from taxable income for
employer-provided health insurance, the biggest break, at $164.2 billion a
year in 2014; the exclusion for employer-provided pensions, the
second-biggest, at $162.7 billion; and the exclusions for Medicare and
Social Security benefits.
Other big breaks include the mortgage-interest
deduction, third-largest; taxing capital-gains income at lower rates than
other income; the earned-income credit for the working poor; and deductions
for state and local taxes.
The report, citing political opposition, technical
challenges and other reasons, said that "it may prove difficult to gain more
than $100 billion to $150 billion in additional tax revenues" by eliminating
tax breaks. That likely would leave little for reducing tax rates, perhaps
only enough for one or two percentage points in the top individual rate,
while maintaining the same level of revenue, the report said.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I'm suspicious that this greatly underestimates the so-called "tax breaks" by
not mentioning exclusions from revenue. For example, hundreds of billions of
interest revenue from municipal bonds are excluded from taxable revenue
(federal). Many types of life insurance payments are tax exempt. Clerics get
some generous exemptions for housing allowances. And there are capital gains
exemptions in Roth IRAs and scores of other exclusions.
Case Studies in
Gaming the Income Tax Laws
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
The SEC is doing a big favor for tort lawyers
The SEC prides itself on ensuring that U.S. markets
are transparent, but in ruling out arbitration it has said no without any
explanation. The matter deserves a fair hearing.
"The Alternative to Shareholder Class Actions: The SEC blocks
arbitration without any explanation," by Hal Scott and Leslie Silverman,
The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577312373860495762.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission
rejected attempts by the Carlyle Group, and proposals by stockholders of
Pfizer and Gannett, to mandate arbitration rather than litigation in
disputes between investors and management. The SEC gave no explanation for
its action on Carlyle (related to an upcoming public offering), and it said
opaquely the Pfizer and Gannett proposals might violate the securities laws.
Arbitration has opponents inside the agency, of
course, and among plaintiffs lawyers. They claim stockholders will receive
less for management wrongdoing, and that this will lead to less deterrence
of such wrongdoing. But this argument ignores some important facts. And it
does not address the problem identified by the Committee on Capital Markets
Regulation—that securities class-action litigation may be the most
burdensome feature of U.S. capital markets.
From 2000 through 2011, the total value of all U.S.
securities class-action settlements was approximately $64.4 billion,
according to NERA Economic Consulting. These settlements do little to
accomplish the class action's traditional goals of compensation and
deterrence.
Unlike mass tort litigation, securities class
actions involve stockholders who are often both plaintiffs and investors in
the defendant corporation. The suits are invariably settled before trial,
generally for pennies on the dollar. Small investors recover so little they
often do not bother to file for their money: 40%-60% of settlement funds
generally go unclaimed, according to research prepared for the Committee on
Capital Markets. Regardless, plaintiffs attorneys take up to 35% of the
total settlement.
The lawsuits do little to deter wrongdoing. The
stockholders funding a settlement generally have no knowledge of management
misdeeds—they simply held the wrong stock at the wrong time. Managements—the
actual wrongdoers and proper objects of deterrence—rarely pay a dime, as the
corporation's directors' and officers' insurance picks up the settlement
cost.
Real deterrence comes from whistleblowers and the
media, whose reports of fraud send share prices plunging. Deterrence also
comes from the strongest public-enforcement system in the world—administered
by the Department of Justice, the SEC and the state officials.
Securities class actions undercut the
competitiveness of the U.S. capital markets. Plaintiffs attorneys have
demonstrated a clear tendency to target the largest public companies, and
because insurance firms will not provide settlement coverage over a few
hundred million dollars, public companies face substantial risk. Further,
foreign corporations are reluctant to list and trade here, while private
U.S. corporations have grown wary of going public.
In 2011, 7% of U.S. companies that did go public
did so abroad. They were no doubt motivated in part by the litigiousness
they can avoid under the Supreme Court's decision in Morrison v. National
Australia Bank (2010), which does not permit securities claims by private
plaintiffs for shares purchased or sold on a foreign exchange. Historically,
it was almost unheard of for American companies to go public outside the
U.S.
It does not have to be this way. Companies and
their stockholders have recently begun exploring mechanisms by which
disputes must be settled in individual, private arbitration, taking
advantage of the lower costs and quicker results such arbitration affords.
They are following the national policy in favor of arbitration embodied in
the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 and confirmed by the Supreme Court in
AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (2011), which struck down a California
anti-arbitration law. Other important Supreme Court cases include Rodriguez
de Quijas v. Shearson American Express (1989), which held that arbitration
does not violate federal securities laws that prohibit waivers of
substantive rights guaranteed by law, such as anti-fraud provisions.
Despite arbitration's endorsement by Congress and
the Supreme Court, the SEC has rebuffed efforts to substitute arbitration
for securities class actions. So in the recent cases cited above,
investors—prospective, in the case of Carlyle, and existing, in the case of
Pfizer and Gannett—were deprived of the opportunity to decide upon the
dispute-resolution procedure they preferred.
The SEC prides itself on ensuring that U.S. markets
are transparent, but in ruling out arbitration it has said no without any
explanation. The matter deserves a fair hearing.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Mary Shapiro's SEC repeatedly brings down tiny and insignificant punishments on
wrongdoers. My guess is that she fears arbitrators will be too tough on
wrongdoers that have a lot of clout with her bosses in Congress.
From the Scout Report on March 26, 2012
Comunitee ---
http://www.comunitee.com/
Did you ever want to share some commentary on the
news with your friends quickly? Communitee can make this happen via a novel
approach to the "social news network." After signing up for a free account,
visitors can find other users in their respective "community." Visitors can
select their preferred news sources and the short explanatory video on the
homepage gives a nice introduction to the particulars of how things work.
This version is compatible with all operating systems.
Shelfster ---
http://shelfster.com/
If you like physical shelves for storing books,
DVDs, and other items, you'll probably enjoy the digital equivalent for
storing documents, photos and the like: Shelfster. This application can be
used to capture just about anything from any medium, including photos,
spreadsheets, charts, and documents. Users will find that Shelfster can be
used to bookmark websites, save images from the web, clip and move text
blocks, and also record audio (with a smartphone device). This version is
compatible with all operating systems as well as iPhones, iPads, and Android
devices.
Apple, the Media, and Working Conditions in China
After a tempest of controversy regarding a popular theater production, a
retraction and conversation. Defending 'This American Life' and Its Mike
Daisey Retraction
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/theater/defending-this-american-life-and-its-mike-daisey-retraction.html?_r=1&ref=arts
Daisey revises 'Steve Jobs' Monologue After Dispute Over Facts
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/daisey-revises-steve-jobs-monologue-after-dispute-over-facts/?hpw
Mike Daisey speaks out against media in Apple controversy
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/03/mike-daisey-speaks-out-against-critics-in-apple-controversy.html
This American Life: Retraction
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction
This American Life: Mr. Daisey And The Apple Factory
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory
Mike Daisey ---
http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/
From the Scout Report on March 30, 2012
BrandMyMail --- http://www.brandmymail.com/
Have you ever wanted to tweak the appearance of
your Gmail account? This is now possible, courtesy of BrandMyMail.
First-time users can watch the short video on the homepage to learn about
the functionality of the program, gather some insights into how one might
best utilize its primary features. Visitors can add social media links to
their emails, create different layouts, and tweak the colors for individual
expression and uniqueness. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.
TextImages ---
http://www.sttmedia.com/textimages
Those persons who do their own website design will
find TextImages most useful. Developed by Stefan Trost, this helpful tool
allows users to integrate text written on images into their websites.
Visitors can create single text images with this application, along with a
wide range of pictures. Visitors also have the ability to precisely adjust
the writing, design, format, style, colors, fonts, margins, and spacing as
they see fit. The tool is particularly useful for those who want headings or
other recurring text to look the same regardless of browser or available
fonts. This version is compatible with Windows 7, XP, and Vista.
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
NASA's Space Biology Outreach Program - Web of Life
http://weboflife.nasa.gov/
NASA’s Stunning Tour of the Moon ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/nasas_stunning_tour_of_the_moon.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Star Gazing from the International Space Station (and Free Astronomy Courses
Online) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/star_gazing_from_the_international_space_station_.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Pathways to Science ---
http://www.pathwaystoscience.org/
Cyberlearning at Community Colleges: 21st Century Biology Education ---
http://c3cyberlearning.ning.com/
Biological Evolution: Evolutionary Theory ---
http://www.bioedonline.org/slides/slide01.cfm?tk=60
Biological Evolution: Evolutionary Theory ---
http://www.bioedonline.org/slides/slide01.cfm?tk=60 Virtual Textbook of Organic Chemistry ---
http://www.cem.msu.edu/~reusch/vtxtindex.htm
3D Organic Chemistry Animations ---
http://138.253.125.24/~ng/external/
3D Organic Chemistry Animations ---
http://www.chemtube3d.com/
Pure and Applied Chemistry ---
http://www.iupac.org/publications/pac/
The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series209.html
NIH Office of Rare Diseases Research (ORDR) ---
http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/
Northwest Association for Biomedical Research ---
http://www.nwabr.org/
ARTStem ---
http://www.artstem.org/
Digital Morphology (science and medicine) ---
http://www.digimorph.org/index.phtml
National Renewable Energy Laboratory ---
http://www.nrel.gov/learning/
The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science
http://www.learner.org/resources/series209.html
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
Advances in Psychology --- The Phobia Workshop ---
http://biggeekdad.com/2010/03/the-phobia-workshop/
Richard Dawkins Rallies for Reason in Washington DC ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/richard_dawkins_rallies_for_reason_in_washington_dc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
New England Public Policy Center Working Papers (banking) ---
http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/neppc/wp/
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
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
History News Network ---
http://hnn.us/
A Look Back at UNIVAC (computer history) ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/infographic_a_look_back_at_univac.php
This first computer (as we define computers today) was also the first computer
to predict Eisenhower's election to the U.S. Presidency.
University of New Hampshire Library: Literature & Poetry ---
Click Here
http://www.library.unh.edu/digital/islandora/solr/search/%20/1/category:Literature%5C%20%2526%5C%20Poetry%2A%7E/dismax
The Art and Science of Violin Making ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/the_art_and_science_of_violin_making.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials ---
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews
I Love Lucy: An American Legend ---
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/ilovelucy/Pages/default.aspx
Portland State University Digital Repository ---
http://dr.archives.pdx.edu/xmlui/
Stones River Battlefield Historic Landscape Collection (Civil War)
http://library.mtsu.edu/digitalprojects/stonesriver.php
Nelson Mandela Archive Goes Online (With Help From Google) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/nelson_mandela_archive_goes_online_with_help_from_google.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Photos: The 65th Anniversary of D-Day on the Normandy Beaches ---
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2009/06/05/the-65th-anniversary-of-d-day-on-the-normandy-beaches/
Octavio Medellin: Works of Art and Artistic Processes ---
http://digitalcollections.smu.edu/all/cul/med/
The Croatian Museum of Naive Art (art history) ---
http://www.hmnu.org/en/default.asp
James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/james_joyces_ulysses_a_free_audio_book.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Orson Welles’ Last Interview and Final Moments Captured on Film ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/orson_welles_last_interview_and_final_moments_captured_on_film.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ---
http://mfah.org/
Gaugin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise (art history) ---
http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/gauguin/
Aerial Photographs of Colorado ---
https://www.cusys.edu/DigitalLibrary/aerials.html
John Pugh's Murals ---
http://artofjohnpugh.com/default.asp
Picture Chicago ---
http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/chicago/index.asp
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago
This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s ---
http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/featured/twhb/exhibition/overview
Lincoln Park Architectural Photographs ---
http://digicol.lib.depaul.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/lpnc1
Massachusetts Historical Society: Civil War ---
http://www.masshist.org/online/civilwar/
Appalachian Voices ---
http://appvoices.org/
19th Century Maps by Children ---
http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2010/1/7/19th-century-maps-by-children
From the Scout Report on March 30, 2012
As the Tate Modern prepares to open a Damien Hirst retrospective,
critics and others offer comment
Damien Hirst retrospective: Is nothing sacred?
http://www.economist.com/node/21550767
'Damien Hirst should not be in the Tate' says critic
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/9168804/Damien-Hirst-should-not-be-
in-the-Tate-says-critic.html
Damien Hirsts are the sub-prime of the art world
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/julian-spalding-damien-
hirsts-are-the-subprime-of-the-art-world-7586386.html
Damien Hirst on death, drink and diamonds
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/visual-arts/damien-hirst-on-death-drink-
and-diamonds-7581167.html
Damien Hirst's Live Stream: Not So Very Lively
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/03/26/damien-hirsts-live-stream-not-so-
very-lively/
Damien Hirst
http://www.damienhirst.com/
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
Ballet in Super Slow Motion (And More Culture Around the Web) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/ballet_in_super_slow_motion_and_more_culture_around_the_web.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Accordion File (music history) ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Accordion-File/131277/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
The Art and Science of Violin Making ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/the_art_and_science_of_violin_making.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Steve Martin on the Legendary Bluegrass Musician Earl Scruggs
---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/steve_martin_on_the_legendary_bluegrass_musician_earl_scruggs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Earl Scruggs Video Documentary ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK_nqnoWl6o&feature=pyv&ad=3780036702&kw=earl
scruggs banjo
Earl Scruggs and Steve Martin Play Dueling Banjos ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqd7mXvHupU
Also see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icMTVV5Lwaw
Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt Playing Cripple Creek ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4sqishGuYw
The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Features 17,000 Recordings ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/the_alan_lomax_music_archive_now_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The Historic Landscape of Nevada: Development, Water, and the Natural
Environment ---
http://digital.library.unlv.edu/collections/historic-landscape
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 26, 2012
March 27, 2012
March 28, 2012
March 29, 2012
March 30, 2012
March 31, 2012
April 2, 2012
April 3, 2012
April 5, 2012
April 6, 2012
April 7, 2012
April 9, 2012
Metformin appeared to slow prostate cancer growth ---
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-metformin-prostate-cancer-growth.html
Monty Python’s Away From it All: A Twisted Travelogue with John Cleese ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/monty_pythons_iaway_from_it_alli_a_twisted_travelogue_with_john_cleese.html
Advances in Psychology --- The Phobia Workshop ---
http://biggeekdad.com/2010/03/the-phobia-workshop/
I Love Lucy: An American Legend ---
http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/ilovelucy/Pages/default.aspx
Forwarded by Auntie Bev
All I need to know
I learned from the Easter Bunny!
Don't put all your eggs in
one basket.
Everyone needs a friend who
is all ears.
There's no such thing as too
much candy.
All work and no play can
make you a basket case.
A cute tail attracts a lot
of attention.
Everyone is entitled to a
bad hare day.
Let happy thoughts multiply
like rabbits.
Some body parts should be
floppy.
Keep your paws off of other
people's jelly beans.
Good things come in small,
sugar coated packages.
The grass is always greener
in someone else's basket.
To show your true colors,
you have to come out of the shell.
The best things in life are
still sweet and gooey.
May the joy of the season
fill your heart.
AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU!
Happy Easter!
Love,
Bev
Forwarded by Paula
Bob Jensen did not check to see if some of them are urban legends.
Thought you knew everything?
Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.
And 'lollipop' is the longest word typed with your right hand.
(Bet you tried this out mentally, didn't you?)
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
' Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'.
(Are you doubting this?)
Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never
stop growing.
The sentence: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' uses every letter
of the alphabet.
(Now, you KNOW you're going to try this out for accuracy, right?)
The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level' are the same whether they are read
left to right or right to left (palindromes).
(Yep, I knew you were going to 'do' this one.)
There are only four words in the English language which end in 'dous':
tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
(You're not possibly doubting this, are you ?)
There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in
order: 'abstemious' and 'facetious.'
(Yes, admit it, you are going to say, a e i o u)
TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one
row of the keyboard.
|(All you typists are going to test this out)
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds
(Some days that's about what my memory span is.)
A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second. A shark is the
only fish that can blink with both eyes. A snail can sleep for three years.
(I know some people that could do this too!)
Almonds are a member of the peach family.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
(I know some people like that also . Actually I know A LOT of people like this!)
Babies are born without kneecaps They don't appear until the child reaches 2
to 6 years of age.
February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never
end because of the rate of reproduction.
Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors
Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!
Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.
The cruise liner, QE 2,
moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns. The microwave
was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar
melted in his pocket.
(Good thing he did that.)
The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid .
There are more chickens than people in the world.
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
Now you know more than you did before!!
Forwarded by Jim
'Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm,
she'll give you a baby If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you
give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give
you her heart.
She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any
crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit.'
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